Apple M2 Specifications, Price, Release Date, and Benchmarks

Here is everything we know so far about Apple’s upcoming Apple M2 CPU, including its release date, specs, price, and recent benchmarks. Up until 2020, Apple worked with Intel to make laptops that were both light and powerful. But they could never match the performance of high-powered Intel or AMD CPUs in other laptops on the market.

Apple’s choice to make a change led to the creation of an ARM processor called M1 that was made in-house. The M1 made huge improvements in performance and efficiency.

And the M2 chip, which has an 8-core CPU, isn’t as powerful as the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips in the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops.

Read on for all the information you need about the new Apple M2 chip.

Apple M2 chip: Top new features and improvements

• The new 5-nanometer chip is a follow-up to the amazing M1 8-core CPU and up to a 12-core GPU, with better performance than M1.
• Apple says that it has 25% more transistors than the M1 because it has 20 billion.
• Can handle a unified memory bandwidth of 100 GB/s
• Up to 24GB of unified memory can be used.
• 16-core Neural Engine with improvements over the M1 Neural Engine. Can play back multiple streams of ProRes 4K/8K video.

Apple M2 chip release date and configurations

The 13-inch MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, both of which came out in the summer of 2022, were the first laptops to use the new Apple M2 chip. The M2 chip is in the new 13-inch MacBook Air 2022 (starting price: $1,199) and the MacBook Pro 2022 (starting price: $1,299), so you’ll have to pay more than $1,000 to get a MacBook with an M2 chip.

It was also available in the Mac mini M2, a cheaper and more powerful version of Apple’s small Mac that came out in 2023.

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Apple M2 chip: Features

Apple’s new M2 chip can have a CPU with up to 8 cores and a GPU with up to 10 cores. That’s better than the first M1, which could have up to an 8-core CPU and an 8-core GPU. But it can’t match the number of cores in the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips, which have 8–10 CPU cores and 16–32 GPU cores.

Apple says, though, that the M2 chip can perform up to 18% better on multiple cores than the M1. We’ll have to check that out for ourselves, but if it’s true, that’s good news because the M1 chip blew us away with how fast it was and how little power it used.

The M2 also has a Neural Engine with 16 cores, just like the M1. Apple says that the M2’s Neural Engine can handle up to 15.8 trillion operations per second, which is over 40 percent more than the M1.

The M2 chip can handle up to 24GB of memory, and Apple says it can do up to twice as much as the M1 chip while using half as much power.

That would be a big improvement in performance and power efficiency, and it would back up Apple’s claim that the M2-powered 13-inch MacBook Pro 2022 can play videos for up to 20 hours on a single charge.

The M2 also comes with a new media engine that should be able to decode up to 8K HVEC and H.264 video and play back multiple 4K and 8K ProRes streams.

Apple also says that the image signal processor (ISP) in the M2 chip is much better than what was in the M1, so it should help you look your best on video calls.

Apple M2 chip: Outlook

If you’re a Mac fan who’s been looking at a new 13-inch MacBook, it’s exciting that Apple has finally released the successor to 2020’s game-changing M1 chip. The M2 chip is more of a middle-of-the-road piece of Apple silicon that does better than its predecessor, the M1, but not as well as the most advanced M1 Max.

Apple made M2, the next generation, because M1 was so successful.

we will show you everything we know so far about Apple’s M2 chip, such as when it will be available, what it will cost, and how well it performs.