Apple M2

The Apple M2 is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the late 2022 MacBook Air and, MacBook Pro 13. It offers 8 cores divided in four performance cores and four power-efficiency cores. The big cores offer 192 KB instruction cache, 128 KB data cache, and 16 MB shared L2 cache (up from 12 MB). The four efficiency cores are a lot smaller and offer only 128 KB instruction cache, 64 KB data cache, and 4 MB shared cache. The efficiency cores (E cluster) clock with  up to 2,4 GHz, the performance cores (P cluster) with up to 3,5 GHz and therefore higher than the M1 cores. The architecture should be similar to the A15 (iPhone 13) with Avalanche and Blizzard cores.

The chip features a unified memory architecture for the CPU and GPU cores and supports up to 24 GB LPDDR5-6400 for a bandwidth of up to 100GB/s.

According to Apple, the M2 offers a 18% higher CPU performance at the same power consumption level compared to the Apple M1. In our tests, the MacBook Pro 13 with active cooling was able to reach the 18% in Geekbench Multi. In other benchmarks we measured 12 to 15% gains compared to the M1. Therefore, the performance is now near the M1 Pro with 8 cores. The passively cooled MacBook Air may however suffer from throttling in longer load scenarios.

The integrated graphics card in the M2 offers 8 or 10 cores and a peak performance of 3.6 TFLOPs.

Furthermore, the SoC integrates a fast 16 core neural engine with a peak performance of 16 TOPS (for AI hardware acceleration), a secure enclave (e.g., for encryption), Thunderbolt / USB 4 controller, an ISP, and media de- and encoders.

The Apple M2 includes 20 billion transistors (up from the 16 billion of the M1) and is manufactured in the second generation 5nm process at TSMC (most likely N5P). The power consumption is rated at 20W what we also measured under CPU load.

Series	Apple M2
Series: M2 Apple M2 Max 2.42 - 3.7 GHz 12 / 12  48 MB L3 Apple M2 Pro 2.42 - 3.5 GHz 12 / 12  24 MB L3 Apple M2 Pro 10-Core 2.42 - 3.7 GHz 10 / 10  24 MB L3 Apple M2 « 2.42 - 3.48 GHz 8 / 8  8 MB L3
Clock Rate	2424 - 3480 MHz
Level 1 Cache	2 MB
Level 2 Cache	20 MB
Level 3 Cache	8 MB
Number of Cores / Threads	8 / 8
Power Consumption (TDP = Thermal Design Power)	20 Watt
Transistor Count	20000 Million
Manufacturing Technology	5 nm
Features	ARMv8 Instruction Set
GPU	Apple M2 10-Core GPU ( - 1398 MHz)
64 Bit	64 Bit support
Architecture	ARM
Announcement Date	06/10/2022
Product Link (external)	www.apple.com

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