Apple M2 vs AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX

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.

AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX

The AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX is a processor for big (gaming) laptops based on the Rembrandt generation. The R9 6900HX integrates all eight cores based on the Zen 3+ microarchitecture. They are clocked at 3.3 (guaranteed base clock) to 4.9 GHz (Turbo) and support SMT / Hyperthreading (16 threads). The chip is manufactured on the modern 6 nm TSMC process. The "X" in the name indicates the overclocking capabilities of the CPU.

The new Zen 3+ is a refresh of the Zen 3 architecture and should not offer a lot of changes. The chip itself however, offers a lot of new features, like support for USB 4 (40 Gbps), PCI-E Gen 4, DDR5-4800MT/s or LPDDR5-6400MT/s, WiFi 6E, Bluetooth LE 5.2, DisplayPort 2, and AV1 decode.

A big novelty is the integrated GPU Radeon 680M, that is now based on the RDNA2 architecture and offers 12 CUs at up to 2.4 GHz. It should be the fastest iGPU of all at the time of announcement.

Performance

The average 6900HX in our database edges out the Core i7-12800H just slightly while, a little disappointingly, not quite managing to leave the 6900HS behind in the dust. Don't get us wrong; this is still a brilliant CPU for your demanding apps and games, as of late 2022. It does lag behind some of the 12th generation Intel Core i9 options, though.

Thanks to its decent cooling solution and a long-term CPU power limit of nearly 90 W, the XMG Neo 15 2022 is among the fastest laptops built around the 6900HX that we know of. It can be at least 20% faster in CPU-bound workloads than the slowest system featuring the same chip in our database, as of August 2023.

Power consumption

This Ryzen 9 series chip has a default TDP, also known as the long-term power limit, of 45 W with the letter "X" indicating that the user is officially allowed to overclock the thing - leading to an increase in power consumption levels. Either way, a high-performance cooling solution is a must for a CPU like this.

The R9 6900HX is built with TSMC's 6 nm process making for very good, as of early 2023, energy efficiency.