AMD Ryzen 5 7530U vs Apple M2

AMD Ryzen 5 7530U

The AMD Ryzen 5 7530U is a processor for thin and light laptops based on the Cezanne generation. It is part of the second "Barcelo" refresh in early 2023 and offers 200 MHz higher boost clock for the CPU cores compared to the old Ryzen 5 5625U (but a slower base clock speed). The R5 7530U integrates six of the eight cores based on the Zen 3 microarchitecture. The cores are clocked at 2 (guaranteed base clock) to 4.5 GHz (single core boost) and support SMT for a total of 12 threads. The chip is manufactured in 7 nm at TSMC.

Performance

The average 7530U in our database is in the same league as the Ryzen 5 5625U, Ryzen 7 4800U, Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U, Core i5-1335U, as far as multi-thread benchmark scores are concerned.

Thanks to its decent cooling solution and a long-term CPU power limit of 37 W, the VivoBook 15X OLED M3504YA is among the fastest laptops built around the 7530U that we know of. It can be roughly 40% faster in CPU-bound workloads than the slowest system featuring the same chip in our database, as of August 2023.

In addition to the six CPU cores, the APU also integrates a Radeon RX Vega 7 (now only called Radeon Graphics) integrated graphics card with 7 CUs at up to 2 GHz. The dual channel memory controller supports DDR4-3200 and energy efficient LPDDR4-4266 RAM. Furthermore, 16 MB level 3 cache (up from 8 MB at the 4800U) can be found on the chip.

Power consumption

This Ryzen has a default TDP of 15 W (also known as the Power Limit 1).

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.