Expectations of the keynote for this March 8, while waiting for Apple to officially confirm the date, are exploding. Along with seeing the new iPhone SE 3 and the occasional iPad, we’re expecting the stellar appearance of the M2, chips that along with a simple rule of three, we can approximate their landmarks.
Excessive power for the whole range
Although Apple’s silicon is gaining popularity now, Apple has been designing its own chips for a long time, since the iPhone 4 to be exact. The similarity between the chips of the A series, those of the iPhone and the iPad, and those of the M series, those of the Mac and also of the iPad, is very great, so using the data available, we can perform a rule of three to calculate performance
That’s exactly what they did at igamesnews, where they start by explaining that the M2 will be to the M1 what the A15 is to the A14. In the post, they point out, as Apple already officially confirmed at the time, that the M1 is based on the architecture of the A14, but scaled to have more cores. Calling the M1 an A14X is an overstatement, of course, but the similarities are there.
With this in mind, they specify that the improvement between M1 and M2 should be quite similar to that of A14 to A15. This, yes, adjust cores switching for Pro and Max variants
Where we see more improvements is in multi-core. As we can see in the graph below, the power progression from less to more is: M1, M2, M1 Max and M2 Max. A progression that takes on its full meaning given the evolution that has taken place so far. A progression that, in addition, would bring power without compromising energy consumption, which would maintain performance per watt at the figures we already know, or even slightly above.
“That could give scores of just under 9,000 for the M2 (still not as fast as the M1 Max, thanks to that high-performance eight-core chip). That’s a great score for ultraportable laptops like the MacBook Air. But an A score well above 14,000 for the M2 Max would put it ahead of Intel’s faster Alder Lake Core i9, which has 14 cores (six performance and eight efficiency), and the M2 Max is likely to achieve these performance gains at a fraction of the power.
It’s clear that we are talking about hypotheses, but very valid assumptions. Hypotheses which, if confirmed, will change the rules of the game throughout the Mac range, but especially in the entry and high end. A MacBook Air with an M2 is impressive, while a Mac Pro with an M2 Max (or more of them) is almost hard to imagine.