Power has a whole new destination, with Apple finally announcing its next-generation pro silicon processors, dubbed the M2 Pro and M2 Max. Both these newly unveiled chips will soon be used to power the company’s updated 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro and Mac mini PCs and are being labelled “the world’s most powerful and efficient chip for a pro laptop”. The Cupertino giant has been creating in-house processors for its Mac lineup for a while now and each new iteration adds plenty of performance and efficiency, thus promising to deliver a best-in-class experience.
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M2 Pro and M2 Max Chips | Image: Apple
With the new M2 Pro and M2 Max chipsets, Apple is taking things to the next level, promising “power-efficient performance and battery life to pro users.” Besides the fresh internals, both the Pros boost the same designs as before and are currently available to order, with shipping to kick off on January 24.
Among the two, the Apple M2 Pro is the less-powered chipset and improves on the architecture of the already existing M2 to deliver 10 or 12 core CPUs, featuring eight high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores. The manufacturer claims that the M2 Pro has 40 billion transistors, which is double the number of transistors the M2 came with and nearly 20 per cent more than the M1 Pro.
On the GPU side of things, the core count has been amped from 16 to 19 cores and now has a larger L2 cache. Apple says that this will help enable faster image processing performance and “console-quality gaming.” The chipset has support for up to 32GB of low-latency unified memory and is built using a second-generation 5-nanometer process technology.
MacBook Pro with M2 chip | Image: Apple
On the other hand, the beefer M2 Max has a whopping 67 billion transistors, 10 billion more than the M1 Max, and has a beastly support of up to 96GB of fast unified memory. Similar to the M2 Pro, it too features 12 CPU cores; however, here you get 38 GPU cores, instead of the 34 found in the M1 Max. With a powerhouse like this, multi-tasking or working across multiple pro apps will be “incredibly quick and fluid.”
Both M2 Pro and M2 Max have Apple’s next-generation, 16-core Neural Engine, “capable of 15.8 trillion operations per second, and up to 40 per cent faster than the previous generation.” But the most attention-grabbing thing with these new processors is battery life. With M2 Pro and M2 Max powering the MacBook Pro models, Apple claims that these can now last up to 22 hours, the “longest battery life ever in a Mac.”
MacBook Pro with M2 chip | Image: Apple
Both the newer Pro models now have support for WiFi 6E and an HDMI port that for the very time support 8K up to 60Hz, while 4K displays up to 240Hz. Guess, Apple is finally going back to its roots! All of this is on top of the already-existing three Thunderbolt 4 ports, an SDXC card slot and MagSafe 3 charging.
The newer MacBook Pro models are now up for pre-orders online and in the Apple Store app. These will start shipping starting January 24. The new 14-inch MacBook Pro with M2 Pro starts at AUD $3,199, while the chunky 16-inch MacBook Pro with M2 Pro starts at AUD $3,999.
MacBook Pro with M2 chip | Image: Apple
