The new MacBook Pro is the first model with the second generation of Apple’s ARM processor. However, the design and equipment appear surprisingly backward-looking.
At the end of 2020, Apple shook up the IT world with its M1 processor. The higher expansion stages M1 Pro, M1 Max and M1 Ultra, which will be added in the course of 2021, use the same components, but with more cores in the CPU and GPU. Now follows with the M2 the first representative of the second chip generation.
Instead of a completely new architecture or a finer manufacturing process, there is mainly fine-tuning. More cache is available to the CPU cores, which continue to operate in a combination of four performance and four efficiency cores (4P+4E). The memory interface now addresses LPDDR5 RAM instead of the previous LPDDR4 RAM, which provides 50 percent more bandwidth.
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Apple does not provide any information on clock frequencies or other common processor characteristics; Utility programs report a moderate increase of 9.3 percent from 3.2 to 3.5 GHz maximum clock. It is more important that the efficiency cores now run at up to 2.86 instead of 2.06 GHz (plus 39 percent), which increases performance on all cores in multithreading loads.
