When Apple launched the M1 processor two years ago, it quickly won glowing reviews for its power efficiency and performance. The company’s switch to ARM processing when much more smoothly than Microsoft’s rocky Windows on ARM. At WWDC 2022 last week, Apple announced the new M2 system-on-a-chip, and benchmarks are now revealing the performance.
As you would expect, Apple boasts the M2 builds on the M1 and is 18% faster than its predecessor. Furthermore, the company says that gain does not come at the expense of power efficiency.
Early benchmarks suggest Apple was not over-selling the potential of the M2. In fact, it seems the CPU lives up to the company’s claims.
Geekbench scores for the M2 chipset show Apple has been testing the CPU with three consecutive runs. The test was done on the 13-inch MacBook Pro 2022 with a 14.7-inch screen, which ships with the M2 on board.
Tests
Across all three runs, the processor got an average score of around 1,900 points for single thread, topping out at 1,919. For multi-thread performance, the M2 got a high of 8,928 points. Comparisons to M1 benchmarking suggest the new processor is tracking around 10-15% higher than the older chip.
While Apple is being a little more generous with its estimates, the results are more or less in line with the company’s claims. It will be up to customers who have bought an M1 machine in the last two years to decide whether a 10-15% gain in performance warrants upgrading.
Considering 2022’s slate of M2 Mac’s are hardly brimming with new features (they’re most incremental updates), the M2 is arguably the big selling point.
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