WWDC 2022: Apple’s new M2 chip and what you need to know about it

Apple unveiled a whole range of new software upgrades at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) that kicked off on June 6 including iOS 16, watchOS 9, iPadOS 16, and macOS 13 or macOS Ventura. Apple also unveiled the new M2 chip that for starters is going to power the newly redesigned MacBook Air and a 13-inch MacBook Pro. 

Apple’s M2 chip comes after the Apple M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max, and the M1 Ultra chips. The M2, as Apple promises, is more powerful and is going to bring in a lot of performance improvements. 

Like the M1, Apple’s M2 uses Apple’s custom Arm silicon and is built on a 5nm process with 20 billion transistors, which is 25 per cent more transistors than what the M1 had. And based on this, Apple is promising an 18 per cent faster CPU and a 35 per cent faster GPU on the M2 as compared to the M1. Apple says that the performance of the M2 is 1.9x faster than the “latest 10-core PC laptop chip”. 

Apple is also using new performance cores and efficiency cores on the M2 along with 100Gbps memory bandwidth and 24GB of unified memory. This is 50 per cent more than what’s on the M1. The M2 also has four high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores with a shared 16MB cache on the performance cores and a shared 4MB cache on the efficiency cores.

The M2 chip has a next-gen secure enclave and a neural engine, an updated media engine that supports 8K H.264 and HEVC video - this means that the chip can stream 4K and 8K video at the same time. 

The chip has 10 cores as compared to the eight on the M1, and this combined with a larger cache and higher memory bandwidth “should boost graphics performance” and the company is promising up to 35 per cent better performance on the M2 as compared to the M1. 

Also read: Apple's iOS 16: Intelligent and user friendly; check features and specs here

Also read: WWDC 2022: Apple unveils new MacBook Air powered by M2; check price and other details