Apple announced the 2022 MacBook Air / MacBook Pro lineup with the new generation of M2 chips during the WWDC2022 keynote. But like the previous generation M1 family, many speculate that the Cupertino tech giant will also drop M2 Pro / M2 Max related blurbs soon.
Previously, Apple has brought the M1Pro / M1Max option for the 14/16-inch Apple Silicon MacBook Pro.
The latest reports say that the upcoming M2 Max chip will feature a 12-core CPU + 38-core GPU design. As for the legendary M2Pro, no more details are known yet.
Apple promises its new M2 processors are up to 26 times faster than the Intel Core i5. In a new marketing campaign by Apple to encourage the use and comparison of its new computers and products, Apple claims its new 8-core chip is much faster than a Core i5, though there’s a trick to it.
Apple M2 promises to be 26 times faster than a Core i5 Is this true?
Apple recently announced its Silicon M2 processors that will be coming to the new MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro (13-inch).
The new M2 silicon will offer interesting performance improvements over the first-generation M1, with a 5nm process and a count of 8 cores, which seems to be enough for Apple company for most common tasks.
Apple has been very clever in its marketing, “trumping” its x86 competitors with numbers. For example, it says it can edit video 15 times faster than an Intel CPU, or that it’s 26 times faster at zooming images.
The NBcheck website NBcheck discovered, upon closer inspection of the final scores, that Apple is actually comparing the M2 processor to an 8th-generation Intel Core, the Core i5-8210Y. This processor was launched in 2019 and was part of this year’s MacBook Air. This chip has only 2 cores and 4 threads and ran at a base clock speed of 1.6 GHz, with a maximum of 3.6 GHz. The integrated graphics card was a modest UHD 617.
Apple chooses to use an “old” processor for comparison, rather than a more modern MacBook Air, which has the i5-1030G7 10th generation, which has 4 cores and 8 threads. The reason for this is that this processor is more powerful than the M2, even though it has fewer cores.
We know that Apple’s products are very good and it is valuable that they develop their own chips, but it is not necessary to make this kind of “absurd” comparison with older chips that do not even have the same number of cores.