Apple M1 and M2 chip comparison

By comparing the M1 chip with the M2 chip, we wanted to see what’s different about both and what the secrets are to perform in this way and be very efficient.

Apple surprised with the performance of its own ARM-based SoCs for mobile devices, outperforming even top competitors like Qualcomm, Samsung, and Mediatek. And when many believed that it could not surpass the Intel chips that equipped its laptops and desktops, it launched the M series, again surprising many.

What is the A Series chip?

Apple has managed to design amazing microarchitectures for the CPUs of mobile devices like iPhone and iPad. These chips not only have a well-designed microarchitecture, but also have other elements that make them smart and powerful, such as the use of a heterogeneous SoC with various types of accelerators, such as an NPU for Artificial Intelligence.

From the A4 to the A16 Bionic, all designs gain in performance and surprise users and competitors. In addition, Apple has succeeded in creating a complete ecosystem of chips based on its own designs for all of its products. Not only the A-Series, but also the Apple S-Series (SiP designs for Apple Watch), Apple W-Series (WiFi and Bluetooth wireless SoCs), Apple T-Series (chips for security, encryption, among other elements) ) chips are also available.

What is the M-Series chip?

And, of course, we couldn’t forget the M-Series either, which are the chips that Apple has created for its most powerful Macbook and Mac models, although it has also begun to equip them in other high-performance devices such as the iPad Pro and iPad Air. .

These designs have managed to maximize the qualities of the Arm architecture to extract maximum performance while maintaining good energy efficiency, which reduces consumption and improves the autonomy of devices that depend on a battery.

Apple’s integrated GPU

I’d like to pause on the Apple GPU, which we haven’t talked about. And it is that in the SoC, Apple not only integrates a CPU, but also other units such as the GPU or the graphics processing unit. In this case, it is not a design made from scratch by Apple, but has had the help of an excellent partner, such as Imagination Technologies, the designer of GPUs for Arm like the PowerVR.

In fact, Apple used PowerVR designs in its first designs, although it later wanted to control this part as well to create its own GPUs. But, according to rumors, they are still designs derived from IMG designs.

However, it must be said that these Apple chips are not wonderful for gaming, as the equipment powered by AMD Radeon Pro GPUs were in the x86 era. Despite that, they have been able to defend themselves well in performance tests in apps like Adobe Creative and other design programs, but don’t expect wonders in rendering and video games… And here we will see some differences with respect to M1 vs M2.

Apple M1 Chips

Apple M1 Chip Specs

The first in the series was the M1 that saw the light of day in 2020. This new Apple design marked a before and after, not only because of the change from x86 to Arm, but also because of the results obtained. This new chip had:

• 16 billion transistors
• TSMC 5nm manufacturing node
• It integrated 16 Neural Engine cores
• 8 CPU cores
• 8 GPU cores
• Support up to 16 GB of unified memory
• Memory Bandwidth 100 GB/s

The M1 could be found in several configurations:

• 8x CPU + 7x GPU
• 8x CPU + 8x GPU

Apple M1 Pro Chip Specs

The new M1 Pro was introduced with some notable improvements. The characteristics of this more powerful chip were:

• 33.7 billion transistors
• TSMC 5nm manufacturing node
• It integrated 16 Neural Engine cores
• 10 CPU cores
• 16 GPU cores
• Support up to 32 GB of unified memory
• Memory Bandwidth 200 GB/s

Apple M1 Max Chip Specs

A more powerful chip than the M1 Pro was the M1 Max, the characteristics of this other chip were:

• 57 billion transistors
• TSMC 5nm manufacturing node
• It integrated 16 Neural Engine cores
• 10 CPU cores
• 32 GPU cores
• Support up to 64 GB of unified memory
• Memory Bandwidth 400 GB/s

Apple M1 Ultra Chip Specs

The top of the range would also arrive, the M1 Ultra, the most powerful of all the M1s:

• 114 billion transistors
• TSMC 5nm manufacturing node
• It integrated 32 Neural Engine cores
• 20 CPU cores
• 64 GPU cores
• Support up to 128 GB of unified memory
• Memory Bandwidth 800 GB/s

Apple M2 Chips

Apple M2 Chip Specs

These are the main specifications of Apple’s M2 chip:

• 20 billion transistors
• TSMC 2nd Gen 5nm Fabrication Node
• It integrated 16 Neural Engine cores
• 8 CPU cores
• 10 GPU cores
• Support up to 24 GB of unified memory
• Memory Bandwidth 100 GB/s

The M1 chip is available in 2 different configurations:

• 8 core CPU and 8 core GPU.
• 10 core CPU and 10 core GPU.

Apple M2 Pro Chip Specs

The M2 Pro chip comes with a 10-core CPU, a 16-core GPU, and a 16-core Neural Engine. The more powerful variation comes with 12 core CPU, 19 core GPU and 16 core Neural Engine.

Apple M2 Max Chip Specs

M2 Max is more powerful with the base chip which includes 12 core CPU, 30 core GPU and 16 core Neural Engine. The most powerful M2 Max chip has an impressive 12-core CPU, 38-core GPU and 16-core Neural Engine.

M1 vs. M2 comparison

Obviously, although the M2 chip has been a step backwards compared to the Ultra versions of the M1, the truth is that compared to its previous generation brother it translates into significant performance gains. It is not easy to compare these two SoCs, but according to the figures provided by Apple and the benchmarks, you can see the leap that this new redesigned microarchitecture has brought.

For example, in tests with Geekbench you can see scores for:

• Multi-core: M1 7654 – M2 8928
• Single-core: M1 1752 – M2 1919

Despite having the same number of cores, the difference is noticeable. According to these data, the performance improvement with a single core is 11.5% and the improvement in terms of maximum performance, using all cores, is practically 20% compared to the M1.