Difference between m2 and m1 chip
Apple’s M1 chip was a true revolution that no one has managed to match in 2 years. And Apple, before anyone has been able to match them, has launched the M2 chip that improves the power of the M1 chip by around 20%. These are very interesting data that show the enormous capacity of Apple designing chips.
Despite the fact that the two processors use the same manufacturing process in 5 nm, Apple has managed to improve power without increasing energy consumption. Which is one of the key aspects of Apple Silicon chips.
Specifications: M1 vs. M2
As you can see in the following comparative table, the M2 chip introduces interesting new features that make it a more powerful chip, especially in terms of tasks related to video editing.
- Specifications
- M1
- M2
- CPU
- 4 high-performance cores and 4 high-efficiency cores
- 4 high-performance cores and 4 high-efficiency cores
- L2 Cache
- 12MB
- 16MB
- GPU
- 8 cores (2.6 TFLOPS)
- 10 cores (3.6 TFLOPS)
- Neural Engine
- 16 cores (11 trillion operations per second)
- 16 cores (15.8 trillion operations per second)
- RAM memory
- Up to 16 GB
- Up to 24 GB
- Memory controller
- LPDDR4-4266 | 8x 16CH | 68GB/sec
- LPDDR5-6400 | 8x 16-bit CH | 100GB/sec
- Encode/Decode
- 4K | H.264, H.265
- 8K | H.264, H.265, ProRes, ProRes RAW
- Transistors
- 16 billion
- 20 billion
Chip M1
M1 Specifications
These are the main specifications of Apple’s M1 chip:
- 8 core CPU.
- 7 or 8 core GPU.
- Up to 16 GB of unified memory.
- 16 billion transistors.
M1 configurations
The M1 chip is available in 3 different configurations:
- 8 core CPU and 7 core GPU.
- 8 core CPU and 8 core GPU.
Chip M2
M2 Specifications
These are the main specifications of Apple’s M2 chip:
- 8 core CPU.
- 10 core GPU.
- Up to 24 GB of unified memory.
- 20 billion transistors.
M2 configurations
The M1 chip is available in 3 different configurations:
- 8 core CPU and 8 core GPU.
- 10 core CPU and 10 core GPU.
Performance: M1 vs. M2
While the specs clearly show the superiority of the M2 chip, this has to translate into performance, which is really hard to measure. However, that is what the performance tests are for, although they are not something to look at only, they do allow us to compare two processors as similar as the M1 and M2.
Therefore, looking at the score they get in a benchmark test like Geekbench, these are the results:
- M1 chip. Single core score: 1752. Multicore score: 7654.
- M2 chip. Single core score: 1919. Multicore score: 8928.
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.
Of course, the M2 chip is a more than interesting update compared to the M1 chip. Not to say that if you have a Mac with the M1 you should upgrade to one with the M2, but it is a significant improvement for only two years.