After releasing the Mac with the M1 Ultra in early 2022, Apple is now said to be working on the next system on a chip (SoC), namely the M2.
The Cupertino-based company is said to be preparing nine new Macs that will use the M2 SoC in various variants. According to Mark Gurman from Bloomberg, the development of the M2 has now reached internal testing.
M2 itself is said to be made with the 4nm node process from TSMC. Of the nine existing Mac models, there are four different M2 chips. One of them is the MacBook Air with M2 which has eight CPU cores and 10 graphics cores.
Then there is also the entry-level MacBook Pro which has the M2 with the same specifications as the MacBook Air, as well as the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM that uses the M2 Pro and M2 Max. The M2 Max reportedly has 12 CPU cores and 38 graphics cores, up from 10 CPU cores and 32 graphics cores like the M1 Max.
Not only Macs with M2 were tested, because there is also a Mac Pro that will use the M1 Ultra successor chip, as quoted by us from Techspot, Monday (18/4/2022).
Gurman also said that Apple is also testing Mac Mini that uses the M1 Pro chip such as the MacBook Pro 14 and 16. Actually they also tested the Mac Mini with the M1 Max, but the product does not seem to be released to the public, because there is already a Mac Studio with M1 Max.
Gurman's report also complements his report in February, which stated that in 2022 there will be at least four Macs that will be launched with the M2 chip. It's just that he didn't mention the exact date of the launch, but maybe some of them will launch at WWDC 2022 which will be held on June 6 -10.
How fast is the M2? Some say that the M2 will be slightly slower than the M1 Pro and M1 Max. However, Jason Cross from Macworld predicts that an upgrade from M1 to M2 is like an upgrade from A14 to A15.
"M2 versus M1 is like A15 versus A14. M1 is based on the basic architecture of the A14, then increased the number of high-performance CPU cores (from two to four) and the number of GPU cores increased (from four to eight)," explains Cross.