Introduced at WWDC 2022, the Apple M2 single-chip system is used in the brand new MacBook Air and updated MacBook Pro 13. It is designed to replace the M1 but for now devices on both processors will be sold in parallel.

Even more transistors: what is known about the M2

The Apple M2 is slightly larger than the M1 – this is well illustrated by the schematic picture submitted by the company itself.

Apple M1 and M2 processors in comparison / Photo Apple

• Platforms have slightly different technical processes. Both chips are manufactured using a 5 nanometer process, but if last year’s had 16 billion transistors, the new one has 20 billion transistors.
• The M2 consumes less power than the M1, but the performance is higher: the surcharge on the CPU – 18 percent, on the GPU – 35 percent.
• The octa-core CPU of the new processor is represented by four high-performance cores with 16 megabytes of shared cache and four energy-efficient cores with 4 megabytes of shared cache.
• The 10-core GPU had more cache than the M1 GPU and its performance was 3.6 TFLOPS.
• Also in the SoC configuration is a 16-core neural processor to accelerate AI tasks, and a “media driver” for hardware video decoding, including H. This is important for those who work professionally with video.
• Finally, the SoC supports up to 24 gigabytes of unified memory (LPDDR5) with a bandwidth of 100 gigabits per second.

Key Features of Apple M2 / Photo Apple

What’s wrong

Despite all its advantages, Apple’s new processor still has one major drawback that some users are complaining about. It’s still M1. only supports connection of one external monitor.

As you can see from the published specs of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro 13, both support only one external monitor with resolutions up to 6K and a refresh rate of 60Hz.

Last year’s more expensive 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models support up to two external displays with the M1 Pro chip and up to four with the M1 Max chip. It looks like this year the company has followed the same path and will only allow more display connections on the M2 Pro and Max chip models.