Manzanathe giant of bitten apples from Cupertino, has just revealed its processors M2 Pro and M2 Max with the goal of raising the bar even higher for their own personal computers, more specifically the MacBook Pro and Mac mini models. Here again, we find SoCs based on ARM architecture, which aim to combine CPU and GPU-level performance with efficiency that is said to be higher than x86, and with support for up to 96 GB of unified memory.

Going deeper into the details, the Apple M2 Pro expands the original chip’s own architecture with up to 12 CPU cores and up to 19 GPU cores, along with up to 32GB of high-speed unified memory. The M2 Max chip further enhances the design with a GPU with up to 38 cores and support that doubles the bandwidth of the unified memory, which can reach 96GB capacity. The company claims that with top performance per watt, the M2 Max is the most powerful and energy-efficient processor it has ever seen in a professional notebook.

Recently, however, it is not only the “raw” performance of the processor and graphics that matters, but also the ability to work with artificial intelligence, which is a sector that has recently experienced a great boom. Here, both M2 Pro and M2 Max include a Faster 16-core Neural Enginewhile the multimedia engine has been improved to reach its best version to date.

The Neural Engine introduced in the M2 Pro and M2 Max processors is capable of performing 15.8 trillion operations per second, achieving speeds up to 40% higher than the previous generation. One of the areas where it will be applied is optimizing camera image quality using computational video.

The Apple M2 Pro is manufactured using a second generation 5 nanometer process and includes a total 40 billion transistors, which the company says is 20% more than the M1 Pro and double that of the original M2. The processor, which can have ten or twelve cores, which are divided into up to eight high-performance and another four efficient ones, offers a performance of up to 20% faster in multi-threaded tasks than M1 Pro. Apps like Adobe Photoshop should run faster than ever, and according to Apple, Xcode IDE runs up to 2.5 times faster than on the most powerful Intel-based MacBook Pro.

As for the GPU, the M2 Pro has a total of nineteen cores, three more than the M1 Pro, and has an even larger level 2 cache for up to 30% more performance. In this way, the experience and power in this aspect should be equivalent to a game console, although Apple did not specify any model or generation.

For his part, he Apple M2 Max It takes the brand’s throne at the performance level with its 67,000 million transistors, 10,000 million more than the M1 Max and double that of the standard M2. However, it is perhaps in the memory where it stands out the most. doubling M2 Pro bandwidth to 400GB/s with support for a maximum of 96GB of unified memory, so it should be able to handle super-heavy workloads with smooth system usage. The company touts things like superior visuals, machine learning model training, and multi-gigapixel image blending, both connected and running on battery.

The M2 Max has the same number of cores as the M2 Pro at the processor level, but on the graphics level, it is more powerful as it is able to incorporate an even larger level 2 cache and up to 38 cores. As a result, graphics performance has increased by up to 30% compared to the M1 Max.

Apple says that “With 96 GB of memory, the new MacBook Pro with M2 Max handles graphics-intensive projects that other competing systems can’t handle.“. To this end, and depending on its version, he tested with OTOY Octane X 2022.1 and bought the mentioned MacBook with two compatibles: one with an Intel Core i9 processor, NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 with 24 GB of GDDR6 memory. and Windows 11. Pro and more with Intel Core i9, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti with 16 GB of GDDR6 memory and the latest version of Windows 11 Home.

Another feature of Apple processors is advanced media engine with acceleration for formats such as H.264 and HEVC and ProRes video rendering (encoding) and playback (decoding), enabling playback of multiple 4K and 8K video streams with low power consumption. It’s important to note here that the M2 Max has two video rendering engines and two ProRes engines, so it should render videos twice as fast as the M2 Pro. To improve security, there is the latest generation of Secure Enclave, a key component to the top security offered by Apple.

As we can see, Apple seems determined to bet heavily on the professional market with its new M2 Pro and M2 Max processors, although in the end the equipment that includes them can be bought by anyone who pays for it. Until Windows works as it should on ARM, Apple will apparently continue to behave as the company with the most room for growth in the notebook sector, and that its ARM processors have been a breath of fresh air, which the sector needed as food.