next-gen 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros, alongside a refreshed Mac mini that was long overdue. The new chips are the successors to the M1 Max and M1 Pro that were announced in 2021. At the moment, the M2 Max is only found in the new laptops, while the M2 Pro also powers the new Mac mini.
Both the M2 Pro and M2 Max are powerful chips, but the latter has even more power. As explained by an increase over the M1 Pro, which comes with either an 8-core U and 14-core GPU, or a 10-core U and 16-core GPU. The M2 Pro also comes with either 16GB or 32GB of unified memory with 200GB/s of bandwidth.
The M2 Max Is More Powerful
As for the M2 Max, it is even more powerful, offering more U and GPU cores, as well as additional memory with faster bandwidth. The base M2 Max variant has a 12-core U and a 30-core GPU, while the top-end version rocks a 12-core U and a 38-core GPU. In comparison, the top-end M1 Max has 10 U cores and 30 GPU cores. The M2 Max also comes with up to 96GB of unified memory at 400GB/s of bandwidth, which is twice that of the M2 Pro and four times that of the standard M2.
Both the M2 Pro and M2 Max include Apple’s next-generation 16-core Neural Engine that the company claims is capable of 15.8 trillion operations per second. The company also says that it is up to 40 percent faster than the previous generation. In of the media engine, the M2 Pro includes hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC, and ProRes video encode and decode. The M2 Max, on the other hand, features two video encode engines and two ProRes engines that Apple claims offers up to two-times faster video encoding than the M2 Pro.
The increased cores in the new chips will allow for better performance in multi-threaded apps, while the enhanced memory bandwidth means that they will be able to move data super-fast, helping video editors, 3D-modelers and other creators. Overall, if Apple's claims are verified by benchmarks and testing, it would mean that the M2 Pro and M2 Max are the fastest chips from the company yet. Going forward, it will be interesting to see which other Apple devices they will power in the coming months.
Source: Apple