January 2022 • Macworld 35M2: SPECS AND SPEED
According to several reports, the
M2 will make its debut in the next
MacBook Air. It will be faster than the
M1, but Bloomberg reports that it will
have the same number of CPU cores
as the M1 and up to 10 graphics cores.
That would put the M2 closer to the
M1 than the M1 Pro.
The M2’s debut in Apple’s thinnest
and lightest laptop says a lot about
the chip. Like the current MacBook
Air, reports say the 2022 MacBook
Air won’t have a fan for cooling, which
could mean Apple will be limiting the
M2’s performance in order to maintain
a proper operating temperature. If
the A15 is any
indication,
the M2 chip
could bring a
single-core
performance
boost of roughly
10 per cent over
the M1 and 20
per cent better
multi-core CPU
performance.
On the GPU
side, we saw
speeds that
were 40 to 50
per cent faster
than the iPhone 12’s A14 chip when
compared with the higher-end iPhone
13 Pro and about 25 per cent higher
with the 4-core GPU in the iPhone 13.
Compared to the M1, we’ll
probably see the M2 increase in
CPU performance to be about 15
per cent with a bigger jump in GPU
performance. The M1 Pro, with its
eight or 10 CPU cores (two efficiency
cores, the rest are performance
cores), boasts multi-core CPU
performance that’s about 70 per
cent better than the M1, so even
with a nice increase, the M2 will still
be significantly slower overall than
the M1 Pro.The 2022 MacBook Air could look very different from the
current Air (pictured), and it could have an M2 chip.