back to article Apple’s M2 chip isn’t a slam dunk, but it does point to the future

For all the pomp and circumstance surrounding Apple's move to homegrown silicon for Macs, the tech giant has admitted that the new M2 chip isn't quite the slam dunk that its predecessor was when compared to the latest from Apple's former CPU supplier, Intel. During its WWDC 2022 keynote Monday, Apple focused its high-level …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    Lies, damn lies, and benchmarks

    While the M2 seems like it will be appropriate for some applications, selected benchmarks don't convince me of anything. It's not to single out Apple. The same could be said for presentations press releases, roadmaps, and benchmarks from Intel, AMD, Google, and everyone else.

    Ultimately it's a horses for courses question. I'm much more interested in what Apple thinks the M2 is best for and who the target audience is.

    1. Anal Leakage

      Re: Lies, damn lies, and benchmarks

      Fun fact: not everyone is a gamer.

      1. elsergiovolador Silver badge

        Re: Lies, damn lies, and benchmarks

        Fun fact, for near real time simulations and signal processing only gaming CPUs are viable as your process is as fast as the slowest core.

        All the pro or server CPUs don't cut the mustard so to speak.

        1. gnasher729 Silver badge

          Re: Lies, damn lies, and benchmarks

          Ahem…. M1 CPUs were right up there with the fastest single core performance, and M2 CPUs are quite a bit faster.

    2. big_D Silver badge

      Re: Lies, damn lies, and benchmarks

      Also, the article compared the M2 to the 12th gen P-series processor, which is for powerful, thicker laptops, where heat dissipation and bigger batteries aren't such a problem, admits that the M2 is faster than the U-series for ultrabooks, then says that Apple doesn't have the fastest processor for ultra-thin laptops...

      If the article said, that they don't have the most powerful chips for mobile workstations or gamin laptops, fair enough, but they aren't ultra-thin.

      Also, for me, power per Watt is important. With electricity prices having doubled in the last 6 months, I'm looking very much at saving power where I can, my Ryzen 1700 desktop was replaced with an M1 Mac this time around, similar performance (for the applications I use), but it uses a fraction of the power that the Ryzen 1700 + nVidia GTX1060ti do.

      1. big_D Silver badge

        Re: Lies, damn lies, and benchmarks

        Okay, and the local gas company just announced that they are raising their prices a further 117% in August! Time to really tighten the belt!

  2. Solviva

    Not a fanboy here, but an 8 core processor 'only' giving 87% compared to a 12 core processor doesn't sound like much of an issue. Takes that bit longer to render each frame of youtube? Takes that bit longer to encode a video. Takes exactly the same time to load faceache. The takeaway is the barely noticeable performance hit is offset by the huge power savings.

    Back in the day you could (would) pump extra volts and subsequently amps into your CPU to get those extra few hundred MHz at a significant power increase. Then power wasn't much of an issue as long as you could get rid of the heat, performance was king. Now performance is fairly stagnant, power costs real money, so the M2 for most tasks looks to be a jolly good choice compared to the space heaters that Intel has to offer.

    Would be interesting to have an AMD comparison too, is that missing because they don't see AMD as competition or were they somewhat more embarrassed when compared to a Ryzen in terms of power & performance?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      No, the article mentions "performance per watt" but what it's leaving out is that there's different types of performance. For instance, is it at idle? Is it scrolling a webpage? Is it using a hardware decoder? This is probably why the article doesn't mention 1 specific thing it's great at, just a quick hand wave at a performance per watt claim.

      And as for heavy CPU based jobs, If the machine takes 20% longer to render a job because it's 20% slower, well you break even on energy but you've lost time from the wall clock. So, you lose there :-( (unless your time isn't worth anything).

      1. batfink

        My question exactly. It's all very well to say that your CPU drags less power at full usage levels, but that's no help if it drags more power at idle - which is where it's likely to spend much of its time.

      2. captain veg Silver badge

        Re: you've lost time from the wall clock

        My time is worth plenty. That's why I find something else to do while waiting for a heavy job to finish.

        Sometimes it's an opportunity to pass into motion a different kind of heavy job.

        -A.

    2. big_D Silver badge

      Actually, video encoding should be much faster, as it has dedicated elements on the die to handle those faster than the CPI or GPU and leaving the CPU & GPU free to do other things.

      It very much comes down to the software you use and your workflow, whether the Apple M1/M2 series processors or Intel/AMD processors make more sense. If the software is optimized for M1/M2, it can be a lot faster, especially on Pro/Max/Ultra, if the software can really take advantage of parallel processing.

      Recent tests in c't magazine showed that the M1 Ultra ran rings around Intel/AMD desktop chips for certain tasks in DAW (digital audio) and photo and video editing, but if the software wasn't optimised (E.g. Adobe Creative Suite, which is ageing and doesn't take much advantage of parallel processing) and there is no advantage of using the Apple silicon. Serif's suite of graphic tools, on the other hand, scale well and were markedly faster on the Ultra, as well as Logic Pro etc. from Apple.

    3. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      It's really about the performance of the overall system and this is where Apple have got most things right but also where they skate over things. For a high-end chip a max of 24 GB of shared memory isn't really enough even if what there is, is very fast and this does help make the chips feel faster than they really are.

      Anyone who's been playing with ARM chips for a while will know that, while never as fast as x86, they're pretty quick and much smaller and tend to draw less power. Then there's all the hardware acceleration, assuming Apple lets third party software run it. The neural engine is probably less impressive, because model training is likely to be running on a cluster anyway, than GPU oomph for things that can take advantage of it like media encoding, though there other non-ML areas where all those vector units can be very useful.

      And battery life: this is for notebooks after all. Apple seems to have decided that 1 kg is what most people are happy with as long as battery life is good enough: for less you have to start taking useful things like the battery away or have a smaller screen. This is where Apple have traditionally excelled and where the new machines outlast the competition.

      1. big_D Silver badge

        For a high-end chip a max of 24 GB of shared memory isn't really enough even if what there is, is very fast and this does help make the chips feel faster than they really are.

        The rest of your comment is more or less in line with how I see it, but...

        The M2 is the entry level chip, it is the equivalent of the Core i3 of the Apple ecosystem. We have the Pro, Max and Ultra, which are the high end chips. It also depends very much on what you will use the device for.

        Most of our desktop PCs still have 4GB RAM and are fast enough - I'd never buy something with only 4GB, I'd consider 8GB the minimum at work, but that is email, excel and remote desktop for most users.

        Likewise, if you look at equivalent ultrabooks to the MacBook Air or the base MacBook "Pro", they generally have slower U-class processors and 8 to 16GB RAM, like the HP Spectre series for example.

        1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

          Seeing as they're sticking the M2 in MBPs i think "entry-level" isn't quite appropriate.

          The memory restriction is really quite odd. I'm assuming this is largely down to manufacturing issues due to the way memory is accessed. But the problems with "shared CPU/GPU" memory should be clear to those of us able to remember Intel's foray into the area. Assume you have 75% and possibly only 50% of nominal capacity at most available.

          I agree that MacOS is fine for many things with 8GB but not if you're going to run any VMs or do any kind of grunt work.

          1. DrBobK

            But it is the v small MBP, not the 14" or 16", which previously got Pro and Max variants of M1. I expect the larger MBPs will get M2Pro and M2Max when they appear.

          2. big_D Silver badge

            Except that, instead of allotting a few MB for the video memory, or NP units, they can grab everything, if they need it. This makes them more flexible than a CPU + discrete GPU combination, maybe not on the 8GB or 24GB M1/M2, but on the 128GB M1 Ultra, that means the GPU and neural cores can use the full 128GB of RAM, if needed (minus what OS X itself needs, obviously).

            And the MBP is the "MacBook Air in a MBP case" model. It doesn't have the expansion of a "real" MBP, only the 14" and 16" models get the high end professional chips.

            As to playing around with VMs, again, this is an entry level chip, and, yes, 8GB is going to cramp things, but you wouldn't expect a Core i3 to run a lot of VMs either... That said, I had a couple Windows Server test VMs set up on my i5 ThinkPad with 8GB RAM.

          3. Jaybus

            Not that odd. There is no external memory bus. It can only use whatever RAM can be crammed onto the die. It restricts the quantity of RAM, but also eliminates a much slower bus. All RAM is accessed at on-die speed.

  3. ThomH

    In Apple-specific terms, still a huge win

    Especially in the MacBook Air, Apple did not have a good history of using Intel’s fastest — even when maximally configured, Apple’s final Intel-based Air declined the top-of-the-line mobile i7 for TDP reasons, using the 9W 1060 rather than the 15W 1065.

    So getting this level of performance _even in the base model_ is a huge performance leap for Apple customers.

    1. Sammy Smalls

      Re: In Apple-specific terms, still a huge win

      I moved up from the 2018 i5 1.6Ghz to the M1 Air and the difference is night and day. Battery life, performance, noise (lack of), heat, and general doing what a computer should without noticing it.

      I hated that u1060 iteration. The only thing that made me move to it was the 8GB of ram limit on the previous, non-retina air. It probably wasnt worth it. There was negligible performance increase because of how crap the CPU was.

      One thing about the m1 - do not believe the people who say 'you only need 8GB of ram because of how the SSD is tightly integrated to the SOC'. I hit the 16GB limit on mine sometimes and it's very noticeable. Maybe not as bad as my Windows PC, but its definitely there.

      1. captain veg Silver badge

        Re: In Apple-specific terms, still a huge win

        I always advise people thinking of buying a machine with non-upgradable RAM to spec at least twice as much as they think they'll need, because it won't be long, compared with the potential lifetime of the machine, until they a lot more than they originally specced.

        So while I was sufficiently impressed by the M1-powered Mini to spend my hard-earned on one, I was deeply unimpressed by the 16GB ceiling. It'll do... for now.

        -A.

  4. mevets

    Historical practice..

    Apple have a history of releasing top shelf hardware in whatever category they are playing in. That isn't fanboi; at one point I might have been fanboi. Then I worked for them for a bit. Not a fanboi. But they deserve credit for more than packaging; they make some pretty impressive kit.

    The M1, was followed up with the M1Max a weird rebranding of dual socket, but a substantial performance jump from the M1. When do you think the M2Max ( I would *love* it if they called it the M286, as in Agent 86 Maxwell Smart and 99) will arrive? Right now the macbook air outperforms the imac. That does not seem sustainable. Maybe the quad-socket version could be M299.

    1. Smirnov

      Re: the M1Max a weird rebranding of dual socket,

      It's the M1 Ultra which consists of two CPUs (SoCs, actually) bonded together (there are no sockets with AS so it's still not "dual socket"), the M1 Max is still a single device.

    2. Ian 55

      Re: Historical practice..

      M286 risks people remembering the Intel 80286 though, which they wouldn't want.

  5. sreynolds

    Marketing slides....

    Sorry is it just me but I find those slides a bit over simplified for my liking.

    1. andygrace

      Re: Marketing slides....

      Agreed but in fairness the target audience here on El Reg is about three orders of magnitude better at compute and graph interpretation skills than potential customers of the MBA.

      I'd think the audience here is probably still an order or magnitude ahead of the median WWDC virtual attendee. Not to say there aren't some incredibly high end people who do, it's just Apple's app development process has become more about design and library abstraction engineering than hard core code.

      I think what they've done here with the inspiration and dedication going all the way back to Sophie Wilson et al at Acorn and the original ARM Cambridge - it's an extraordinary achievement. ProRes video encoding on a low end chip, power envelope, neural co-processing, on package HBM2, GPU and CPU performance. Nothing short of amazing.

      Just a shame the announced PACMAN 48 bit address + pointer authentication "vulnerability" of the M1 using ARMv8.3 reminds me of the 26 bit addressing mode in the original ARM where the extra 6 bits were used for flags and SWIs. That caused quite a few bad memories of assembly code revisions by me when it went full 32 bit. This new one to me seems mostly theoretical rather than a huge security flaw. Unlike Spectre and friends.

  6. AdamWill

    Ultra-thin?

    "The company did claim that the M2's CPU is 1.9x faster than Intel's 10-core Core i7-1255U while using the same amount of power, but while this may be a more appropriate comparison, the fact is that Apple doesn't have a CPU for ultra-thin laptops that is as powerful as Intel's best."

    Well, that's kinda arguable. It's not as powerful *at peak power consumption*, indeed. But it seems unlikely that a CPU in any "ultra-thin" chassis is going to be able to consume 50+W of power for any significant amount of time.

    You'd have to run extensive real-world benchmarks to be sure, but I would be pretty surprised if an ultra-thin laptop with the i7-1255U actually outperforms an ultra-thin M2 laptop in a long-running, high CPU intensity test. I'd expect, rather, that the i7-1255U one would blaze out of the gates for ten minutes, then fairly quickly be throttled down to a substantially lower speed to prevent overheating.

    You can run a CPU at 50+W in a laptop for a long time, but it won't be an ultrathin one. It'll be a much thicker workstation-type one.

    For good performance in an ultra-thin, you *really really need* high performance-per-watt, because it's just not possible to clear a lot of heat out of a chassis that thin.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Ultra-thin?

      .. and, speaking from experience (I'm looking at you, Sony VAIO), you would also need an asbestos lap.

      And asbestos has been banned.

      It would be interesting if the corporate number crunchers such as AutoCAD would support the M1-and-beyond infrastructure, I would love to see a comparison with Intel on power consumption and heat generation.

  7. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

    Reading the Runes between the Company Lines

    We continue to have a relentless focus on power efficient performance. In other words, maximizing performance while minimizing power consumption," Srouji said.

    The perfect parameter for stealthy work .... pathfinder developments.

    Ultimately it's a horses for courses question. I'm much more interested in what Apple thinks the M2 is best for and who the target audience is. .... HildyJ

    Quite so, HildyJ. AIMaster Pilots would a prime sector/vector well equipped to give Apple invaluable feedback on their OS's suitability for new hardware/software/virtual machine warfare performance competition and/or opposition.

    To imagine that they don't supply equipment for/to beta testing pirates and mercenary units in that sector in return for private and proprietary info and intel on live operational results is a great result for Apple whenever they do stealthy pathfinder development work.

  8. Sandgrounder

    Interesting metric

    Fastest processor for x watts.

    I wonder if the car industry will take it up. Will we start to see adverts such as

    "This VW Golf is the Fastest car that does 50 miles per gallon"

    1. Dave 126 Silver badge

      Re: Interesting metric

      "This VW is the fastest car that can travel to work and back without refuelling" might also work. Of course efficiency in cars is largely desirable because fuel costs money, whereas efficiency in laptops is largely desired for freedom from plug sockets.

      1. Muscleguy

        Re: Interesting metric

        In my experience not all the sockets on trains work. So if your booked seat is next to a nonfunctional socket and the carriage is full your battery matters.

    2. Alan Gregory 1

      Re: Interesting metric

      For a short period of time the Daihatus Charade was the cheapest car on the market that had a power to engine ratio greater than 100bhp per litre of engine capacity.

  9. trevorde Silver badge

    Biggest problem

    No software

  10. heyrick Silver badge

    Not a fanboy

    But it seems to me that carrying on working after n hours as your slightly slower processor chugs along might just be more useful than twiddling thumbs because the blazing fast processor expired the battery capacity an hour ago...

    This will be good for people who like performance to be available, but aren't necessarily able to be tethered to a charging cable.

    1. hardboiledphil

      Re: Not a fanboy

      I have an M1Max (personal) and an Dell i9 (company) and admittedly the Max was more money but there really is no comparison for everyday use. Max is same speed whether on battery or power but i9 significanly slower on batter. Max is silent while i9 has fans running when constantly over 10-20% cpu and Max probably lasts 4 times as long on battery. Company machine does have some other crap on it that doesn't really help it's performance (it's faster compiling in WSL2 than Windows???) but if it was my money on the i9 I'd be sorely disappointed unless I didn't know how much better other machines can be to use

      1. Sgt_Oddball

        Re: Not a fanboy

        I've (currently) got both an i7 2019 Mac book pro and an M1 2021 mac book pro...

        Performance wise I've not noticed much of a difference (once I got our build pipeline to actually work on the M1 without breaking or having to re-write everything - but that's another story) but battery life though, that's been a huge difference.

        I7 would have been lucky to get to lunch with more than 50% battery after morning meetings. M1 though made it to 1pm before dipping below 90%.... 90% battery after 4 hours work. And that's without it attempting to take off from my desk or be hot enough to keep a coffee mug warm.

        That alone was a big deal to me as it means I can get away not needing to drag the charger in to the office with me.

        1. andygrace

          Re: Not a fanboy

          Yep - totally agree. It's really an experiential improvement.

          As soon as the Homebrew legends team had brew up and working well (to which I added a teeny, tiny bit) using the original Apple Dev Transition Kit, it really has been a pleasure to code on an M1 MBA.

          Still use all Linux server side, but even Windows runs amazingly well via Parallels on that crazy long-life first generation M1 machine.

          That's coming from a guy whose primary dev platform was originally CP/M then DOS on x86 until the iPhone arrived. Tried some new x86_64 notebooks every couple of years since then but they haven't been a daily driver ever since.

          I reckon these ports of macOS to ARM64 has clinched it for me on the client side for a long time to come.

          1. werdsmith Silver badge

            Re: Not a fanboy

            For the first time ever I am seriously considering getting me an ARM Macbook of some description. And the Macbook market share is growing, so it appears that the ARM switch is a bit of a breakthrough for Apple.

            1. Androgynous Cupboard Silver badge

              Re: Not a fanboy

              Moving from a 2015 Macbook Pro to my current M1 Pro Macbook Pro was the single biggest performance jump I've seen in about 20 years. For both compiling and running our large CPU-bound Java application, performance triple.

    2. Alan Gregory 1

      Re: Not a fanboy

      The analogy that always got me was a comparison between a Xeon and an i7 where the i7 was described as a Ferrari and the Xeon as a pick up truck.

      Depending on what you were trying to do, both had strengths and weaknesses.

  11. DenTheMan

    i7-1255U is essentialy a dual core plus.

    Apple are comparing theirs to a low power Intel chip with only 2 power cores.

    Yes it is power efficient and fast but as to VFM, not really.

    Intel reverting to Big.Little is a positive sign. Most users do not need fastest chips, posturing being a main use of them, ignoring gaming.

  12. anthonyhegedus Silver badge

    Not really a fanboy either

    It's horses for courses. I use my 16GB Mac M1 Pro-CPU laptop most of the time plugged in, and some of the time 'on my lap'. I like the fact that the battery lasts about 10 hours for ordinary use (less if I'm doing remote support - maybe 6 hours) and doesn't get hot. It barely gets warm.

    I get fewer slowdowns during the day than with my 32GB Core i7 PC.

    However, I don't need massive compute speed and I don't do video editing or play games (much).

    And yet I almost never recommend Macs to my customers

    1. andygrace

      Re: Not really a fanboy either

      I know exactly what you mean.

      It sounds weird, but using notebook on your lap without it even getting slightly warm is almost a revelation.

      I don't think I have ever used any mobile machine that is this cool - in the thermal sense, and completely silent.

      1. Ace2 Silver badge

        Re: Not really a fanboy either

        My 2018 MBP would heat up to the point you would notice it when typing, if there was a 4K monitor connected but nothing else going on. Apparently it brings up the discrete GPU whenever a monitor is attached.

        The M1 Pro version isn’t detectably warm even with a monitor attached *and* doing actual work.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Apple released a higher powered SOC than most vendors. That is all. This is neither "earth shattering" nor "ground breaking" news, despite the rah-rahs of the Apple fanboi who wrote this article.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Plenty of votes down, but that is ALL it is - an SOC with beefed up memory and cores.

  14. Marty McFly Silver badge
    Thumb Down

    I really want to like the M1...

    ...but it still cannot play a Quicktime video smoothly. My mid-2011 Mini plays the video fine. My sparkly new M1 Mini plays....the video...with....jerks and...starts. Same, same, same - display, keyboard, network, video, etc.

    But hey, I can spout really cool marketing performance benchmarks. If I do that enough I will believe it must be good, and I will stop....hearing....the gaps....in....the video.

    1. Ace2 Silver badge

      Re: I really want to like the M1...

      That has not been my experience with a mini, an MBA, or an MBP. Is the video in an unusual format? Try with a new user account?

  15. fidodogbreath

    As others have noted, the M-series chips give a significant improvement in real-world computer usability. I personally value not having the constant drone of a laptop fan that sounds like it's spooling up for takeoff.

    Last fall, Jim Salter from Ars Technica compared performance and power consumption of the M1 vs then-current Intel and AMD CPUs, with similar results. If the ONLY thing you care about is having the highest possible performance, the top-end legacy CPUs can take the crown.

    But when power consumption and thermal issues are added to the equation, the M1 provided comparable grunt for a fraction of the power and heat...which is also Apple's claim about the M2 as reported in the article.

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