With little fanfare, Apple today released refreshed MacBook Pros and a new mini.
Rumors of a big jump in performance and efficiency (similar to what Intel and AMD surprisingly released earlier this month) all came to shame. It is now unlikely that Apple will make a big jump in performance and power efficiency this year, sticking to the 5nm M2 nodes.
The jump from M1pro/max to M2 gives 11-20% boost and battery times are supposedly marginally improved (from 21 to 22 hours of video decoding) most likely as a result of better codecs.
Even last year’s Intel 12th gen and AMDs 6th gen Ryzens were already significantly faster than M1 and M2 (due to support for more threads, more cores, and support for higher max TDPs), so the big selling point of these new models from Apple will have to be battery-performance. “OK performance even without an adaptor plugged in”, For raw CPU performance, and GPU performance they will be far behind the new Intel and AMD HX chips.. for power efficiency they will most likely have to compete with AMD’s 4nm 7940 that will offer greater software compatibility and similar performance to Apples M2 Max CPU at significantly lower TDP.
Current Performance comparison:
Mobile CPUs Cinebench multi-threaded scores:
Apples M1 (2020) : score 7508 8-threads (4 high-performing firestorm Cores + 4 low-power icestorm Cores)
Apple M1 Max (2021) : score 12328 10-threads (8 high-performing firestorm Cores + 2 low-power icestorm Cores)
Apples M2 (2022) : score 8619 8-threads (4 high-performing firestorm Cores + 4 low-power icestorm Cores)
AMD R9 7940HS (2023) : score 15261 16-threads (8 high-performing x86 cores with SMT hyperthreading)
AMD R9 7945HX (2023) : score 24772 32-threads (16 high-performing x86 Cores with SMT hyperthreading)
Intel i9-13980HX (2023) : score 26860 (boost mode >32000 ) 32-threads (8 high-performing x86 Cores with SMT hyperthreading support, and 16 low-power 1-thread cores)
Apple M2 Max (2023) : score 15515 12-threads (8-high-performing firestorm Cores + 2 low-power cores no SMT)
