Makes me feel a little better about my Mac Studio purchase, looks like I won’t be missing out too much
I had to upgrade regardless but still
I had to upgrade regardless but still
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'M2 Max' Geekbench Scores Leak Online, Revealing Rumored Specs and Performance
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Doesn't surprise M2 Pro/Max/Ultra will very likely follow the same trend of M1 to M2. The M3 SOC's should bring the bigger benefits for those that need. The M2's 98GB of unified memory will be of use for some, adding further power in the portable domain. Apple will continue to optimise the OS for the new M2's until release with improved numbers.
Tend to concur with @leman if Apple is leaking the numbers now, and you already have a macOS point release as a tip. Apple have been doing this for years as it's free advertising and whips up the community & tech press. It's an incremental release and let's be straight the vast the majority will be looking at the base model 13"/14" Mac's not a fully loaded 16" Max
As for Intel its academic as Apple is phasing them out, I think the only one that may remain for a few more years is the MacPro as some applications/users require the X86 processors on the Mac platform. If they are faster so be it, but they won't in the Mac, Maybe MacPro as an expensive option.
I decided early this year I'll look at M3 when it's released if I need the performance. Bottom line is I need to see the benight as a user.
Q-6
Tend to concur with @leman if Apple is leaking the numbers now, and you already have a macOS point release as a tip. Apple have been doing this for years as it's free advertising and whips up the community & tech press. It's an incremental release and let's be straight the vast the majority will be looking at the base model 13"/14" Mac's not a fully loaded 16" Max
As for Intel its academic as Apple is phasing them out, I think the only one that may remain for a few more years is the MacPro as some applications/users require the X86 processors on the Mac platform. If they are faster so be it, but they won't in the Mac, Maybe MacPro as an expensive option.
I decided early this year I'll look at M3 when it's released if I need the performance. Bottom line is I need to see the benight as a user.
Q-6
For those of us getting an upgrade from a 6 year old computer it is not a 11% increase in performance, it is much more. Who needs a new computer every year!
As a professional programmer for 35 years, I want to get value from my workstations. Programming enhancements into my development gives me more productivity improvements than raw CPU speed for what I do. Passing tasks off to other cores is where I get more performance.
When I deal with terabytes of data the Apple hardware is just not fine tuned enough to give the performance I can get on Windows. Thus for our data servers they are always windows boxes.
I am looking to double the number of cores, double the amount of Ram increase GPU performance, increase RAM, and SSD performance. Now that my late MacPro 6 core cannot be upgraded, it is time to get a new one.
I will wait for the new MacStudio as I want a desktop. Maybe by late 2023 it will be 3nm technology, maybe an M3. The M2 max fits my bill perfectly.
As a professional programmer for 35 years, I want to get value from my workstations. Programming enhancements into my development gives me more productivity improvements than raw CPU speed for what I do. Passing tasks off to other cores is where I get more performance.
When I deal with terabytes of data the Apple hardware is just not fine tuned enough to give the performance I can get on Windows. Thus for our data servers they are always windows boxes.
I am looking to double the number of cores, double the amount of Ram increase GPU performance, increase RAM, and SSD performance. Now that my late MacPro 6 core cannot be upgraded, it is time to get a new one.
I will wait for the new MacStudio as I want a desktop. Maybe by late 2023 it will be 3nm technology, maybe an M3. The M2 max fits my bill perfectly.
I guess a lot of folks will soon get the go ahead to get a discounted M1 Max. Me included. So far, as with the new Airs, the M2's have no reason to exist. The base M1's are Airs HUGE values compared to the base M2's. No one should get an M2 Air, base model and especially the higher tiers.
The M2 Air is a way better form factor than the M1 Air, full stop. The M2 is a very incremental upgrade, what do ya'll want? When they move the 3nm, gains should be much more. I have a feeling this is going to be like Intel was - the generation that they shrink the die and then the prior gen is the same size but optimized more, exactly like M1 to M2. M3 will be a die shrink, M4 will be a refinement of M3, rinse and repeat.
It was also thanks to the wider memory bus, from 128-bit in M1 to 256-bit in M1 Pro to 512-bit in Max/Ultra. The memory bus won't change but perhaps they will use LPDDR5X which is about 33% faster. LPDDR5 is about 50% faster than LPDDR4X so 68GB/s increased to 100. Now we may get M2 Pro with LPDDR5X and 272GB/s and M2 Max with 545GB/s and M2 Ultra with 1091GB/s.
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Not only were Intel's CPU core improvements anemic but the integrated GPU was at a complete stall (zero improvement) for ages. Even Intel's latest and greatest integrated GPU is nothing to write home about. With Apple's SOC the monolithic GPU has made significant improvements along with the neural engine which didn't even exist for Intel. The efficiency core and uncore have also improved by a relevant amount. Much of Apple's SOC improvements (efficiency, GPU, ANE, memory speed, etc) are actually relevant to mass market usage but this isn't captured in the single core GB number that everyone is fixated on. Also note that Apple's SOC gains fit under a similar thermal budget unlike Intel which blew out thermals for what was essentially overclocking with each 14nm generation.
Here’s a curveball opinion:
M3 chips will be “4nm”.
M4 chips will use true 3nm.
M3 chips will be “4nm”.
M4 chips will use true 3nm.
If these benchmarks are correct, then the M2 Max increase in power is pathetic.
You get only a 5.5% increase in single core, 11% increase in multicore.
This means performance of an M1 and M2 Mac are almost the same.
Perhaps this is why Apple postponed release of the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips.
Apple is waiting for 3 nm since it gives a 45% reduction in power consumption, and improves performance by 23%. That is a good incremental upgrade.
Note that a new generation of chips is 100% faster in performance (2x the performance). Generally after using the computer for a while, an incremental upgrade's performance increase is not noticeable.
You get only a 5.5% increase in single core, 11% increase in multicore.
This means performance of an M1 and M2 Mac are almost the same.
Perhaps this is why Apple postponed release of the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips.
Apple is waiting for 3 nm since it gives a 45% reduction in power consumption, and improves performance by 23%. That is a good incremental upgrade.
Note that a new generation of chips is 100% faster in performance (2x the performance). Generally after using the computer for a while, an incremental upgrade's performance increase is not noticeable.
It's an incremental upgrade, fail to see why so many are surprised or disappointed. Little like Intel's Tick, Tock regime. Those of us that have an M1 smart move is to wait on M3. Those on Intel will get a massive boost in performance and battery life portable from M2 or a great deal on an M1
Also bear in mind that the performance numbers will likely increase as Apple optimises the OS given this is their first "leak"...
As said even the base model M1's are devastatingly fast in comparison to the Intel models...
Q-6
Anyone remember Tim Cook's "We have new Intel Macs in the pipeline" proclamation in 2020? Whatever happened with that? All this talk about M1 -> M2 incremental improvements, N[345] processes and TDP limits suddenly made me think of that ...
Continuous delays on Intel's side most likely... Ice Lake SP was originally scheduled for 2019 and got released mid 2021, Sapphire Rapids should have been out in 2021 but probably won't enter the market until late 2023 at best...
It is entirely possible that Apple simply decided that pursuing this simply won't be worth the effort.
The thing is, most of Apple’s Mac revenue comes from laptops, and for laptops the peak performance for low wattage is especially important. This works through into low heat and long battery power times, so in a way the desktop performance is secondary.
This is the advantage of the vertical integration. Apple can design the chips they want, for the devices most important to them. I don’t think they care that much for the performance crown, its merely a nice-to-have marketing trinket, not the sole means by which success is measured.
This is the advantage of the vertical integration. Apple can design the chips they want, for the devices most important to them. I don’t think they care that much for the performance crown, its merely a nice-to-have marketing trinket, not the sole means by which success is measured.
They can do whatever they please, but if performance is just identical to a x86 PC, why bother at all with a platform that just can't cooperate as well? That's what we have been discussing here. If we are to give up on that convenience, there must be a concrete benefit to it.
But also all the benefits of MacOS, the fact that you don’t have to fiddle with drivers to keep the platform operating. My uncle recently installed a new set of drivers on his x86 PC, and suddenly pdf export was broken in a few places when my aunt wanted to deal with her reports. On a Mac that would be unthinkable.
Most major applications are available on Mac as well as PC, and you get a lot of baseline apps with the Mac that you don’t get with a PC. Plus the fact that Macs in their price bracket are very popular machines, I don’t see that there is a particular difficulty with “cooperation”.
If you’re in a particular market segment where PCs are dominant and there are applications that are not available on Mac, then by all means buy a PC. But I don’t think there is a major compatibility problem for most users.
A 100% increase hasn't been a thing we've seen much since the 1990s.
When did you ever see a 100% increase in performance? Btw, the 10% in single-core we see here (from M1 to M2) is comparable to what Intel got by moving to a completely new, redesigned core microarchitecture a year ago.
Except PCs are also getting better and better in usability, especially if they are pre-loaded with Windows. You CAN tinker them if you so wish, but with e.g, a Dell laptop or Surface tablet, you'll have a very smooth out-of-the-box experience.
Let's also not forget that Tim Cook is laying off the QA team, so the usability of MacOS / iPadOS / iOS is steadily dropping. I often find iOS to bug sometimes when swiping down, with half of the screen blanking, and the iOS's calendar to be a visual mess. I even considered Google Calendar instead, because the 100% flat layout was so confusing.
The benefit goes beyond performance.
Take the M1 iMac for instance. You will not find an intel CPU that can fit into the form factor of the iMac, which is basically just the monitor. This is also why the 5k iMac is my favourite form factor, because it's just a screen on the table, taking up less space (and looking amazing while at it).
The Mac Studio design is made possible because you have the M1x chip which offers great performance while consuming lesser power (which in turn means less heat produced, and less prone to thermal throttling). It's also been found to be comparable in price or even cheaper compared to equivalently-specced desktops, and this is with Apple-level margins built in.
At this point, it feels like every other company is going with pumping pure performance because that's the only metric they can still count on to beat Apple in terms of benchmarks, but you also have to ask yourself - at what cost? What is the price of said performance?
If you had two equivalent vehicles in every way but one used one-third the fuel for the same performance, which would you choose?