Apple revealed the M1 processor in November 2020 and its successor, the M2, during its WWDC presentation earlier this week.
It will power the new MacBook Air and 13″ MacBook Pro revealed at the same event, and while these MacBooks won’t be available until next month, Apple supplier TSMC, according to analyst Jeff Pu of Haitong Intl Tech Research, will begin mass manufacturing of the M2 Pro processor later this year.
Apple’s 3NM based M2 chipset to enter mass production
The M2 Pro will be manufactured using a 3nm technology rather than the 5nm technique used for the vanilla M2 and M1 Pro. It is believed to contain four efficiency and eight performance cores, as opposed to the M1 Pro, which has two lower efficiency cores.
Jeff Pu also stated that Apple’s augmented reality headgear, which is slated to begin arriving in Q2 2023, will be introduced after the Chinese New Year and will go into mass production in February 2023. Furthermore, the analyst confirmed speculations of the iPhone 15 Pro using a periscope lens for optical magnification, as well as Apple’s intentions to employ its own modem in the 2023 iPhone.
Apple claims that the M2 offers 18% faster CPU performance than the M1, as well as 35% better graphics owing to a new 10-core GPU. M2 also has up to 24GB of RAM, whereas M1 only has 8GB and 16GB of RAM.
Throughout this year, 9to5Mac discovered from insiders that Apple has been creating even more powerful CPUs for the long-awaited Apple Silicon Mac Pro, as well as a new Mac mini with the M2 Pro chip. According to Pu’s claim, all high-end variants of the M2 chip will be produced using the 3-nanometer technology.
This time, Apple has also been working on a new Mac mini (codenamed J474) using the M2 Pro processor — a variation with eight performance cores and four efficiency cores, totaling a 12-core CPU vs the existing M1 Pro’s 10-core CPU. Incidentally, in addition to citing “Apple’s in-house server” in regard to the upcoming Mac Pro, Pu also implies that a new iPad with a 3-nanometer CPU will be released.
Apple, like many other firms and people, has habits. It like recycling names and concepts, in part because it makes it simpler to advertise things to customers. Because clients may already be familiar with various sorts of hardware from a prior generation, maintaining the same overall concept for a new generation makes sense.
This is especially true when the differences aren’t dramatic. This provides Apple with a good incentive to adhere to tried-and-true principles rather than introducing what may be viewed as too many changes.