Reporting by XinZhiyuan
Editor: Yuan Xie is sleepy
Apple's product conference is approaching, from fruit powder customers to the industry are looking forward to: what new products will be launched? What about the legendary M2 chip?
Two weeks from now, Apple is about to hold its first conference of 2022?
What novel little things will there be this time?
New products released on March 8th!
Now, Apple's complete innovation of its own computer products has come to the third step.
In 2020, Apple cut out the Intel chip on its own entry-level products and fully replaced the M1 chip on the MacBook Pro 13, MacBook Air, and Mac mini.
In 2021, Apple further expanded the product line equipped with M1 chip - iMac, and conveniently eliminated AMD. The new MacBook Pro 14 and 16 are powered by higher-end M1 Pro and M1 Max chips.
In 2022, the pace of Mac computers switching to Apple's self-developed chips will increase, and several new Mac models will be equipped with the following chips:
Brand new M2
Performance-enhanced M1 Max
The 2021 model M1 Pro and Max
According to Bloomberg's forecast, the third round of Mac updates could kick off on March 8, when Apple will hold its first major media event of 2022.
While the focus of the conference may be on the 5G version of the iPhone SE and iPad Air, at least one new Mac will be unveiled.
Judging from the application documents submitted by Apple around the world, it also supports the idea that the new Mac is about to go out on the street.
In its application to Russia's telecommunications regulator, Apple listed three new Mac models, one of which was labeled a laptop product and the other two were labeled desktop products.
To better predict which new Mac will arrive in March 2022, Bloomberg listed the most likely new models in 2022:
The new Mac mini with the M1 Pro chip
The 13-inch version of the MacBook Pro with the M2 chip, which continues the 2020 model, has a second status in the product line to the 14- and 16-inch versions.
The new Mac mini with M2 chip
A 24-inch iMac with an M2 chip
The MacBook Air with M2 chip and redesign
The iMac Pro with M1 Pro and Max chips and a larger size
Considering that the two oldest Macs currently using Apple chips are the entry-level MacBook Pro and Mac mini, it is likely that these two older products will be upgraded first.
In addition, there are already products with M1 Pro and Max versions of chips on the market, and the release of iMac Pro based on this will not be too far away.
As Apple's high-end desktop series, the Mac Pro also seems to embrace Apple chips and will launch two models:
Twice the performance of the M1 Max, equipped with a 20-core CPU and a 64-core GPU
4 times the performance of the M1 Max, equipped with a 40-core CPU and a 128-core GPU
It is speculated that the performance-enhanced version of the Mac Pro will not be released more than the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June at the latest, so as to catch up with the autumn release.
The redesigned new MacBook Air will be an excellent holiday season item, so it makes sense to release it in fall/winter 2022, even if Apple had planned to launch this model in late 2021 or early 2022.
Based on the track record of Apple's Mac chip updates, in 2023, M2 chips will also have Pro and Max versions, along with the M3 chips.
Some fruit fans saw the news and said that they could not afford to sell such new products unless they participated in the squid game.
M2 to M1, just as A15 to A14?
Bloomberg expects the M2 chip to have faster CPU performance than the M1, but it is still possible to maintain the same 8-core architecture. The GPU will be greatly improved, and it will be enhanced from a 7/8 core architecture to a 9/10 core architecture.
Of course, the speculation and rumors about the M2 chip are not only this one.
There are also people on macworld, a senior fruit powder media website, that they have received reliable information that the difference between M2 and M1 chips is like the difference between A14 and A15 chips.
According to it, M1 is actually a double performance gain version based on the A14 infrastructure, so the M2 chip is likely to be a double performance gain version based on the A15 infrastructure.
Exactly, the A15 chip used in the iPhone 13 Pro version is 5 cores, and the double number is exactly the M2 chip 10-core GPU statement in bloomberg news.
For M2 Max, following the upgrade from M1 to M1 Max, the GPU core will quadruple from the base M1 chip (40 in total).
Moreover, TSMC, which produces chips, is still using a 5-nanometer process when producing A14 and M1 chips. M2 chip products now improved to a 4nm process, according to TSMC, run 11% faster and consume 22% less power under the same energy consumption.
According to the local news of the Electronic Times, TSMC is working overtime during the Spring Festival in order to catch up with the construction period when Apple released new products with M2 chips in March.
According to the A15 single-core performance 7% higher than the A14, multi-core performance 20% higher, Macworld based on the M1 and M1 Max running score records, M2 and M2 Max to do single-core and multi-core state hypothetical running score.
In geekbench 5, M2 and M2 Max can surpass M1 Max's single-core performance by 1800 points, which is comparable to Intel Core i9 Alder Lake high-performance laptop chips.
In terms of multi-core performance, since M2 will use the same layout of 4 efficiency cores + 4 performance cores as M1, the score will naturally be inferior to that of M1 Max with 8 performance cores.
Still, even if it's just below 9,000, that's still a good score for an ultra-portable laptop like the MacBook Air.
The M2 Max performed much better, with a score of well over 14,000 points, which would allow it to surpass Intel's fastest Alder Lake Core i9, which has 14 cores (6 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores).
As for graphics performance, the same assumptions can be drawn.
Among them, the A15 has 25% more GPU cores than the A14, and on the cross-platform test of 3DMark Wild Life, the A15 is 30% faster than the A14.
If M2 will change from up to 8 GPU cores to 10, M2 Max's cores will also change from 32 to 40 at this scale.
Extrapolating from this, the M2 can get more than 6000 points, while the M2 Max will break through 26000 points, close to the mobile version of the RTX 3070 running score.
While such a performance boost would put the M2 Max on par with mid-to-high-end mobile discrete GPUs, it still doesn't deliver half the performance of top desktop GPUs.
What's more, AMD and Nvidia's high-end GPUs (and even Intel's upcoming Arc series) have hardware-accelerated ray tracing capabilities that Apple chip's GPUs have not had so far.
While Macworld believes that support for this feature will happen sooner or later, it may not be in the M2 series. Apple has been behind its competitors in this regard for many years, and there is unlikely to be any improvement this year.
After hearing about these enhancements, fruit fans have made new creations on the classical "Redemption of kidney cutters".
Discard the under-screen fingerprint
After multiple conversations with people who asked not to be named, LeaksApplePro said Apple's engineers are no longer developing under-screen fingerprint sensors for the iPhone.
While this has been explored for years, it seems that Face ID is the way out, especially when Apple decided in January to move all of its Touch ID work and resources to the team working on Face ID.
Now, the iOS 15.4 beta can already be unlocked with Face ID while wearing a mask, and this will continue to be a trend for almost all Apple products.
LeaksApplePro believes that Apple's next step is obvious — the Face ID sensor under the screen.
As planned, the official version of iOS 15.4 will be released in early March, and this will be the last major update before iOS 16.
In addition, the development of iOS 16 is going quite well, at least so far, the version has not encountered any problems.
Resources:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-02-20/when-will-apple-aapl-launch-a-new-macbook-air-macbook-pro-imac-pro-in-2022-kzvdtgri
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/02/08/macbook-pro-m2-coming-early-march/
https://www.macworld.com/article/614713/m2-chip-cpu-gpu-speed-performance.html