Apple has just unveiled its brand new M2 Pro & M2 Max SOCs but the top chip was compared to an aging Intel Core i9 CPU from 2019.
Apple Compares Its Brand New M2 Max SOC With 4 Year Old Intel Core i9 CPU
During the presentation, Apple showcased the latest MacBook Pro running on the M2 Pro & M2 Max SOCs. Talking a little about the specifications of these new chips, the M2 Pro features a 5nm process technology and features 40 billion transistors while comprising 10/12 cores with up to 32 GB of low latency unified memory systems. The M2 Max scales things up with 67 billion transistors and features 12 Cores with 96 GB of the same unified system memory. The main difference comes in the form of the GPU configurations.
The Apple M2 Pro rocks up to 19 GPU cores with a bigger L2 cache and is 30% faster than the GPU on the M1 Pro. The M2 Max is double that with 38 GPU cores, an even larger cache, and 30% faster than the M1 Max.
Now in the presentation, Apple posted some weird benchmarks (as always) where they compare the M2 Max with the M1 Max and also an Intel Core i9 CPU, running on the 2019 MacBook Pro. It seems like Apple used an 8-core Intel chip to compare against its top M2 Max part & as far as the Cinema 4D results go, the M2 Max is 6 times faster but this is mostly a GPU-intensive benchmark.
To make things clear, Intel's Core i9 CPUs were first introduced during the 8th and 9th Gen Core families back in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Apple used both 8th and 9th Gen CPUs from Intel to power its MacBook Pro laptops at the time and the company currently offers 12th Gen CPUs with 13th Gen CPUs heading out to retail next month.
Apple M2 Pro Benchmarks:
Apple M2 Max Benchmarks:
Furthermore, Apple also claims that its M2 Max can "tackle graphics-intensive projects that competing systems can’t even run". The test results specifically used a workload which had required 40 GB of graphics memory. The comparative systems featured an RTX 6000 and a GeForce-RTX 3080 Ti GPU. Both of these laptop GPUs don't feature the required VRAM pool however, that shouldn't be a reason for these GPUs to not make it work entirely.
Apple also used to tout a lot about their efficiency figures against competing PC components but that seems to be missing this generation. We have previously called out just how flawed Apple's own benchmarks can be and it is likely that the company is making even more clumsy marketing claims to mislead the audience into believing that these gains actually matter a lot.
Footnotes:
- Results are compared to previous-generation 2.4GHz 8-core Intel Core i9-based 16-inch MacBook Pro systems with Radeon Pro 5600M graphics with 8GB HBM2, 64GB of RAM, and 8TB SSD.
- Testing was conducted by Apple in November and December 2022 using preproduction 16-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M2 Max, 12-core CPU, 38-core GPU, 96GB of RAM, and 8TB SSD, as well as a production Intel Core i9-based PC system with NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 graphics with 24GB GDDR6 and the latest version of Windows 11 Pro available at the time of testing, and a production Intel Core i9-based PC system with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics with 16GB GDDR6 and the latest version of Windows 11 Home available at the time of testing. OTOY Octane X 2022.1 on preproduction 16-inch MacBook Pro systems and OTOY OctaneRender 2022.1 on Windows systems were tested using a scene that requires over 40GB of graphics memory when rendered. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Pro.
- Testing was conducted by Apple in November and December 2022 using preproduction 16-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M2 Pro, 12-core CPU, 19-core GPU, 16GB of RAM, and 1TB SSD. The Apple TV app movie playback test measures battery life by playing back HD 1080p content with display brightness set to eight clicks from the bottom. Battery life varies by use and configuration. See apple.com/batteries for more information.
