The Apple M2 processor was officially announced in June 2022. Now, the M2 processor family has been expanded with the presence of the M2 Pro and M2 Max . These two processors promise faster performance when compared to the previous M1 Pro and M1 Max.
Apple M2 Pro
The M2 Pro and M2 Max come with the same architecture as the previous M2. The difference is in the number of cores, the amount of unified memory and memory bandwidth. M2 Pro brings CPU configurations up to 12 Cores and CPUs up to 19 Cores. Bigger than from M2 which only 8 CPU cores and up to 10 GPU Cores.
When compared to the previous M1 Pro and M1 Max, the M2 Pro’s CPU performance has increased by around 20%. Apple claims, to run applications such as Adobe Photoshop M2 Pro can run 40% faster.
Apple M2 Max
If you need more powerful performance, the M2 Max is the fastest processor made by Apple at the moment. The design brings 12 CPU Cores and up to 38 GPU Cores. For unified memory, M2 Max supports up to 96GB. Four times larger than the M2. With a memory bandwidth of up to 400GB/s, the M2 Max is twice as fast as the M2 Pro which is only 200GB/s. With these specifications, the M2 Max offers very fast graphic performance. The graphics performance has increased by up to 30% compared to the previous M1 Max.
Apple M2 Pro and M2 Max processor specifications at a glance:
| M2 | M2 Pro | M2 Max | |
| CPU cores | 8 (4 efficiency + 4 performance) | 10 or 12 (4 efficiency + 6 or 8 performance) | 12 (4 efficiency + 8 performance) |
| GPU cores | Up to 10 | 16 or 19 | 30 or 38 |
| Unified memory | 8GB, 16GB, or 24GB | 16GB or 32GB | 32GB, 64GB or to 96GB |
| NPU colors | 16 | 16 | 16 |
| Memory bandwidth | 100GB/s | 200GB/s | 400GB/s |
All M2 processors offer up to 40% faster AI performance thanks to 16 core neural processing units. The M2 Pro is also equipped with a media engine that offers hardware accelerated encoding decoding for the H.264, HEVC and Prores codecs. So, it is possible for this processor to play 4K and 8K ProRes video content simultaneously. The M2 Max has twice the performance of the M2 Pro thanks to two video encode engines and two ProRes Engines. Power consumption is also economical. According to Apple, the M2 Pro, which is the brain of the latest MacBook Pro, can offer up to 22 hours of usage time for video playback.
Apple M2 Pro and M2 Max availability
Both of these processors are available and can be found in the MacBook Pro and Mac Mini 2023.
