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Apple has recently unveiled new MacBook Pros based on the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips, offering a range of advanced features. These systems boast 8K video output, Wi-Fi 6E, and up to 96GB of unified memory on the highest-spec machine, as well as what Apple claims is the longest-ever Mac battery life.
The latest M2 systems on a chip (SoC) that power the systems are the biggest change since those in the last set of MacBook Pros. The hardware for both looks broadly similar to their prior releases, but with significant improvements in performance and capabilities. The M2 Pro is available with up to 12 CPU and 19 GPU cores, and 32GB of memory, while the M2 Max offers an upper limit of 38 GPU cores, double the memory bandwidth of the Pro (from 200 to 400GB/s), and up to 96GB of unified memory.
Speed
Apple claims that the M2 Pro in the 16-inch MacBook Pro is up to 40 percent faster than its own M1 Pro MacBook Pro at the broadly defined "image processing in Photoshop" metric, and 80 percent faster than an Intel-based Core i9 MacBook Pro. For Xcode compiling, Apple cites a 25 percent gain over the M1 Pro and a 250 percent leap over the Core i9.
The M2 Max has the same 12-core CPU as the M2 Pro, but a lot more room for graphics processing, with up to 32 cores and a larger L2 cache. Apple doesn't specify gains over the M1 Max found in the prior Pro or the Mac Studio, but notes that its 16-core Neural Engine (present in the M2 Pro and Max) is 40 percent faster than the previous generation.
All the M2 Pro and Max systems are capable of 4K and 8K ProRes video playback "while using very little power," according to Apple. The M2 Pro has hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC, and ProRes video encoding and decoding, while the M2 Max has two video encoding engines and two ProRes engines, making it twice as fast at encoding as an M2 Pro.