APPLE LAUNCHES M2 CHIP
4bn more transistors for second-gen silicone
WHEN APPLE RELEASED its M1 chip, the ARM-based design not only gave Apple independence but kept it dangerously competitive. Apple is now ready with round two. The M1 was a 5nm chip and TSMC isn’t ready with 3nm yet, so the M2 is a tweak of the 5nm design with a similar transistor density. The M2 has 20 billion transistors, so it’s physically bigger, but the basic pattern is the same: four performance cores, 16MB rather than 12MB of L2 cache, and four efficiency cores.