I compared the M2 with several other CPUs (using cpubenchmark.net) that are in the same money-range and the M2 has a shockingly low score compared to other CPUs. For example, while the Apple M2 8 Core 3500 MHz scored 15416, the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS scored 28917 and the Intel Core i7-13650HX 32119.
I don’t know how reliable these benchmarks are, but I wasn’t expecting M2 to be so bad. Am I missing something or? I wanted to buy a Macbook air M2 16GB 256GB, since I keep hearing how awesome it is, but now I’m not sure. Someone pls explain.
The base M2 is decent, but it’s far from the most powerful CPUs out there.
What is impressive about the M2 is how powerful it is for how little power it uses, which means less heat, which means thin and fanless computers that can run at full performance on batteries alone and survive a whole day… like your mobile phone.
This scales right up into the bigger M2 Pro and M2 Max, which are strong performers, but once again, in sleek and thin laptops, all the performance available on battery power, will last basically a whole work day.
The Apple M chips are ARM, like those that have been used in mobiles and tablets for many years. It’s a revolution in power-to-performance that has been decades in the making. What many people don’t know is that ARM at this calibre, this power design, is just getting started.
Consider it analogous to a Tesla. There are plenty of cars that can out-drag a Tesla, but nothing in the same class as one. You are looking at luxury sports cars, supercars with high maintenance engines, not daily commuters. But electric is only getting started and some people are building electric hypercars and racecars that are smashing all the records. Those hypercars and racecars of the ARM CPU world are coming, even if Apple is sticking to the consumer/Tesla market.