Youtuber Hardware Unboxed shares benchmark results for Apple’s M2 SoC and AMD Ryzen R7-6800U.It can be seen that the new Apple Silicon product can lead the Radeon 680M “RDNA 2” internal display in the GPU running score of “Tomb Raider: Shadow”, but it is slightly inferior in the CPU running score.
First review the specifications of the next two chip platforms. The Apple M2 SoC released last month uses TSMC’s 5nm process and has 20 billion transistors – a 25% increase over the M1 SoC.
Although the CPU is still 8 cores, the cores themselves have been upgraded. Combined with larger caches and efficiency cores, M2 multi-threaded performance has improved by 18%.
The on-chip 24GB LPDDR5 unified memory is 2×12GB @ 128-bit specification, and the bandwidth is increased by 50% (to 100 GB/s).
The upgraded 16-core Neural Engine can perform 158,000 operations per second, a performance improvement of 40%. In addition, the GPU part has been upgraded to 10 cores, a 25% increase compared to the M1 SoC.
Coupled with a larger L2 cache and higher bandwidth, GPU performance has increased by 35% – throughput of 111 Gtexels / 55 GPixels per second.
In terms of CPU performance, AMD/Intel’s mainstream mobile chips are compared with M2 SoCs, mainly including Intel’s 11/12th generation, and AMD’s Ryzen 5000/6000 series.
Considering the TDP of the M2 SoC is in the 25-28W range, its direct competitors should be the Ryzen 6000U and the Alder Lake-U28 SKU.
Benchmarks show that the M2 SoC performs worse than the Core i7-1260P / Ryzen R7-6800U on the Cinebench R23 test plan. However, in the single-threaded program, although the M2 is ahead of the R7-6800U, it is inferior to the Alder Lake CPU.
In terms of power data, the M2 SoC with a maximum of 24W has a big lead. The Ryzen R7-6800U has a maximum of 37W, and the Core i7-1260P has a maximum of 45W – it seems that Apple’s claim of “twice the energy efficiency of Alder Lake CPU” is still credible.
AMD/Intel maintained their lead in the Handbrake test program. In the Blender test plan, the M2 SoC is slightly ahead of Alder Lake, but slightly behind the R7-6800U.
The same is true for the Matlab test plan, where the M2 SoC was overwhelmed by Alder Lake. In the Microsoft Excel application, however, it finally got a modest improvement.
In the Adobe Premiere Pro test program, the performance advantage of the M2 SoC finally exploded, even beating some high-end 45W chips – GPU optimization for applications clearly plays a big role here.
In terms of gaming, the M2 MacBook may not be the first choice for players. Even so, Hardware Unboxed decided to give it a shot, and it turned out to be a solid performer in Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
At 1920×1200 resolution @ SMAA enabled, the graphics performance of the M2 SoC is 10% higher than the R7-6800U’s RDNA 2 internal display (Radeon 680M).
Finally, in terms of battery life, the M2 SoC is also 48% longer than the R7-6800U platform in the standard 4K Youtube playback test plan and 2.2 times longer than the Core i7-1260P platform.