Teardown of the 14″ MacBook Pro M2 with Apple’s Help

Re:Teardown of the 14″ MacBook Pro M2 with Apple’s Help by Maursault on Sunday January 29, 2023 @11:56AM (#34569992)

iPad is not a Mac, and you're massively exaggerating. The iPad had a single core CPU, iPad 2 a dual core. Mystery solved there. The GPU was not 9 times faster![1] DDR2 RAM, released 8 years before the iPad 2, is twice as fast as DDR. You should be complaining about the iPad not having DDR2 rather than being amazed at the performance leap between subsequent generations, which, btw, was indeed incremental.

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/SGX535-vs-SGX543MP2_2376_2572....

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Re:Teardown of the 14″ MacBook Pro M2 with Apple’s Help by wtallis on Sunday January 29, 2023 @04:57PM (#34573196)

Am I missing something, or is there literally nothing in your link that actually provides a performance comparison between those two GPUs?

Also, how does the stuff about DDR vs DDR2 RAM fit into this conversation at all? What you're responding to seems to be a claim about RAM capacity rather than speed.

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Re:Teardown of the 14″ MacBook Pro M2 with Apple’s Help by hajile on Monday January 30, 2023 @08:53AM (#34579559)

Apple switched from ARM Cortex A8 to A9. There were a lot of improvements.

The change from in order to out of order was huge. L2 cache doubled to 1MB. Memory bandwidth doubled. The FPU got properly pipelined too. RAM also doubled to 512MB.

In combination, this translates into 20% better integer performance and double the FPU performance. This is pretty close to what other chips saw moving to A9.

For stuff like web browsing, that FPU update basically doubled performance and made the iPad 2 much more useful to consumers.

On the GPU front, Apple themselves made the 9x claim, but Anandtech showed closer to 6x. That’s still a massive improvement. If something was limited by the previous 256MB RAM, that 9x number becomes very believable.

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