In the past couple of weeks, Apple has already refreshed most of its products and offerings with its M1 chip. Now, according to a news report from Nikkei, Apple has begun mass production of its M2 silicon chip. The report conveys that Apple could unveil the chip as early as July 2021.
As per rumors, the Apple M2 chip is expected to make its debut alongside new Macbooks later in the year. Normally, Apple unveils these things at WWDC. This year’s WWDC event has been scheduled for June so there is speculation that the company might show off the chip at the event.
Meanwhile, some reports claimed the successor of the M1 chip will be known as M1X. The existence of an M2 muddies the waters because Apple might be cooking both.
As per reports, Apple’s M2 chip will use TSMC’s enhanced 5 nm node (N5P) process which is an incremental upgrade over its last generation. However, we have no information regarding the exact core configuration of the chip yet.
Some of the reports suggest that Apple will most probably stick to the big.LITTLE architecture. There could be a mix of four (or six) performance cores and four efficiency cores because anything more than this would make the M1 chip obsolete.
This makes less sense because it is hardly a year that the M1 chip is around. Apple might on the other hand come with some improvements in terms of GPU, NPU, and IPC.
Last year, Bloomberg reported that Apple is working on a twelve-core and sixteen-core chip. The twelve core chip is most probably aimed at consumer devices, while the latter is most probably aimed at enterprise-grade applications. Some rumors claimed Apple will launch a new MacBook later this year so the company might charge it with these chips.
