It’s been a little over two years since (AAPL(Intel kicked out long ago)INTC) to the limit in favor of designing its own chips. And with its latest processors hitting the market in the new MacBook Pro and Mac minis, the tech giant says its bet has paid off handsomely.
“If you even look at the gains between the M1 Pro, M2 Pro and M2 Max, you know, CPU performance is up 20%, GPUs up 30%,” Bob Borchers, Apple’s vice president of global product marketing, told Yahoo. . finance. “It’s not normal for the way platforms like this age. A few years ago, you would have been happy with 5% here, 6% there, et cetera.”
M2 Pro and M2 Max from Apple, are higher-powered versions of the M2, which it introduced in June. The company says that the M2 Max, which has a 12-core CPU and 38-core GPU, is the most powerful and efficient chip for a professional laptop. The company claims that the MacBook Pro with the M2 Pro is 40% faster than the MacBook with the M1 Pro and 80% faster than the MacBook with the older Intel Core i9 chip.
It’s not just about improving product speeds, Tim Millet, Apple’s vice president of platform engineering, told Yahoo Finance. And making its own chips allows Apple to avoid third-party bottlenecks.
“If you’re a retailer of silicon, and somebody like Apple comes in and says, ‘Hey, we want you to add all these transistors to these chips that you’re selling because we want to enable this amazing new product. They’ll scratch their heads a little bit and kind of say, ‘Well, what’s the payoff here?'” Millett said.
“They have to sell this chip to maybe 10 other customers who don’t necessarily care about the same things that Apple cares about. We don’t have to worry about that issue when we make our own chips.
Apple wasn’t always interested in letting go of Intel, though. In fact, a few years ago, the company was content with its relationship with the chip giant.
“Five years ago, we might not have been ready, maybe We were at a point where the relationship with Intel was still strong. “We didn’t want to disrupt anything there,” Millett said.
But Intel’s slow progress in improving chip performance and a desire to build its Mac line to its own standards meant Apple had to put the chipmaker in its rearview mirror.
“It was clear that the third parties were not concerned about this problem,” Millett explained. “They were worried about maintaining their competitive advantage with each other assuming everyone would be happy to take something marginally better. We did the math, and figured, ‘No, that’s not where the technology is.’ And so you can see the big strides we’ve made between generation The last of the Intel-based and M1-generation Macs.”
Of course, leaving Intel behind also means that one less company has to pay for parts, which helps Apple keep more of its money in its own coffers.
It allowed Apple to lay a new foundation for overall Mac performance, Millett said.
However, Apple, like the rest of the computer industry, is facing a slowdown in the PC market. The company is expected to announce that Mac sales have declined significantly in its upcoming earnings announcement on February 2nd.
With two new lines of chips and a faster MacBook Pro and Mac mini, the company may have the firepower it needs to quickly overcome this decline.
Sign up for the Yahoo Finance technical newsletter
More Dan
Did you get a tip? Email Daniel Hawley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter at @tweet.
Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance
Download the Yahoo Finance app for an Apple or android
Follow Yahoo Finance on Twitter TwitterAnd FacebookAnd InstagramAnd FlipboardAnd linkedinAnd Youtube