The First Apple M2 Benchmark Results Are Out - Here's What They Reveal

It was at WWDC 2022 that Apple took the covers off the newest chipset from the company's self-designed Apple Silicon range. The new M2 chip is a direct successor to the first generation Apple M1 chip that launched two years ago and is slated to power most entry-level Mac products for the foreseeable future. Typical of Apple, the M2 chip segment saw the company make several performance improvement claims over the older M1 chips. These claims were accompanied by ambiguous graphs that claimed that the M2 chips would offer at least an 18% improvement in CPU performance over the M1 chips while consuming the same amount of power.

However, these claims were not backed by third-party benchmark results that chipmakers generally use as supporting material. For the same reason, when it comes to Apple Silicon-related benchmarks, consumers usually wait for real-world benchmark results before committing to a purchase. And that is exactly what has happened this time around, too, with the first M2 benchmarks having begun to appear just before the products begin to go on sale. The first of these benchmarks appeared on Geekbench, and initial impressions are that Apple's claim about the near 20% improvement in performance is realistic.