Abstract:
Apple today officially released the M6 chip, which is the company’s first processor built using a 2-nanometer process and equipped with dual 16-core neural network engines. Apple said that the 2nm process can integrate higher density transistors in a smaller chip area, thus comprehensively improving the performance and energy efficiency of the chip.
In terms of CPU, M6 is equipped with a more powerful 12-core central processing unit, which has two more cores than M5. It is composed of two super cores, four performance cores and six energy efficiency cores. Apple claims that the chip has the world's fastest single-threaded processing performance, and its multi-threaded performance is up to 1.2 times better than the M5, and up to 2.4 times better than the M1 chip.
The graphics processor has also been upgraded. The M6 is equipped with a 12-core GPU, two more cores than the M5, and each core has a built-in neural accelerator. Apple said that this design increases the peak graphics processing performance of the chip in AI computing by nearly 30% compared to the M5, and more than 8 times compared to the M1 chip, allowing the device-side large language model to process prompt words faster. In addition, the GPU has been updated in aspects such as shader core architecture, dynamic caching technology and hardware-accelerated ray tracing, increasing the geometry processing speed by up to 50%.
One of the highlights of the M6 chip is the introduction of dual 16-core neural network engines, whose peak computing power is twice that of the previous generation. Apple said that the system framework can automatically call two neural network engines at the same time, further improving the speed of applications running AI models. In terms of memory specifications, the chip supports up to 32GB of unified memory, and the unified memory bandwidth can reach up to 170GB per second, which is 10% higher than the M5 and 2.5 times higher than the M1 chip.
It is reported that the M6 chip will be installed on the new Mac mini model for the first time, and the product will be officially launched on September 22.
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