Apple’s M2 chip might have some new competition, although not really.
That competition is the AMD 7840U, a chip that has a terrible name but might not actually have terrible performance. In fact, AMD says that its silicon is so good that it can best the base Apple M2 — the one that’s in the impressive MacBook Air. And not just by a bit.
How fast is the 7840U? AMD reckons that it’ll beat out the M2 by up to 75% in something it’s calling “application performance,” whatever that actually is.
Bad name, good chip
The Verge reports that AMD even provided a vague chart that would give Apple’s notoriously iffy graphs a run for their money. And sure enough, multiprocessing and Passmark 10 “application performance” is shown to be 72% and 75% better than the M2 respectively.
It isn’t just about performance, either. AMD says that the chip will offer “leadership efficiency for exceptional battery life,” but it didn’t go into any details as to what that might mean. Considering the huge battery life that the M2 chips offer AMD will have to go some way to compete.
Not that any of this really matters, of course. Nobody is cross-shopping an AMD chip against an Apple one because they can’t be used in the same machines. But the fact that the chips being used in the best Macbooks are now being used as a basis of comparison just shows how impressive they are and, just as notable, we know that the likes of AMD are more than aware of how good they are as well.
Of course, all of this is compared to a chip that’s about to be replaced. The M3 series will be with us soon enough and then AMD might have to start all over again if it wants to keep up.