Apple M2 Max (38-GPU)
Benchmarks & Specs

The name of the Apple M2 Max (38 GPU) alone provides a lot of information. Developed in-house by Apple, it comes from the second generation of its own processors, which are used in all current iMacs, Mac Minis and iPads. The addition "38-GPU" is necessary because the same processor is also available with 30 GPU cores.

The processor is built on a hybrid big.LITTLE structure consisting of 8 performance cores called Avalanche and 4 efficiency cores called Blizzard. The performance cores clock at a maximum of 3.50 gigahertz and the maximum clock frequency of the efficient cores is 2.80 gigahertz. Like all Apple processors, the Apple M2 Max (38 GPU) does not support hyperthreading, which means that CPU cores and computing threads are both at 12.

The internal graphics unit of the Apple M2 Max (38-GPU) has a maximum clock frequency of 1.40 gigahertz and consists of 608 execution units and 4864 shader units. The graphics unit achieves an FP32 computing power (single precision) of 13490 GigaFLOPS. In the Apple universe, when the processor appeared in the first quarter of 2023, only the graphics unit of the Apple M1 Ultra was more powerful.

The graphics unit can decode and encode the following codes: HEVC 8/10 bit, H.264, VP9, JPEG. The video codecs VP8, AVC and VC-1 can only be decoded. Hardware encoding of AV1 codec is not supported by Apple M2 Max (38 GPU).

The main memory is integrated in the processor, so the size must be selected when purchasing the device. How much memory you can install depends on the end device, but a maximum of 96 gigabytes of RAM can be selected. The Apple M2 Max (38 GPU) has 4 memory channels and thus achieves a bandwidth of 409.6 GB/s. For comparison: With the currently (Q1/2023) fastest Intel i9 processor, not even a quarter of the bandwidth is achieved.

• High graphics and AI performance
• Strong Multi-Core performance
• Efficient 5 nm M2 architecture
• Large 36 MB Level 2 Cache