Apple today announced the M6 chip, its first built using a 2-nanometer process and featuring a Dual 16-core Neural Engine.
Apple says the 2nm process packs greater transistor density into a smaller die, contributing to the chip's overall gains in performance and power efficiency.
The M6 chip features a larger, more powerful 12-core CPU, two more cores than the M5, made up of two super cores, four performance cores, and six efficiency cores. Apple says the chip delivers the world's fastest single-threaded performance and up to 1.2x faster multithreaded performance than the M5, and up to 2.4x faster than the M1.
The chip also features a 12-core GPU, with two more cores than the M5, with a Neural Accelerator built into each core. Apple says this delivers nearly a 30% increase in peak GPU compute for AI compared to the M5, and more than 8x compared to the M1, resulting in faster prompt processing for on-device LLMs.
The GPU also gains updates to the shader core architecture, Dynamic Caching, and hardware-accelerated ray tracing, along with a 50% increase in geometry rates for more complex graphics.
The M6 introduces a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, offering up to 2x the peak compute of previous generations. Apple says system frameworks can automatically use both engines at once, allowing applications to run AI models faster.
The chip supports up to 32GB of unified memory and up to 170GB/s of unified memory bandwidth, which is a 10% increase over M5 and 2.5x more than the M1.
The M6 debuts in the new Mac mini, which launches on Tuesday, September 22.
