Apple says that the ‌M2‌ chip takes the performance per watt of the ‌M1‌ even further with an 18 percent faster CPU, a 35 percent more powerful GPU, and a 40 percent faster Neural Engine.

As the second major iteration of Apple silicon, it may not be clear how significant of an improvement the ‌M2‌ is over the ‌M1‌, especially as it sticks with a 5nm fabrication process, contrary to some rumors that suggested a bigger performance and efficiency leap would be in store.

Like the A14 Bionic, the ‌M1‌ chip is built using TSMC's first-generation 5nm fabrication process.

The ‌M2‌ adds four billion additional transistors for a total of 20 billion – 25 percent more than ‌M1‌.

The ‌M1‌ and ‌M2‌ both have four high-performance and four energy-efficient cores, but while the ‌M1‌ features "Firestorm" and "Icestorm" cores from the A14 Bionic chip, the ‌M2‌ offers "Avalanche" and "Blizzard" from the A15 Bionic chip.

According to Apple, this results in 18 percent greater multithreaded performance than ‌M1‌.

The only difference here is that the shared L2 cache is larger on the ‌M2‌ chip — 16MB instead of 12MB on the ‌M1‌.

The ‌M2‌ features two more GPU cores over the ‌M1‌, resulting in a moderate boost in graphics performance.

Apple says that the ‌M2‌ has up to 25 percent higher graphics performance than ‌M1‌ at the same power level, and up to 35 percent better performance at its max power.

Overall, the ‌M2‌ chip offers moderate improvements over the ‌M1‌, even if most ‌M1‌ users are unlikely to notice significant improvements when upgrading to the ‌M2‌.