As Johnson says about the BIM program Vectorworks Architect, which is fully native to Apple Silicon, “we love it because the caches make these transitions from 3D views to 2D plan views much faster.”Īpple’s new M2 Macs mark the first step toward a new set of upgrades across their Apple Silicon-based product line. It especially means for BIM projects in AEC, those large models move around much faster when data can be cached. A key difference is making room for 10 GPU cores versus the 8 on the M1. The M2 is significantly larger than the M1, with 20 billion transistors versus 16 billion for the M1. As Steve Johnson, senior vice president of Vectorworks told Architosh, “With Apple Silicon, we don’t have to copy so much data around memory because of the System on Chip’s integrated memory architecture.” (see: Architosh, “The Gift That Keeps On Giving-Vectorworks Talks Apple Silicon,” ) Sames goes for Revit, another frequency-bound, dominantly single-threaded BIM tool that is also not written for macOS.Īs we learned from the Vectorworks folks, Apple’s system on a chip (SoC) approach with Apple Silicon has advantages that are simply not there to be had on Intel X86 architectures where the memory for the GPU and the memory for the CPU are separate things with an interconnect between them. Now SolidWorks is not written for macOS much less Apple Silicon, but if it was, it would perform very well on the M2.
Since most CAD, BIM, and 3D modeling tools like SketchUp are single-threaded codebases, the M2 would run everything from SketchUp to SolidWorks as fast if not faster than just about any chip out there. So the 35 percent improvement in GPU performance by the M2 is definitely appreciable.Īs far as a mobile CAD or BIM laptop is concerned, an M2-based MacBook Pro 13-in model would make an excellent machine to have in the home office or to carry around to job sites. Originally, the M1 while lauded for its single-core and multi-core CPU performance, did not necessarily win over the critics for its GPU performance. (see our Guide to Selecting Optimal CPU for Your Workstation section inside this Xpresso newsletter issue). If it did, however, it would essentially tie the top Intel i9 12900K chip. So we really don’t know if the M2 achieves up to 2,000 on the single-core Geekbench test.
An 18 percent improvement on that is another 314.6 (315 Geekbench 5 points, yielding a grand total score of 2,063.Īpple doesn’t use Geekbench 5 to confirm that 18 percent faster CPU performance, but rather Final Cut Pro tests.
In our own M1-based Mac mini tests from a year ago, we achieved a Geekbench 5 score of 1748. Although just based on a process node enhancement, Apple yields non-trivial performance improvements.Īpple says the M2 is 18 percent faster at the CPU level than the M1. Apple Silicon has now moved to the M2 chip.
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