This is about the processors, not the laptops, so commenting on the chips instead. They look great, but they look like they're the M1 design, just more of it. Which is plenty for a laptop! But it'll be interesting to see what they'll do for their desktops.
Most of the additional chip area went into more GPUs and special-purpose video codec hardware. It's "just" two more cores than the vanilla M1, and some of the efficiency cores on the M1 became performance cores. So CPU-bound things like compiling code will be "only" 20-50% faster than on the M1 MacBook. The big wins are for GPU-heavy and codec-heavy workloads.
That makes sense since that's where most users will need their performance. I'm still a bit sad that the era of "general purpose computing" where CPU can do all workloads is coming to an end.
Nevertheless, impressive chips, I'm very curious where they'll take it for the Mac Pro, and (hopefully) the iMac Pro.
Most of the additional chip area went into more GPUs and special-purpose video codec hardware. It's "just" two more cores than the vanilla M1, and some of the efficiency cores on the M1 became performance cores. So CPU-bound things like compiling code will be "only" 20-50% faster than on the M1 MacBook. The big wins are for GPU-heavy and codec-heavy workloads.
That makes sense since that's where most users will need their performance. I'm still a bit sad that the era of "general purpose computing" where CPU can do all workloads is coming to an end.
Nevertheless, impressive chips, I'm very curious where they'll take it for the Mac Pro, and (hopefully) the iMac Pro.