Enlarge (credit: Apple)

CUPERTINO, Calif.—Exactly two years after Apple first announced the M1, its direct successor has finally been revealed. Apple executives and product managers presented details about the new chip—predictably dubbed the M2—during its annual developer conference.

The M2 is an improvement in many ways on the M1, but it's not meant to one-up the higher-end M1 Pro, M1 Max, or M1 Ultra seen in the MacBook Pro and Mac Studio. M2 Pro, Max, and Ultra variants have higher CPU and GPU core counts that will still outspeed the M2's performance improvements.

Like its predecessor, the M2 has eight CPU cores—four high-performance cores and four low-power efficiency cores. Apple says it will perform about 18 percent faster than the M1's CPU  It also bumps the GPU cores from eight to 10, providing a 35 percent performance boost, though as with M1 we may see multiple versions of the M2 chip that ship with different numbers of GPU cores.