Question for those in the know: are there any substantial changes from M1 to M2? I'm sure lots of tuning took place, but is there any major component that was completely overhauled?
Another question for those in the know: there are what seem to be tons of weird GPU problems on macOS under M1— weird cursor tails, choppy scrolling, and very occasional panics that derive from GPU drivers. Are there any workarounds for unstable GPU behavior that were discovered during the RE & driver implementation?
Edit: I've directly observed these on my machine, and it doesn't look to be an isolated incident. There is a video in [2] below.
YMMV but on an MBP 16" M1 Pro driving its internal display alongside an Apple Thunderbolt Display (yes, the one they sold from 2011-2016) I've seen no graphical problems whatsoever in the past year.
Agreed with other commenter: I'd disregard the reports. Been using an M1 for 6 months now on macOS. One kernel panic when closing the lid. Solid machine and no issues with the GPU.
> there are what seem to be tons of weird GPU problems on macOS under M1— weird cursor tails, choppy scrolling, and very occasional panics that derive from GPU drivers.
Never heard of these. Been using M1 for a year. I don’t think it’s worth taking seriously.
Are you sure you're not using any displaylink cable/drivers?
I had a choppy mouse at a certain point, but that was only with a bluetooth mouse. Bluetooth runs at a slower rate in any case, but I think it might have had to do with some interference.
I'm aware of bluetooth issues, it's a similar experience. However, this is using the built-in trackpad and built-in display, and occurs seemingly randomly. The bluetooth issue made it initially very difficult to find any discussion of the M1 issue.
The biggest change, IIRC, is that the M1 was based on the A12(?) but the M2 was based on the A14(?). So the CPU/GPU design was newer. They tweaked and improved other modules like the neural engine too.
So it wasn’t just clock speed, but to most end users it was just somewhat faster and more mature.
I've been reading bits and pieces from the people doing Linux for Apple SoCs for a while and it sounds like the evolution has been mostly incremental going way back (like A7 era).
GPU and display controller were initially expected to have large amount of changes, but this turned out not to be the case.
Amount of changes between M1->M1Pro/Max/Ultra and M1Pro/Max/Ultra->M2 is similar.