Jika melihat SoC M6 baru dari Apple, chip PC 2nm generasi berikutnya akan sangat keren

Reviews of Apple's latest M6 SoC are out, and the new chip looks hella impressive. Sadly, that probably won't be a huge direct benefit to PC gamers, what with the Mac's limited library of titles and patchy game optimisation.

But wait, because there's one really important detail regarding the M6 that is highly PC relevant. It uses TSMC's latest N2 silicon node.

Historically, of course, a new node was pretty much a nailed-down certainty in terms of the benefits it would bring. You could expect improved transistor density, better power efficiency and even lower cost.

More recently, ye olde Moore's Law that pertained to such matters has been looking a bit patchy. Intel famously got stuck on 14 nm for about a decade instead of the usual two-year cadence, a problem so serious the company's future was in doubt.

Anyway, the point is that you can no longer safely assume a new node is going to bring killer benefits. So, the fact that TSMC's new N2 node, which is basically its take on a 2 nm class of silicon, looks healthy and then some in the new Apple M6 chip is very good news for the PC.

Just to put a few numbers on this, according to Notebookcheck, the M6 clocks in at 4,698 single-core points in Geekbench 6.7. The Ryzen AI 9 HX 470, which is very, very nearly AMD's fastest laptop CPU, returns just 2,872 points. The M6 is also around 10% faster than the old Apple M5 chip in that benchmark. The M6 has a similar advantage over the AMD CPU and the old M5 chip in Cinebench.

For the record, the M6 has a much bigger advantage over the old M5 chip in multi-threaded workloads thanks to also having 12 CPU cores where the M5 has 10. You're looking at about 50% more overall CPU performance. And that's in a single generation jump.

Meanwhile, Notebookcheck also has the new M6 chip running at nearly 20% better performance per watt than the old M5 chip. Oh, and it's twice as power efficient as that AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470. Yikes.

Long story short, then, TSMC's N2 silicon has allowed Apple to make some very, very solid gains with the M6. Of course, it won't all be done to the new silicon. But however you slice it, TSMC N2 is looking very healthy indeed.

The follow up question is obviously when the PC might benefit from TSMC N2. CPUs and GPUs on N2? Yes please. The short answer is that we don't know for sure. The ongoing AI-fuelled Rampocalypse obviously colours everything. It's hard to imagine AMD and Nvidia prioritising scarce access to the N2 node on mere PC chips.

That said, AMD has announced that its next-gen Zen 6 CPUs, at least the variants for servers, are already in production on N2. If Zen 6 for PCs is also on N2, that would mean AMD has largely skipped TSMC's N3 node.

As for Nvidia, its current Blackwell graphics chips are built on N4, while its next-gen Rubin GPUs are being built on N3. Some rumours suggest Rubin may not arrive before 2028. So, an N2 Nvidia GPU may not appear before 2030.

Intel, meanwhile, has been a bit more aggressive and has been using TSMC's N3 silicon since the launch of Lunar Lake in late 2024. The company may be using N2 for some variants of its upcoming Nova Lake family of CPUs, which will probably launch early next year.

All of which means the PC is unlikely to be swimming in N2 silicon any time soon. But it is coming. And it does look very promising. Indeed, a bit of a wait probably wouldn't be a bad thing. It might just allow time for chip prices to return to something resembling sanity.