What 2nm enables
Along with the A20 Pro in the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Duo, the M6 represents the first of Apple’s chips to use the new 2nm manufacturing process from TSMC, and it’s one of the first mass-market 2nm chips in the world.
New manufacturing process technologies can be tricky to understand, but in essence, this new 2nm process has smaller features—gates and transistors and resistors and such—which means the same logic and RAM storage can fit into a smaller area. You can use this to make a smaller chip, or just to fit more chip “stuff” in the same area.
In the case of the M6, it allows Apple to increase core counts and add features while actually making the chip slightly smaller than the M5. The M6 is estimated to be about 142 mm2, compared to the M5’s 157 mm2. In fact, with the exception of the 119 mm2 M1, the M6 is the smallest M-series chip yet.
This new manufacturing process brings more than just smaller, denser chip features. It also gives us a new type of transistor, GAAFET (gate-all-around field-effect transistor), which replaces the older FinFET design. It surrounds the gate material on all four sides, vs. just three sides as in the FinFET technology. It reduces leakage and makes the chips more electrically stable, so they can run at lower power and higher clock speeds.
Big CPU changes
With the M5, Apple rebranded its performance cores as “super cores.” In the M5 Pro and Max, the company used both the new super cores and new mid-range performance cores. Some chips, such as the A18 Pro, included both super and efficiency cores.
The M6 is the first Apple processor to use three different CPU core designs: 2 Super cores, 4 Performance cores, and 6 Efficiency cores. It’s not the first company to do this sort of thing, as Intel’s Panther Lake generation includes a 4-8-4 design with what it calls performance cores, efficiency cores, and low-power efficiency cores.
