When making its very first M1 chip official in June 2020, Apple promised that its entire catalog of computers would switch to ARM architecture within two years. Here we are in December 2022 and a machine under Intel is still resisting: the Mac Pro.
Farewell to the M2 Extreme chip?
Designed for particularly demanding workloads, the Mac Pro has not evolved since its arrival on the market in 2019. The latest rumors dispersed by Bloomberg, however, mentioned its upcoming upgrade with an M2 Extreme processor, but this idea seems to have been abandoned. .
According to information from the English-speaking site, it should have been made up of four M2 Max chips merged to deliver truly mind-blowing power. Too complex and expensive to produce, its development would have been stopped by Apple and the future Mac Pro would have to make do with an M2 Ultra chip with 24 CPU cores, 76 GPU cores and 192 GB of RAM. The machine would also retain the ability to expand storage and RAM.
Complex positioning
The technical data sheet may seem attractive on paper, but the potential positioning of this Mac Pro is puzzling. First of all because the current Mac Pro is able to carry up to 1.5 TB of RAM and four graphics cards, enough to stand up to an M2 Ultra chip, however optimized it may be. Apple’s future computer would also compete with the Mac Studio, the new darling of professionals, which should also inherit an M2 Ultra chip during its next upgrade.
As it stands, it’s hard to know who the Mac Pro M2 Ultra would be for. Apple could wait for the birth of the M3 chips – thus giving the firm time to develop 3 nm chips -, but that would still delay the release of its computer dedicated to graphic designers for many months, and therefore the complete switch to a family. of Mac under ARM.