Apple has apparently scrapped plans to make a new Apple Silicon Mac Pro with a high-end “M2 Extreme” chip with 48 CPU cores and 152 GPU cores. That’s what Mark Gurman says in his latest issue On Newsletter. Gurman also says the new Mac Pro will be made in Vietnam, a marked departure from the “Made in USA” 2019 Intel Mac Pro.
The “Extreme” chip would essentially have been a dual M2 Ultra. But complexity and cost concerns appear to have put those plans on hold. Gurman still says Apple is preparing to launch a new Mac Pro with an M2 Ultra inside, with a design that allows for expandability of some components like RAM and storage.
Gurman says the M2 Extreme chip faced challenges of production complexity and cost issues. Not pushing it any further also frees up the TSMC silicon fab to use the chip production capacity for higher volume chips for mainstream Apple products.
The M2 Ultra chip supports up to 24 CPU cores, 76 GPU cores and up to 192 GB unified RAM.
While a lot more than most people need, it’s worth pointing out that 192GB of RAM is still significantly less than the 1.5TB of RAM supported by the current-gen 2019 Mac Pro. It is also unclear how the 76-core GPU will fare, since the current Mac Pro can theoretically be configured with four internal graphics cards.
To make up for that lack, Gurman says the new Mac Pro will retain expansion options for RAM, storage, and other components beyond what’s in the M2 Ultra chip itself.
The Mac Pro is expected to use a new-generation M2 Ultra chip (rather than the M1 Ultra) and retain one of its defining characteristics: easy expandability for additional memory, storage, and other components.
Apple originally announced that the Apple Silicon transition would be complete within two years, which would have resulted in Apple Silicon versions of the entire Mac lineup being made available by November 2022. That deadline has since passed, however, and the new Mac Pro hasn’t come out. Neither has a high-end Apple Silicon Mac mini.
According to Gurman, an M2 Pro Mac mini and the M2 Ultra Mac Pro are in active testing and are expected to launch in 2023. The 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models M2 Pro and M2 Max should also arrive early in the new year. A new Pro Display XDR and a second-generation Studio Display are also said to be in development.
A new M3-powered iMac is not expected until late 2023 at the earliest. An Apple Silicon iMac Pro is also under investigation, although Gurman says it has experienced similar development delays as the Mac Pro initiative.
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