The Mac Pro is due to get an Apple silicon upgrade but it may be nowhere near as powerful as previously predicted, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
Apple might have canceled the M2 Extreme chip that was due to go into its now-delayed Mac Pro computer, instead leaving customers to make do with a less performant configuration when the next Mac Pro launches in 2023. That’s according to Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman — and it’s not the only bad news he recently shared in his Power On newsletter.
Gurman says that until recently, Apple’s plan was to launch two versions of the upcoming Apple silicon Mac Pro: One with an M2 Ultra chip (an upgrade of the M1 Ultra found in the Mac Studio), and one with a chip Gurman dubs the M2 Extreme, which would have consisted of two M2 Ultras fused together.
The resulting chip would have boasted 48 CPU cores and 152 graphics cores — double the 24 CPU cores and 76 graphics cores expected to be found in the M2 Ultra. As well as that, the M2 Ultra is rumored to “top out” with “at least 192GB of memory,” according to Gurman. It’s unclear if that means 192GB is the maximum memory or the starting point, but either way, it’s far less than the 1.5TB the current Mac Pro can be equipped with. Even considering Apple silicon’s unified memory that the Intel models lack, that’s still a large performance dip.
That lesser performance will be disappointing to high-end users who have been waiting for a new Mac Pro for over two years since the start of Apple’s transition to its own chips.
