Analyst says the Mac Pro's Apple silicon processor won't be an M2

[Daniel Sims]

Rumor mill: An Apple analyst and designer who has leaked information about Apple silicon before has come out with more information about the completion of the company’s transition to custom processors. The new leak about the Mac Pro supports existing ones.

In the past, Twitter leaker @dylandkt has given accurate details on the M1 iPad Pro and the 24-inch iMac before Apple’s announcements confirmed them. Last October he also said the 2022 MacBook Air will use an M2 chip, the next generation of Arm-based custom CPUs.

This week Dylan said Apple is still on track to replace the CPUs in all its computers with Apple silicon this year, with the Mac Pro being the last to leave Intel x86 processors behind. Instead of an M2 chip, however, Dylan said the Mac Pro will start its transition to Apple silicon with another version of M1 “beyond the cores of the M1 Max.” Nothing has been said thus far about how the 27" iMac will move away from Intel.

The Apple Silicon transition will end by Q4 of 2022. The Mac Pro will be the last device to be replaced. The Mac Pro’s processor will not be an extension of the M2. The processor of the Mac Pro will instead be a further extension of the M1 beyond the cores of the M1 Max.

— Dylan (@dylandkt) January 17, 2022

A new M1 processor with more than the M1 Max’s 10 cores would fall in line with what Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said last November – that a new Mac Pro would feature M1 variations that double and quadruple the M1 Max’s cores. Apple also reportedly has a 40-core 3nm Apple silicon processor on track for 2023.

In addition to the new MacBook Air, Dylan also said we will see a 10th generation iPad with 5G, Bluetooth 5.0, Wi-Fi 6, an A14 processor, a 10.2” screen, and the lightning connector by the end of the year. The following iPad will be a redesign planned for 2023.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/93021-analyst-mac-pro-apple-silicon-processor-wont-m2.html

 

[psycros]

So the model that actually needs the most processing power will get the updated chip last. Classic Apple.

 

[Dimitriid]

Honestly the latest M1s where not like absolutely impressive: They can edge past similarly configured systems with the advantage of being just one SoC instead of a cpu + gpu architecture so for laptops is very nice indeed.

But now we're talking desktops. And pro desktops at that: the power constrains shouldn't be that important and we haven't see how the M1 could perform with 0 power constrains, yet we know from other ARM chips that it's good at somethings and not so good at others.

So 10 cores would probably fall flat vs a true workstation/HEDT configuration with 32 to 64 Zen2 cores that threadripper has to offer so either these rumors are way off, Apple is planning to compete on price (Doubt it) or it won't be anywhere near the clear cut victory as it was on laptops, even for content creators.

My guess is that they either will have from 2x to 4x M1 10 cores w/howevermany gpu cores on a single desktop machine or it will have dedicated GPUs to push through some of those tasks for those willing to pay upwards of 50k for em.

 

[Faelan]

So the model that actually needs the most processing power will get the updated chip last. Classic Apple.

Imagine the reaction if Nvidia released the 3050 first and took over a year to get the halo products out.

 

[Sausagemeat]

I have no doubt that it will blow the doors off of an X86 equivalent. The laptop M1 absolutely destroys the X86 equivalents in performance per watt.

Of course be prepared for the lowest common denominators in the tech community to make sure they are seen hating on it no matter how good it actually is..

 

[Lounds]

If you edit videos for a living surely a decent spec gaming pc would render faster than a Mac Pro?

 

[Sausagemeat]

If you edit videos for a living surely a decent spec gaming pc would render faster than a Mac Pro?

Most people choose a Mac for its software, not the hardware. A lot of professionals like Final Cut Pro which is only available on Mac.

It’s not really about which one is faster. Until the M1 version comes out you can compare directly however. Currently Mac Pro’s can be specced with Xeon CPUs up to 28 cores, this is likely to be faster at rendering than your average gaming pc.

 

[GamerNerves]

This is another step to a completely independent design at the cost of pure performance. Possibly power efficiency will be better compared to what Intel will have, which is hard to say yet though, since we haven't seen what Raptor Lake has to offer, but I seriously doubt Apple can offer the best solution, as an example, for video producers, if they don't make their Mac chips silly big.
I don't say Apple is taking the wrong road, but the take away here is their new direction, not the best possible solution for the customer. Even Alder Lake shows how powerful design Intel has at 65 W, which I doubt gets much worse (or even better?) at 45 W, or wherever the consumption level of this new M1 alteration stands.
New laptops with Alder Lake are going to excel this year before new CPU generations come out, that's just the reality.

 

[Avet85]

If you edit videos for a living surely a decent spec gaming pc would render faster than a Mac Pro?

Actually, Apple is doing amazing software optimizations for M1 chips. New MacBook Pro Max can render videos faster than $50,000 fully specced Mac Pro. Editing will depend on what size project are you working on because MacBook Pro has a max of 64GB of memory, so Mac Pro has the advantage there.

If you are in the Apple ecosystem (FinalCut, ProRes Codec) the user experience is much better than on Windows.

With MacBook Pro Max you can easily edit 8K ProresRAW videos very smoothly for $4,000. But on Windows, you will need a $10.000 Threadripper beast. And you can connect any monitor to MacBook and use it as a desktop.

 

[nodfor]

It will probably be overpriced like every apple product. So thanks, but no thanks.

 

[Austinturner]

So the model that actually needs the most processing power will get the updated chip last. Classic Apple.

If you were starting to design and build your own processors and you needed a few iterations to match the performance of your current supplier…what would you do if not release the highest performing product last once you worked out how to build it?

 

[hahahanoobs]

If you edit videos for a living surely a decent spec gaming pc would render faster than a Mac Pro?

Yes.

 

[Dimitriid]

If you edit videos for a living surely a decent spec gaming pc would render faster than a Mac Pro?

For the most part, it will be. But it depends on what's your video editing software entirely. Final Cut pro it will be since it's Apple software it's well optimized.

Premiere at this point yes it is faster, but it took a little while to get there: there was a relatively long period of time where Premiere just didn't run natively on M1 so it mean it's performance was just bad on the M1 I think now it's far better.

I think Resolve was the same: A good year of just not having a native M1 version but now it does.

So the answer is yes but for a long time, only if you were willing to change video editing software to Final Cut. Now you can also use Premiere with relatively good results too.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

I have no doubt that it will blow the doors off of an X86 equivalent. The laptop M1 absolutely destroys the X86 equivalents in performance per watt.

Of course be prepared for the lowest common denominators in the tech community to make sure they are seen hating on it no matter how good it actually is..

That doesnt really translate. Sure, in apps that are optimized for the ARM architecture on mac OS specifically apple does great, but I seem to remember when intel was beating AMD that software built for a certian OS and a certian processor instruction by a certian company was "cheating". In software not specifically optimized fr apple on ARM performance is much closer to the competition, which is using older 7nm TSMC or 14nm intel nodes compared to apple's 5nm node.

It also doesnt scale as well, the m1 pro max pulls twice the power of the m1 pro(90~ watts) yet doesnt consistently provide twice the performance. Sometimes it does, other times its only 30-40% faster. Said chip was still being compared to mobile parts from the competition that pull 45-70 watts depending on turbo, especially compared to a 35 watt 5800hs the apple perf-watt isnt impressive.

In a desktop without the cooling limits of laptops the x86 competition will be fierce. If you dismiss all ciritcism as "hate" then get ready to be the comment section's punching bag. Apple's ARM chip is impressive but it is hardly the destroyer that the ARM crowd has been howling about for the last 10 years, it needed a massive cache (and massive die) along with the 5nm advantage to pull ahead of AMD's zen 2 based 4000 mobile series.

 

[ChristopherB]

With MacBook Pro Max you can easily edit 8K ProresRAW videos very smoothly for $4,000. But on Windows, you will need a $10.000 Threadripper beast. And you can connect any monitor to MacBook and use it as a desktop.]

That makes you sound like you have never edited videos on a PC running Windows if you think you need a Threadripper system for smooth 8K video editing.