Mike Peterson
Amid Apple's transition to first-party silicon across its Mac lineup, evidence that the company may be working on an Intel-based Mac Pro has been discovered in the latest version of Xcode.
The evidence was first spotted by Brendan Shanks, a developer at CodeWeavers. According to Shanks, the first beta version of Xcode 13 contains a reference to Intel Ice Lake Xeon processor support.
Interesting addition to usr/include/mach/machine.h in Xcode 13 beta 1: CPUFAMILY_INTEL_ICELAKE_SP.
— Brendan Shanks (@realmrpippy) June 8, 2021
Mac Pro refresh coming? pic.twitter.com/e3OQuLyUeV
More specifically, Xcode refers to Ice Lake SP, Intel's latest scalable Xeon processor. Apple currently uses Xeon processors in its desktop Mac Pro model, which was first unveiled in June 2018. That makes a Mac Pro the most likely candidate for a future Intel Mac.
The Intel reference seems to back up previous rumors of a Mac Pro with non-Apple Silicon chips.
Back in January, Bloomberg reported that Apple was working on two Mac Pro devices. One would be a smaller, redesigned desktop with an Apple Silicon chip, while the second would be identical to the current Mac Pro and would continue to use an Intel processor.
Similarly, in May, references in a macOS Big Sur beta appeared to point toward an unreleased 10-core Intel Core i9 processor.
Apple has said that the transition to Apple Silicon, announced in June 2020, would take about two years to complete. Given that the first M1 Macs were released in November 2020, there is indeed still time for an Intel Mac to be released within that timeframe.
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16 Comments
Come on Apple, we need a non-overpriced MacProMini with Desktop level components, for normal people. It'll be a hit with the gaming crowd, developers and be a good general purpose computer.
Don't include a GPU by default, so that we can just install our own and use it for gaming.
It has been sadly obvious for oh, about as many years as Steve Jobs have been dead, that Apple is firmly opposed to any kind of state-of-the-art gaming on the Mac.
I've been a Mac user since I got my first Macintosh SE (so quite a while) and it has always been a bit of a challenge to be a gamer on that platform. But Steve Jobs regularly trotted out gaming celebs like John Carmack to tout the gaming prowess of Mac OS X. We also got OpenGL, PC compatible ports and eventually the ability to boot straight into Windows and play any game we wanted.
Under Cook, mobile games seem to be OK, but game developers on the Mac are given such a cold shoulder that even Mac gaming stalwart Blizzard refrained from launching their latest hit game Overwatch on the Mac. This was the first game since the start of that company that wasn't simultaneoulsy launched on both PC and Mac. Apples anemic GPU choices didn't enable the game to meet Blizzard's user experience standards.
What I don't get is the joy that clowns like Lkrupp seems to derive from the fact that Mac users now need to purchase a second computer for gaming. Is there any reason at all to celebrate that one specific, and incidentally very popular, activity simply can't be adequately performed on a Mac computer?