Apple scales back plans for 'Extreme' Apple Silicon Mac Pro

Apple's introduction of an Apple Silicon Mac Pro won't include an "Extreme" variant of the M2 chip, with the top-end Mac said to feature an M2 Ultra instead.

The Mac Pro is the last model in the entire Mac range to not be offered with an Apple Silicon chip. While rumors and speculation has Apple working on one for launch sometime in 2023, it may not be as powerful as once thought.

The model was believed to use an "M2 Extreme" chip, a doubling down of the Ultra chip concept that combines two M2 Ultra chips into one piece of silicon. In theory, the chip could've offered 48 CPU cores and 152 GPU cores, but that apparently won't be happening.

According to Mark Gurman's "Power On" newsletter for Bloomberg, Apple's pulling back from offering a Mac Pro with an Extreme chip inside, due to production problems. Due to its complexity and worries over its cost, the chip's manufacturing won't go ahead, and the high-end Mac Pro variant is scrapped.

Instead, the Mac Pro will use an M2 Ultra chip, which will have 24 CPU cores and 76 GPU cores, as well as support for up to 192 gigabytes of Unified Memory.

The M2 Extreme could've been a reason for the relatively slow introduction of a New Mac Pro. In July, Gurman said Apple had an M1 Mac Pro ready, but didn't launch it in favor of developing the more powerful M2 Extreme chip.

Despite the reduced potential computing power, Gurman insists that Apple will continue to offer some level of Mac Pro expandability, including options to increase the memory, internal storage, and other components.

An M2 Pro Mac mini and M2 Ultra Mac Pro are apparently in testing for 2023 launches, Gurman adds, while M2 Pro and M2 Max versions of the 14-inch MacBook Pro and 16-inch MacBook Pro.

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43 Comments

blastdoor 3589 comments · 15 Years

About 2 years ago

Disappointing if true

muthuk_vanalingam 1371 comments · 8 Years

blastdoor said:

Disappointing if true

This doesn't make any sense or whatsoever to me. May be, Apple is trying to catch the leaksters with this one.

Fidonet127 598 comments · 5 Years

There are some people who require tons of memory and used the 1.5TB of memory. For those people, I do not see how 192GB of memory is going to work for them. Yes people can get away with smaller memory, but not that much shrinkage. The Studio has up to 128GB of memory, so this wouldn't increase memory that much. Is this just going to be a M2 Mac Studio in a bigger box with more expandability of something? For that matter, is the M2 Mac Studio going to offer up to 192GB of memory?

9secondkox2 3147 comments · 8 Years

Gurman is wrong.

Apple didn’t delay the Mac Pro two plus years in order to give us a Mac Studio with a different name.

The new Mac Pro won’t arrive until apple is ready to blow the doors off everything else - even if that means waiting for M3 Extreme.

The M2 just isn’t the destroyer hoped for. It’s great, but not something that will meet expectations of the delayed pro.

M3 has been for a long time where the convergence of all the good things was headed. It may mean Apple breaks a promise, but it’s better than releasing something prematurely just because an ambitious project didn’t work out in time.

The only way an M2 Ultra goes in a Mac Pro is if Apple developed an external-to-SOC traffic controller that mimics how their Fabric works - and then add multiple M2Ultra packages in a “modular” config.

macxpress 5913 comments · 16 Years

9secondkox2 said:

Gurman is wrong.
Apple didn’t delay the Mac Pro two plus years in order to give us a Mac Studio with a different name.

The new Mac Pro won’t arrive until apple is ready to blow the doors off everything else - even if that means waiting for M3 Extreme.

The M2 just isn’t the destroyer hoped for. It’s great, but not something that will meet expectations of the delayed pro.

M3 has been for a long time where the convergence of all the good things was headed. It may mean Apple breaks a promise, but it’s better than releasing something prematurely just because an ambitious project didn’t work out in time.

The only way an M2 Ultra goes in a Mac Pro is if Apple developed an external-to-SOC traffic controller that mimics how their Fabric works - and then add multiple M2Ultra packages in a “modular” config.

I agree...I've also never really like Mark Gurman. He may be right sometimes but other times its just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks and then if that doesn't seem to work out, throw more shit at the wall to see if that sticks. I still remember when be blamed Apple for him being wrong lol. This is the kind of arrogant person he is.

I wouldn't be surprised to see an M3 based MacPro and also wouldn't be surprised if it was supposed to be an M3 MacPro all along. Apple has MacStudio which can hold over most users who need power. Apple can afford to wait to get MacPro right.