While Apple added new GPU options to the Mac Pro configurator last year, there haven’t been any major changes to the lineup since 2019.In fact, this is the last product line to not have Apple’s M-series chip option. The leaker @DylanDKT That will change in the last three months of the year, the post said.
The new Mac Pro will reportedly use the same chipset that sits on top of the M1 Max, which powers the MacBook Pro 14-inch and 16-inch models. We’ve heard of the “dual” M1 Max, which is essentially a Max chip with extra hardware — up to 40 CPU cores and 128 GPU cores (though the Max only has an 8+2 CPU configuration and 32 GPU cores). Importantly, it won’t be a variant of the M2, which may introduce a new architecture to the kernel.
While the Mac mini and iMac can still use Intel chips, we feel like they will disappear soon. Dylan mentioned the new iMac Pro, which it says will use something more powerful than the M1 Max (though not as powerful as the Mac Pro chip).
Current Mac Pros feature Intel Xeon processors with up to 28 cores
Leakers report that in addition to desktop Macs, there will be Apple M2-powered devices arriving in the second half of this year. The MacBook Pro 13 (one of the first M1 devices) will be replaced by a 14-inch model using the M2. This change will be accompanied by a price increase. There will also be a new MacBook Air with the M2, which will likely retain the 13-inch diagonal display.
The reasoning behind this division is that M2 will likely be fabricated on a smaller node (current M1 chips come from TSMC’s 5nm fab). This will result in lower yields, making large chips (with many cores) unfeasible. Meanwhile, the 5nm node has matured enough to accommodate a 40-core monster.
