Report: Apple’s Next Mac Pro to Ship With M2 Ultra and M2 Extreme Chips
As Apple is bringing its new M2 chips to the 6th-gen iPad Pro this week, the company is working on supercharged versions of this same chip for the next Mac Pro. This is the last Mac model to abandon Intel CPUs to Apple Silicon, and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that the next Mac Pro that is expected to be released next year will come with M2 “Ultra” and M2 “Extreme” chips.
According to Gurman, Apple’s M2 Ultra chip will include 24 CPU cores and 76 GPU cores. The ‘Extreme’ version of the chip will boost that to 48 CPU cores and 152 GPU cores, with a maximum of 256GB of unified memory.
In comparison, the base M2 chips that Apple currently ships in its latest MacBook Air and 13” MacBook Pro have an 8-core CPU and a 10-core GPU. The M2 “Max” chip that’s expected to come in the next 14” and 16” MacBook Pro models plus a new high-end new Mac Mini is expected to have 12 CPU cores and 38 GPU cores.
The Mac Pro used to be Apple’s most powerful Mac, but it hasn’t been updated since 2019. Earlier this year, Apple released a new Mac Studio powered by M1 Max and M1 Ultra chips, and the company claimed that the base model with an M1 Max chip was more powerful than the current Mac Pro.
With its custom-designed ARM-based chips, Apple currently provides unmatched levels of performance per watt to Mac users. The upcoming Mac Pro with M2 Ultra and M2 Extreme chips will likely be a new performance milestone for ARM-based Macs, and they will conclude a long transition from Intel chips to Apple Silicon that started two years ago with Apple’s first M1 chip.