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Apple Reportedly Worked on Two 'Extreme' Chips

vantelimus said:
Have you never worked at a large company in the tech industry? Lots of projects get shelved before they hit the public.
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Yup, staffing in large engineering groups is very amorphus across projects and time. Projects are not necessarily isolated teams. It might have been seen all along as a leading edge "maybe" project. The best engineers might want to contribute rather than (or in addition to) humdrum incremental upgrade work.

Failure, whether on a purely technical level and/or a market demand level, can still be rewarding work. It also could have been a good learning experience for the engineer (making them more valuable) and for Apple in terms of engineering advances that might get applied in other ways in the future.
 
Most likely buyers... they won't blink dropping >$10k per Extreme.

- AI researchers and machine learning engineers
- Hollywood studios
- 3D animation studios
- Scientific researchers
- Music production
- Software developers
- Enterprise creative teams

If Apple made an M5 Extreme today

A hypothetical configuration might look something like:

- 64–96 CPU cores
- 160–240 GPU cores
- 64–128 Neural Engine cores
- 512 GB–1 TB unified memory
- Memory bandwidth well beyond current Ultra chips
- Multiple TB5 controllers
- Designed for a future Mac Pro

Such a machine could easily cost US$10,000–20,000+ depending on memory and storage.
 
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gummybear2026 said:
More like what a waste of R&D for this ridiculousness.
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That is a valid point.

Yet there is a fundamental flaw in Apple's thinking and I think that this is what doomed the whole project.
So it is ultimately all Apple's own fault.

There is not one reason why a high-end user would want an "Extreme" chip.
Some would need the raw computational power, others would need the massive amount of RAM it bundles, and yet others need both.

The market for these users is already very small from the beginning.
Yet to fragment it further by only offering one single option that force-bundles its computational power with a certain fixed amount of RAM - that is the killer.

The "Extreme" CPU R&D only makes sense if potential users have full configurability between CPU power and RAM.
By bundling those into a non-user configurable and non-user upgradeable "black box" - Apple shot themselves in the foot. Making the resulting user base so small that the whole product became no longer viable.
They really should have realized this earlier. I fault Apple for not doing that.

In a somewhat similar fashion the same happened to the Mac Pro.

It's somehow infuriating that the amazing performance per watt the Apple silicon offers, remains off limits to exactly the users who would benefit the most from it, as RAM and SSD are not later upgradable nor configurable to the specs especially these users would need. Also costs could not be spread out over time by deferring upgrades to RAM and SSD to a later point.

So for whom are these Apple silicon chips really? I start to wonder.

Consumers are OK with iPhone chips, I am sure and as the success of the Neo demonstrates.
Yet high-end users typically want more configurability than the "must decide at purchase time" one-shot configurations that Apple silicon dictates.
Sure, there are some who are OK with the much limited fixed options that Apple offers - but with rising memory prices this strategy becomes less and less viable.
If customers could buy the minimum CPU, RAM and SSD configuration today and upgrade these when memory prices come down later - the problem would be solved.
But the way it stands, Apple painted themselves into a massive corner...
 
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This naming scheme reminds me that Capcom used to have the same problem as Valve. They couldn't count to 3. That's how we ended up with Street Fighter II. Then Super Street Fighter II. Then Super Street Fighter II Turbo. Then Street Fighter II Champion Edition. It was silly.
 
txntalized said:
Am I the only one who thinks those chips plus a 5090 would be a powerhouse for gaming(if you could get more games on macOS)
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While I could imagine Apple supporting dGPUs for AI or even CUDA (not going to happen), there is zero chance of Apple letting dGPUs into the display pipeline for at least another decade.
 
Siliconguy said:
As for "Think of a transportation company that owned airplanes. But they have so much demand that they are turning away customers. So they buy a fleet of buses and semi-trucks. This could work ONLY if they carefully managed what went on the plane and what went on the road."

Like UPS and Fedex do every day? Or for that matter the Fusion Drives Apple was rather fond of a decade ago. It's a solved problem. Doing RAM that way will increase power consumption though so for the laptop market there is a good reason not to do it. On a desktop power usage matters a lot less.
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I used to work for FedEx oodles of years ago. Back when FedEx Ground was green and FedEx Overnight was Purple. Ground and Air were two separate companies for a very very long time because it was very complicated to integrate the two. Fusion Drives is not the same as "fusion memory" no matter how much you claim it is. If this were true, Windows and Linux. would have had this years ago.
 
HVDynamo said:
Yeah, they shot themselves in the foot with the Mac Pro. Having upgradable RAM/Storage and expansion slots was the main seller. I wanted one when they talked about the 2019, but once they released it at those prices I noped out. They made it too expensive for a consumer that just wanted an upgradable machine. I understand having the higher tiers for real professionals, but the price for the base model was outrageous for what you got. Then Apple Silicon came along and they squandered it even further.

The Apple Silicon Mac Pro should have had a Modular CPU board, and allowed extra RAM be upgraded by the user beyond the unified memory. You pay for the fixed unified memory on the CPU board, then you can add more that's slower that gets used when the unified memory fills up. Then having plenty of storage bays, and adding support for aftermarket GPU's from AMD/Nvidia would have made the Mac Pro more worth it. The starting price would have been OK, with the modularity allowing you to replace the CPU board separately down the road without having to replace everything else. I would have paid the steep entry price if it meant 4 years later I could upgrade the CPU board from an M2Max to an M5 Max/Ultra, or even bought second hand upgrades from other people upgrading.

I know all that is a pipe dream that never would have happened. But I can dream.
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If they'd done that, it wouldn't be another disposable computer.
 
What a missed opportunity… they could have sold a ton of these to AI and scientific computing professionals.
It’s a shame that Apple, for a very long time, only seems to be targetting the photo/video/youtube “professionals”, who actually don’t need that much processing power/RAM.
 
All Taken said:
Mac Studio extreme, please.
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There is not enough thermal capacity with the Studio. Also, you need reasonabe amounts of RAM (terabytes), disk (tens of terrabytes) and networking speeds (at least 100gbps, ideally 400gbps and beyond) for many uses (AI, scientific computing) of such powerfull computers these days. The Mac Pro (or a reintroduced Xserve) would have been ideal for this.
 
peter2 said:
There is not enough thermal capacity with the Studio. Also, you need sreasonabe RAM (terabytes), disk (tens of terrabytes) and networking speeds (at least 100gbps, ideally 400 and beyond) for many uses (AI, scientific calculations) of such powerfull computers these days. The Mac Pro (or a reintroduced cserve) would have been ideal for this.
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To borrow a quote from inception: "You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling"

Studio doesn't have to remain as a fixed size, anymore than the Mac Pro did. Only the transition this time for thermal reasons would be moving in a direction which makes sense for the chips available.

I'm happy to have a larger Studio be a Mac Pro in all but name.
 
All Taken said:
To borrow a quote from inception: "You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling"

Studio doesn't have to remain as a fixed size, anymore than the Mac Pro did. Only the transition this time for thermal reasons would be moving in a direction which makes sense for the chips available.

I'm happy to have a larger Studio be a Mac Pro in all but name.
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In theory, you could be right. But in practice, Apple has demontrated multiple times that it is obsessed with small computers, even if it makes no sense. (I wonder who cares that a desktop is almost the size of a laptop, or that an iMac/display is really thin. As if anyone was moving these computers around every day…)
 
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"Apple decided not to release the chips due to concerns over higher production costs and limited demand for the Mac Pro"

Bad call. It's shocking to me to see how many people are willing to pay any price for the most powerful Apple products. They would have sold a ton of anything marked as "Extreme".

...and six months later we would have gotten the Apple Mouse "Extreme" 🙂
 
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