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'M4 Extreme' Chip Unlikely After Apple 'Cancels' High-Performance Chip [Updated]
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Do they forget occasionally that they are trillion dollar company able to do both simultaneously? Sometimes I wonder.
Do I need to hold someone’s beer, so that they can do a bit more work? Hmmmm.
Do I need to hold someone’s beer, so that they can do a bit more work? Hmmmm.
The reason that this is a "very small niche" is that Apple drove almost everyone who needed slots over to Windows. Same with internal storage, and other features common in Windows PCs, but stupid-expensive on macs.
I still use Apple these days, but I feel very trapped and taken advantage of, and do not recommend Apple to friends.
I’m waiting for the M-SX Ultra Max-Pro Double-Extreme 4x4 Turbo Super-Duty!
GPUs can and are used for AI training and inference. NVIDIA has GPUs that have special functional units designed to efficiently handle AI workloads while also providing great GPU performance. However, if the primary goal is AI then supporting other GPU workloads ends up wasting silicon.
In addition, the CPU portion of an AI chip isn't likely to be as beefy as the CPU portion of an M4 Max.
Taken together, it's not obvious that such a chip would have dual application in Mac desktops and Apple's AI servers.
Has Apple ever named a product with the 80's tag "Extreme"?
This is somebody attempting to manipulate the stock, that's all.
This is somebody attempting to manipulate the stock, that's all.
Too slow. I think that Apple has passed beyond that approach with on-die interconnect.
Just give me an 8" Mac Pro Cube Personal Workstation with the ASi equivalent of a top-end Threadripper in CPU power, dual 5090s in GPU power, 960GB ECC LPDDR6 RAM, & a 32TB SSD; is that too much to ask...? ;^p
There simply isn't a market for the Mac Pro, it's as simple as that!
Apple this "past summer" canceled the development of a high-performance Mac chip that would have consisted of four smaller chips stitched together, in order to free up engineering resources for a planned AI server chip, according to The Information.
Based on the report's description of the chip, it sounds like Apple has canceled a previously-rumored "Extreme" chip for the Mac. It was previously reported that an "M2 Extreme" chip was scrapped a few years ago, but perhaps Apple had revisited the idea since then. In any case, it now sounds like an "M4 Extreme" chip is also unlikely.
Apple likely would have introduced the "M4 Extreme" in its high-end Mac Pro tower. The chip would have offered even faster performance than the M4 Ultra chip that is expected to launch in new Mac Studio and Mac Pro models later next year.
If the "M4 Extreme" were to have been a quadrupled version of the M4 Max chip that debuted in the MacBook Pro a few months ago, it would have had massive specifications, including up to a 64-core CPU and up to a 160-core GPU.
While the "Extreme" chip may be off the table once again, it seems like Apple has repeatedly shown interest in developing such a chip, so perhaps it will eventually materialize as part of the M5 series or later. For now, though, the wait continues.
Article Link: 'M4 Extreme' Chip Unlikely After Apple 'Cancels' High-Performance Chip
So you are saying you don't think Mac OS already has the capability to do task assigning for multiple cores?
I cannot imagine using a product that makes me feel that way. You really should talk to someone and remove yourself from that situation, rather than posting on a rumors website for them. It sounds extremely unhealthy.
There are a lot of compromises when you try to do multi-core across multiple sockets. Those compromises aren't so bad when you're doing enterprise workloads like a lot of VMs on the same host - but those are very much the workloads that apple do not run.
Apple's stuff is all almost single user, interactive and multi socket sucks at that.
Maybe they could do multi-socket M series on their cloud infrastructure but thats stuff we'll likely never see or have any exposure to outside of it running our iCloud/siri workloads.
People don't want to hear it but probably true. Unless apple break into another market - the traditional strongholds of
- graphic design
- photography
- video production
Sure there are some users who need more, but the number of them is pretty insignificant and of those many of them could probably scale the workload across multiple machines instead of one big machine. Not saying all - but at this point the numbers are so small as to be irrelevant.
Interesting to see people refusing to buy a Mac Pro without the Extreme chip because they absolutely need the features and performance of the Extreme without even knowing what those features and performance might be.
Hopefully, the end/delay of this project mean the M4 Ultra Mac Studio and Pro are coming sooner rather than later.
Hopefully, the end/delay of this project mean the M4 Ultra Mac Studio and Pro are coming sooner rather than later.
I'm not in this group, but it doesn't seem that hard to understand. People who want more CPU know they want more CPU, the exact performance number isn't needed to know that a bigger chip will be closer to what they want.
But more than CPU power, plenty of vocal people want the RAM that the old Mac Pro offered, and have been complaining ever since the switch to Apple Silicon. Here it's easily to play the extrapolation game. 2x Max's RAM for an Ultra, and 2X-4X Ultra's RAM for an Extreme (if an Extreme is a 2X or 4X ultra). Considering Apple RAM pricing, selling just one unit would cover all the R&D costs.
Seems we are back to the point where it is better to connect these systems together over a fast network than try to fit more processors into a single box.
I would like to see Apple move their focus more to GPU, if they are as serious about games as they have said they are lately.
I'm not in this group, but it doesn't seem that hard to understand. People who want more CPU know they want more CPU, the exact performance number isn't needed to know that a bigger chip will be closer to what they want.
But more than CPU power, plenty of vocal people want the RAM that the old Mac Pro offered, and have been complaining ever since the switch to Apple Silicon. Here it's easily to play the extrapolation game. 2x Max's RAM for an Ultra, and 2X-4X Ultra's RAM for an Extreme (if an Extreme is a 2X or 4X ultra). Considering Apple RAM pricing, selling just one unit would cover all the R&D costs.
I feel like at this point the Mac Pro suffers more from the loss of flexibility than the gain in raw power. As you say, the people who just want max CPU and RAM for their custom software know who they are.
The rest of us might like to use those PCI slots for more than just giant SSDs but Apple doesn't seem to think so.
I mean they already name their OS releases after "drug fueled trips through California" so that's actually not far off.
But that's just it: an M4 Ultra would have more CPU power than any other M4 out there. Yeah, I always want more CPU power myself. People are talking like they can't buy the next Mac Pro unless it has an M4 Extreme in it without knowing what an M4 Ultra could do or how much better an M4 Extreme would be or what features it would have. They just want a chip called something else, but they make fun of the name on top of that.
While the Ultra series does seem to scale pretty well, the fact that Apple is having problems with the 'Extreme' may well indicate that it is not scaling as well as the design costs. And there are plenty of things to use PCI slots for, depending on your needs.
AirPort Extreme - Wikipedia
