What can they call the chip in the Mac Pro?

[mazz0]

Mn Max has to be the best version of the Mn, right? But surely the Mac Pro will have a more powerful processor than any laptop, if only to fit in more RAM, so what are they going to call that one?

Come to think of it, I wonder how they'll handle RAM in the Pro. I mean, you're not going to get a terabyte of RAM on a SOC are you. I wonder if they'll have two layers of RAM: some on the SOC, some external. <shrugs> I have no idea.

 

[leman]

Mn Max has to be the best version of the Mn, right? But surely the Mac Pro will have a more powerful processor than any laptop, if only to fit in more RAM, so what are they going to call that one?

Probably still Max but with more cores. Some folks have speculated that multiple Max chips are designed to be connected together to build one super-SOC.

Come to think of it, I wonder how they'll handle RAM in the Pro. I mean, you're not going to get a terabyte of RAM on a SOC are you. I wonder if they'll have two layers of RAM: some on the SOC, some external. <shrugs> I have no idea.

Everything is possible. I think they will have a healthy amount of HBM2 backed by user-replaceable DDR5

 

[dustSafa]

Extreme?

 

[thingstoponder]

It’s pretty much a guarantee we’re going to see multiple Max and maybe Pro chips combined via an interface or interposer. They can just say “it has 2 or 4 M1 Max chips for 2 or 4 times the performance of MacBook Pro.”

I dont think branding matters as much for the Mac Pro. They don’t need a fancy new name.

As for RAM. I don’t see any reason to think it will support 1.5 TBs of RAM. The only Apple Silicon Mac Pro we’ve heard about so far from Gurman is a small Mac Pro. This machine is not going to have replaceable GPUs and probably not RAM either. It will probably have 256GB because that is 4x M1 Pro.

The only refresh of the tower Mac Pro we’ve heard about is an Intel one.

 

[Andropov]

Everything is possible. I think they will have a healthy amount of HBM2 backed by user-replaceable DDR5

I doubt it. HBM memory has much higher latency than even DDR4 (106.7 ns vs 73.3 ns in this paper about FPGAs).

 

[leman]

I doubt it. HBM memory has much higher latency than even DDR4 (106.7 ns vs 73.3 ns in this paper about FPGAs).

LPDDR also has higher latency, M1 RAM latency has been measured at 100ns (check the Anandtech review). DDR5 will probably have higher latency than DDR4. More advanced protocols tend to increase the latency. At any rate, this is not a problem in practice. There are enough of memory channels and plenty of cache to keep the data flowing, and Apples hardware has massive amount of parallelism to hide the latency anyway.

 

[l0stl0rd]

M1 ultra?

 

[senttoschool]

M1 Max x4
M1 4x Max
M1 Max 40 CPU Cores, 128 GPU Cores

 

[Andropov]

LPDDR also has higher latency, M1 RAM latency has been measured at 100ns (check the Anandtech review). DDR5 will probably have higher latency than DDR4. More advanced protocols tend to increase the latency. At any rate, this is not a problem in practice. There are enough of memory channels and plenty of cache to keep the data flowing, and Apples hardware has massive amount of parallelism to hide the latency anyway.

You're right, I must have been thinking of the GDDR6 latencies (up to 270ns per this review vs the 96ns of the M1 per AnandTech). Still, even greater bandwidth shouldn't be of much use to the CPU, just to the GPU, right? I wouldn't expect the CPU to be able to saturate the memory bandwidth alone.

 

[tygurr]

Knowing Apple, wouldn't be surprised to see something like M1 Max Pro

 

[leman]

You're right, I must have been thinking of the GDDR6 latencies (up to 270ns per this review vs the 96ns of the M1 per AnandTech). Still, even greater bandwidth shouldn't be of much use to the CPU, just to the GPU, right? I wouldn't expect the CPU to be able to saturate the memory bandwidth alone.

Depends on the workload. Personally, I am very exited to have this much bandwidth to my CPU cores since my work (a lot of which involves naive scanning of tables) could benefit from it.

 

[dhruveonmars]

Knowing Apple, wouldn't be surprised to see something like M1 Max Pro

Would've said M1 Pro Max, which aligns with the iPhone naming too

 

[darngooddesign]

M#-Max-S-Bionic

 

[UBS28]

M1 Pro Max.

 

[vel0city]

Silicon Daddy.

 

[Pro Apple Silicon]

It’s pretty much a guarantee we’re going to see multiple Max and maybe Pro chips combined via an interface or interposer. They can just say “it has 2 or 4 M1 Max chips for 2 or 4 times the performance of MacBook Pro.”

I dont think branding matters as much for the Mac Pro. They don’t need a fancy new name.

As for RAM. I don’t see any reason to think it will support 1.5 TBs of RAM. The only Apple Silicon Mac Pro we’ve heard about so far from Gurman is a small Mac Pro. This machine is not going to have replaceable GPUs and probably not RAM either. It will probably have 256GB because that is 4x M1 Pro.

The only refresh of the tower Mac Pro we’ve heard about is an Intel one.

Pretty much a guarantee?

I don't think so. These are complete packages. Made from scratch for their use case. They aren't just going to string multiple complete packages together, lol.

No, Apple will make 2 or more complete packages for the Mac Pro. They will not be expandable. And it won't matter because the performance will meet the needs of the user. Like every other Apple Silicon product thus far.

 

[darngooddesign]

Notcho Chip

 

[darngooddesign]

Pretty much a guarantee?

I don't think so. These are complete packages. Made from scratch for their use case. They aren't just going to string multiple complete packages together, lol.

No, Apple will make 2 or more complete packages for the Mac Pro. They will not be expandable. And it won't matter because the performance will meet the needs of the user. Like every other Apple Silicon product thus far.

Yeah, We’ve already seen that Apple build single larger chips to get the power they want, no reason to think that will change in the future.

 

[thingstoponder]

Pretty much a guarantee?

I don't think so. These are complete packages. Made from scratch for their use case. They aren't just going to string multiple complete packages together, lol.

No, Apple will make 2 or more complete packages for the Mac Pro. They will not be expandable. And it won't matter because the performance will meet the needs of the user. Like every other Apple Silicon product thus far.

What you’re saying isn’t even possible. The M1 Max is already massive at 432mm/2. 2x that size is infeasible and 4x is simply not possible.

Do you know of any industry or analyst type people who are saying otherwise? I think ever since the Gurman report of the code names and the core configurations of the upcoming chips were announced this has been the prevailing thought.

How exactly are they going to make a 32+8 CPU core + 128 GPU core monolithic SoC? On a still relatively cutting edge process node nonetheless? This is over 1600mm/2. The largest chip now is an Nvidia GPU at half that size on an older node.

Chiplet designs are nothing new either. AMD has been doing it for years on CPUs and Nvidia and AMD are going that way for GPUs as well as Intel.

I don’t know exactly what Apple will do but it certainly will not be monolithic SoCs. They couldn’t do it even if they wanted to.

 

[matrix07]

M1 Xtreme.

 

[Pro Apple Silicon]

What you’re saying isn’t even possible. The M1 Max is already massive at 432mm/2. 2x that size is infeasible and 4x is simply not possible.

Do you know of any industry or analyst type people who are saying otherwise? I think ever since the Gurman report of the code names and the core configurations of the upcoming chips were announced this has been the prevailing thought.

How exactly are they going to make a 32+8 CPU core + 128 GPU core monolithic SoC? On a still relatively cutting edge process node nonetheless? This is over 1600mm/2. The largest chip now is an Nvidia GPU at half that size on an older node.

Chiplet designs are nothing new either. AMD has been doing it for years on CPUs and Nvidia and AMD are going that way for GPUs as well as Intel.

I don’t know exactly what Apple will do but it certainly will not be monolithic SoCs. They couldn’t do it even if they wanted to.

For you to say that they couldn't do it if they wanted to is extreme, to say the least. I'll be kind.

The idea of stringing together the complete packages we have now is absurd. You're not going to have multiple M1's each with their own set of unified memory and graphics cores that are independent from each other. That won't make for a faster or more capable machine.

The only possibility here is some new hybrid that has multiple M1's with CPU and GPU cores that all share a separate set of memory.

 

[darngooddesign]

The only possibility here is some new hybrid that has multiple M1's with CPU and GPU cores that all share a separate set of memory.

We are still thinking of 2D logic boards. Apple could build a singe SOC with components stacked and hardwired together instead of being on a flat plane. There would still be a shared pool of memory for the entire array. It might be slightly less efficient than a flat SoC but the benefits of being able to fit two or four M1-Maxes in a double-height Mini would outweigh it.

Of course, you could fit a double or quadruple sized flat M1-Max in an iMac Pro case.

 

[satcomer]

M1 Pro Max.

Probably 2 Max board plus a really good video system able to drive 4 monitors!

 

[thingstoponder]

For you to say that they couldn't do it if they wanted to is extreme, to say the least. I'll be kind.

Are you saying they can make a monolithic chip twice as large as the current largest chip on the market? I’ll say it again… it’s not possible. ~800mm/2 is basically the limit of any silicon node.

The idea of stringing together the complete packages we have now is absurd. You're not going to have multiple M1's each with their own set of unified memory and graphics cores that are independent from each other. That won't make for a faster or more capable machine.

The only possibility here is some new hybrid that has multiple M1's with CPU and GPU cores that all share a separate set of memory.

I never claimed to know how they would do it, merely that it won’t be a monolithic SoC.

We are still thinking of 2D logic boards. Apple could build a singe SOC with components stacked and hardwired together instead of being on a flat plane. There would still be a shared pool of memory for the entire array. It might be slightly less efficient than a flat SoC but the benefits of being able to fit two or four M1-Maxes in a double-height Mini would outweigh it.

Of course, you could fit a double or quadruple sized flat M1-Max in an iMac Pro case.

This is the right thinking. There’s a lot of interesting stuff happening now with silicon packaging. Apple is going to ship a machine with up to 4 times the CPU and 4 times the GPU of the M1 Max in the near future. How they will do it is anyones guess, but it won’t be a monolithic die.

 

[fakestrawberryflavor]

Pro max. I mean it’s already the phone branding lol