I've been saying 4x M1 Max is not a thing and never will be a thing ever since the week I got my M1 Max and saw that the IRQ controller was only instantiated to support 2 dies, but everyone kept parroting that nonsense the Bloomberg reporter said about a 4-die version regardless...

Turns out I was right.

The Mac Pro chip will be a different thing/die.

Plus they are running out of M1 superlatives. They’ll have to go to M2 to avoid launching M1 Plaid.

They could do M1 More Thing.

m1 hyper turbo deluxe

or they could take a page out of microsofts book and just call the next one "m one"

M1 One: The Second One!

M1 Series One

M1 Ultra²

M1 Mark II ala Sony

Bloomberg brought the Supermicro hit pieces. I personally can't take them seriously anymore. Not after the second article with 0 fact checking and sad attempt at an irrelevant die shot. And their word is certainly irrelevant against one of people who are working (and succeeding) at running linux on M1.

Could they do a multi-socket board for the Mac Pro?

I expect this for CPU side. Multiple SoC introduces NUMA but it's already done on Dual Xeon based Mac. I wonder how their GPU work for the configuration.

In a world where latency:storage size tradeoffs need to be made for practical reasons (and will, at some point, be required for fundamental physical reasons), we should just embrace NUMA anyway. Death to the lie of uniform access! NUMA is the future!

Ehrm, anyway.

It actually isn't clear to me whether designing a two socket motherboard is fundamentally an easier task than jamming more of the things into a single package (given that they have already embraced some sort of chiplette paradigm).

I believe designing/manufacturing a 5nm chip only used for Mac Pro can't be profitable. That's why they designed M1 Ultra as MCM of M1 Max.

They would never do that

The Mac Pro (and the high-end Powermacs that preceded it) were always available in a dual socket incarnation, right up to the trashcan Mac.

The trashcan Mac Pro was announced almost 9 years ago. Apple today is a very different company. They've moved onto chiplet designed SoC's with little to no care about upgradability.

They have done this previously for dual socket Xeons. Historical precedence doesn’t necessarily hold here, but in fact, it’s been done on the “cheese graters” previously

They've moved on to chiplet design. Don't disregard their clear direction to SoC's with non-upgradeable RAM, GPU, CPU.

They also water-cooled them but I’d bet a lot of money we never see that again either.

The Mac Pro chip will be a 4x M2 Max

In a previous Apple press release[1] they said:

> The Mac is now one year into its two-year transition to Apple silicon, and M1 Pro and M1 Max represent another huge step forward. These are the most powerful and capable chips Apple has ever created, and together with M1, they form a family of chips that lead the industry in performance, custom technologies, and power efficiency.

I think it is just as likely that they mean "completes the family [as it stands today]" as they do "completes the family [permanently]."

[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/10/introducing-m1-pro-an...

edit: This comment around SoC code names is worth a look too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30605713

What is M2 really going to be difference wise?

I think M2 is going to improve on single thread performance.

Judging from the geekbench scores[0], M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max perform identically in single threaded tasks. And the newly leaked Mac Studio benchmark[1] shows essentially identical single thread performance.

[0]: https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks [1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/13330272

~15-20% faster if releases start this year, plus whatever optimizations learned from M1 in wide release such as perhaps tuning the silicon allocation given the various system. If next year, M2 or M3 (get it) will use Taiwan Semi's so-called 3nm, which should be a significant jump just like 7-5nm several years ago for the phones and iPads.

Hopefully one of the changes of the M2 design will be a better decorrelation of RAM and cores count.

They’d need that anyway for a Mac Pro replacement (128GB wouldn’t cut it for everyone), but even for smaller config it’s frustrating being limited to 16G on the M1 and 32 on the Pro. Just because I need more RAM doesn’t mean I want the extra size and heat or whatever.

For my purposes, the biggest drawback of using an SoC is being constrained to just the unified memory.

Since I run a lot of memory intensive tasks but few CPU or GPU bound tasks, a regular m1 with way more memory would be ideal.

I doubt there will be much learned after actually shipping M1. Developing silicon takes a long time. I wouldn’t be surprised if the design was more or less fixed by the time the M1 released.

They also said that the Mac Pro is still yet to transition. So they'll have to come up with something for that. My suspicion is that it won't be M branded. Perhaps P1 for pro?

I have been thinking about this, and one theory I came up with was a switch chip between M1 Max chiplets... you have 4 (or more?) M1 Maxes connected to the same switch chip... it might add latency for some tasks but it would be one way to scale without going to a new M2 processor... Then again, M2 could come out in June at the WWDC, doubling everything and adding 3 more ultra connect things to each M2 Max, allowing unlimited (ish) upgradability... but, probably not...

It may be M branded, just not M1. It could be based on an M2 Ultra or M2 Mega or whatever and what they said would still hold true.

That doesn't necessarily rule out more powerful iterations that also launch under the M1 Ultra branding though.

(edit: per a sibling comment, if the internals like IRQ only really scale to 2 chiplets that pretty much would rule it out though.)

Probably not on the same design as the current M1 series, at least not for the Mac Pro. The current x86 pro supports up to 1.5TB of RAM. I don’t think they will be able to match that using a SoC with integrated RAM. There will probably be a different CPU design for the Pro with an external memory bus.

M2 family Mac Pro upcoming…