News Apple's High-End M3 Ultra, M3 Max, and M3 Pro Expected to Get Major Upgrades

[Admin]

Apple to significantly improve its workstation-grade M3 Max, M3 Ultra, and M3 Pro processors, but this may not be the case with M3.

Apple's High-End M3 Ultra, M3 Max, and M3 Pro Expected to Get Major Upgrades : Read more

 

[ezst036]

Apple's M3 Ultra to have up to 32 cores

AMD: Hold my beer.

Threadripper: 96 cores.

And the top-end Apple with 32 cores? A few car payments.

 

[bit_user]

workstation-grade processors from AMD and Intel already have 56 – 64 cores and it remains to be seen what they are going to offer when Apple's M3 Ultra-based Mac Studio or Mac Pro systems are available in the second half of 2024.

Actually the Threadripper 7995WX is rumored to have 96 Zen 4 cores and is supposedly launching soon. Probably at least 3 quarters before these new Mac Studio and Pro machines.

Next-Gen Ryzen Threadripper 7000WX Zen 4 CPU Specs Exposed

Ryzen Threadripper 7000WX CPUs are in transit somewhere.

www.tomshardware.com

The big questions I have are:

• Will the Ultra still be the maximal configuration, or might they scale up further to 4 tiles?
• Will they feature an off-package memory-expansion solution, like CXL? Right now, I'm sure the Mac Pro's limit of 192 GB is a deal-breaker, for some.

Other than that, we just need to sit back and wait until the M3 cores can be benchmarked.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

AMD: Hold my beer.

Threadripper: 96 cores.

And the top-end Apple with 32 cores? A few car payments.

Talk about that "Apple Tax".

Imagine what Apple would charge for 96 cores.

 

[Brian D Smith]

Should we just not name this site: The Grain of Salt ? I mean...someone is always spilling salt here!

 

[JamesJones44]

I'm a little skeptical of 6e cores on the Pro line, especially if the Max is only going to have 4. I can't see them doing a special config just for the Pro line when they are likely to be not good enough silicon for a Max from a production point of view in early runs.

 

[bit_user]

I'm a little skeptical of 6e cores on the Pro line, especially if the Max is only going to have 4.

Probably a typo. The table says:

Spec	M3 Ultra	M2 Ultra	M3 Max	M2 Max	M3 Pro	M2 Pro	M3	M2
CPU Top	24P + 8E | 32C	16P + 8E | 24C	12P + 4E | 16C	8P + 4E | 12C	8P + 6E | 14C	8P + 4E | 12C	4P + 4E | 8C	4P + 4E | 8C
CPU Base	-	-	-	-	6P + 6E | 12C	6P + 4E | 10C	-
GPU Top	80 clusters	76 clusters	40 clusters	38 clusters	20 clusters	16 clusters	10 clusters	10 clusters
GPU Base	64 clusters	60 clusters	32 clusters	30 clusters	18 clusters	19 clusters	-	8 clusters

That matches up the M3 Ultra as exactly double of the M3 Max.

 

[thestryker]

While I was hoping for a version with a cut back GPU to allow for more cores this is still seemingly a huge improvement. Hopefully someone will be able to determine if this has a new core design or not. I'm not interested in apple's products, but their SoCs have been very interesting to watch since they've been the only fully custom design to really step away from ARM's base. Not that they'll ever license their cores, but it could give an idea for what we might see out of Qualcomm.

 

[bit_user]

they've been the only fully custom design to really step away from ARM's base.

In the mobile arena, Qualcomm had fully-custom cores up to the Snapdragon 820. It bought Nuvia in 2021, set to launch sometime soon.

Samsung also made custom ARM cores through 2019 or so. I recall Anandtech did a nice retrospective, but I'm having a little trouble locating it. It sounds like the architecture & the team had untapped potential, but lacked the funding to pursue some of the bigger architectural wins.

Not that they'll ever license their cores, but it could give an idea for what we might see out of Qualcomm.

Apple's chips are like a showcase of what's possible for ARM ISA products and SoCs in general.

Another big question I have is if/when Apple will move to ARMv9-A. This is interesting, in part, because it includes SVE2.

 

[Lucky_SLS]

Google, Qualcomm, Samsung can design their own CPUs but they all lag behind in terms of software integration. I think that is Apple's greatest strength.

 

[bit_user]

Google, Qualcomm, Samsung can design their own CPUs but they all lag behind in terms of software integration. I think that is Apple's greatest strength.

As far as I know, only Qualcomm has a team capable of designing CPU cores competitive with ARM's and Apple's.

As I said, Samsung closed down its CPU division, and they even killed off their proprietary GPU design effort, in favor of using AMD's RDNA.

I wouldn't call "HW/SW integration" Apple's greatest strength, but it's clearly an asset. Their CPUs can still outmatch others in perf/W, even running Linux. However, Linux support for their SoCs is still in early stages, so I'm not talking about overall performance.

 

[Lucky_SLS]

I dont really think qualcomm is that good with CPU design. Mediatek with ARM's reference design can match qualcomm's offerings. So how are they better than ARM or mediatek?

Qualcomm also tried their CPUs with surface tablets/laptops. Their software team and microsoft did not do a great job there as well...

 

[bit_user]

I dont really think qualcomm is that good with CPU design.

They haven't designed their own cores since 2015/2016. Just over 2 years ago, they spent over $2B buying a company founded by leading CPU designers from Apple, Google, and other major firms, called Nuvia. They have yet to release any SoC featuring Nuvia cores, so we can't say how good they are.

Mediatek with ARM's reference design can match qualcomm's offerings. So how are they better than ARM or mediatek?

Right now, both MediaTek and Qualcomm SoCs are both using the same cores from ARM. So, there's not much room for them to differentiate.

 

[Heat_Fan89]

And you still won't be able to play all the latest games.

 

[The Historical Fidelity]

“and will also be the developers N3 chip designed for desktops and laptops.”

Please, tell me more about how the N3 chip designs developers???