Apple is deep in the trenches working on the next iteration of its M-series system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs for its family of Mac computers. The company will be the first in the world to deploy TSMC's 3nm silicon in consumer products, which will be a watershed moment for the computer industry. Apple is expecting to begin unveiling 3nm products starting in October, and a new report from Bloomberg sheds some light on the anticipated core configurations. The most interesting is the top dog, the M3 Ultra, which will fuse two M3 Max SoC into a single chunk of powerful silicon. The report states Apple's flagship 3nm design will feature up to 80 GPU cores, making it a mild upgrade over the existing M2 Ultra, which is already packing 76 cores.
News of Apple's plans comes from Mark Gurman, who has inside sources at Apple willing to risk life and limb to reveal some of the company's secrets. In his latest report, he states the baseline configuration of the M3 Ultra will offer 32 CPU cores, which are divided between 24 performance and eight efficiency cores. That's up from 24 cores in the base model M2 Ultra. On the GPU side, the base model will go from 60 GPU cores to 64, with the top configuration going from 76 to 80, so overall not a groundbreaking upgrade. This is a deviation from precedent, as Apple added 12 GPU cores when replacing the M1 Ultra with the M2 version, as noted by The Verge, going from 64 cores to 76. The M3 Ultra chip will only be found in the Mac Studio and Mac Pro.
Unsurprisingly, the M3 Max is exactly half the configuration of the Ultra version, as two of these chips make up the Ultra. The high-end config will sport 16 CPU cores, divided into 12 P-cores and four E-cores, along with up to 40 GPU cores. The top-line M2 Max offers 12 CPU and 38 GPU cores, also a modest upgrade. The M3 Max chip is destined for the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro notebooks and the base model Mac Studio.
Rounding out the lineup is the M3 Pro, which will offer up to 14 CPU cores (8P+6E) along with a 20-core GPU. That's up from 12 CPU and 16 GPU cores in the current M2 Pro. This chip will find its way into the MacBook Pros and the Mac Mini.
Gurman anticipates Apple will follow the same rollout cycle used for previous M-series SoCs, debuting the base M3 model in October of this year, reportedly offering 12GB of memory for the first time. It will follow up with the M3 Pro and Max in early 2024. The M3 Ultra is not expected to be unveiled until the end of 2024, which makes sense since the M2 Ultra was just unveiled in June at WWDC.
