According to The Information, Apple this “past summer” reportedly axed development of its most ambitious Apple Silicon chip for the Mac that would sit above the M-Ultra chip as it would stitch four smaller chips together, similar to how the current M2 Ultra fuses two M2 Max chips via UltraFusion technology. This was an effort to focus on developing an AI server chip, especially with the launch of Apple Intelligence, so Apple would benefit from that chip to power its Apple Intelligence servers.
This wasn’t the first time we heard Apple exploring such chip technology as that concept was previously explored even during the Mac’s transition to Apple Silicon. That chip could theoretically make its debut in the Mac Pro when it transitioned to Apple Silicon. Despite previous rumors, now that the Mac Pro with Apple Silicon launched back in the summer of 2023, it appeared that Apple canceled the development of an “M2 Extreme” chip, which would make the Mac Pro stand out even further than the Mac Studio as the both the Mac Studio and Mac Pro can be configured with the exact maximum specs for the M2 Ultra chip. Engineering proved even more ambitious for Apple than it anticipated.
Apple had every tier in the M2 series with the highest-end being the Ultra; however, when Apple debuted the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max in October 2023, they became the first chips for the Mac to use the 3nm process. However, the first-generation 3nm process proved to be very costly, so Apple immediately moved forward with the M4 lineup of chips, and we’ve now had the M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max, leaving the M3 series as quickly as possible. That’s why we’ve never had the M3 Ultra at all.
Apple is rumored to be developing the M4 Ultra to debut in the next generation of both the Mac Studio and Mac Pro, which currently has the M2 Max (Studio) and M2 Ultra (Studio/Pro). Apple is aiming to update its entire Mac lineup with the latest M4 series of chips, and if everything goes as planned, we expect Apple to finally update the Mac Studio and Mac Pro next summer, possibly at WWDC. However, given what was previously mentioned, we shouldn’t expect the “M4 Extreme” to make its debut anymore. Had there been such a chip that was a quadrupled version of the existing M4 Max chip, it would have four times the maximum number of cores at up to a 64-core CPU and up to a 160-core GPU. But for now, since this concept was revisited a few times, Apple could continue exploring this concept shortly.
