According to a report from Bloomberg, Apple is preparing its next generation of MacBook Pros with more powerful in-house chips and is eyeing a replacement for its most powerful tower, the Mac Pro.
The MacBook Pros will come in 14-inch and 16-inch sizes with MagSafe charging, more ports, and, as previously rumored, the return of HDMI and an SD card slot, the report claims. That’s a serious step up from two Thunderbolt ports on the existing Pros.
The laptops will have two different processors, code-named Jade C-Chop and Jade-C Die, each 10-core processors (eight high-performance and two efficiency) but with two graphics options: 16 and 32-core. A Mac Mini revamp is expected to use the same chip. It’s unclear what these will be called, though there have been rumors of an M2.
These new chips should allow for up to 64GB of RAM and utilize more Thunderbolt ports to connect to external devices, which is a limitation on the existing M1 machines.
The same Bloomberg report claims that there are two new Mac Pro chips on the way, codenamed Jade 2C-Die, with a 20-core chip (16 high-performance and four efficiency cores) and Jade 4C-Die with 40 cores (32 high-performance and eight high-efficiency cores). The graphics, the report claims, would use either 64 or 128-core options. These would replace both CPUs from Intel and graphics from AMD. The Mac Pro itself is likely to be a smaller version of the existing design.
Besides these professional-grade chips, Apple is planning an heir apparent to the M1 for a new version of the MacBook Air. The chip, codenamed Staten, will have the same number of compute cores but increase the number of graphics cores. The base 13-inch MacBook Pro may also see an update with that chip.
During the announcement of the M1 processor for MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and Mac Mini, vice president of hardware engineering John Ternus said that the transition away from Intel would occur in the next “couple of years.” If the timelines in this report stay true, Intel could be gone from Apple’s product line as soon as next year.
Apple recently moved M1 to the iMac, a colorful lineup of desktop computers, and also added it to the iPad Pro. Apple’s in-house chips have been reinvigorating its product line, so we’re curious to see where things go from here.