Or maybe they'll just put dual / quad M1 Maxes in the Mac Pro? Not sure whether that's feasible or a good way to increase perf though (since they might need to load balance those chips intelligently).
M1 Quattro!!!
Oh, wait, no, of course it will be M1
Quadra!!!!!
You're right - the name "M1 Max" could be a case of premature maximisation or, to put it another way, "Mountain Lion syndrome"...
Seriously, though... the "Jade 2C" and "Jade 4C" rumours do sound as if they may essentially be 2 or 4 M1 Max's either on the same die or the same package, but it's all very sketchy at the moment.
Looking at the "Pro" and "Max" they're exceptional by laptop standards - delivering the sort of power only previously obtainable in "luggable mobile workstation" format - and probably good enough to significantly upgrade everything up to the middle tier 5k iMac and high-end Mini - but they might struggle to provide a compelling replacement for the highest BTO iMac specs or replace the defunct iMac Pro (but then, if the iMac Pro had been flying off the shelves it wouldn't have been dropped...) Personally, I wouldn't say no to even a M1 Pro desktop, but some people are going to need more.
Question is whether Apple sells enough high-end systems to justify building a monolithic Xeon-W-killer chip with 20+ cores and a GPU to rival the sort of multi-GPU PCIe systems that the Mac Pro can handle. Using multiple M1 Max-class chips (either in the same package or in separate packages) might be a more economical option.
...also, I doubt we'll see a Mac Pro replacement much before WWDC 2022 - it's going to be the hardest model to replace - by which time the M2 will probably be out in the new Air, and the M2 whatever MBPs will probably be coming, so we may be looking at a whole new naming scheme.
If the Mac Pro gets replaced with anything remotely equivalent. Speculation: the Intel MP is good for another few years, and will have to be supported, giving Apple time to have another go with the "trashcan" concept (in terms of philosophy - they won't repeat the shape/cooling design) except this time they'll still have a reasonably up-to-date "traditional" alternative to keep people happy.
Apple Silicon's "unique selling point" is always going to be low power consumption and huge gains for anything using the neural engine or on-die codecs/accelerators. That's pretty clear even with the M1 Max. The power consumption isn't going to be such a big advantage on a full-size desktop - I suspect an Apple Silicon Mac Pro replacement is going to rely very much on optimised software & media formats to impress, and is likely to be so-so, for a lot of legacy software. Running it alongside a still-credible Intel Mac Pro for a year or two may work better than trying to force it on people (which they did with the trashcan).
Other wild speculation: M1 Max "compute modules" in MPX format to slot in to your Intel Mac Pro.
