Multiple M1 SoC inside future iMac Pro & Mac Pro?

[Hexley]

Apple appears to be putting M1 in almost all its products.


I was surprised when they placed it in the iMac and iPad Pro rather than coming out with higher-end chips like the "M1x".


Which leads me to wonder if Apple will only keep to the M1 for the iMac Pro & Mac Pro but have multiple SoCs inside of them.

These product lines probably make up less than 1% of Macs sold so it would not have the economies of scale to have a too specialized SoC.


In the early single core days of Intel/AMD they used to put multiple CPUs to have multiple cores.


Perhaps this will be done by Apple? iMac Pro & Mac Pro have enough internal space to accommodate as many SoC they deemed to be used


If there is a specific M1 SKU with up to 16GB RAM then why not have two or even twenty M1 SoC to hit 32GB or 640GB of RAM.


Just disable the other parts of the SoC that are redundant or may cause conflicts.

If that were to occur then.... awesome!

I hope these Macs gets them

• 4 USB4/TB port Mac mini
• 4 USB4/TB port Macbook Pro 13"
• 4 USB4/TB port Macbook Pro 16"
• More than 4 USB4/TB port iMac 24"
• More than 4 USB4/TB port iMac Pro 32"
• Mac Pro

 

[Serban55]

Since apple told (state of the union) they believe in one SoC unifed everything.. there wont be 2xM1
Expect in couple of years the ssd to be part of that union as well

 

[Hexley]

Since apple told (state of the union) they believe in one SoC unifed everything.. there wont be 2xM1
Expect in couple of years the ssd to be part of that union as well

Don't tell me that 1xM1 will be put into the Mac Pro. That's a bit looney unless they plan to reduce pricing to $2,500.

 

[Okta]

I would assume they'll either come up with a more powerful SoC or they'll find a way to combine them into one. I don't think they'll follow the traditional double processor server setup.

 

[Serban55]

Don't tell me that 1xM1 will be put into the Mac Pro. That's a bit looney unless they plan to reduce pricing to $2,500.

Where did i said that?
I just told you there wont be 2x SoC in any apple products

 

[Serban55]

Since apple told (state of the union) they believe in one SoC unified everything...

this thread now can be closed

 

[Serban55]

The next macs will get a more powerful SoC. No more M1
Next in line will be 14” and 16” mbp i guess, after that the bigger imac and the last will be the mac pro

 

[leman]

This was already discussed back and forth.

To make it short, no, they are not going to do that as it won’t make any sense. The Mac Pro will use it’s own series of chips that will be more suitable for its niche. Yes, these chips are going to be expensive, but so is the Mac Pro.

If you want to have an what kind of hardware setup we will likely see in a Mac Pro, read about Nvidia Grace.

 

[SpitUK]

The M1 is for all lower end machines. We will see a higher core version of M1 for the pro machines, probably M1X.

 

[Chancha]

This was already discussed back and forth.

To make it short, no, they are not going to do that as it won’t make any sense. The Mac Pro will use it’s own series of chips that will be more suitable for its niche. Yes, these chips are going to be expensive, but so is the Mac Pro.

If you want to have an what kind of hardware setup we will likely see in a Mac Pro, read about Nvidia Grace.

That said, they may have to unload some of the packaged components off from the SoC for Mac Pro tier design, to allow for higher ceiling configs. Graphic cores and memory modules especially.

If Apple ever develops any sort of computing across multiple Apple Silicons, it may be purposed for distributed Mac mini GRID farm sort of thing? I don't think this is the sort of direction they aim for anyway, the client device only needs to be powerful enough to a point, leave the rest on the cloud is what seems to be their vision.

 

[leman]

That said, they may have to unload some of the packaged components off from the SoC for Mac Pro tier design, to allow for higher ceiling configs. Graphic cores and memory modules especially.

That's why I was referring to Nvidia Grace as an idea how it might look like.

If Apple ever develops any sort of computing across multiple Apple Silicons, it may be purposed for distributed Mac mini GRID farm sort of thing? I don't think this is the sort of direction they aim for anyway, the client device only needs to be powerful enough to a point, leave the rest on the cloud is what seems to be their vision.

One speculation is that the Mac Pro might support multiple compute boards via MPX modules in a NUMA-like fashion. But I doubt that we will see any official distributed computing API. Apple discontinued Xgrid years ago and there is little reason for them to bring it back with so many third-party batch processing systems readily available.

 

[mi7chy]

More likely multi-core than multi-chip like the 160-core Ampere Altra Neoverse-N1.

https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/stockfish

 

[leman]

More likely multi-core than multi-chip like the 160-core Ampere Altra Neoverse-N1.

https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/stockfish

By the way, those Altra scores are another indicator that there is something weird with Stockfish and ARM CPUs. In SPECint, a 160-core Altra setup is performing competitively with 2x 64-core EPYC machines, but in Stockfish the EPYC systems are about two times faster. Doesn't make much sense.