Next-Generation MacBook Pros Rumored to Feature 'Very High-Bandwidth' RAM

Apple's next-generation 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with M2 Pro and M2 Max chips will be equipped with "very high-bandwidth, high-speed RAM," according to information shared by MacRumors Forums member Amethyst, who accurately revealed details about the Mac Studio and Studio Display before those products were announced.

14 vs 16 inch mbp m2 pro and max feature 1
The current 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models are equipped with LPDDR5 RAM from Samsung, with the M1 Pro chip providing up to 200 GB/s of memory bandwidth and the M1 Max chip topping out at 400 GB/s. On a speculative basis, it is possible that the next MacBook Pro models could be equipped with Samsung's latest LPDDR5X RAM for up to 33% increased memory bandwidth with up to 20% less power consumption. This would result in up to 300 GB/s memory bandwidth for the M2 Pro and up to 600 GB/s for the M2 Max.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman expects the next MacBook Pros to have few other changes beyond the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips. At this point, it seems likely that the laptops will be announced in November at the earliest with press releases on the Apple Newsroom site. Apple has launched new Macs in November multiple times in recent years, including the original 16-inch MacBook Pro in 2019 and the first three Macs with the M1 chip in 2020.

The current 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips were released in October 2021 and featured a complete redesign with a notch in the display and additional ports like HDMI, MagSafe, and an SD card reader.

Related Roundup: MacBook Pro
Related Forum: MacBook Pro

Popular Stories

iOS 26

Everything New in iOS 26.1 Beta 1

Monday September 22, 2025 12:44 pm PDT by
Apple released the first beta of iOS 26.1 today, just a week after launching iOS 26. iOS 26.1 mainly adds new languages to Apple Intelligence, but there are a few other features that are worth knowing about. New Apple Intelligence Languages Apple Intelligence is now available in Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese (Portugal), Swedish, Turkish, Chinese (Traditional), and Vietnamese. AirPo...
iPhone 17 Pro and Air Feature

Two iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air Colors Appear to Scratch More Easily

Friday September 19, 2025 10:02 am PDT by
As reported by Bloomberg today, some of the new iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air models on display at Apple Stores today are already scratched and scuffed. French blog Consomac also reported on this topic. The scratches appear to be most prominent on models with darker finishes, including the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max in Deep Blue, and the iPhone Air in Space Black. Images Credit: Consoma ...
apple tv 4k new orange

Next Apple TV Expected to Launch This Year With These New Features

Monday September 22, 2025 10:00 am PDT by
The next Apple TV is expected to be released later this year, and a handful of new features and changes have been rumored for the device. Below, we recap what to expect from the next Apple TV, according to rumors. Likely Features N1 Chip With Wi-Fi 7 Last year, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said the next Apple TV would be equipped with Apple's own combined Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip, which is...
Apple Intelligence General Feature 2

iOS 26.1 Adds New Apple Intelligence Languages and Expands AirPods Live Translation

Monday September 22, 2025 11:15 am PDT by
With iOS 26.1, Apple Intelligence is gaining support for additional languages, including Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese (Portugal), Swedish, Turkish, Chinese (Traditional), and Vietnamese. Apple announced plans to expand the languages that can be used with Apple Intelligence last year, and now the added language support is here. Apple Intelligence is now available in the following...
Apple Foldable Thumb

Foldable iPhone Like 'Two Titanium iPhone Airs' Joined at the Hinge

Monday September 22, 2025 2:16 am PDT by
Next year's rumored foldable iPhone will showcase an ultra-thin design resembling "two titanium iPhone Airs side-by-side," according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. Writing in the Q&A section of his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman says Apple's first foldable device will be "super thin and a design achievement," combining Apple's thinnest iPhone form factor with cutting-edge folding...
iPhone 17 Pro and Air N1 Feature

Some iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone Air Users Experiencing Intermittent Wi-Fi Issue

Monday September 22, 2025 8:44 am PDT by
Apple's latest iPhone models launched on Friday, and some early adopters of the devices are experiencing intermittent Wi-Fi issues. Affected customers say Wi-Fi connectivity periodically cuts out on the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air, with hundreds of comments about the issue posted across the MacRumors Forums, Reddit, and the Apple Support Community over the...
iPhone 17 Pro USB C Port

iPhone 17 Pro Max's USB-C Charging Speeds Tested With Apple Chargers

Monday September 22, 2025 7:29 am PDT by
The website ChargerLAB has tested the iPhone 17 Pro Max's USB-C charging speeds with a variety of Apple's chargers, from 18W to 140W. The device reached a peak charging speed of around 36W with the following Apple chargers:40W Dynamic Power Adapter with 60W Max 61W USB-C Power Adapter 67W USB-C Power Adapter 70W USB-C Power Adapter 96W USB-C Power Adapter 140W USB-C Power AdapterFor...

Top Rated Comments

roach1245 Avatar
38 months ago
Some notes on memory bandwidth of the Apple Silicon machines (which is already extremely high) vs the new Ryzen / Intel CPUs that were released a few days / weeks ago:

Ran a simple benchmark on a new Ryzen 7950x desktop build (64GB RAM) here in the lab (the build will be returned to the supplier) vs my M1 Max laptop (64GB RAM).

Task: Take about 10000 parquet files (10.6GB total) and append them into 1 dataframe (> 400 million observations) in memory.

Hypothesis: The Ryzen 7950x should be way faster - at first thought - because it has 16 cores (versus 8 M1 Max performance cores) that are also clocked way higher.

Result: They are equally as fast because the Ryzen CPU is bottlenecked by memory bandwidth (very fast cores but just 2 memory channels on the CPU).

The files:




The task is most efficiently done in parallel using all cores available, used both polars (Rust ) and pandas-modin (C++) to do this as fast as possible.

When using all 8 performance cores on my M1 Max, memory bandwidth to CPU is at about 120 GB/s (theoretical max is 200Gb/s).




Yet the Ryzen 7950x can do 81 GB/s memory bandwidth at most as the memory runs at 5200MT/s (* 8 bytes * 2 memory channels)/1024 = 81.25 GB/s (you can stretch this to about 100 GB/s if you heavily overclock). Thus despite the 7950x's 16 faster cores it's as fast as my M1 Max with 10 cores in this task because about 6 Ryzen cores are enough to reach that 81GB/s of bandwidth. The other 10 cores are starved from input and just idling.

This is not new; others have ran similar tasks with similar results. E.g. https://tlkh.dev/benchmarking-the-apple-m1-max who finds that

"... adding more cores on the 5600X does not help (2 cores are enough to maximize memory bandwidth), while 10 cores on the M1 Max is the optimal configuration".

The M1 Ultra has 20 cores and 400GB/s of memory bandwidth and thus runs way faster than the Ryzen 7950X as none of its 20 cores are starved. This is even more so when the Ryzen 7950X is decked out with 128GB of DDR5 RAM instead (4 DIMM slots) and therefore runs at a slower 3600 MT/s instead which is a meager 56.25 GB/s memory bandwidth. 5 Ryzen cores can fully consume that; the other 11 cores will just idle.

This is also iterated at http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20220427/ which similarly highlights the importance of memory bandwidth (in computational fluid dynamics in this case) and finds that:

"M1 Ultra has an extremely high 800 GB/sec memory bandwidth.... which leads to a level of CPU performance scaling that I don’t even see on supercomputers, and is the result of a SoC (system on a chip) design"

The new Intel Raptor Lake CPUs also only have 2 memory channels and top out at about 120GB/s max memory bandwidth (heavily overclockded) as well so there won't be a difference here.

So just a heads up: the new Ryzen/Intel CPUs are good for gaming and workflows which are not so much memory dependent, but if you're doing data analysis or other scientific HPC work of some sort that is CPU-and-memory bound (thus not GPU machine learning) you'll very quickly run into memory bandwidth limits. Then you better stick to Apple's M1 / M2 chips or the AMD / Intel CPUs with more than 2 memory channels and thus more memory bandwidth (which are also way more expensive, e.g. the AMD ThreadRipper Pro 5965WX with 26 cores and 8 memory channels at 200GB/s memory bandwidth max for which you have to pay $2400 just for the chip itself and $1000 for a compatible motherboard).
Score: 73 Votes (Like | Disagree)
TheYayAreaLiving ?️ Avatar
38 months ago

Also 'very high prices'
Prices not so high. Remembering the golden era. Apple Online Store, 2002.

Attachment Image
Score: 30 Votes (Like | Disagree)
applicious84 Avatar
38 months ago

Some notes on memory bandwidth of the Apple Silicon machines (which is already extremely high) vs the new Ryzen / Intel CPUs that were released a few days / weeks ago:

Ran a simple benchmark on a new Ryzen 7950x desktop build (64GB RAM) here in the lab (the build will be returned to the supplier) vs my M1 Max laptop (64GB RAM).

Task: Take about 1000 parquet files (10.6GB total) and append them into 1 file (> 400 million observations).

Hypothesis: The Ryzen 7950x should be way faster - at first thought - because it has 16 cores (versus 8 M1 Max performance cores) that are also clocked way higher.

Result: They are equally as fast because the Ryzen CPU is bottlenecked by memory bandwidth (very fast cores but just 2 memory channels on the CPU).

The files:




The task is most efficiently done in parallel using all cores available, used both polars (Rust ) and pandas-modin (C++) to do this as fast as possible.

When using all 8 performance cores on my M1 Max, memory bandwidth to CPU is at about 120 GB/s (theoretical max is 200Gb/s).




Yet the Ryzen 7950x can do 81 GB/s memory bandwidth at most as the memory runs at 5200MT/s (* 8 bytes * 2 memory channels)/1024 = 81.25 GB/s (you can stretch this to about 100 GB/s if you heavily overclock). Thus despite the 7950x's 16 faster cores it's as fast as my M1 Max with 10 cores in this task because about 6 Ryzen cores are enough to reach that 81GB/s of bandwidth. The other 10 cores are starved from input and just idling.

This is not new; others have ran similar tasks with similar results. E.g. https://tlkh.dev/benchmarking-the-apple-m1-max who finds that

"... adding more cores on the 5600X does not help (2 cores are enough to maximize memory bandwidth), while 10 cores on the M1 Max is the optimal configuration".

Or what was referred to earlier: http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20220427/ ('http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20220427/').

The M1 Ultra has 20 cores and 400GB/s of memory bandwidth and thus runs way faster than the Ryzen 7950X as none of its 20 cores are starved. This is even more so when the Ryzen 7950X is decked out with 128GB of DDR5 RAM instead (4 DIMM slots) and therefore runs at a slower 3600 MT/s instead which is a meager 56.25 GB/s memory bandwidth. 5 Ryzen cores can fully consume that; the other 11 cores will just idle.

The new Intel Raptor Lake CPUs also only have 2 memory channels and top out at about 100GB/s max memory bandwidth as well so there won't be a difference here.

So just a heads up: the new Ryzen/Intel CPUs are good for gaming and workflows which are not so much memory dependent, but if you're doing data analysis or other scientific HPC work of some sort that is CPU-and-memory bound (thus not GPU machine learning) you'll very quickly run into memory bandwidth limits. Then you better stick to Apple's M1 / M2 chips or the AMD / Intel CPUs with more than 2 memory channels and thus more memory bandwidth (which are also way more expensive, e.g. the AMD ThreadRipper Pro 5965WX with 26 cores and 8 memory channels at 200GB/s memory bandwidth max for which you have to pay $2400 just for the chip itself and $1000 for a compatible motherboard).
You do realize this forum is for fanboys and not tech nerds, right? I'll read this on Anand Tech and Tom's Hardware, my friend ;)

Oh, and much appreciated. Nice post :)
Score: 17 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Lakersfan74 Avatar
38 months ago
Waiting for no need to upgrade from M1 posts.
Score: 16 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Mrkevinfinnerty Avatar
38 months ago
Also 'very high prices'
Score: 13 Votes (Like | Disagree)
temende Avatar
38 months ago
Nice improvement, but what matters more is memory latency, not bandwidth.
Score: 11 Votes (Like | Disagree)