Mysterious New 'Compute Module' Found in Apple Beta Code

An all-new "compute module" device has been spotted in Apple beta code, hinting that new hardware may soon be on the way.

Mac Pro Feature Teal
The new "ComputeModule" device class was spotted in Apple's iOS 16.4 developer disk image from the Xcode 16.4 beta by 9to5Mac, indicating that it runs iOS or a variant of it. The code suggests that Apple has at least two different compute modules in development with the identifiers "ComputeModule13,1" and "ComputeModule13,3."

The modules' purpose is unclear, but speculation argues that they are designed for the Apple silicon Mac Pro – potentially serving as a solution to enable a modular interface for swappable hardware components or add additional compute power via technologies like Swift Distributed Actors. There is also a chance that the compute modules could be designed for Apple's upcoming mixed-reality headset or something else entirely.

Yesterday, recent Apple Bluetooth 5.3 filings were uncovered, a move that often precedes the launch of new products, so the compute module finding could be the latest indication that new Apple hardware is likely on the horizon.

Popular Stories

apple wallet drivers license feature iPhone 15 pro

iPhone Driver's Licenses: These 17 U.S. States Offer Them or Will Later

Thursday June 19, 2025 11:28 am PDT by
In select U.S. states, residents can add their driver's license or state ID to the Wallet app on the iPhone and Apple Watch, providing a convenient and contactless way to display proof of identity or age at select airports and businesses, and in select apps. Unfortunately, this feature continues to roll out very slowly since it was announced in 2021, with only nine U.S. states and Puerto...
apple watch ultra 2 new black

Apple Watch Ultra 3 Finally Coming After Two-Year Hiatus

Monday June 16, 2025 8:45 am PDT by
Apple will finally deliver the Apple Watch Ultra 3 sometime this year, according to analyst Jeff Pu of GF Securities Hong Kong (via @jukanlosreve). The analyst expects both the Apple Watch Series 11 and Apple Watch Ultra 3 to arrive this year (likely alongside the new iPhone 17 lineup, if previous launches are anything to go by), according to his latest product roadmap shared with...
iPhone 17 Pro Blue Feature Tighter Crop

iPhone 17 Pro Launching in Three Months With These 12 New Features

Saturday June 14, 2025 5:45 pm PDT by
The iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max are three months away, and there are plenty of rumors about the devices. Below, we recap key changes rumored for the iPhone 17 Pro models as of June 2025:Aluminum frame: iPhone 17 Pro models are rumored to have an aluminum frame, whereas the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro models have a titanium frame, and the iPhone X through iPhone 14 Pro have a...
ios 26 call holding

iOS 26 Beta is Hiding a New Ringtone — Here's What It Sounds Like

Thursday June 19, 2025 7:25 pm PDT by
Apple is hiding a new ringtone within iOS 26. The new ringtone is an alternative version of the existing Reflection ringtone, which has been the default ringtone since the iPhone X was released in 2017. It was discovered within the code for the first developer beta of iOS 26, but it remains hidden, so you will not find it in the list of ringtones available in the Settings app for now. It...
iOS 18

Apple Releases iOS 18.6 Public Beta

Wednesday June 18, 2025 10:24 am PDT by
Apple today seeded the first betas of upcoming iOS 18.6 and iPadOS 18.6 updates to public beta testers, with the betas coming just a few days after Apple provided the betas to developers. Testers who have signed up for beta updates through Apple's beta site can download iOS 18.6 and iPadOS 18.6 from the Settings app on a compatible device by going to General > Software Update. When the...
new iphone lockscreen ios 26

iOS 26: Five Changes Coming to Your iPhone Lock Screen

Tuesday June 17, 2025 8:46 am PDT by
With iOS 26, Apple has made some additions to the iPhone Lock Screen that aim to make it more customizable than ever. Of course, things can always change before the software makes its way to the general iPhone-owning public, but here are five new things iOS 26 can do on the Lock Screen as of the current developer beta. Widgets Top or Bottom In iOS 18, the row of widgets on your Lock...
General Spotify Feature

Spotify Preparing to Launch Long-Awaited Lossless Audio Tier on iPhone

Thursday June 19, 2025 1:46 pm PDT by
Spotify appears to be gearing up to launch its long-awaited lossless music tier. Chris Messina (via TechCrunch) and Spicetify (via The Verge) spotted new lossless references within the code for Spotify's desktop app and web player. With assistance from Aaron Perris, MacRumors has confirmed that the latest beta of the Spotify app for the iPhone also contains new lossless-related code....
iOS 26 on Three iPhones

Apple Says iOS 26 Won't Be Available on These iPhone Models

Tuesday June 10, 2025 6:58 am PDT by
Apple this week revealed that iOS 26 is compatible with the iPhone 11 series and newer. That means that iOS 18 is the end of the road for the iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR, which were all released in 2018. However, those devices will continue to receive security updates for at least a few more years. iOS 26 is compatible with the following iPhone models: iPhone 16e iPhone...
Craig Federighi No

John Gruber Reacts to Apple Declining His Interview After His Criticism

Wednesday June 18, 2025 8:10 pm PDT by
Every year between 2015 and 2024, at least one Apple executive agreed to be interviewed by Daring Fireball's John Gruber for a special WWDC episode of his podcast, The Talk Show. Last year, for example, Apple's software engineering chief Craig Federighi, marketing chief Greg Joswiak, and top AI researcher John Giannandrea joined Gruber on stage at the California Theatre in San Jose to discuss...

Top Rated Comments

dr_lha Avatar
30 months ago

What "many things"? Apple's product lineup has been pretty stagnant, and continues to remain so, other than some spec bumps.
There are wrong opinions, and then there's this.
Score: 15 Votes (Like | Disagree)
goonie4life9 Avatar
30 months ago

What "many things"? Apple's product lineup has been pretty stagnant, and continues to remain so, other than some spec bumps.
Au contrarie! Apple is currently selling the All New iPhone 14 and the most powerful iPhone ever, the iPhone 14 Pro. Additionally, Apple has best-on-class laptops, using the most powerful Apple Silicon ever available in a portable device. And Apple hasn’t stopped there. The most powerful Apple Silicon ever is now available in Apple desktop device, delivering pro-level performance in beautifully designed chassis. Finally, Apple just released Beats headphones in three incredible new colors and the AirPods and AirPods Pro continue to be the best, most integrated headphones Apple has ever released. Apple is so excited by all the innovative, best-ever products they currently have available and can’t wait to see the incredible things customers will do with them.
Score: 13 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Freida Avatar
30 months ago
You should stop with the kool-aid.

Apple has the best design, yes. However, Apple has been stagnant for a while. The M1 was a great start but it slowly faded. Transition is still not complete and Apple can't compete with high end GPU cards. HW Raytracing is still missing among other things. Sure, for video editing etc. their dedicated encoders help massively but overall they didn't overtake the market nor do they have the most powerful silicon. What they do have is the best performance per watt but thats not enough when you need to get the job done and the hardware&software combo is basically not working as good.
There is a reason why any serious 3D/VFX artist can't use Macs for work as its designed for it nor there is support. Apple always boasts about great relationship with this vendor or that vendor but they are not pushing anything. Maya is industry standard for 3D and yet most VFX houses use Linux and PC as the support is lacking heavily.

Nvidia smokes Apple out of the water on pretty much everything related to 3D. Just look how Apple killed Shake which at one point was industry standard.

Don't get me wrong, I love my Apple computer and Apple stuff but I'm also being realistic and critical.
M transition was a great start but thats about it. Apple is stagnant - just look how they updated one product with M2 chip and left iMac for example without anything. Some of their upgrades (like ram/ssd) are insanely expensive compared to alternatives and because they switched away from Intel we have to fork out money to Apple as we can't upgrade it ourselves cheaper. (27" iMac was awesome for ram upgrades!)
They charge $400 just so you have height adjustable stand for your monitor - that is not innovation, that is pure insult.

So, Apple does few things well but overall they are stagnant. Lets be more critical as Apple needs to know that they can't get away with anything


Au contrarie! Apple is currently selling the All New iPhone 14 and the most powerful iPhone ever, the iPhone 14 Pro. Additionally, Apple has best-on-class laptops, using the most powerful Apple Silicon ever available in a portable device. And Apple hasn’t stopped there. The most powerful Apple Silicon ever is now available in Apple desktop device, delivering pro-level performance in beautifully designed chassis. Finally, Apple just released Beats headphones in three incredible new colors and the AirPods and AirPods Pro continue to be the best, most integrated headphones Apple has ever released. Apple is so excited by all the innovative, best-ever products they currently have available and can’t wait to see the incredible things customers will do with them.
Score: 13 Votes (Like | Disagree)
4nNtt Avatar
30 months ago
The "13" in the "ComputeModule13,1" model might mean these have the M1 Ultra chip. This has interesting implications for possible back-enabling hardware raytracing. Either the new Mac Pro just won't get hardware ray tracing which would be a disappointment to pro users in visual effects (a big market for the Mac Pro) or this may be the reason for the secret silicon discovered by Asahi Linux developers in the Max/Ultra chips. Read on for the technical explaination.

There is a mysterious section of 16 extra (32 total) Neural Engine matrix cores turned off in software in the M1 Max (64 NE cores in the Ultra). They take up a fair amount of space on the die. It is like they are scaling the NE cores 1-to-1 with the number of GPU cores. They are not used for binning and macOS hides the extras right after boot so they don't show up in hardware reports. Hardware ray-tracing is primarily a matrix math problem so the NE cores are potentially relevant.

These cores are smaller and more programmable than what would be in an Nvidia or AMD hardware ray tracing accelerator so they are easy to dismiss at first as unrelated. However, Apple's solution is not going to look much like the incumbents. Apple's future ray tracing tech was licensed from Imagination Technologies in 2020. Rather then cores with a large fixed pipeline like in Nvidia/AMD chips, Apple's chips will have a simpler ray estimator that will get close to finding a ray intersection then they will use the normal GPU compute units to refine that result down to the final answer. The GPU cores can find the intersection much more efficiently when they are starting from an estimate. Possibly these mysterious NE cores that are adept at matrix math will be used for the intersection estimators that then hand off to standard GPU cores. I think the fact that they are 1-to-1 with GPU cores and perform the right type of math makes it pretty credible this could line up with this algorithm. The details of Imagination's algorithm are likely to run better on a GPU of Apple's design that heavily uses on-core caches over the immediate-mode rendering style (using GPU RAM heavily as scratch storage) as employed by AMD/Nvidia.

If this is true, the Apple chip might potentially blow Nvidia/AMD out-of-the-water. An Nvidia chip just uses a small part of its silicon for raytracing while most of it sits idle. The design Apple licensed and may have implemented would use all the cores on the GPU and all the NE cores (including the secret ones) for accelerated ray tracing. There is probably a signifiant software component which is why this tech may have been sitting idle.

There is one other mysterious aspect. Apple was rumored to bring the same tech to iPhone, but apparently they had to postpone the next-gen A-series GPU design a year because hardware raytracing was using too much power. It isn't clear how this GPU relates the the M-series GPU. Possibly the hardware ray tracing algorithm needs more work for mobile devices, but it could be ready for desktop devices including older Apple Silicon devices soon.

There certainly is a fair amount speculation in this take, but the mysterious extra cores and Apple's licensing of Imagination Technologies hardware ray tracing method in 2020 are definite facts.
Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)
GraXXoR Avatar
30 months ago

I thought M processors are not “modulerable.”
Everything is "modulerable" if you pad it with enough logic.


But dreamers like me are just going to dream of a Raspberry Pi CM4-alike Computer Module with an A15 Bionic instead of a Broadcom.
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
bradman83 Avatar
30 months ago
macOS already supports symmetric multiprocessing, which extends to multiple whole CPUs, as well as multiple GPUs. It's entirely possible Apple will package multiple M2 Ultras in a similar manner. There's nothing about the SoC configuration that would prevent this on a hardware level so long as the OS/kernel are programmed for how to address these redundant resources.
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)