'M4 Extreme' Chip Unlikely After Apple 'Cancels' High-Performance Chip [Updated]

Apple this "past summer" canceled the development of a high-performance Mac chip that would have consisted of four smaller chips stitched together, in order to free up engineering resources for a planned AI server chip, according to The Information.

M4 Extreme Cancelled
Based on the report's description of the chip, it sounds like Apple has canceled a previously-rumored "Extreme" chip for the Mac. It was previously reported that an "M2 Extreme" chip was scrapped a few years ago, but perhaps Apple had revisited the idea since then. In any case, it now sounds like an "M4 Extreme" chip is also unlikely.

Apple likely would have introduced the "M4 Extreme" in its high-end Mac Pro tower. The chip would have offered even faster performance than the M4 Ultra chip that is expected to launch in new Mac Studio and Mac Pro models later next year.

If the "M4 Extreme" were to have been a quadrupled version of the M4 Max chip that debuted in the MacBook Pro a few months ago, it would have had massive specifications, including up to a 64-core CPU and up to a 160-core GPU.

While the "Extreme" chip may be off the table once again, it seems like Apple has repeatedly shown interest in developing such a chip, so perhaps it will eventually materialize as part of the M5 series or later. For now, though, the wait continues.

Update: After this story was published, Daring Fireball's John Gruber made a good point about how there is a long, multi-year gap between Apple designing and shipping new chips. Accordingly, it is possible the latest chip canceled actually would have been an "M5 Extreme" chip or later if development was only recently ended.

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Top Rated Comments

CWallace Avatar
10 months ago

I've been wondering for years now why Apple doesn't make another dual processor Mac Pro, like they've done in the PPC and early Intel days.
The Apple Silicon architecture may not be designed for multi-processor operations so performance would not scale and you may hit issues with memory access and cache coherency.

This sounds like what is happening with these "Extreme" SoCs - the Ultra is not twice as good as the Max even though it is two Max connected directly. Two Ultras talking to each other across an external connection on a motherboard would be even worse.
Score: 16 Votes (Like | Disagree)
jb310 Avatar
10 months ago
It was really going to be called Extreme?

I guess we should pour one out for M4 Radical, M4 Totally Awesome, and M4 Most Excellent Dude. ?‍♂️
Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Jack Burton Avatar
10 months ago
Just bring out the M4 Max/ultra studio, please!



Attachment Image
Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Thalesian Avatar
10 months ago
This is anecdotal, but I got a M1 Ultra a couple years back to test out training some large LLM models that wouldn’t fit on NVIDIA chips like an RTX 6000 Ada. The latter has 48Gb VRAM, while the M1 Ultra has ~98Gb VRAM effectively, albeit at much slower training speeds.

It did fine for a few models, but then something bizarre happened - anything with an odd numbered batch size returned only infinite gradients and nan losses. Even numbered batch sizes could kind of train, but gradients exploded frequently. I couldn’t replicate this on my NVIDIA hardware or even a Mac M3 Max chip.

Only a hypothesis on my end, but I worry that the dye connection between chips is fragile and prone to error, particularly with these demanding high throughput actions. This can lead to otherwise normal Mac behavior, but render it useless with AI applications. My Mac M1 is still under Apple Care, but I don’t know how to even begin to describe the problem to Apple support.
Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)
turbineseaplane Avatar
10 months ago

Apple maybe realized there's not enough demand for an Extreme chip to justify the cost of design and production.
Potential buyers of Extreme chip machines simply can't trust Apple to support them and their needs.

They've rug pulled these users over and over, and the vast majority have moved on with no interest in coming back to this sort of "relationship"

The onus is on Apple to ever show the world it can stay focused and committed to long term support that truly high end pro users demand and need.
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
PsykX Avatar
10 months ago
Without a different chip, the Mac Pro is dead to me :

The Mac Pro (base model) is 63% more expensive than Mac Studio.
The Mac Pro is 4.7X heavier than Mac Studio.
The Mac Pro is 14.4X bigger than Mac Studio.

The Mac Pro is exactly as powerful as Mac Studio.

I mean, it was already a niche computer before, now it's a niche of a niche.
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)