Sure, Apple It may already have an M3 chipone where it dropped a little more a year after the M2 saw the light of day. Certainly the company’s M-series silicon line has already proven itself to be a standout among computer processors, but even that wasn’t enough. According to the latest rumors from the corner of 1 Infinite Loop, Apple will release another chip this year in addition to a new production of, the legendary M4 iMacs, MacBooks, and even a new Mac Mini. This new chip will be very AI-centric, and to be honest, we couldn’t be less excited than if you had told us that it was also made of candy.
The M3 has only been in the cradle for five months, but new reports suggest a new baby is on the way, and it’s already in production. Bloomberg’s Apple guru Mark Gurman wrote On Thursday, Apple will try again to use a new chip design to bring even more laptops and computers to market. According to Gurman’s unnamed sources with inside knowledge, the chip will once again be available in three different flavors.
Last year’s M3 lineup included the base chip, the M3 Pro, and the M3 Max. While Apple had previously released an M2 Ultra that was intended to be the largest enterprise processor available, Apple would instead prefer to update its entire Mac lineup to to get these new CPUs.
The Cupertino, California-based company could launch these new Macs sometime later this year. WWDC 2024 is scheduled to take place in June, and we already expect that the topic of AI will be huge, although the focus will most likely be on it Telephones, Tabletsand maybe others too Load-bearing. Gurman noted that the company could talk about the M4 chip at its biggest technology conference of the year.
Which new Apple products will reportedly feature a new M4 chip?
So if Gurman is to be believed, we’ll once again see a new range of Macs crowding out the already crowded lineup. Bloomberg suggests we get a new iMac (no details on sizes though, although we’d like a new 32-inch model), a Low-end 14-inch MacBook Pro, a high-end 14-inch model as well as 16-inch variants. What’s most interesting is that we may see something new Mac Mini, a design that seemed to skip the M3 chip entirely. According to Bloomberg, the Mac Pro could also eventually get the most powerful version of the M4, currently called the Hydra. There’s still no word on a new upgrade Mac Studioso we’ll have to wait and see.
While Apple released its M2 MacBook Pro in January 2023, the company also released its M3 MacBook in October of the same year. They included some moderate performance updates and easily beat the top spot among the most powerful MacBooks on the market, but were also very similar to the previous M2 range.
The M4 chip will reportedly last until 2025, at which point the company will reportedly release more products with the new chip, including new MacBook Airs. We were originally hoping to get a lot more mileage out of the M3 than we seem to have. So who knows if Apple would also try to sell us the M5 chip during this time. The Cupertino company is reportedly trying to make up for sluggish Mac sales in 2022-2023. Mac shipments fell in early 2023, and the company reported a 27% decline in Mac sales at the end of September last year. The companys previous quarterly earnings report The report, ending December 30 last year, shows that Mac sales increased only moderately compared to the same period in 2022.
Why is everyone suddenly releasing new chips?
Beyond the hype, Apple may be particularly worried about the competition and all the hype surrounding “AI PCs.” Intel got the ball rolling with its Meteor Lake series of mobile chips like the Intel Core Ultra 7 and Core Ultra 9. Most new Windows-based PCs this year all carry this slogan: along with a copilot buttonwhich is intended to provide quick access to Microsoft’s AI modeled on OpenAI.
Qualcomm is expected to release its ARM-based CPU Snapdragon X Elite in June. The company told Gizmodo (and gave us some insight in some personal benchmarks) that the new chip outperforms the Ultra 7 in benchmark performance and has up to 60% better power efficiency with the same features. The company also claims its AI capabilities are 4.5 times better than Intel’s current chips.
These claims all revolve around the NPU, a neural processing unit that Qualcomm says achieves 45 TOPS, which stands for “trillion operations per second.” Of course, Intel has another chip series in the pipeline, the Lunar Lake series, which the company recently introduced claims In addition, the NPU had 45 TOPS, so the CPUs could achieve a total of more than 100 TOPS. It’s a silly marketing talk, but that’s where we are in the CPU market today.
The funny thing is that Apple’s M-series chips already have a neural processing component; It’s just that the company hasn’t had to talk about it yet. The company started mentioning it with the latest MacBook Air version, and it seems like it’s only going to get louder from here on out. We have The regular M3 chip stood side by side with an Intel Core Ultra 7 in a Dell XPS 14 and found them relatively comparable, although the M3 still wins in single-threaded capabilities.
The current M3 chip can run a chatbot natively rather than in the cloud (though not as quickly as one would like, judging by our testing on the M3 MacBook Air). The same goes for the current Meteor Lake chips, although there are currently none of the major brands offering this type of software that doesn’t run in the cloud. The arrival of the “AI PC” seemed premature considering all the new chips coming out, even though they all want to claim that they have the capacity for on-device AI. On the other hand, we are simply tired of the empty promises. Things get even worse when these new M4 MacBooks look and function exactly like the M3, which look and function exactly like the M2. Given the speed at which these new chips are coming to market, we don’t have high hopes.