'M4 Extreme' Chip Unlikely After Apple 'Cancels' High-Performance Chip

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.

Related Roundup: Mac Pro
Buyer's Guide: Mac Pro (Neutral)
Related Forum: Mac Pro

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Top Rated Comments

CWallace Avatar
3 hours ago at 08:04 am

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: 9 Votes (Like | Disagree)
jb310 Avatar
3 hours ago at 08:13 am
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: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Thalesian Avatar
3 hours ago at 08:08 am
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: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Jack Burton Avatar
3 hours ago at 08:15 am
Just bring out the M4 Max/ultra studio, please!



Attachment Image
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Contact_Feanor Avatar
3 hours ago at 07:59 am
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. It would greatly improve the case for the Mac Pro above the Mac Studio and would actually provide the necessary slots for all the expansion in there (now there's not enough bandwidth in the SOC to actually use all expansion slots at full speed at the same time).
Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)
turbineseaplane Avatar
3 hours ago at 07:57 am
A sad day for John Siracusa

The high end is learning how we have it in "prefers a small iPhone" world

More homogenization of every product line to "the middle"
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)