On October 25 news, Taiwan’s Industrial and Commercial Times reported, although the personal computer (PC) market demand is sluggish, Apple will still launch a number of new machines in the next few months, and Apple also accelerated the second generation of Apple Silicon’s M2 processor development and mass production, according to industry sources, Apple M2 processor will play a big core war, may launch with 48 cores of the highest end According to industry sources, Apple’s M2 processors will be in a major core war, with the highest-end M2 Extreme with 48 cores likely to be launched for high-end PC and workstation applications, and TSMC, the leading foundry, is expected to take the 3nm foundry order.
Apple’s M2 processor has been launched using TSMC’s second-generation 5nm process, with an 8-core CPU and 10-core GPU, a significant improvement in CPU speed and GPU performance compared to its M1 processor predecessor.
Apple plans to launch new MacBook Pro, Mac mini and Mac Pro with upgraded M2 series processors in the coming months, according to the report.
According to industry sources, Apple’s subsequent M2 processors will be a core war, increasing the number of processor cores to boost computing performance and highlighting the low-power advantages of the Arm architecture. The M2 Pro processor, codenamed Rhodes Chop, will have a 10-core CPU and a 20-core GPU and will be manufactured at 3nm by TSMC.
As with last year’s M1 series processors, Apple will also launch the M2 Max processor, codenamed Rhodes 1C, with a 12-core CPU and 38-core GPU, and the M2 Ultra processor, codenamed Rhodes 2C, with double the number of CPU and GPU cores compared to the M2 Max.
As the chipset design matures and TSMC’s advanced packaging technology advances smoothly, it is rumored that Apple may launch the M2 Extreme processor next year, which will integrate two M2 Max with a 48-core CPU and 152-core GPU. If the M2 Extreme is true, Apple’s PC processor performance will catch up with Intel’s next year and become the dominant processor in the Arm architecture market.
TSMC has not commented on this, but the company recently pointed out in a corporate presentation that it has observed many customers participating in 3nm and that the number of designs scheduled for the first two years of production will be more than twice that of 5nm. We are confident that the 3nm family will be another large-scale process node for TSMC with long-term demand.
