Apple Unveils M2 Ultra Mac Pro; Intel To Feel the Heat
Apple’s M2 Ultra Mac Pro will be substantially cheaper than its intel-powered counterparts.
- Apple has introduced a new Mac Pro option, powered by Apple silicon M2 Ultra chips, completely transitioning away from Intel products.
- While Intel will be hit by Apple’s move, it will also have to consider strong competition from NVIDIA and AMD.
In a major shift, Apple has announced that the last few Intel-powered Macs are now discontinued. Apple has been transitioning from Intel to Apple Silicon over the last three years.
Intel’s shares saw a dip of more than 4% following the launch of Apple’s M2 Ultra chip, which will power the new Apple M2 Ultra Mac Pro. The chip is also said to operate up to three times faster than the top-end Intel-based Mac Pros.
The new Mac Pro will be available at a basic price of $6,999 and come with 192 GB of memory. The M2 Ultra chip is an electronic brain combining two M2 Max chips and will power both Mac Studio and Mac Pro desktop PCs. While the most high-end version of the Intel-based Mac Pro costs around $54,000, the new model is expected to cost only around $13,000.
The macOS Sonoma update will continue to support a couple of generations of Intel Macs. However, any product without an Apple T2 chip will not be able to run the new OS, which basically limits all Apple computers made before 2018, except for the 2017 iMac Pro.
The development is important even as Apple Mac’s revenue in the last quarter fell by more than 30%, with the PC industry shipments witnessing a 30% year-over-year decline.
See More: Microsoft Drives AI Efforts With CoreWeave Deal
Intel Unveils Single-Slot A60 GPU
In addition to the news from Apple, Intel will likely face challenges from competitors such as NVIDIA, which has recently gained attention for processors for running artificial intelligence models, and AMD, which has gained market share in data centers and PC chips.
Intel announced two new Arc Alchemist GPUs aimed at operations on workstation PCs. The new GPUs will feature the Arc Pro A60M mobile GPU and the new single-slot Arc Pro A60 desktop card, depending on end use. These will be the fastest workstation products offered by Intel, with superior memory and GPU cores than predecessors from the company.
The mobile A60M features 256 EUs, 16 Xe Cores, 256 matrix engines, and 16 RT units, with 8GB of GDDR6 memory operating on a 128-bit bus. The Arc Pro A60, on the other hand, will come with better capabilities, including 12GB of GDDR6 memory and a 192-bit bus. The products will be key to Intel’s competitive advantage in the near future.
What do you think is next for Apple’s products? Let us know on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. We would love to hear from you!
Image source: Shutterstock
LATEST NEWS STORIES
