At the end of 2020, when Apple released the M1 chip, we were impressed by its speed improvements over its Intel predecessors. Apple did it again a year later with the M1 Pro and M1 Max. Apple announced the M1 Ultra in March 2022, completing the M1 chip lineup and drastically altering our expectations. At WWDC 2022, Apple announced its next-generation Apple silicon: M2. So what's next?
Apple will unveil the M2 at WWDC in June 2022. The MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro are the first Macs to use the new chip. Apple will offer Macs with the M1 for months and maybe years to come, but the M2 will eventually replace the M1.
According to a Bloomberg report, Apple's next-generation high-performance laptop processors might feature several tiers of performance like its M1 Pro and M1 Max models, each equipped with 16 performance and four efficiency cores - a combination of 16 high-performance cores and four low-power cores.
On the basis of what we know about the M2, the M2 Pro and Max could have 12 CPU cores, up to 38 or 40 GPU cores, and higher RAM limits. The current pacing indicates that these will launch in 2023, possibly at WWDC or at the fall Mac event, but some reports suggest that they may launch later in 2022.
When John Ternnus announced the M1 Ultra processor at the 'Peak Performance' event, he said it would be the last one in the M1 family. Later in the presentation, he teased the Mac Pro, the final Mac to use Apple silicon.
Apple is working on a desktop chip that's closer to a workstation than a mere upgrade to the M1 Ultra for the next generation of its Mac Pro tower, assuming both of those things are true. The Mac pro chip is expected to have up to 40 cores, which will be achieved by a four-die process or pairing of 32 performance cores and a 64-core or 128-core GPU.
There are already rumors that Apple is working on the third generation of its M-series processors. The processor is likely to be the first Mac processor built with a 3nm process and offers a significant speed boost over the M2 due to a new architecture with possibly more GPU and CPU cores, higher RAM limits, and additional Thunderbolt ports. Ibiza is its code name.
M3 Pro and M3 Max are codenamed Lobos and Palma, and will reportedly be based on M3 processor. According to the M1 timeline, this chip probably won't arrive until 2025
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