Apple is shifting its Silicon strategy for its upcoming Mac. A new report from Bloomberg goes into detail about the Cupertino company’s plans to skip the higher-end M6 chip. Instead, it’ll release the base M6 then skip to the M7 in 2027.
The new entry-level MacBook Pro has been tested with the M6 chip and is planned for later this year. It’ll offer improved memory bandwidth with up to 200GB per second, beating out the M5’s 153GB.
According to Bloomberg’s source, the M6 chip will update the memory architecture and neural engine to improve AI processing.
Bloomberg says Apple will improve the performance across all of the cores, which are the processing units in the chips. The M6 will also have a new graphics processing unit, with testing up to 12 graphics cores. The improvement for the GPU will help with the rendering demands of AI, graphics and other tasks.
Bloomberg indicates that the M6 won’t see any additional variants. However, the M7 will get the next ‘Pro’ and ‘Max’ chips instead. The M7 chip is expected to be available “as early as the first half of next year.” The M7 Pro and M7 Max are expected for the end of next year, and the M7 Ultra in 2028.
The M7 lineup will have a focus on on-device AI processing, reports Bloomberg. The base version will reportedly support 240GB per second of memory bandwidth.
Bloomberg also says that Apple is still working on the M5 Ultra and aims to release it later this year in the new Mac Studio.
Source: Bloomberg, via: 9to5Google
