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Comment by marcan_42 | Hacker News Reader

I've been saying 4x M1 Max is not a thing and never will be a thing ever since the week I got my M1 Max and saw that the IRQ controller was only instantiated to support 2 dies, but everyone kept parroting that nonsense the Bloomberg reporter said about a 4-die version regardless...

Turns out I was right.

The Mac Pro chip will be a different thing/die.

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Plus they are running out of M1 superlatives. They’ll have to go to M2 to avoid launching M1 Plaid.

m1 hyper turbo deluxe

or they could take a page out of microsofts book and just call the next one "m one"

M1 One: The Second One!

M1 Series One

M1 Mark II ala Sony

They could do M1 More Thing.

M1 Ultra²

Bloomberg brought the Supermicro hit pieces. I personally can't take them seriously anymore. Not after the second article with 0 fact checking and sad attempt at an irrelevant die shot. And their word is certainly irrelevant against one of people who are working (and succeeding) at running linux on M1.

Could they do a multi-socket board for the Mac Pro?

They would never do that

They have done this previously for dual socket Xeons. Historical precedence doesn’t necessarily hold here, but in fact, it’s been done on the “cheese graters” previously

They also water-cooled them but I’d bet a lot of money we never see that again either.

They've moved on to chiplet design. Don't disregard their clear direction to SoC's with non-upgradeable RAM, GPU, CPU.

The Mac Pro (and the high-end Powermacs that preceded it) were always available in a dual socket incarnation, right up to the trashcan Mac.

The trashcan Mac Pro was announced almost 9 years ago. Apple today is a very different company. They've moved onto chiplet designed SoC's with little to no care about upgradability.

I expect this for CPU side. Multiple SoC introduces NUMA but it's already done on Dual Xeon based Mac. I wonder how their GPU work for the configuration.

In a world where latency:storage size tradeoffs need to be made for practical reasons (and will, at some point, be required for fundamental physical reasons), we should just embrace NUMA anyway. Death to the lie of uniform access! NUMA is the future!

Ehrm, anyway.

It actually isn't clear to me whether designing a two socket motherboard is fundamentally an easier task than jamming more of the things into a single package (given that they have already embraced some sort of chiplette paradigm).

I believe designing/manufacturing a 5nm chip only used for Mac Pro can't be profitable. That's why they designed M1 Ultra as MCM of M1 Max.

The Mac Pro chip will be a 4x M2 Max

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