And whereas an “M4 Extremely” has appeared in some rumors concerning the next-gen Mac Studio replace, that processor’s core counts match up with what Apple introduced because the M3 Extremely right now.

Make-up of the M3 Extremely

The M3 Extremely is a pair of M3 Max chips joined along with a silicon interposer, an association just like what Apple did with the M1 Extremely and M2 Extremely. As such, the whole lot is doubled: 32 CPU cores as an alternative of 16, 80 GPU cores as an alternative of 40, 32 Neural Engine cores as an alternative of 16, and two ProRes video encoding engines as an alternative of 1.

Apple has additionally added a few extras, getting the M3 Extremely licensed for 120Gbps Thunderbolt 5 (the M3 Max helps Thunderbolt 4) and supporting as much as 512GB of RAM (M3 Max tops out at 128GB). And for some new-to-Mac-Studio options like hardware-accelerated ray-tracing for graphics, the M3 and M4 GPUs each help the options.

The existence of the M3 Extremely places to relaxation some lightly sourced speculation from final yr, suggesting that the M3 Max was transport with out the silicon used to fuse two Max chips collectively right into a single Extremely chip.

As for why Apple has determined that it doesn’t want an Extremely chip for each Apple Silicon technology, we will solely speculate. However the Mac Studio has been round for just a few years now, and Apple seemingly has a greater sense of how the Max-versus-Extremely gross sales break down. It could merely be the case that the gross sales of the high-end Mac Studio and Mac Professional can’t justify the fee and energy wanted to design and manufacture a brand new Extremely chip each time Apple desires to tweak its silicon.