Apple 'once developed the most powerful processor but did not announce it'

According to Bloomberg expert Mark Gurman, Apple had great ambitions to create a pinnacle position for the Mac Pro workstation line. To do that, the company's engineers designed a new processor chip called Extreme, located on the Ultra line.

Extreme is described as having twice the CPU and GPU cores compared to the Ultra version at that time. The project has progressed very far in the laboratory, Apple successfully manufactured both test versions including M2 Extreme and M3 Extreme.

"Apple even assembled and operated these chip models with completely outstanding graphics and central processing performance. However, the project was eventually canceled due to expensive production costs and concerns about too little market demand for the Mac Pro," Gurman said.

Not stopping at the processor, Apple also developed two Mac Pro prototypes, internal codes J170 and J190. In particular, the J170 still uses Intel chips even though it was developed at a stage when the company switched to Apple Silicon, designed for specific tasks that need to support discrete graphics cards through the PCIe slot. The J190 is equipped with M3 Ultra with the original plan to launch with Mac Studio M3 Ultra in early 2025.

According to MacRumors, the information that Apple still creates a Mac Pro version running on Intel chips in the context of switching to self-developed chips shows that the company has been struggling to meet the needs of professional user groups, who need discrete PCIe graphics cards that the Apple Silicon architecture does not support.

However, at the end of March, Apple confirmed the death of Mac Pro. The move is considered inevitable because since the release of the Mac Pro version using Apple Silicon (M2 Ultra) in 2023, the company has not announced any new models. Instead, the company focused on the smaller Mac Studio line, with last year's M3 Ultra and M4 Max options.

First introduced in August 2006, Mac Pro is aimed at professional users with top configuration parameters. The machine had design upgrades in 2013 with a cylindrical shape, also known as the "trash can Mac Pro", then the 2019 Mac Pro with many round holes in the front, compared to a "cheese grater".

Currently, Apple only sells three lines of desktop computers, including iMac, Mac Mini and Mac Studio. Among them, Mac Studio is considered to replace Mac Pro when it has been supplemented with many powerful configuration options, and also supports Thunderbolt 5 that can be connected to pool SoC resources together, creating a powerful cluster for AI tasks.