Apple has made a commitment to make the full transition to Apple Silicon by 2022, but recent rumors are claiming that the next-gen Mac Pro 2022 will feature Intel Ice Lake Xeon W-3300 workstation CPU which goes against tech giants’ promise and also suggest that Cupertino giants are not done with Intel just yet.
As reported by Wccftech, Yukki_AnS (who has good accuracy in reporting about Intel) claims that Apple will release Intel variant of its next Mac Pro in 2022 on its own or alongside another variant based on its second-generation ARM silicon codenamed “Jade’ (which could be M1X or M2 expect to feature in upcoming MacBook Pro models) to cover all types of users.
The Intel Ice Lake Xeon W-3300 could offer up to 38 cores and 76 threads to a final Intel-based Apple Mac Pro 2022. And as Wccftech notes, the Ice Lake Xeon W-3300 Workstation family offer “support on the LGA 4189 socket platform with up to 270W TDP CPU support, 64 Gen 4 PCIe Lanes, and 8-channel DDR4-3200 memory with up to 4 TB capacities.”
The flagship Xeon W-3375 is so far the fastest chip with 38 cores and 76 threads which offers maximum clock speeds are reported at 4.0 GHz.
However, talking about the house-grown Jade, Bloomberg previously reported that (via 9to5Mac),
Codenamed Jade 2C-Die and Jade 4C-Die, a redesigned Mac Pro is planned to come in 20 or 40 computing core variations, made up of 16 high-performance or 32 high-performance cores and four or eight high-efficiency cores. The chips would also include either 64 core or 128 core options for graphics.
And as mentioned above Apple could release Intel and its own Jade-based variant (which can limit customization by using small cases) in the same year but at different times to please all types of customers.
Form the above rumor we can say that Intel is Apple’s first choice of CPU until “they get their own silicon to be on par with x86 offerings,” instead of AMD offerings such as Threadripper Pro.