A report in Japanese publication Nikkei claims that the following technology of Apple’s custom-designed silicon chips for Mac, dubbed “M2,” entered manufacturing this month.
Citing “sources acquainted with the matter,” Nikkei reviews that the chips will energy Macs that can be launched within the second half of 2021, doubtlessly as quickly as July. That July date means that new Macs could possibly be introduced at Apple’s 2021 developer convention, which kicks off on June 7.
The sources additionally say this new chip will “ultimately” be utilized in different Macs and Apple merchandise moreover MacBooks. The chip could be the successor to the M1, which Apple has included in not too long ago launched or introduced fashions of the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Professional, Mac mini, iPad Professional, and 24-inch iMac.
The revised 5 nm design is being manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, which Apple has used many occasions earlier than.
We had been already anticipating new Apple Silicon-based Macs to launch this yr. Apple introduced a two-year roadmap to convey its custom-designed chips to all Macs when it first introduced the M1 final summer time, and a number of reviews and leaks have described the corporate’s plans to update the 16-inch MacBook Pro with a brand new, quicker M1 relative. The M1 may additionally come to the 30-inch iMac and higher-end configurations of the 13-inch MacBook Professional.
Earlier reviews battle barely with the main points of this story. These reviews declare that no less than a number of the new Macs anticipated later this yr will ship with a variant of the first-generation M1 however with extra cores and different optimizations and enhancements, similar to help for extra ports and exterior screens.
We have been calling that hypothetical chip an M1X, after Apple’s now-abandoned iPad chip-naming scheme, i.e., “A12X” as a extra highly effective cousin to the A12. However till now, any dialogue of the chip’s title has been pure hypothesis.
Apple may plan to launch each an M2 for its subsequent wave of entry-level machines and a higher-core-count variant of the M1 or M2 as beforehand anticipated, or the M2 would be the higher-core-count chip destined for the following 16-inch MacBook Professional, marking a departure from that previous chip-naming scheme.
