Intel Ice Lake Xeon W-3300 Workstation CPUs Rumored To Power Next-Gen Apple Mac Pro 2022
Intel Ice Lake Xeon W-3300 Workstation CPUs Rumored To Power Next-Gen Apple Mac Pro 2022
Apple might be using Intel's next-gen Xeon W-3300 Ice Lake CPUs to power their brand new Mac Pro coming this year. The rumor comes from YuuKi_AnS who has been providing insights on the Intel Xeon families for workstations and servers for a while now and has been quite accurate with his leaks.
We were talking about the Intel Xeon W-3300 'Ice Lake' CPU family just a few weeks ago. The first chips started appearing on online retail outlets and will be launching soon. The leaker states that Apple's Mac Pro 2022 seems to be using Intel's Xeon W-3300 chips which if true would mean that Apple might delay the launch of its own Jade SOC based on its second-generation ARM silicon and also referred to as M2 SOC by some.
Apple’s MacPro 2022 seems to use Intel’s Xeon-W 33xx series processors...
(LGA4189 iceLake-SP)
— 结城安穗-YuuKi_AnS (@yuuki_ans) July 26, 2021
It is likely that Apple could launch Mac Pro 2022 solutions based around both Intel Xeon W-3300 and its own Jade chips but that remains to be seen. So far, it's been reported that the Apple Mac Pro based around the Jade SOC will come in two configurations featuring 20 cores (Jade 2C-Die) & 40 cores (Jade 4C-Die). The base configuration will offer 16 high-performance & 4 efficiency cores while the higher-end configuration will offer 32 high-performance & 8 efficiency cores.
The Intel Xeon W-3300 Ice Lake configurations for the Apple Mac Pro 2022 would offer up to 38 cores and 76 threads. The Ice Lake Xeon W-3300 Workstation family will 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 Xeon W-3375 is so far the fastest chip listed here with 38 cores and 76 threads. It is stated that the chip features 57 MB of cache which is 1.5 MB per core and maximum clock speeds are reported at 4.0 GHz. This will be a major upgrade over the existing Intel Xeon W lineup powering the Apple Mac Pro that features up to 28 cores, DDR4-2933 memory support, and up to 1.5 TB capacities.
It's definitely interesting that Intel is still relying on Intel's Xeon workstation lineup instead of AMD offerings such as Threadripper Pro. AMD is the brand of choice for Apple's Mac and Mac Pro line when it comes to GPUs but Intel seems to be their choice of CPU until they get their own silicon to be on par with x86 offerings. They have done a great job closing the boundaries on the mainstream segment but closing the gap in the workstation and server segment might take a while & hence, the company is expected to keep relying on Intel Xeon (or even AMD's Threadripper Pro CPU lineup in the future).
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