Intel Xeon: Mac Pro with Ice Lake-SP instead of ARM-SoC as an intermediate step

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Apple should think about giving the current Mac Pro an upgrade in the form of the new Xeon CPUs based on Ice Lake-SP with up to 40 cores, before also upgrading the workstation later Apple Silicon should take over. An M2 SoC forecast for the year 2022 and up to 128 cores is already wandering the rumor mill.

line of code reveals Ice Lake-SP

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, known for his mostly very reliable sources, shared a tweet from Mac and Unix expert Brandon Shanks alias @realmrpippy, who found a line of code in the first beta of the upcoming version of Apple's integrated development environment Xcode. Gurman himself also confirms work on an Intel upgrade for the Mac Pro.

Cook had already announced new Intel Macs

It would not be surprising that before the arrival of Apple Silicon, Intel would once again be featured in the Mac Pro, given the statements made by Tim Cook about WWDC a year ago. When the move to Apple Silicon was announced, Cook also stated that new Intel-based Macs are also in development. The switch to Apple Silicon is to take place gradually from the end of 2020 to the end of 2022. Apple has never ruled out upgrading existing models. New models such as the iMac, however, should use M-SoCs.

Mac Pro is still using Cascade Lake-SP

The current Mac Pro, which costs up to 64,000 euros in its top configuration, offers a maximum of one Intel Xeon W-3275M with 28 cores based on Cascade Lake-SP and would be refreshed with Intel's Ice Lake- SP make a big leap in performance before Apple Silicon will also take over the workstation in the future.