Bloomberg: A larger iMac with Apple silicon has been in the works

Apple recently released the new 24-inch colorful iMacs, but the company is now planning to release a larger iMac all-in-one desktop powered by its own chips instead of Intel ones.


STORY HIGHLIGHTS:

  • Apple recently unveiled a 24-inch iMac with its own M1 chip.
  • The current 30-inch Intel-based model remains on sale.
  • A larger iMac with Apple silicon has been in the works.
  • It’s unclear if it’ll have the same 30-inch size as the Intel model.

A larger Apple silicon iMac is coming

Apple unveiled a redesigned 24-inch iMac with a range of colorful appearances, the Apple M1 chips and other features on April 20, 2021. The new all-in-one desktop, along with the M1 iPad Pro and the updated Apple TV 4K, will be in stores on May 21, 2021.

The new iMac has replaced the previous 21.5-inch Intel-based version. While Apple currently sells the flagship Intel model with a 27-inch display, its replacement is allegedly in the works.

According to Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman:

Apple has also been working on a larger iMac with in-house processors, but development of that version was paused months ago in part to let Apple focus on releasing the redesigned 24-inch model in April 2021.

Gurman hasn’t laid out any technical specifications pertaining to the custom processor that will power the next iMac beyond saying that the upcoming Apple chips will “greatly outpace the performance and capabilities” of the current Apple M1 silicon.

For what it’s worth, Gurman claims that the next Mac mini along with the redesigned 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros will use a ten-core CPU with eight high-performance cores and two energy-efficient cores. By comparison, the current Apple M1 chip in the 24-inch iMac has eight processing cores, four high-performance ones and four energy-efficient ones.

Will the next iMac offer better GPUs than AMD?

More importantly, those chips are said to offer sixteen or 32 graphics cores. While CPU power always matters, driving such a large-size display like on the 30-inch iMac requires additional GPU power that the M1’s eight graphics cores probably cannot match.

But with at least twice the number of cores (you will be able to upgrade to a 32-core GPU when configuring your machine on Apple’s online store), this upcoming new iMac should be able to provide enough graphics oomph to drive its display.

Whether or not these upcoming Apple GPUs will outperform discreet graphics cards in the current 30-inch Intel-based iMac remains to be seen. For clarification, the 30-inch Intel-used iMac can be configured with up to AMD Radeon Pro 5700 XT with 16GB of GDDR6 memory.