Apple appears to be planning a surprise for the destiny of its M1 System on a Chip (SoC). A comprehensive examination of the M1 Max silicon reveals that the design may have a previously unrecognized connection bus.
This would enable the Cupertino, California-based corporation to stack many dies with each other to dramatically boost the number of CPU and GPU cores. The Multi-Chip-Module (MCM) scaling technique enables the manufacturer to stack many dies together in a chiplet-based architecture. In principle, Apple could simply increase the M1 Max up to 40 CPU cores and 128 GPU cores. System memory would also be more than double or quadruple.
The concealed part on the base of an M1 Max chip was revealed by Twitter user @VadimYuryev. It’s worth noting that this possible connection has not been seen in Apple’s published drawings of the M1 Max die.
Linking several M1 Max chips in this way would produce an M1 Max Duo or possibly an M1 Max Quadra. Оther exрerts hаve been sрeсulаting аbоut this рrоbаbility fоr а long time. John Siracusa, a programmer and tech journalist, proposed Jade-C as a core component for Pro Mac SoCs in May 2021.
Siracusa’s picture depicts a shrunk form of the M1, with 16 GPU cores sacrificed for a reduced form factor. He also illustrates 2C and 4C dies, which combine two and four M1 SoCs onto a single package, respectively.