“Apple’s Mac products, which range from thin and light notebooks all the way to powerful all-in-one desktop workstations, are powered by processors supplied by Intel,” Ashraf Eassa writes for The Motley Fool. “According to my estimates, Intel generates about $3 billion in annual revenue from sales of chips into Apple’s Macs, making up about 9% of its total client computing group revenue.”
“Over the last several months, Intel has launched or announced a wide range of processors that would allow Apple to release upgraded versions of its Mac products,” Eassa writes. “Apple sells two variants of its powerful MacBook Pro computers — one with a 13-inch display and one with a 15-inch display. Intel announced a processor family known as Coffee Lake-U earlier this year, which improves upon its predecessor by moving from a dual-core design to a quad-core design. That new quad-core Coffee Lake-U chip will likely power Apple’s upgraded 13-inch MacBook Pro. Apple’s 15-inch MacBook Pro products use Intel’s higher-performance H-series processors. The current 15-inch MacBook Pro incorporates a chip called Kaby Lake-H, which is a quad-core design. The successor to Kaby Lake-H, known as Coffee Lake-H, is a hex-core design. So, expect the MacBook Pro to see a jump in processor core count compared to its predecessor as well. ”
“Over the last several years, Apple has regularly updated the 12-inch MacBook with new processors. The 2016 model saw an upgrade to Intel’s Skylake-Y chips and the 2017 model was upgraded with a chip called Kaby Lake-Y,” Eassa writes. “It was widely expected that the 2018 model would include a chip known as Cannon Lake-Y, but the manufacturing technology that’s used to build the Cannon Lake-Y chips is proving problematic.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s iMac and iMac Pro desktops are also discussed in the full article, but the Mac Pro and Mac mini are as ignored by Eassa as they are by Apple.