Apple M6 Pro and M6 Max resurrection hinted at in new supply-chain report

A new report from Taiwan suggests Apple may not have fully abandoned the M6 Pro and M6 Max as previously rumoured. The report discusses potential plans for a future "high-end M6 series," contradicting Mark Gurman's earlier claims that Apple had moved away from the M6 Pro and M6 Max, along with the M6 Ultra, and shifted focus to the M7 family.

Commercial Times, citing semiconductor industry sources, highlights Apple's potential use of TSMC's N2 process and its Fusion Architecture for a future high-end M6 series silicon. It also references advanced packaging technologies such as SoIC-MH and WMCM. The former is said to increase die-to-die interconnect density, while the latter integrates logic dies, LPDDR memory, and high-speed I/O at another packaging level.

TSMC is reportedly expanding capacity for these technologies, with WMCM production expected to reach around 60,000 units per month by the end of 2026 and over 120,000 by 2027. However, the report is explicitly framed as industry analysis and not confirmation that Apple has ordered said components for M6 Pro or M6 Max chips. The packaging technologies discussed may be intended for the M6 generation. Still, they could be used in future M7-series products, such as the gargantuan M7 Ultra that supposedly supports up to 2 TB of unified memory.

Overall, the report holds some water given how muddled Apple's high-end Mac roadmap has become. An earlier report from Mark Gurman said the long-rumoured OLED MacBook Pro redesign would initially be reserved for models powered by the M6 Pro and M6 Max, while the base M6 variant would retain a mini-LED display. Gurman later claimed Apple would use the new OLED panel on existing M5 Pro and M5 Max boards and call the laptop a MacBook Ultra.  

Nevertheless, the rumoured resurrection of the M6 Pro and M6 Max will be good news for power users who undoubtedly welcome the extra compute. As one of the first laptop chips fabricated on TSMC's N2 node, they could offer notable performance upgrades and a potential increase in CPU/GPU cores, as shown by the Apple M6.