Delidding Apple’s M2 Ultra Chip Shows Package Size Bigger Than Intel Xeon CPUs

Delidding Apple’s M2 Ultra Chip Shows Package Size Bigger Than Intel Xeon CPUs

Apple definitely got the message across when it comes to their M-series chips’ efficiency – which is quite ahead of x86-based competition from both Intel and AMD. However, the chip itself is by no means small, not this particular M2 Ultra chip that is effectively two M2 Max SoCs fused into one.

Twitter user @techanalye1 has managed to delid the huge IHS covering both the 24-core Apple Silicon itself as well as the surrounding DRAM chips, which occupies an area bigger than Intel’s workstation Xeon W9-3495X CPU which contains 56 cores inside, as seen on the image above. (Though to be fair, the Xeon doesn’t put memory chips under the IHS, and instead relies on DIMM modules for memory.)

The second image shows the thermal paste that runs with a relatively tidy rectangle across the IHS – that’s where the silicon of M2 Ultra is located directly below. While on the surface M2 Ultra may look like a huge chip, most of that space is occupied by DRAM chips that forms a total of 192GB unified memory, and in turn it’ll save the space required to build dedicated DIMM slots.

Of course, that comes at the cost of expandability, as there are still plenty of applications that need well beyond 192GB of RAM that Apple currently offers. The Xeon W9 meanwhile supports up to 4TB of RAM, making it capable of dealing AI or data-heavy workloads that demand a lot more RAM capacity (Apple Silicon puts its focus on media capabilities, for the most part).

Source: Wccftech

Pokdepinion: I’d say the Apple’s silicon is definitely smaller in size, but probably not much smaller than Xeon’s silicon.