Apple Hydra chipset is coming. Which devices will feature it?

With the Hydra chipset, Apple aims to differentiate its performance-oriented computers from the main catalog. The Mac Pro may hit the market with Apple Hydra before the end of the year.

After developing its own chips, Apple made significant strides in the mobile world and extended this success to desktops. So far, the company has developed two distinct chip families, and now it's opening the door to a third.

What is Apple Hydra?

According to leaks, the new chip family named Apple Hydra will be used in the Mac Pro 2025 workstation series, contributing to the uniqueness of this category. Apple prefers to avoid blending categories by continually using M-series chips.

For example, despite the huge price gap between the M2 Ultra Mac Pro and Mac Studio, there isn’t a proportional difference in performance. This impacts Mac Pro sales negatively and discourages consumers.

The Apple Hydra chipset is expected to surpass the M4 Ultra in terms of CPU and GPU performance. Based on leaks, the M4 Ultra will feature up to 32 cores for processing and 80 cores for graphics. It will compete head-to-head with the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X in multi-core performance, while Apple Hydra could push even further.