Apple Silicon Equivalent To Four M3 Ultra SoCs With A Theoretical 536 Billion Transistors Was ‘Nearly Finished’ For The Self-Driving Car Project

Apple’s ‘Project Titan’ was the company’s self-driving car ambition that had an estimated $10 billion invested in the venture. After a decade of rash decisions, delays, and frequent leadership changes, the autonomous vehicle development was axed entirely. In addition to the ludicrous expenditure, the efforts of various teams, including the Apple Silicon, went up in smoke, as these individuals were nearly finished with a custom chipset that was equal to not one, but a whopping four M2 Ultra SoCs, which is Apple’s most powerful in-house silicon to date.

The quadruple M2 Ultra custom silicon for the Apple Car was considered the ‘AI brain’

The Apple car project had lofty ambitions, aiming straight for the heavens, with the technology giant always intending to integrate an advanced autonomous driving system into the vehicle. However, a sufficiently powerful custom chipset would be required to make this possible. The company’s Mac Pro and Mac Studio were already fueled by the M2 Ultra, but a car is a significantly bigger piece of machinery and would require immense horsepower. In a Q&A session by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the reporter mentioned that the Apple Silicon team was ‘heavily invested’ in this project and developed a new chipset equivalent to four M2 Ultra SoCs.

Think of it like this, a single M2 Ultra flaunted 134 billion transistors, with its top-end model sporting a 24-core CPU, a 76-core GPU, and a 32-core Neural Engine. Assuming the Apple Silicon team leveraged the ‘UltraFusion’ process that has enabled them in the past to combine two M1 Max and M2 Max chipsets into an M1 Ultra and M2 Ultra, respectively, the new chip may have featured 536 billion transistors, a 96-core CPU and a 304-core GPU. Of course, this is just plain speculation at this stage, but the latest findings reveal that Apple had gargantuan plans for ‘Project Titan.’

Sadly, it was believed that development was canceled because the project was not financially viable, and Apple may not have been able to compete with Tesla in the market, though it had every plan to do so. The new chip was ‘nearly finished’ before the project was scrapped, but it is possible that the Apple Silicon team re-purposes the resources and engineering knowledge that it accumulated during the development phase. As it so happens, the technology giant has yet to launch the M3 Ultra, which is slated to arrive in mid-2024, so let us see if the latter possesses any attribute similar to the chip that was seemingly on par with four M2 Ultra SoCs.

News Source: Bloomberg

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