Apple’s MacBooks have always been great pieces of hardware. Most of us here at Stuff do most of our work on them, for good reason. It won’t come as a surprise to anyone that Apple’s looking to improve its flagship laptop with the 2021 iteration, but it might be doing so quite significantly, in the form of its upgraded M1X chipset.

Mega-MacBook

Apple made the switch to its proprietary M1 chipsets last year. The ARM-based 8 core processor took the already well-performing MacBook to the next level, offering speed and efficiency as we’d never seen before. According to Apple insider Mark Gruman’s Power On newsletter, the M1X will take them a step further.

Now, based on the naming alone we can tell that this isn’t exactly going to be the next generation of Apple’s integrated system on a chip (SoC). Rather, it will serve as an upgrade to the existing model. Like the iPhone 13 Pro is to the vanilla iPhone 13.

According to Gruman, the M1X will arrive in 2 flavours, those being 10 CPU cores (eight high-performance and two high-efficiency) and 16 GPU cores, or the same CPU and 32 GPU cores. Back when M1X leaks first surfaced (sorry Tim) we thought we’d be looking at 8 high-performance cores and 4 high-efficiency ones, but what Gruman says we’re getting is still nothing to sniff at.

XDA-Developers speculates that the new SoC should land with a hefty 64GB of RAM too.

As to when we might see this speedy new piece of silicone; Apple generally shows off its new MacBook releases in October, so we’re expecting to get an official first look at the powerful new hardware within the next few weeks. Take that with a grain of salt though. These are still unofficial leaks, after all.