Apple developed a monster chip for its Apple Car project, report says

Apple Car may never happen, but that doesn’t mean the company didn’t develop some impressive tech while the project was still alive.

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple had developed an incredibly mighty chip to power the Apple Car. In a Q&A session on Monday, Gurman said that the chip was nearly finished, and was “equal to about four M2 Ultras combined.”

The M2 Ultra is the chip that’s inside the Mac Pro and the most powerful configuration of the Mac Studio. It has, at most, a 24-core CPU, a 76-core GPU, and a 32-core Neural Engine, with support for up to 192GB RAM. Modern cars do require very powerful silicon; for example, the Tesla FSD (Full Self-Driving) chip has 12 ARM CPUs inside and a total of 6 billion transistors. But if Gurman’s info is correct, Apple’s chip probably would have dwarfed that, as a single M2 Ultra chip has 134 billion transistors.

Apple was rumored to be building an autonomous car for a decade, spending billions, before reportedly killing off the project and focusing on Apple CarPlay instead.

Gurman also shared a few other tidbits related to Apple’s now-abandoned Apple Car project, as well as the company’s ongoing CarPlay efforts. For example, he doesn’t think that Apple will sell or license the tech developed for the Apple Car project, though “there’s a good chunk of material that could be reused for the company’s own future products.”

As for CarPlay, Gurman thinks Apple is “all-in on the new CarPlay,” which runs through the iPhone, but going forward, he thinks that “Apple really should embed its own software and hardware into cars themselves,” something that Google has already done with Android Automotive.