It’s a fair point. Especially for the new Mac Pro they could have implemented a more robust thermal solution and clock the whole thing higher. That’s one advantage of a bigger chasis, isn’t it?
It’s overcooled. There is no way it’s thermally limited. It’s got to have headroom for days.
I’m very curious where this idea I keep seeing in the comments that Apple refuses to run chips at full speed for cooling reasons comes from.
I agree that it’s likely they wanted to use the quad M2 chip (jade 4 C die, if I remember the term correctly), which would have given them far more PCIE lanes and made it more desirable.
But that doesn’t seem to have worked out. And the lineup had a whole they needed to fill for some of their top end customers. So here we are.