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13-Inch MacBook Pro With M2 Chip Outperforms Base Model Mac Pro Despite Costing Nearly $5,000 Less
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I've hardly been an ardent supporter of the 2019 Mac Pro or it's admittedly extravagant pricing - but some of these comments are just too dumb to endure.
Someone has already said it here, but it bears repeating: if you don't know why you would need a Mac Pro then you don't need a Mac Pro. (The same goes for the M1 Max/Ultra).
Good luck adding 512GB RAM, quad high-end AMD workstation-class GPUs (and yes, they will thrash the M2 on GPU-heavy tasks, especially if they're not lovingly hand-optimised for Metal and the Apple Silicon GPU) or maybe 4 specialist PCIe video/audio interface cards to that MacBook Air - or maybe fitting an internal RAID array. OK you could use an external PCIE cage but those only provide a fraction of the 64 lanes of PCIe bandwidth that the Mac Pro offered.
What's true is that the base, $6000 8 core Mac Pro (with a worse GPU than the iMac) has never made sense as a stand-alone purchase, unless you were in a very small niche that just needed those specialist PCIe cards. With that CPU and GPU, even the top-end Intel iMacs and MacBook Pros offered comparable power.
I'd wager that most serious Mac Pro customers spent at least another $6000 on internal expansions and upgrades (whether they were third party or Apple). That's the bit you can't do on an iMac or MacBook.
What's changed with M1 is that the raw CPU power of the M1 Ultra in the $4000 Mac Studio now beats even the top-end Xeon available in the Mac Pro (something like a $7k upgrade over the base MP) - but even that glosses over a few points, like, the M1 Ultra tops out at 128GB RAM while the MP can take 1.5TB (...about half of that $7k CPU upgrade is not to just get more, but to get the M-suffix version that supports up to 2TB RAM). ...and you have to very carefully pick your benchmarks for the M1 Ultra to compete with some of the high-end GPU options you can fit to the Mac Pro.
The Intel Mac Pro probably is heading for obsolescence in the long term, and we know that Apple are going to offer some sort of Apple Silicon-based replacement Real Soon Now, but the sort or enterprises that need Mac Pro-level expandability can't turn on a dime, and a lot of work needs to be done on optimising the software they use before they can switch to Apple Silicon.
Also remember that computer pricing is enormously dependent on economies of scale - and Apple sell vastly more MacBook Airs than they do Mac Pros.
Even compared to PC hardware you'd probably need to spend Mac Pro-like prices to get Xeon-W, ECC and (these two are important) 1.5TB RAM capacity and 8 PCIe slots with comparable numbers of lanes. However, that skipped over a whole class of much cheaper machines with maybe 3-4 PCIe slots, 512GB RAM capability and maybe better-value AMD procesors. My main beef with the 2019 Mac Pro was not that it was a bad machine, but there was such a huge gulf between the totally non-expandable iMac and the insanely expandable Mac Pro.
Spoken like a true non-professional. There are plenty of special tasks/apps that Intels are simply required or just beat M1 or M2 silicon. The gap is closing but Intel will still be relevant to desktop computing for another 2-3 years. Why would Apple cut off those influential pro users and not make good revenue in the process? These benchmarks will also help push more users closer to Apple Silicon which is Apple's long term strategy.
so funny, harde har har. Actually why don't you compare a comparable specced windows laptop to the MBP 14 or 16 and see what prices you get in the windows world, then factor in weight and battery life. the Apple silicon Macs are very good values indeed. And they only do less, if they don't do what you need, but pretty much (except for gaming) there are excellent products to do virtually everything on a Mac. Oh you might not be able to run some antiquated Windows programs, but you can still do the same functionality.
Im really curios to know what Apple has prepared for the Mac Pro lineup...Dual M2 Ultra working as a single chip? What about GPU performance? Could Apple Silicon finally outperform RTX 3090 (raw performance)? If Apple Studio already costs $5k, what a Mac Pro would cost?
you mean Windows? You can tile macOS windows just fine. But seriously, if MS won't license windows on ARM and you absolutely have to run Windows (poor you), then why would you even care to consider Apple siliconBut the M2 can't run tiled windows. For that, you need a Mac Pro.
Unfair comparison. Mac Pro hasn’t been updated for nearly three years, and we are comparing a 2022 product with an outdated machine that Apple gave a short love and quickly ignored.
This is crazy. Apple really needs to complete the Mac Pro transition to Apple Silicon.
Well lets debunk that Load of tosh.
The M2 ( or M1 ) didn’t even exist 2 And half years ago.
The Dual GPU was the fastest card out for about 6 months and it’s still damn fast.
It’s the only Mac with PCIe Slots. 8 of them I have a some AV breakout cards and audio cards that you can’t attach any other way.
Can have a 1.5tb of Ram - I have half that and fill it With huge 3d Datasets for animation.
The Afterburner card is still incredible fast for the right codec.
It still runs windows for the odd times I have to run a windoze only app - like 3D Studio.
In 2 and half years it has made me over 200k
The next Mac Pro needs to have all this or we are back to the the Cylinder Mac Pro (which is essentially the mac studio)
That was the beef that a lot of people had (and have) with the current Mac Pro. So many users (myself included) wanted Apple to re-introduce the good "pickup truck" type computer that existed in the G4, G5, and Mac Pro prior to the introduction of the 2013 Mac Pro (aka, G4 Cube v2.0). What Apple delivered instead was a Kenworth, and from then on has said that you can either have the Kenworth or you have to settle for a Corolla, because they aren't building anything in between.
Now that is someone who gets the reason for the MacPro in the first place. It is always funny to read comments by someone who doesn't understand the reason for intel Xeon's in the first place, or thinks that the MacPro is all that expensive - until they check out the Windows equivalent with Xeon's, gobs of ECC memory, and uber busses (LOL sounds like a new ride share)
Well it has - they have had a number of GPU upgrades. The CPU for them is less of an issue - the replacement newer Xeons are barely any faster. Such is the problem with intel chips.
Slow news day? Click-Bait at best. Let’s focus on this CPU only tasks and forget everything else. Like how exactly I get 1TB+ of memory into the M2 for all these large datasets and how about the GPU tasks for certain video codecs, you know the ones where the Mac Pro runs circles around a fully maxed out Mac Studio…
The mistake people make is comparing to Xeon workstations without understanding whether a Xeon workstation even provides any benefit. CAD, Scientific Measurement, Engineering, and Modelling are all workloads that benefit from running a Xeon and ECC memory because those are workloads that require dead-on accuracy in memory. Photo Editing, Recording and Audio Engineering, Animation, Video Editing - none of those workflows benefit a whole heck of a lot from either a Xeon or ECC memory. For those workloads, Xeons offer a small benefit in memory cache, but little else (ECC memory offers next to nothing).
The only reason Apple went with Xeons is because profit margins could be pushed much higher with Xeons, and users would only be able to compare to other Xeon workstations (just as you're doing now) without being able to compare the actual performance for their own given workloads.
As a side-note, had Apple gone with AMD Ryzen processors, they would still have been able to offer ECC memory. Despite Ryzen an Epic outperforming Xeon for nearly a decade, Apple still insisted on sticking with Intel.
The deal breaker for me is with a Macbook Pro there's no $700 option for Pro Wheels.
It is funny. It's called a joke. Perhaps consider seeing a doctor to get the stick extracted.
I'm wondering why Apple hasn't introduced Fusion RAM for the M-series. All your currently active processes in on-chip RAM and everything else offloaded to slower upgradable RAM.
That’s the real question. Apple doesn’t have a Mac Pro replacement yet. Dual M2 Ultra is nowhere near enough. We need much better performance.
Look at this and how a Nvidia 1080Ti is almost twice as fast as a 48-GPU-Core M1 Ultra: https://sebastianraschka.com/blog/2022/pytorch-m1-gpu.html
Also this:
A Mac Pro shouldn’t just outperform a 3090 gaming card. They have to face professional cards, like one or multiple RTX8000. Or go even further like Nvidia DGX stations and A100. This is a professional machine competing with Dell, Lenovo, Nvidia and the likes. Marketing this to YouTubers for video work isn’t enough. The price is really irrelevant, as these machines make money. Some of my simple Dell systems are $30k+ for a “usable” configuration, after that the sky is the limit. They could easily start at $10k and then go up to $150k or $200k, as long as they offer similar performance to other systems out there. Above that, I’d like to see proper cluster solutions from Apple.