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exoticSpice

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Jan 9, 2022
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Sadly, the 7,1 will be the Mac Pro do so. I don't think Apple's dGPUs will be cost effective compared to other high-end cards

In the future maybe for the Druid line from Intel we may see competing with AMD and Nvidia and this givs 7,1 owners to try
those GPUs from Intel too.

what the 8,1 won't have is the GPU versatility that the 7,1 will have? Apple's GPUs don't even have Hardware based Ray-tracing yet and all major vendors (AMD, Intel and Nvidia) do.
 
We don't know this for a fact. As far as I know the only thing preventing 3rd party GPUs from running on an AS Mac are drivers. If Apple writes the drivers then they'll work. I would be surprised if the new Mac Pro does not have PCIe slots. I think it will take the same MPX modules as the 7,1. Of course there will be newer ones too.
 
We don't know this for a fact. As far as I know the only thing preventing 3rd party GPUs from running on an AS Mac are drivers. If Apple writes the drivers then they'll work. I would be surprised if the new Mac Pro does not have PCIe slots. I think it will take the same MPX modules as the 7,1. Of course there will be newer ones too.
I don't think it'll use MPX. That was a weird proprietary workaround Apple invented because Intel Xeon E5 CPUs did not support anything faster than PCIe 3.0; it added extra lanes / power connectors and an internal Thunderbolt bus so that you could pipe graphics out of the stock TB ports instead of a port on the GPU itself. Not sure why they needed that, but they did.

It's a technological dead end, and the 7,1 Mac Pro is such a small market that it's never going to be taken up by many third-party peripherals manufacturers, except for boutique pro solutions providers, probably.

Since Apple controls the SoC, there's no reason not to support full PCIe 5.0 (with 4.0 backwards compatibility) which will be 4x the speed of 3.0. As @MisterAndrew says, it's up to Apple to support 3rd-party cards.

That said, it really depends on what Apple sees as the market for the Mac Pro. If it's a workstation aimed at high-performance niche markets like audio-video / music production, engineering, scientific computing, VFX, then all that matters is that the GPU has enough horsepower to do those tasks, not necessarily the brand.

Feature film VFX, arguably one of the big use cases, is rarely rendered on a single machine anyway, but sent to a render farm. But the individual VFX artist's workstation needs to be fast enough to render changes and preview animation, scenes, etc. So far, in tests we've seen, the M1 Max and Ultra are quite capable vs the Vega in the current 7,1.

What I can imagine in the 8,1 will be either a really monster SoC with more graphics cores, more high-performance CPU cores, and much more unified system memory and cache, or they (less likely) might take the step of having a separate, socketed Apple Silicon GPU but that is tied closely to the CPU; that might be user-selectable / upgradeable.

Even less likely but still possible, might be Apple Silicon GPUs on standard PCIe 5.0 cards. These might be solely for offline rendering and not realtime previews, because being outside the SoC would mean roundtrip delays in sending and receiving data, which then have to be assembled, buffered, synced etc. But it would be a selling point for a rackmountable render-farm solution.

I can see the expansion slots being used for TB / USB-C expansion, additional Ethernet for RedNet/Dante or Avid integrated systems, 4k+ video capture cards, HDMI for previewing on various devices, PCIe SSDs, certain kinds of pro audio i/o (ADAT optical), etc. But maybe not for GPUs, indeed.
 
What I don't like is how Apple keeps us in the dark about the future of the product roadmap. I don't see how it would hurt them to disclose their long-term plans on a niche market product. I think it hurts them not doing so because a lot of people feel uncomfortable making a large investment in something that has a questionable future. However, maybe their most important customers already know and signed some kind of non-disclosure agreement.

I think Apple should say, "This is where we are going with this product and we're committed to supporting it long-term and this is why you should invest in it."
 
I think Apple should say, "This is where we are going with this product and we're committed to supporting it long-term and this is why you should invest in it."
I feel like that would be a recipe for overpromising and underdelivering, which would be bad for Apple
 
I think Apple should say, "This is where we are going with this product and we're committed to supporting it long-term and this is why you should invest in it."
Apple did say the Mac Pro is coming and giving a product roadmap is bad. If you don't meet it the deadline or promise then it gets annoying.
 
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I don't think it'll use MPX. That was a weird proprietary workaround Apple invented because Intel Xeon E5 CPUs did not support anything faster than PCIe 3.0; it added extra lanes / power connectors and an internal Thunderbolt bus so that you could pipe graphics out of the stock TB ports instead of a port on the GPU itself. Not sure why they needed that, but they did.

It's a technological dead end, and the 7,1 Mac Pro is such a small market that it's never going to be taken up by many third-party peripherals manufacturers, except for boutique pro solutions providers, probably.

Since Apple controls the SoC, there's no reason not to support full PCIe 5.0 (with 4.0 backwards compatibility) which will be 4x the speed of 3.0. As @MisterAndrew says, it's up to Apple to support 3rd-party cards.

That said, it really depends on what Apple sees as the market for the Mac Pro. If it's a workstation aimed at high-performance niche markets like audio-video / music production, engineering, scientific computing, VFX, then all that matters is that the GPU has enough horsepower to do those tasks, not necessarily the brand.

Feature film VFX, arguably one of the big use cases, is rarely rendered on a single machine anyway, but sent to a render farm. But the individual VFX artist's workstation needs to be fast enough to render changes and preview animation, scenes, etc. So far, in tests we've seen, the M1 Max and Ultra are quite capable vs the Vega in the current 7,1.

What I can imagine in the 8,1 will be either a really monster SoC with more graphics cores, more high-performance CPU cores, and much more unified system memory and cache, or they (less likely) might take the step of having a separate, socketed Apple Silicon GPU but that is tied closely to the CPU; that might be user-selectable / upgradeable.

Even less likely but still possible, might be Apple Silicon GPUs on standard PCIe 5.0 cards. These might be solely for offline rendering and not realtime previews, because being outside the SoC would mean roundtrip delays in sending and receiving data, which then have to be assembled, buffered, synced etc. But it would be a selling point for a rackmountable render-farm solution.

I can see the expansion slots being used for TB / USB-C expansion, additional Ethernet for RedNet/Dante or Avid integrated systems, 4k+ video capture cards, HDMI for previewing on various devices, PCIe SSDs, certain kinds of pro audio i/o (ADAT optical), etc. But maybe not for GPUs, indeed.
All I know is my Mac Pro (2 w6800X Duos) is faster than 3 RTX 3090's in Octane, which I use daily for client work in VFX and Motion Graphics...so unless that Mac Pro 8.1 can beat 3 RTX 3090's, it's a non-starter...and that's where there problems START...because by the time it releases, the W7800X Duo's will likely be out for the Mac Pro 7.1 to compete with the RTX 4090's, in which case, The 8.1 is going to come into the game already behind.

Only solution I see is allowing our current GPU's to fit in the 8.1 That's almost the only thing that will get me to upgrade from my current setup. Also, Even though I run a studio, we have an in-house renderfarm and rarely send out to an external farm...I know you're speaking on mainly the big houses, but you'd be surprised how many small vex houses there are that keep everything in-house.
 
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