Apple Executive Discusses New Mac Pro's Lack of Graphics Card Support

[spaz8]

Usain Bolt (Nvidia high powered large die GPU) lines up against a six year old (Apple’s underpowered Gen 2 iGPU that shares a die with CPU) at the Olympics. Gun goes off and Bolt sets a new world record, but right behind Bolt only a mere second or two is the six year old.
Now who do you think the stadium is going nuts over? And that’s where the “crazy” comment comes from. What Apple is doing with this early tech without even using RT cores is pretty “Crazy”

Interesting, I would of expected the 6yr old to be trampled by all the people vying for Usain Bolt's autograph.

Remind me of all the athletes names that came in 2nd to Michael Phelps in the 2016 Olympics?.. my memory's not as good as yours.

 

[svish]

Good to hear more about this. Was surprised with the Mac Pro announcement at WWDC

 

[spaz8]

I'd like to remind ppl that Apple is a $3 trillion dollar company. They could build their own rockets to go to the moon if they wanted to. Its hilarious to hear ppl make excuses about drivers being hard etc. Sure Apple is still subject to the laws of physics but they have pretty unlimited resources, and I don't think have to make a huge profit on absolutely everything they do. They just have to want to do it.

I do think an early post by Mr.Dee might be onto something though. IF Apple starts releasing a new M* Ultra chip every 15 months.. that might mean a new Mac Studio and Mac Pro every 15 months. It might very much be the old EA sports strategy where you don't put in all the features at once but spread them out across many yearly releases. It is painful and terrible for Apple to make pro users wait, for better GPU performance (3d) and ram 256+ amounts.. but in 3yrs you might have a M4 Mac Studio topping out at 320 GB of Ram and starting with 64 GB as the base.

 

[SFjohn]

Apple should put more gpu cores into Apple Silicon than it does now.

It will, next with M3, and more each generation after that… 🤷

 

[Tagbert]

This is one of my favourite things on Macrumors - people insisting you justify your statements of requirements, as they cannot comprehend that someone might actually need more power than them.

Yesterday I was maxing out my 64gb on the studio ultra I have. I honestly thought that would be enough but apparently not the way apple silicon operates. 96gb on the next computer when the M3 is out.

i guess I’m not really trying.

Are you running multiple VMs?

 

[zapmymac]

Am I understanding correctly, that Apple will not allow Nvidia/AMD access? As PCI express is neutral…

Or Apple won’t pay them to write drivers?

Either way, without GPU’s industrial/medical/other can’t do what they need, therefore Apple is no longer in “that” area of “Pro” business.

A/V pros and that’s it. They just refuse to say it. They are segmenting their pro use. Time to move move

 

[internetter]

Just waiting for the announcement of M2 chips hosted on beefy PCIe cards.

 

[MuppetGate]

The real problem is of course the drivers. You can't really expect NVIDIA or AMD to make decent Mac drivers without giving them a large pile of cash.

Which is one reason why it’s not going to happen.

The other reason is that you can’t fit a graphics card in the Vision Pro

 

[mdriftmeyer]

AMD AI at the Data Center Premiere

We'll see far more about their new product line being revealed and the MI300 series of CDNA 3.x based processors with over 146 billion transistors, 128GB HBMe 3.0 and 24 core Zen 4.x chiplet based CPU and GPU cores on a single SoC via a 3D stacked die across a unified memory backplane.

In order for Apple Vision to really make inroads it will need a much larger network to draw upon than what's inside the head set.

Fiber will have to become standard in every home. New advances in Material Science Engineering will have to replace silica based processors and more to scale down the product to be the ultimate end game--a seamless pair of glasses or contact lenses.

Without advanced processing at the Data Center it'll be collecting dust outside of augmented gaming and movie viewing.

The Mac Pro not having a SoC with a unified memory backplane leveraging CXL 2.0 which would guarantee external GPU interfacing is a decision Apple made and will have to be revisited or the product will have a very short cycle.

Showing Pro Tools as the first image in their rolodex of imagery for the Mac Pro Overview on Audio is rather humorous.

Afterburner Claims built-in

New Mac Pro from the Overview page footnotes.

Mac Pro 2019 from the Store Accessories page for Afterburner PCIe x16 via their MPX interface

Source: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MW682AM/A/apple-afterburner-card

Remember, Apple chose PCIe 3.0 for the Mac Pro 2019 even though PCIe 4.0 was released in 2017. PCIe 3.0 was released in 2010.

They highlighted the 2023 Mac Pro having 2x the PCIe bandwidth over the 2019. Sure, because they didn't offer a product with full PCIe 4.0 support that the Radeon 6000WX series is based upon and is still backward compatible with all the Radeon cards released at the original 2019 Mac Pro reveal.

None of the PCIe peripherals [other than SSD/NVme based 5.0 PCIe cards fully leverage 5.0] cited would need more than PCIe 3.0 to use since either they are Audio or Data Array only based cards.

The Up to 22 streams of 8K versus the Afterburner from 4 years ago with Up to 6 streams of 8K and 23 streams of 4K isn't a monumental leap forward as they are making it out to be.

The M1Ultra specs:

Apple unveils M1 Ultra, the world’s most powerful chip for a personal computer

Apple today announced M1 Ultra, the next giant leap for Apple silicon and the Mac.

www.apple.com

This is an incremental improvement over the M1 and produces 4 more 8k ProRes 422 streams. Too bad they never bothered releasing an Afterburner 2.0 card that would have noticeably improved over the past 4 years, but planned obsolescence is what this transition has been about. The only way they could overshadow the 2019 was to let it rot. Why they never went with Zen 4 to marry the GPGPUs and up to 2 TB of DDR4 ECC when it was released as they could have done and PCIe 4.0 will forever remain a mystery.

The biggest miss [deliberate omission] was not supporting CXL 2.0 and folding that into their designs for the future.

Literally, everyone whose who is onboard with CXL consortium:

Our Members - Compute Express Link

Keyword Search: Board of Directors Contributors Adopters Adopters 6Harmonics Inc. Accelerated Tech, Inc Accipiter Systems Inc Achronix Semiconductor Corporation ADTEC Corporation Aeponyx Inc. AIC Inc. AMI US Holdings Inc. Anritsu Corporation Apacer Technology Inc. ASRock Rack Inc. ASUSTek...

www.computeexpresslink.org

CXL 3.0 spec announcement:

https://www.computeexpresslink.org/_files/ugd/0c1418_a859d94c29684b44b91c458d5dae454e.pdf

1. Highlights of the CXL 3.0 specification:
   • Fabric capabilities
     o Multi-headed and Fabric Attached Devices o Enhanced Fabric Management
     o Composable disaggregated infrastructure
   • Better scalability and improved resource utilization o Enhanced memory pooling
     o Multi-level switching
     o New enhanced coherency capabilities o Improved software capabilities
   • Doubles the bandwidth to 64GTs
   • Zero added latency over CXL 2.0
   • Full backward compatibility with CXL 2.0, CXL 1.1, and CXL 1.0
     “CXL 3.0 is a significant step forward in enabling heterogeneous computing,” said Kevin Krewell, principal analyst, TIRIAS Research. “With its expanded features for coherent memory sharing and new fabric capabilities, CXL 3.0 adds new levels of flexibility and composability required by present day and future data centers. The CXL Consortium has made exceptionally fast progress in delivering this important spec to the industry.”

Eventually, Apple will interact heavily in CXL at their data centers. Let's hope they incorporate it into upcoming solutions on their systems.

 

[ninetyCent]

I don’t get this. What are the pci-e slots for then? Wifi card?

 

[MuppetGate]

They could have at least put the SoC on a swappable card. The Mac Pro is essentially a Studio + external PCIe enclosures in a single box. So let people keep the case + PCIe slots by making the SoC replaceable for the next generation Ultra.

Apple: we would prefer folk to buy a new Mac Pro when we release a new chip, and just swap the cards into the new box.

You: I don’t want to buy a new machine. I want to buy a new chip.

Can you see the disconnect?

 

[JimmyHook]

Lol at the folks who want a slower mac just for the sake of expandability

 

[JimmyHook]

Apple: we would prefer folk to buy a new Mac Pro when we release a new chip, and just swap the cards into the new box.

You: I don’t want to buy a new machine. I want to buy a new chip.

Can you see the disconnect?

How would the processor be swappable and efficient simultaneously?

 

[JayKay514]

What does "pro" mean to Apple?

To understand this, we have to remember that Apple, since Jobs' return, tacitly acknowledged that trying to beat an entire industry was pointless ("We have to give up the idea that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose," etc.).

Apple's success strategy since the introduction of the iMac has been to play on their own terms, to identify niches where they can offer a superior user experience and value proposition, solving real problems. That means they don't have to expend R&D to solve problems for unprofitable niches.

Plus, they have been burned by relying on suppliers whose needs often ran counter to Apple's, and being at the mercy of other companies' timetables or technical issues.

Remember PowerPC? It was the next best thing since sliced bread, until it hit a wall in terms of thermal performance and speed, topping out at about 2.7GHz and a 90nm feature size. The top-end dual-processor models pulled an eye-watering 150 watts when idling. With that, they couldn't produce a G5 laptop. Apple moved to Intel as a result.

And all was well, until the trashcan fiasco, and then, the Intel 2019 Mac Pro was a weird hodgepodge with a duct-taped solution (MPX) to provide more power and bandwidth to custom graphics cards, to get around Intel's then-inability to produce Xeon chips with PCIe 4.0 support and more PCIe lanes.

Apple's been designing their own chips for 13 years now, since the iPhone 4 and the iPad in 2010. They've been optimizing them on the power-per-watt model, not the "we have a big box with fans so thermals don't matter" model. And it's been paying off handsomely for them, enabling them to make machines that are thinner, lighter, smaller, and have all-day battery life -- things that matter to their core customers.

The transition to Apple silicon is the apotheosis of their "we make the whole widget" approach, following Alan Kay's dictum that "people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."

Yes, maybe Apple is letting go of certain markets, at least for now. That's freeing them up to focus on what matters to them, hardware that enables them to take big swings like Vision Pro.

Who knows where it'll go in the future - I for one think that if Apple saw a profitable market in it, they might go the route of producing specialized M-series-derived all-GPU chips and all-Neural Engine chips to go into blade servers to offload graphics and ML tasks, but again, is that really where they want to be spending their money?

I do see the M-series getting more unified memory and more GPU cores - then again more complexity always comes with lower yields, at least initially.

 

[User 6502]

Lol at the folks who want a slower mac just for the sake of expandability

Supporting external GPUs wouldn’t make a Mac slower. The M chip would still have exactly the same graphic processing units and it would use it anytime this was the best (faster approach). For a number of tasks, that integrated GPU would be easily outperformed by an external dedicated one, and in these cases the operating system would use that one instead. Supporting external GPUs is not just about expandability, in fact that is only a nice side effect, but mainly about performance.

 

[MuppetGate]

They have nothing to lose if they just allowed a little more control for consumers that spend as much money on a computer as they do on a CAR. They USED to be a lot more of a respectable company when they had the Intel Mac Pros between 2006 and 2013. It's minimal effort on their end to offer some decent GPUs or at least get AMD on board (im not even going to get into how much of an embarrassment they are with their relationship with Nvidia).

The price is on the Mac Pros is disgusting; $3000 more over the Mac Studio just to get PCIe slots. That's a disgusting insult to everyone.

The problem here is that you are just considering what you want from a Mac Pro (and there’s nothing wrong in that), but Apple has to consider the whole ecosystem their customers are buying into: an ecosystem that includes the phones, tablets, computers (traditional and spatial – whatever that means). All those systems have to run on the same architecture.

No one is going to use a Vision Pro fitted with a GPU card cooking their noggin, so you won’t see a GPU card in any future Mac Pros. By limiting themselves to this architecture across the whole ecosystem, they also push themselves to bleed the best performance across the whole ecosystem.

 

[MuppetGate]

What does "pro" mean to Apple?

To understand this, we have to remember that Apple, since Jobs' return, tacitly acknowledged that trying to beat an entire industry was pointless ("We have to give up the idea that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose," etc.).

Apple's success strategy since the introduction of the iMac has been to play on their own terms, to identify niches where they can offer a superior user experience and value proposition, solving real problems. That means they don't have to expend R&D to solve problems for unprofitable niches.

Plus, they have been burned by relying on suppliers whose needs often ran counter to Apple's, and being at the mercy of other companies' timetables or technical issues.

Remember PowerPC? It was the next best thing since sliced bread, until it hit a wall in terms of thermal performance and speed, topping out at about 2.7GHz and a 90nm feature size. The top-end dual-processor models pulled an eye-watering 150 watts when idling. With that, they couldn't produce a G5 laptop. Apple moved to Intel as a result.

And all was well, until the trashcan fiasco, and then, the Intel 2019 Mac Pro was a weird hodgepodge with a duct-taped solution (MPX) to provide more power and bandwidth to custom graphics cards, to get around Intel's then-inability to produce Xeon chips with PCIe 4.0 support and more PCIe lanes.

Apple's been designing their own chips for 13 years now, since the iPhone 4 and the iPad in 2010. They've been optimizing them on the power-per-watt model, not the "we have a big box with fans so thermals don't matter" model. And it's been paying off handsomely for them, enabling them to make machines that are thinner, lighter, smaller, and have all-day battery life -- things that matter to their core customers.

The transition to Apple silicon is the apotheosis of their "we make the whole widget" approach, following Alan Kay's dictum that "people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."

Yes, maybe Apple is letting go of certain markets, at least for now. That's freeing them up to focus on what matters to them, hardware that enables them to take big swings like Vision Pro.

Who knows where it'll go in the future - I for one think that if Apple saw a profitable market in it, they might go the route of producing specialized M-series-derived all-GPU chips and all-Neural Engine chips to go into blade servers to offload graphics and ML tasks, but again, is that really where they want to be spending their money?

I do see the M-series getting more unified memory and more GPU cores - then again more complexity always comes with lower yields, at least initially.

Some great points here, especially the part concerning Apple relying on external suppliers for key components: IBM for the processor, Intel … for the processor. Folk are suggesting that Apple should pay nVidia to write Mac drivers. That would not end well.

 

[MuppetGate]

So basically, if I want improved GPU performance, say, 2 years from now, I will have to buy a brand new entire Mac Pro? Lol are you kidding me? This has to be a joke. Those things run for about 7 grand BEFORE tax. And as we know, those M2 graphics will be out of date in just a couple of years and simply cannot do everything that discrete GPUs can do. Apple is basically putting us on a Mac Pro subscription. I've officially heard it all. 🤣🤣🤣🤣

Well, assuming you really needed a Mac Pro in the first place, you could always sell the old one.

But these are such niche machines it might be tricky to find a local buyer.

Mmm. The subscription might not be a bad idea 🤔

 

[Alan Wynn]

Too busy drinking their own kool-aid to care what real pros want.

Did you purchase a 2019 Mac Pro? Do you work at a facility that purchased one? What is your definition of a “real pro”?

My BF owns a 2019 Mac Pro, and I consult for quite a few studios, post production facilities and visual effects houses who purchased them as well. Just within my close network, I already know of more Mac Pro systems being ordered, than were ordered for the whole last cycle.

The new Mac Pro is basically meant for some YouTuber that "creates content" shooting in 8K Red RAW.

Is that YouTuber making money doing that? Does that not make him or her “a real pro”?

 

[dwaite]

This time it’s a software limitation, not hardware

What's a software limitation?

My understanding is Apple Silicon does not support the memory access modes expected by the hardware, by the drivers, and by applications. This is why eGPU does not work as well (since thats just a PCIe card over a wire).

Patching over this would be ugly and more importantly, slow.

Post on the issue related to Raspberry Pi, which has the same issues (but fewer customer expectations): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27150697 .

Marcan had more posts later related to Asahi Linux development on Twitter, but he unfortunately took down all his posts when he migrated away so that will take some poking around archive.org.

 

[Hank001]

Doesn't needs to be cube sized, about 20 years ago, you could get a real sized, expandable Mac Pro for about $1300-$1500, probably $1800-$2000 actual money.

Correct in my case: I paid € 1699 for the G5 1.6GHz. That includes 21% VAT.

 

[2Stepfan]

ASi means there was never going to be memory or GPU expandability. You can imagine how they’d do it in a geek fantasy, but not as a way of fulfilling apples strategy.

If you want PCI slots for audio, networking, video transcoding you might get a Mac Pro with a $3K premium. You may well get better value from a Studio and an OWC PCI slot expansion box for $300.

No prosumer graphics cards have 192gb ram and apple is likely correct that this may be ample for many people. But it’s still only for particular workflows. Apple will cover most of the important ones, especially video and audio. AI in apples eco system is vastly better served by the dedicated ai processors. Not the same as the pc / gpu stuff, and also not as mature. There will be developments here.

It won’t do gaming, never has, never will. Apple already has all the gaming success it needs, it makes most of the profit available from casual gaming. It does not need to participate in the hardcore pc gaming world. Any desktop / aaa gaming will grow up from mobile / casual gaming with different titles.

This still leaves apple, and Mac fans, with a significant lack of performance at the top end. You either have a workflow with dedicated silicon, or you have much less performance in terms of rendering 3D in real time. Also less benchmarks. It’s quite frustrating at one level. But outside of gaming, most users will be pretty well served.

 

[vladi]

I'd like to remind ppl that Apple is a $3 trillion dollar company. They could build their own rockets to go to the moon if they wanted to. Its hilarious to hear ppl make excuses about drivers being hard etc. Sure Apple is still subject to the laws of physics but they have pretty unlimited resources, and I don't think have to make a huge profit on absolutely everything they do. They just have to want to do it.

I do think an early post by Mr.Dee might be onto something though. IF Apple starts releasing a new M* Ultra chip every 15 months.. that might mean a new Mac Studio and Mac Pro every 15 months. It might very much be the old EA sports strategy where you don't put in all the features at once but spread them out across many yearly releases. It is painful and terrible for Apple to make pro users wait, for better GPU performance (3d) and ram 256+ amounts.. but in 3yrs you might have a M4 Mac Studio topping out at 320 GB of Ram and starting with 64 GB as the base.

Resources can only get you so far and in most cases they will take you on a road to dispose those resources without any wanted results. Having money is one side of the coin, finding and getting the right people who will gel together from the get go is other side of the coin. Apple still has issues navigating around 5G patents and developing their own modem despite having trillions of dollars on their account. Qualcomm owns that piece of the pie and it's really hard to even get in the game let a lone win it when you are late at recognizing the opportunity.

Same thing with GPU, nVidia is for ahead in GPU versatility that barely anyone can catch it and let alone beat it. I will bet my own house that there will be no serious production rendering on Apple ever again like it was twenty years ago. There will be some showcases here and there sure.

 

[k27]

What does "pro" mean to Apple?

John Gruber:

""Pro", in Apple product marketing parlance, does mean professional sometimes (e.g. Mac Pro and iMac Pro). But sometimes it just means premium."

Going Pro

My prediction for new iPhone names next week: iPhone 11, 11 Pro, 11 Pro Max.

daringfireball.net

 

[enb141]

Correct in my case: I paid € 1699 for the G5 1.6GHz. That includes 21% VAT.

I was saving for a computer like that, the last real desktop mac that apple released but then they announced that they were moving to intel.

So I never got a mac desktop.