How do you explain Apple's announcement regarding making it easier to port DX12 games to Mac at WWDC23?
To me, it seems that Apple's strategy has changed and wants to be a major player in AAA gaming again.
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Apple Executive Discusses New Mac Pro's Lack of Graphics Card Support
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How do you explain Apple's announcement regarding making it easier to port DX12 games to Mac at WWDC23?
To me, it seems that Apple's strategy has changed and wants to be a major player in AAA gaming again.
Tech specs:
300W auxiliary power available:
Damn.
300W auxiliary power available:
- Two 6-pin connectors delivering 75W of power each
- One 8-pin connector delivering 150W of power
Damn.
If the memory is in the chip itself doesn’t that mean you can swap/use memory better & faster than if the chip is on the motherboard?
Memory is not just about how much you can address in one go, it’s about the speed of transfer as well. You can create ram disks as memory but it’s slower.
Maybe we stop thinking about traditional windows of architecture when we think about apple?
I don’t think this will be the case. The architecture is far too different to make that kind of comparison. For example look at MacBook Pros. Under Intel, you’d need to order much more ram in your configuration than with the M series chips and the performance of the M series chips blow away the Intel ones performance wise.
I had a top of the line Intel 16 inch + 64 gigs ram and my M2 MacBook Air with 16 gigs ram blew it away in absolutely every single test I did from using Houdini, to editing video in Final Cut, to making music in Logic.
100% this. I’ve said it before I‘ll say it again, you can’t compare hardware specs across architecture like this. I mentioned above how my M2 MacBook Air with 16 gigs ram blew my 16 inch Intel Macbook Pro with 64 gigs ram out of the water using really RAM heavy applications like Houdini, Final Cut and Logic.
Yes, the “Pros” who will buy the new Mac Pro will not be on Macrumors or YouTube complaining about it. Apple knows what they are doing. The higher end Pros will buy it. The cost and power vs. the previous Intel models cannot be compared.
This Mac Pro is not for the average buyer. More so for business and speciality markets. Glad to see Apple still is looking at the higher end needed consumer. I am a Mac Studio more so guy (and need), but will be interested in the bench marks and Mac Pro graphical performance with the +after burner internals. Etc. might be a beast!
This Mac Pro might surprise and shock people. Though it is the “same” CPU and GPU as Mac Studio, I am guessing that the performance will not be the same.
We will see in the next weeks as consumers get it and do their test comparisons….
Funny now that the AI revolution is being lead almost entirely by nVidia... It doesn't matter how fast the Apple GPU is, it doesn't run CUDA and therefore isn't compatible with any of the locally run AI software. In a few years AI will be ubiquitous, and will be used by everyone, especially developers.
I would have hoped that such an expensive machine would be seen as an investment for the future, and would at least be "ready" to run the technology that is very obviously going to define the world in the next few years.
It's like shipping a top-end computer with no possibility for internet access whatsoever in 1998. If as a developer or artist, you're interested in running or training AI in the future (which you should be), then that leaves Apple completely out of your range of options.
I would have hoped that such an expensive machine would be seen as an investment for the future, and would at least be "ready" to run the technology that is very obviously going to define the world in the next few years.
It's like shipping a top-end computer with no possibility for internet access whatsoever in 1998. If as a developer or artist, you're interested in running or training AI in the future (which you should be), then that leaves Apple completely out of your range of options.
Right, but this only applies on a small scale for regular users. If we move towards things like Machine Learning, AI - for example training models and so on or something like 3D modeling and rendering, there's a massive difference between 190GB vs. 1,5TB. And this is a machine aimed at professionals, the M2 family is great including the Ultra model however for specific use cases there are severe limitations, GPU and RAM being the obvious ones.
Higher end professionals dealing in specific fields who need to work locally without proxies will not be super excited about this as both RAM limitations and GPU limitations are quite crippling. A nice machine for various artists however if you need the RAM M2 Ultra cannot do anything to compensate for it.
It's not though, that's what I'm getting at. With the way the chip architecture works the number of gigs of ram you have is vastly different operation wise than on paper.
EDIT: It's like how people stopped using Ghz speed on processors to determine how fast they are. That number means nothing when there's underlying changes to the architecture like how many CPU cores exist for example.
That's certainly the case for many use cases and scenarios and the SSDs are crazy fast however just picture other uses cases like ML on a massive data set, various simulations - industrial (for example simulated PLCs), large complex systems like neural networks, weather forecasts, military usage, scientific simulations and then common use cases like running multiple VM clusters or database systems (as you might not want to have these in the cloud for compliance/security reasons) and so on.
It's not just about ARM vs. x86/x64 architecture I'm afraid, this is likely Apple reusing old form factor and trying to be as efficient as possible with the supply chain as possible to maximize profit.
I understand the differences between ARM and x64 architectures quite well but you are saying is simply not true for professional use cases, the RAM difference is enormous and not usable for complex simulations. Same about GPU support that's used in various ML use cases. Or do you think you can train neural networks on M2 Ultra? If Apple was serious about actual professionals (not just artists), they would work with NVIDIA and others on this machine.
I might be interested in Apple's ARM SoCs if I can run Stable Diffusion on it with reasonable performance. Now it's just me trying not to purchase one of Jensen's cards at a terrible price.
It is essentially a Mac Studio with a $3,000 case.
Apple are really losing sight of a lot of markets. The iPhone and the greed of Cook are really killing Apples computing division.
They need to stop telling customers what Apple thinks they need and instead listed to what the customers need.
The new Pro is a step back from the previous one and each one has been a step back compared to the G5 / Intel from that era.
They designed a stupid chip what can't use external GPUs, it is their poor planning and engineering that is the issue.
And $3k for a case is an insult.
Apple are really losing sight of a lot of markets. The iPhone and the greed of Cook are really killing Apples computing division.
They need to stop telling customers what Apple thinks they need and instead listed to what the customers need.
The new Pro is a step back from the previous one and each one has been a step back compared to the G5 / Intel from that era.
They designed a stupid chip what can't use external GPUs, it is their poor planning and engineering that is the issue.
And $3k for a case is an insult.
In many ways a colossal failure. The case is completely oversized/engineered for that chip and its thermals, as it seems to do just fine in the Mac studio. It’s a silly combination.
But they were forced to slap it in there to say “See, we’ve made the complete transition!”.
Why they did it this way one can only speculate. Is the studio covering a sufficient part of their intended market? Was it Incompatible with their unified memory paradigm? Was it too difficult and there may be video cards coming down the line? Who knows…
But they were forced to slap it in there to say “See, we’ve made the complete transition!”.
Why they did it this way one can only speculate. Is the studio covering a sufficient part of their intended market? Was it Incompatible with their unified memory paradigm? Was it too difficult and there may be video cards coming down the line? Who knows…
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NVIDIA created drivers, without getting paid. Apple just didn’t approve their latest ones. That’s why they haven’t tried again.
They are not the small minority they used to be by any stretch of the imagination. Big data and ML work are very, very common today compared with 5-10 years ago. But most of it is taking place in the cloud. Apple had to do this Mac Pro to close out the silicon migration but I expect it'll be the last one we see. By excluding commodity GPUs on the hardware side and open programming interfaces (CUDA, OpenCL) on the software side they are going all in on client computing. The future Mac Pro is the Studio, which is basically the trash can in another form factor.
Open source developers are improving performance iteratively on models for Apple Silicon. Check out the projects and see if anything meets your performance needs. (For me, I just use Draw Things on an iPad and get images in under a minute, I’m guessing a Mac would be faster).
I've been following the MacOS development of SD. It's frustrating.
I can get 11-12 images in a minute on my RTX 3060 Ti.
And how many of those workstation purchases are for boring cheap boxes running office for big corporations? What proportion of those require Mac Pro like specs? I bet it’s a small number…
I'm not sure I quite understand, but in the presentation last week, the presenter stated that the new MacPro will support "video I/O" cards.
