Apple wants to cater to businesses. Not hobbyists creating little revenue from a Mac Pro but are looking for a quality tower.
That market's gone with the wind.
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Apple Executive Discusses New Mac Pro's Lack of Graphics Card Support
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That market's gone with the wind.
Funny that, they must have a different definition of optimized because a 4090 in a random assortment of hardware sure as hell feels optimized.
Apple play this synchronous, all encompassing, entrenched ideology to market their approach - which I’m sorry.. has its limitations, as this release highlights.
Its been proven over decades that you can mix and match to a high level of efficiency.
Sure, it’s not “in house efficiency” but it’s pretty damn close, and gives the user choice and upgradeability.
A lot of people are making assumptions without having all the facts. Just wait till the machine is tested in the real world.
They care more about shareholder's value than any synthetic benchmark results.
Beating a RTX 4090 does not improve their bonuses.
It's a specialized workstation, not a general purpose one.
I don't think Apple ever "pushed" eGPUs - they just tolerated them because the Intel architecture allowed for it.
Actually memory for the GPU is one advantage Apple's approach has: you can dedicate most of the 192 GB of Unified RAM to the GPU, an amount that you can't do with any desktop GPU that I'm aware of.
LPDDR5 is a low power version derived from standard DDR5, which is not the point. The point is that there is no exclusive LPDDR5 for ARM and another for X86, which was the original comment that I repplied.
Actually probably didn't happen that way. There are a large number of folks who 'claim' that was true, but lots of evidence that it wasn't. It wasn't people complaining. It was a narrow segment of folks telling Apple they would spend big money on systems if they did. "You screwed up .. do exactly what I'm telling you to do" or "See this HP Z8 ... just copy that. " is substantively different than " if you make a $10K workstation I'll buy 5 or 10 of them".
It is also different than more than a few tech sites 'clowning' Apple for approaching the 1500 days (well over a 1000) since last update mark.
The MP 2019 came and the entry price went up 100% . Who was complaining that the Mac Pro price was too low???? There was a substantial number of people who complained who did not get what they wanted. ( old 5,1 chassis with a barely warmed over new motherboard at the old $2,500 starting point. )
Apple delivered the most expensive GPUs they ever produced. Secured and hacker resistant firmware. Afterburner ( a prototype of ProRes processing soon to be put into Apple SoCs. ) . Duo GPUs with Inifinity Fabric; a field prototype for two die shared memory communication.
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Interesting. But wouldn't that just be done on software? If so, maybe they are thinking about that for the future?
Oh, you sweet summer child. People in the MR forums will be complaining about that with righteous indignation until the sun collapses. It brings them so much joy!
Literally what the Mac Studio is, just two Mini's stacked together to allow the same specs as now the Mac Pro.
That YouTuber is definitely MKBHD.
Yeah that's been a problem Apple has been leading for a while, they insist that they're selected internal GPU is the solution and it just isn't, it already looks like from benchmarks the M2 Ultra isn't the best processor ever on a PC like Apple is claiming.
We all assumed that was the case, and the Mac Pro would be the grand ending to the transition, but a year and a half after the M1 ultra was introduced in the Mac Studio the new Mac Pro was essentially the same thing keeping the old design with the PCI expansion and a questionable $1000 price increase.
This is a great point, if Apple couldn't commit to any other upgradability them a swappable PCB with the Ultra processor would be of some value. The problem is Apple wants to encourage people to upgrade so perhaps they plan to keep the Mac Pro around by simply updating the processor annually.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.
Sure, the Studio + enclosures isn't as nice as a single box solution, but at least it allows to swap out only the Studio and keep the rest. The idea that Apple one day might have something to compete with RTX6000/8000 workstation cards or even A100 found in the Nvidia DGX stations is officially wishful thinking now.
I think the Mac Pro is more an aspirational product than something meant for industries it once targeted. But there are professionals who prefer the Mac experience for what it offers. Powerful commercial apps like AutoDesk Maya and Adobe Creative Suite are available for it. The fact that these companies are still
investing development for the Mac would suggest the future is bright for professional creatives and there is a high option if they do need it.
it’s quite simple. If you’re pushing your workstation to the limits these days, there’s a fair chance you’re pushing an Nvidia gpu along with it. Nvidia offers the most powerful frameworks, languages and hardware to help you render, model or train whatever the hell you want.
Apple’s GPU capabilities are impressive, but nowhere near the scale and power of Nvidia. Why on earth would you spend this much money and marry yourself to the Apple ecosystem, when you can go the proven, powerful, cost-effective route?
Apple’s GPU capabilities are impressive, but nowhere near the scale and power of Nvidia. Why on earth would you spend this much money and marry yourself to the Apple ecosystem, when you can go the proven, powerful, cost-effective route?
People here will say, apple are worth the money and if you buy those computers, then those get self paid in matter of months.
I really don't see who will buy this 🤔
While the new Mac Pro features six available PCI Express expansion slots for audio, video capture, storage, networking, and more, the desktop tower is no longer compatible with graphics cards. Instead, graphics processing is handled entirely by the M2 chip, which includes up to a 76-core GPU that can access up to 192GB of unified memory.
Apple's hardware engineering chief John Ternus briefly touched on the matter in an interview with Daring Fireball's John Gruber last week, explaining that expandable GPU support for Apple silicon is not something that the company has pursued.
"Fundamentally, we've built our architecture around this shared memory model and that optimization, and so it's not entirely clear to me how you'd bring in another GPU and do so in a way that is optimized for our systems," Ternus told Gruber. "It hasn't been a direction that we wanted to pursue."
Another limitation of the new Mac Pro compared to the Intel-based model is the lack of user-upgradeable RAM, given the unified memory is soldered to the M2 Ultra chip. In addition, the Intel-based model could be configured with up to 1.5TB of RAM, which is 8× as much as the 192GB maximum for the Apple silicon model.
There are certainly advantages to the new Mac Pro and its unified architecture. For example, Apple says the new Mac Pro is up to 3× faster than the Intel-based model for certain real-world workflows like video transcoding and 3D simulations. For video processing, Apple says the new Mac Pro's performance is equivalent to an Intel-based model with seven Afterburner cards. For overall CPU performance, the new Mac Pro's $6,999 base model is up to 2× faster than a 28-core Intel-based Mac Pro, which started at $12,999.
The new Mac Pro is available to order now, and launches in stores on Tuesday. Customers who don't need PCI Express expansion should consider the Mac Studio, which can be configured with the M2 Ultra chip for $3,000 less than the Mac Pro.
Article Link: Apple Executive Discusses New Mac Pro's Lack of Graphics Card Support
Clearly the executives in charge of the MacPro development team lack the age, depth of experience, and imagination to lead the team.
For a start instead of 7 last generation Pcie slots. The 2023 Mac Pro could have been marginally improved by having two PCIe 5th gen slots, and four actively cooled 5th gen PCIe M.2 raid 5 bays.
Going down that route would have vastly improved the performance, provided some genuine value add (from the engineering team, and been far more user friendly to the customer.
Still would have been a market flop, but one demonstrating next generation potential, rather than merely being a fat big brother with a broken leg to the Mac Studio.
Amy halfwit with a moderate level of electrical engineering expertise, and the keys to Apples engineering cabinet could just have easily gutted the 2019 Mac Pro. Printed a black motherboard and slapped the pcie sockets and the SoC on it.
The real genius applied to the 2023 MacPro was coming up with the secrecy that accompanied the build, given how hard the engineering team member responsible (can’t have been more than one in on the secret) would have been laughing, and cackling in the further east corner of the basement.
Come on Apple, all your engineering person needed to do was replace one of the studio nand socket and controller chips, with a single pcie gen 5 controller chip and an m.2 NVMe socket, and Apple would have doubled its Mac Studio UltraPlus, and MaxPlus offerings over and above the standard Max and Ultrastudio -even if that swap out required the loss of a thunderbolt4 port.
‘Do the Job right or Go home!’ Is a message Apple’s executive need to relearn, because frankly way too many off them are too focused on merely showing up to work.
For a start instead of 7 last generation Pcie slots. The 2023 Mac Pro could have been marginally improved by having two PCIe 5th gen slots, and four actively cooled 5th gen PCIe M.2 raid 5 bays.
Going down that route would have vastly improved the performance, provided some genuine value add (from the engineering team, and been far more user friendly to the customer.
Still would have been a market flop, but one demonstrating next generation potential, rather than merely being a fat big brother with a broken leg to the Mac Studio.
Amy halfwit with a moderate level of electrical engineering expertise, and the keys to Apples engineering cabinet could just have easily gutted the 2019 Mac Pro. Printed a black motherboard and slapped the pcie sockets and the SoC on it.
The real genius applied to the 2023 MacPro was coming up with the secrecy that accompanied the build, given how hard the engineering team member responsible (can’t have been more than one in on the secret) would have been laughing, and cackling in the further east corner of the basement.
Come on Apple, all your engineering person needed to do was replace one of the studio nand socket and controller chips, with a single pcie gen 5 controller chip and an m.2 NVMe socket, and Apple would have doubled its Mac Studio UltraPlus, and MaxPlus offerings over and above the standard Max and Ultrastudio -even if that swap out required the loss of a thunderbolt4 port.
‘Do the Job right or Go home!’ Is a message Apple’s executive need to relearn, because frankly way too many off them are too focused on merely showing up to work.
The architecture doesn’t matter a bit, if one of the cars was designed to fail on the showroom floor it only becomes valuable as a collectors piece sitting in a museum. A car with 10 wheels is certainly going to go faster than a 4 wheel car with a flat tire. And a four wheel car faster than a ten wheel car if the ten wheeler is lacking a motor.
The product is the whole of its parts, and the design philosophy. In the case of the 2023 MacPro the philosophy seems to be nah we didn’t bother, and we don’t care we are just charging a premium.
The toggle would have been in the software yes, but there would need to be firmware work done to enable it; and of course they'd have had to make sure the cooling system they put in there could handle it (I'm just noting the case has the room for it, not necessarily that Apple has configured things with the M2 Mac Pro such that it can actually dissipate that level of heat).
The M2 Mac Pro is what it is at this point. I agree with what some others in this thread have noted; that it does seem like this move was to get the line up completely onto the M-series chips and finish the transition away from Intel. This allows them to start the clock on the end of support for x86 within MacOS. I'm not at this point pessimistic that their won't be an M3 Mac Pro, I think there will be. I'm really curious to see if Apple will try again for the "Extreme" with the M3 generation. The gains of the next TSMC process + updates to the architecture (possible ray tracing additions) + a (very) maybe "extreme" version means that Apple has multiple vectors where they can continue to inject a lot more performance into this machine.
I believe when they looked at the numbers and who was using what along with any detriment on performance of the system caused from breaching the unified memory integration, it wasn’t worth it. Being able to offer 3 times the performance at $6000 lower seems like a win.
To be fair Apples two GPUs are iGPUs that share a die with the CPU. Both Apple GPUs die space together is probably a fraction of the size of the 4090 die and separated by the Fusion connector.
I would agree for the synthetic bench’s like Geekbench. But the Blender bench scenes aren’t “behind the scene“ process. Apple has notoriously had bad bench score on Blender Bench. Blender’s bench uses real world Artist created scenes and stresses the GPU and CPU for an extended period doing raytracing task.
If they were seeing better performance their way than what users think they want they should do what they did. I think a lot of the handwringing is because some already have these devices and want to be able to use them since they paid for them. A system is only as good as its weakest link, so introducing external GPUs into a system running many times faster with full system memory access could dramatically degrade performance. At that point Apple would be blamed for those adjustments and slowdown.
And for good measure it $6000 less