Apple Silicon Mac Pro Reportedly Not Coming at WWDC, Mac Studio Refresh Likely Delayed Until M3

[theorist9]

Before the 2013 model you could get one for 1/2 the price of the gaudy $6000 art example. This line actually started with the 2005 dual G5 water cooled tower (PowerMac) and then switch to intel (renamed Mac Pro). For a Number of years it was updated and then that small 2013 Power Mac was where it all went wrong.

It actually started with the air-cooled PowerMac G5 in 2003. I know because I did all my computational development work in grad school on the dual-1.8 GHz version. The perforrmance was a bit disappointing (the midrange PC I'd bought the year before had faster SC speeds), but I loved how quiet and reliable it was (I think I rebooted once/year). Plus neither Linux nor Windows offered its combination of a slick UI, the ability to run Adobe CC and MS Office, and (essential for my work) a native Unix interface.

 

[Twigg90]

My hope with this situation is due to COVID, chip shortages and unforeseen factors they are further behind in the feature sets of the M chips then they expected to be. Like there were things and features they were expecting to be able to get into M2 that have been pushed to back to M3 or M4 etc.

Apple is too smart and big of a company to have just woke up and realized “We can’t make this work” for what “Pros” expect. Especially after the trash can debacle. While the Mac Pro is definitely their least selling Mac, it also is the most demanding in terms of what they buyer expects, It has to “do” the most.


As far as the Mac Pro is concerned I think they expected to be further in the development of “how” external ram and graphics card will work on Apple silicon. So they are a year+ behind developing the “professional” or modular aspects of Apple silicon as a platform.

I’m sure the Apple Silicon Mac Pro will work with my Sonnet 4 Port USB-C Card and M.2 4x4 PCI card which is a good chunk of what I need. Expandable memory would be nice, especially considering it would be on top of the 128 or 256GB built into the board. I’m least expecting to be able to get my Macvidcards 6600XT to work but hopefully this delay is helping that become a reality, I’m still going to plug it in regardless!


I believe the power supply on the 2019 Mac Pro is on the bottom… so and this is complete speculation but I hope the main logic or the actual SoC AS board like slides into the power supply like a PCI card but different. Then that maybe could be upgraded, if Apple allowed swaps. Seems like a weird business to get into, just a thought.

 

[Serqetry]

AI-powered processes in all our Creative Suites, color postproduction software, music production, video production, 3d / game dev is the future for a next decade. You NEED swappable graphic cards because thats their resource. Apple has to either pivot and create some open platform with a custom M chip or just abandon the true "pro" market and focus on nice web browsing laptops - which they have been doing for past several years.

Totally agree. I am no fan of NVidia but with the world going AI-crazy any new Mac Pro absolutely has to have PCIe slots that support GPUs. All the talk of "that's not all PCIe slots are good for" is nonsense... every other use pales in comparison to GPUs.

I wouldn't be surprised Apple realized this relatively recently with the explosion of AI and had to scrap a pointless Mac Pro design that can't handle GPUs. Maybe they will fix the GPU problem with M3, or better yet create a new class of ARM CPUs that isn't so limited by the SOC design of the M series. Either way, we're definitely not getting this dumb M2 Mac Pro with no GPU support that is no better than a Mac Studio that Mark Gurman has been hallucinating about. Apple's just not that dumb... they already took way longer than they said they would to make a new Mac Pro, so they'll either take longer to get it right, or they won't do it at all.

 

[Twigg90]

IMO those would be bad moves for Apple:

1) In putting the Macs on Apple Silicon, Apple is pursuing both horizontal and vertical integration. Adding the Macs to AS integrates the Macs horizontally with the rest of their products. And it gives them vertical control over most of the Mac hardware stack. Putting the MacPro on x86 would be a step backwards.

2) Going back to x86 is inconsistent with their push towards greater efficiency.

3) Going back to x86 would require them to continue to support two separate platforms for a very small slice of the market.

4) While the MacPro's market is small, its visibility is high—it's their HALO product. It would be a marketing disaster to have their HALO product be based on a tech they are competing against everywhere else. It would be like GM manufacturing the Corvette using the engine from the Ford Mustang.

I'd rather wait and see what they are able to do with AS for the Mac Pro. That's far more interesting than just using someone else's processor.

Great thought process not to mention one day there will be the great purging on all Intel binaries in MacOS.

X86 is done in the Apple world, period.
There’s no going back.
Maybe not today but in 5 years or so the OS just flat out isn’t going to have the code. Same thing they did with snow leopard and PPC.

 

[257Loner]

At this point, after waiting so long for a "pro" desktop, I kinda agree. Seeing how AI whether we want it or not is becoming a part of creative process, its hard to imagine a "pro" machine that doesn't meet the standards needed by AI applications - for instance some of them need a lot of graphic card memory (I'm not speaking strictly about image generation but AI in general - it uses graphic cards for its computations). Some of the new AI tech NEEDS nvidia chip - they don't run on anything else. And let's not forget how all of market is developing - nvidia is more and more connected to AI and declared their commitment to keep this route for foreseeable future. Soon pro apps will have a huge support of AI stuff like generative image up-res'ing, denoising and all that midjourney bs (which I hate ). So to sum up - if apple doesn't figure out a way to have a PCI port for a peripheral graphic card in their Mac Pro and make their M-whatever chips work efficiently with external graphic cards, it's no longer a Pro machine just because of this. It's already obsolete. From a perspective of a "Pro" machine, this was a stupid, narrow minded choice on their behalf - making an all-in-one chip, with dedicated graphic cores, completely ignoring what nvidia is doing. It's apparent they totally missed the AI revolution that is unfolding right before us - just like few other compenies did, including Alphabet (Google). THAT is the visionary aspect of a CEO that Tim Cook lacks. He's good with numbers, but Jobs would have seen it coming and would direct Apple development accordingly.
Considering the path they chose, maybe it's just better to leave the pro market than be a subject of ridicule. It's a niche market anyway. M chip machines are awesome for your everyday applications, including video editing. But it's not a future-proof machine and that's what one should expect from a "pro", expensive workstation. They committed to a certain architecture of M chips which is not suitable for cutting edge and future applications, unless they find a way to open the M chip ecosystem (I'm not a chip architect, I have no idea if that's even doable).
I wonder why noone is talking about this aspect of pro machines - maybe because youtube apple rumor bloggers don't know sh*t and just copy/paste stuff they read at twitter regarding next rumors, creating moronic content that contests their videos from just a few days earlier...
AI-powered processes in all our Creative Suites, color postproduction software, music production, video production, 3d / game dev is the future for a next decade. You NEED swappable graphic cards because thats their resource. Apple has to either pivot and create some open platform with a custom M chip or just abandon the true "pro" market and focus on nice web browsing laptops - which they have been doing for past several years.

I'd like to piggyback off of what you're saying and add that due to the importance of AI processes in future applications, Apple will need to add to their A-series and M-series chips some cores (ASICs) that specialize in AI and ray tracing. Their chips already have cores that specialize in Machine Learning and video encoding/decoding. Now they'll need to add more specialized cores for AI and ray tracing.

As you were saying, the way to do this on the Mac Pro at the fastest speeds possible is by offering compatibility with top-shelf GPUs.

 

[Twigg90]

The new Mac Pro... might... might ...be using a new "system design"... The smaller rumored Mac Pro could have been an adequate solution until this new Mac Pro is ready... but delays caused it to get chopped up... and stuffed into a large Mac mini case (Mac Studio).

For the new Mac Pro... The main CPU... Apple M2 based... is used to run the day to day OS and "generic apps"... and handle the traffic (this is important) to the real power... the compute modules.

These modules could be PCIe 5.0 based cards that hold "special Apple Silicon" chips... one... or two chips per card... and up to 3 cards in each Mac Pro. Something like a SUPER Afterburner cards (Afterburner might have been an experiment)... these compute modules could also have their own dedicated memory per chip... thats why there will be no upgradable memory.

Why we didn't get this new Mac Pro sooner... maybe 🦠 and/or 💰

This isn’t really different than the daughter RAM boards in the early Mac Pros, just can’t buy from third party retailers.

 

[lysingur]

lol what? largely the transition has been seamless and results have been amazing. These apple silicon chips are amazing. Taking a longer time to engineer something isn't poor planning. Planning and actually engineering are very different.

If Apple really understands the difference between planning and engineering, Tim Cook shouldn't have set such a firm deadline for the transition. But he did. He's either very naïve or full of hubris. Take your pick.

It's highly likely that we won't see a new Mac Pro before 2024 considering Apple's focus this year is its AR headset. As I said in my earlier post: Apple f*ked up. Most people are just in denial.

 

[Boil]

If Apple really understands the difference between planning and engineering, Tim Cook shouldn't have set such a firm deadline for the transition. But he did. He's either very naïve or full of hubris. Take your pick.

It's highly likely that we won't see a new Mac Pro before 2024 considering Apple's focus this year is its AR headset. As I said in my earlier post: Apple f*ked up. Most people are just in denial.


View attachment 2192382

"and first system ships by year's end, beginning a two-year transition"

Meaning November 10, 2020 was the start of the two-year clock, not June 22, 2020, which was when the transition was announced...

Regardless, whenever Apple finally announces the ASi Mac Pro, Tim Cook gonna get a chance to do his Maxwell Smart impression...

 

[lysingur]

"and first system ships by year's end, beginning a two-year transition"

Meaning November 10, 2020 was the start of the two-year clock, not June 22, 2020, which was when the transition was announced...

Regardless, whenever Apple finally announces the ASi Mac Pro, Tim Cook gonna get a chance to do his Maxwell Smart impression...

Does it really matter whether it's June 22, 2020, or November 10, 2020? 😆

It would be hilarious if, by November 10, 2023, an ASi Mac Pro is still nowhere to be found on planet Earth. And it's what most likely will happen.

 

[Boil]

Does it really matter whether it's June 22, 2020, or November 10, 2020? 😆

It would be hilarious if, by November 10, 2023, an ASi Mac Pro is still nowhere to be found on planet Earth. And it's what most likely will happen.

@Mago (now) says May 2nd (or 9th) for the ASi Mac Pro...

As for "...an ASi Mac Pro is still nowhere to be found on planet Earth.", pretty sure there are a few variants kicking around the Mothership right now...

 

[RedWeasel]

Oh no! What will the "Pros" use?!? LOL

Windows PCs?

 

[Bodhitree]

The thing is, shoehorning PCIe into an M-series computer is not straightforward, at least the bus will need access to memory and it will need to interface with the SoC. Because the memory controller is on the SoC and the memory is tightly integrated, it may well need an entirely new chip with its own die and so on.

 

[RedWeasel]

The thing is, shoehorning PCIe into an M-series computer is not straightforward, at least the bus will need access to memory and it will need to interface with the SoC. Because the memory controller is on the SoC and the memory is tightly integrated, it may well need an entirely new chip with its own die and so on.

AFAIK Apple Silicon supports PCIe already, for example for Thunderbolt.

 

[lysingur]

@Mago (now) says May 2nd (or 9th) for the ASi Mac Pro...

As for "...an ASi Mac Pro is still nowhere to be found on planet Earth.", pretty sure there are a few variants kicking around the Mothership right now...

A prototype in the Mothership isn't given a part number. So by definition, it isn't a "Mac Pro". Nice try though.

Here is a link for your edification.

@Mago (now) says May 2nd (or 9th) for the ASi Mac Pro...

I'm getting the feeling that someone on planet Earth will be disappointed on May 10th. 😂

 

[richinaus]

Disney, LucasFilm, Pixar, ...

Do they?
Also if they do just use Apple (not just video editing) but all their visual rendering needs, I am sure they know Apples roadmap given the links at ceo level.

 

[Bodhitree]

AFAIK Apple Silicon supports PCIe already, for example for Thunderbolt.

You’re absolutely correct, I was unaware of the Thunderbolt standard beyond just “its a bit like USB only faster”. Just did a little background reading. Yes that means the memory controller will likely already support the PCIe bus and it should be relatively easy to add PCIe slots to an Apple Silicon Mac.

 

[Mr Rib]

I don't understand why the Mac Pro matters. I can't even imagine they make money on it. 99.875% (or more) of posters here will never own one. Why do you care? So you can brag to Windows users about how fast a computer you don't own is? Who cares.

I would be getting one, if it was a true pro machine. So there you have it, we're already above 0,125%

 

[Mr Rib]

M2 = 100GB/s UMA bandwidth
M2 Pro = 200GB/s UMA bandwidth
M2 Max = 400GB/s UMA bandwidth
M1 Ultra = 800GB/s UMA bandwidth

My bad - M2 Pro memory is 5 times slower, M2 Max memory is "only" 3 times slower than 4090 series cards Let's not forget it still needs to efficiently manage and allocate the unified memory since, well, it's shared for everything - unlike VRAM in a graphic card which is sitting there empty waiting only for the GPU to kick in. Also that is only my guess but I doubt M silicon is using it's unified memory with 100% efficiency because that would mean all the software needs to be well optimised and coded. And if it's managed by the M silicon, queueing data access will introduce latency.

What does M1 Ultra performance have to do with anything? The absolute cheapest model of M1 Ultra is $4k currently.
$4k buys you a PC which SMOKES M1 Ultra in 3D / AI / Adobe creative suite applications (single core performance is the only important thing with Adobe - because they don't care and didnt optimise their software). The only thing it *might* be faster in is 4K/8K encoding.

All Apple can do when communicating with someone interested in high performance is lie by showing a misleading graph of how M1 outperforms a 3080 series card at low wattage, which has absolutely no meaning in real life. I have no idea who came up with that graph but it was soooo stupid...

M silicon is cool tech which freed Apple from other (sh*tty on their own terms) vendors such as intel and nvidia.
But the path they chose is not for prosumers. And it was a wise move - it's just a tiny niche market anyway, comparing to the buying potential of all other customers. The benefits of closed architecture vastly outweigh the cons. But they should have declared clearly there is no Mac Pro coming in foreseeable future - since they did declare its coming and didn't deliver. After they realised where the tech world is going (good job not noticing it sooner...), it was fair to announce something, even between the lines, what the future holds. Are we getting semi-open M silicon? Are we getting binned version of regular M silicon? Or maybe a dedicated, GPU-enhanced M silicon just for Pro model? I'm in the market for a Mac Pro, I dont know if I should be waiting or just give up. Considering they didn't deliver on their promise, they owe us at least a controlled leak of what's going on...

 

[bice]

But what if it didn't have to be a janky Hackintosh experience? If something like this existed (which I think is very unlikely anyway), presumably there could be some close vendor partnerships and certification.

Apple did have a similar program back in Mac OS 7 times, though I am not aware of how good compatibility was. One of the major issues would be that officially supporting macOS on third-party systems means a huge variety more hardware combinations to support.

The clones worked fine. MacOs was craptastic back then though.

 

[CraigJDuffy]

What Apple rumors are nowadays:

- under display FaceID… delayed, not coming until 202x and when that time nears, delayed again
- under display TouchID… delayed, not coming until 202x and when that time nears, delayed again
- iMac 27… same
- blood glucose monitoring for Apple Watch… same
- bigger MacBook Air… same
- cheaper AppleTV… same
- new Mac Pro… same
- more than 5K display… same

The sensation is always that Apple underdelivers…

It’s almost like internal development is a hard and long process and leakers jumping the gun and saying that “ X unfinished product will release this year” gives people unrealistic expectations

 

[bobcomer]

well if they had an way to have say dual socket then they can share CPU design and don't really need to make an 1 chip monster chip.

But that ignores the elephant in the room -- Apple silicon chips are oriented more towards performance/efficiency, the Mac Pro has to ignore efficiency to get enough performance. They have to compete with Intel/NVidea, and they have a solid performance background.

 

[bobcomer]

Do you upgrade your car, put different exhaust on it, change out the ignition system, pull out and replace the entire engine, increase the size of the gas tank? Do you even change your own oil or replace the batteries/windshield wipers? What about if you own an EV? Will you be able to change or upgrade that? Why should you do any of the equivalent stuff with your computer?

At least they can be upgraded. Whether I do it or hire it done really doesn't matter. I know I've did upgrades and replaces on many many cars over the years, including my current car.

How about your TV? Do you harbor any notions it can be upgraded or repaired if it breaks, because you should abandon them if you do.

A TV is an appliance, nothing more, so it really helps the other side of the argument than yours. The Mac is getting WAY to close to the same, though I wouldn't call it an appliance -- yet. The software itself makes it not appliance to me.

I just replaced a washer and dryer because it was cheaper to replace than to repair, not to mention that the parts would have been backordered for 5 months.

Appliance.

 

[Realityck]

What does M1 Ultra performance have to do with anything? The absolute cheapest model of M1 Ultra is $4k currently.
$4k buys you a PC which SMOKES M1 Ultra in 3D / AI / Adobe creative suite applications (single core performance is the only important thing with Adobe - because they don't care and didnt optimise their software). The only thing it *might* be faster in is 4K/8K encoding.

How about way faster recovery if you have your Windows OS tank because of malware. The way you reinstall windows can be an awful expensive tumble to restore comparably. As much as you pitch Adobe Creative Suite, it’s not like I heard echos from others, that’s like someone working in graphic/pubs as representative of most users. Yes i think your points are good it’s just a lot of us don’t relate to that scenario for why we use Macs.

 

[steve123]

The thing is, shoehorning PCIe into an M-series computer is not straightforward, at least the bus will need access to memory and it will need to interface with the SoC. Because the memory controller is on the SoC and the memory is tightly integrated, it may well need an entirely new chip with its own die and so on.

Apple silicon already has several PCIe buses. In terminal type ioreg | grep apci and you will see several root controllers, bridges and devices.

 

[steve123]

$4k buys you a PC which SMOKES M1 Ultra in 3D / AI

You have mentioned this several times in similarly vague terms. By "smokes" do you mean smokescreen? I encourage you to provide specifics and evidence to back up those claims.