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Apple Silicon Mac Pro Said to Feature Same Design as 2019 Model, No User-Upgradable RAM
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I believe a lower cost of entry for base model could make this a win. (Like, a LOT lower though)
re: "Just get a Mac Studio". Meh. The more 3rd party peripherals, cables, hubs, and expansion chassis you need to rely on, the greater opportunity for issues to arise. I prefer to keep everything in a box. No fuss, no muss. (And no spaghetti cable hell!)
The Mac Studio is more of a prosumer solution, IMO.
re: "Just get a Mac Studio". Meh. The more 3rd party peripherals, cables, hubs, and expansion chassis you need to rely on, the greater opportunity for issues to arise. I prefer to keep everything in a box. No fuss, no muss. (And no spaghetti cable hell!)
The Mac Studio is more of a prosumer solution, IMO.
The people that buy this thing are going to be sad. All five of them.
This is amazing, but how on earth does Sonnet get Third Party GPU cards to work with Apple Silicon M[#] Macs and MacOS?!
A perfectly phrased excuse. People are saying it, he just makes sure he doesn’t actually hear it.
I might be the last one that cares about this, but I would love to see a co-announcement with Microsoft that Windows on Arm is now officially fully available and supported on the Mac Pro. To me, it’s still a defining feature of the Mac Pro that it can run Windows and run it well enough for games.
I realize the amount of people with the money for this thing and also the desire to use it for PC gaming is probably very, very small. But this is where I’d love to see the lower cost of entry. If they could release a Mac Pro for a comparable price to a good PC gaming rig, that would be amazing.
I know Apple thinks that because they make a billion dollars on casino games on the App Store that they’re a major player in gaming. It’s an unfortunate mindset so what I describe here will probably just remain my nerd fantasy.
But at least Trashcan v1.0 could have memory, video and processor upgrades. The whole current lineup is nothing more than Trashcan v2.0 without the controversial exterior design. Nothing is upgradable now. Well at least without 8 million external cables to run to third party components.
I certainly hope so. Unified RAM is certainly more efficient than federated RAM but external dynamic RAM is far faster and more reliable than depending on using the SSD as a swap space.
How do these vendors get PCIe cards in eGPU enclosures to work with M[#] Macs⁉️ Aren’t the popular GPUs/GPU cards tied to the PC architecture and the Intel ISA?! How? Through drivers?
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Wish they’d do that on all the devices.
By all means do built in and locked down, but make a user accessible NVMe slot and let folks get more usage out of more machines.
There are so so many base model ASi machines out there that I will simply never consider due to the base model storage that can’t be expanded unless it’s external (which I loathe)
Make a certification program if you must… to skim some money off the top and have customers feel good about using approved blades … but give us some options here other than “buy a new machine”
I am making an assumption here; but if it has to have space for a good number of PCI cards, you can't make it that much smaller. Somewhat smaller, sure, but there's a limit depending on how many cards they want to support and what kind of cards those are.
If this thing flops and Apple is dead set on sticking to their own silicon, I can see a day where Apple abandons the Mac Pro altogether and just has the Studio sitting at the top of its lineup. We already were questioning the future of the Pro years ago when it was years (?) without an update.
The way the prices of these machines keep going up and up out of the realm of reality — and this future update now requiring Apple’s RAM upcharges — don’t see how many customers they’re going to be able to find. I don’t know who the market for these machines are. Why would someone not purchase or build a modular Windows PC — one that can run x86 and use nVidia’s GPU’s (CUDA core acceleration)?
If a professional can tell me use cases where these Mac Pros are genuinely a better option than a PC, would you please chime in? Because I would like to know.
The way the prices of these machines keep going up and up out of the realm of reality — and this future update now requiring Apple’s RAM upcharges — don’t see how many customers they’re going to be able to find. I don’t know who the market for these machines are. Why would someone not purchase or build a modular Windows PC — one that can run x86 and use nVidia’s GPU’s (CUDA core acceleration)?
If a professional can tell me use cases where these Mac Pros are genuinely a better option than a PC, would you please chime in? Because I would like to know.
Can AMD or NVidia GPU cards be made to work with Apple M[#] Silicon Macs?! I thought these cards were wedded to the PC architecture and Intel ISA?
Apple used AMD before they went to Intel years ago. They certainly can design their systems to be compatible. They'd need to work with AMD or Nvidia as well but its doable
I think the target market is less price sensitive then us little people who have to watch how we spend our pennies. I mean you can easily spend over 10k on a Mac Pro right now, so those puppies are probably low volume sales anyways.
It's a joke on all users who don't consider their systems a disposable appliance. I understand the trend, but I hate that it's being forced on us.
Is it reasonable to think that “same design” doesn’t forcibly have to be “same size”?
Are there really any of us Apple customers that truly "watch how we spend our pennies"?
I think even the most frugal amongst us dismisses and largely ignores how much more we spend on Apple stuff and we ultimately try to justify it .... usually in ways that are a stretch (myself included).
I don't even think I'd be using macOS anymore if I had to buy Mac hardware (been on a couple different Hacks for the last decade) ... I find it all so restrictive and inflexible and overpriced usually that I just bailed on buying it. The laptops are great, but I don't like the ergonomics of those anymore at my age.
If you really are in need for 64 cores than go for TR but if you are going to use it in apps that only utilize 4 or 8 cores you are in for a ruff ride. Keep in mind that mobos for TR and AMD in general are frankensteins with sourced components all over the place. If you need RAID on board you can only do sofware RAID on AMD, at least that's how it was when I got my only TR build 3970X. I had some issues with mobo stuff working and then refusing to work as well as the whole BIOS defaulting from time to time. Never ever had that with Intel Mac or PC. Threadripper was my first ever AMD build and while it's a monster when you feed it with CPU rendering or some DAW with plethora of VSTs there are many more downsides.
Pick the best workstation motherboard you can find that's the only advice I can give you and do not expect wonders with apps that cannot utilize all the cores available at the same time.
What if it lacks DIMM slots but supports this via PCIE slots:
Using a PCIe Slot to Install DRAM: New Samsung CXL.mem Expansion Module
www.anandtech.com
Apple has not joined the CXL consortium at all. To be of practical use CXL requires PCI-e v5 . Apple is still 'stuck' on PCI-e v4 . Apple largely used PCI-e v4 in the M1 series to reduce the number of PCI-e lanes provisioned out of the SoC (more edge I/O die space to be allocated to the memory controller paths). They treated x1 PCI-e v4 == x2 PCI-e v3 as a 'feature'. CXL support has to be built into the PCI-e controller and into the internal IOMMU subsystems.
CXL was initially driven by Intel. It has broad base support now. AMD even delayed their Zen 4 Epyc solution to pick it up.
But 2-3 years ago it wasn't as crystal clear that it was going to be as broadly supported as it is now. If Apple was not paying attention over the last couple of years and latched onto a "not invented here" attitude ( Intel stuff? Pftt. ) . CXL is not a path to better Perf/Watt. And if that is all that matters to Apple there is a pretty good chance they blew it off (even if they did some PCI-e v5 work. It isn't part of the PCI-e standard. It is another protocol the reuses the lower foundation for transport. Similar to how Apple has a "ssd-storage-PCI-e" variant they run between their SSD controller and their NAND modules. Not the same protocol but foundation circuits can just re-use relatively cheaply.).
The other issue is that CXL memory isn't really transparent. It is cache coherent , but latency sensitive apps will need to account for the NUMA impacts.
Nor is CXL memory going to be cheap. ( a significant fraction of the gotta have DIMMs slot grumbling is motivated by folks who want to buy more mature DIMMs at lower prices in the future as those who absolutely require more memory sooner. )
There is a decent chance that Apple actually views CXL as a threat to their "Unified Memory" value add. If so, they aren't really going to be highly motivated to help it mature faster and erase their advantage. If so they are gong to drag their feet as long as they can before market dynamics makes them put it in. (even though it would be helpful in getting around their RAM cap problem. ). PCI-e v5 has very extremely limited utility across the rest of their SoC line up. Probably not in a hurry to go there either. More likely to put more work into "Thunderbolt next" than that.
Apple hasn't done much with PCI-e rebar to do "more Unified Memory" stuff ( Intel , AMD , Nvidia , Microsoft have been doing more "smart memory" like things to varying degrees of success). If Apple looked at CXL and said 'we already solved the unified memory problem with our design and UltraFusion" then adoption is going to a bumpy road.
Yeah, to a degree, but right now, its harder for me to justify spending > 3k for a laptop. Apple isn't the only maker pushing the pricing envelope. Razer laptops can easily exceed 3,000 as well
Apple has no interest in the high-end workstation market any more.