Apple Silicon Mac Pro Said to Feature Same Design as 2019 Model, No User-Upgradable RAM

[deconstruct60]

Questions for the smart people and engineers here:

What are the possibilities of user-upgradeable RAM running alongside the M-chip-connected RAM? Maybe the rumor is true, but doesn’t mean there will be NO slots for expansion?

Depends upon what "alongside" is suppose to mean. close packed LPDDR5 RAM and DDR5 DIMM RAM in harmonious , homogenous "Unified Memory Pool" ? No.

DDR5 DIMM as a fixed RAM SSD pool that the file system uses as a distinctly separate pool of memory for file caching? Yes. That wouldn't be hard. Go to Activity Monitor memory tab and look at 'caches files" usage and free 80-95% of that up for app usage ( it isn't small). How APFS does file caching is almost totally transparent to applications . So if the file system move the file cache to a 'really much faster SSD" there are no real application code changes required.

There are some applications that try to use mmap and/or large explicit memory allocations to implement a RAM SSD inside their application. ( skip the file system caching and just load up vast chunks or all of several files into memory). If there was an actual real RAM SSD present perhaps modest changes could be made to those apps to use that mechanism when present.


Some folks will throw out the LPDDR5 used only as a L4 cache and the DDR5 being the RAM. I have serious doubts that will for the GPU subsystem. The vast bulk of the Apple M-series SoC's memory controller design is oriented to keeping the GPU cores feed; not the CPU cores. So techniques that Intel has tried on their CPU packages are not necessarily going to readily map over to what Apple is doing. The workload that Apple is applying to the memory system is substantively different. How many high performance GPUs out there have DIMM slots? None. There are a some foundational reasons why that is so.


There are ways to present two different types of memory to applications but that very often means making changes to applications to make that work. Special mac apps just for the Mac Pro are not a solid foundation to drive Mac Pro adoption. People are expecting the same apps to just work 'better' when handed more memory.

Also, what’s the reliability rate been like so far with the M chip RAM vs RAM that can be easily swapped if it goes bad? Anyone know?

If you don't measure how can you improve it? Non ECC RAM doesn't even check for errors. If not even counting how can you get into a "more/less" discussion?

If trying to store a ginormous truckload of data solely in RAM ( > 128GB) then probably be more worried that you can't even count the errors or not. Again why a RAM SSD that has effectively internal mechanism to check for bit rot errors would be more than helpful. APFS isn't going to do it. It punts user data integrity checking back to the SDD ( or HDD). If going to do that then be consistent and do that on the RAM SSD also.

RAM effectively fails due to data corruption typically at a higher rate that the electronics "spontanously combust" and fail to work at all.

 

[R2DHue]

Unfortunately, SAAS/cloud services are the future. I don't want it to be that way, but it's true. Pro Tools costs $100/month for an actually useful version. What individual can afford $100/month software? Same with cloud services. If Apple is going to make us use cloud services to offload our work to, what the heck! Maybe I'm misunderstanding @DailySlow but if Apple is going to remove expansion capabilities and rely on CLOUD SERVICES, I'm honestly going to leave the Mac platform.

I remember when you used to be able to own the bits of the software you purchased.

Now, you can only rent it, and, like with an apartment, you can get “evicted” if you stop paying the rent. Adobe can tell through invisible digital “tells” it embeds in things created with their suite by someone who has stopped paying rent! Adobe will send these “digital squatters” a legal letter essentially telling them to stop using the bits on their hard drives or be sued criminally for piracy!

Also, Apple long ago ran out of datacenter/data storage space for its iCloud, and a lot of iCloud accounts are “housed” on AWS, Microsoft Azure — even Google! (btw, Microsoft uses Amazon AWS for the cloud services it sells — kind of an “In-Inception.”)

AWS is the cloud storage service used by all 17 US intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security and the FBI — which, btw, has a very adversarial relationship with Apple!

Amazon is less than half as big as Apple by Market Cap value. Amazon is barely a tech company! Apple is 100% tech!

If Amazon can do it…

”The Biggest Company in the World” should be able to provide for itself all the cloud storage needs it and its customers require without outsourcing it to companies it can’t trust (and not telling its users!).

It’s probably a financial decision that they don’t.

Bean counters… smh…

 

[haddy]

Don’t think that way. Your gonna live to 95!

Well I'm coming up to 82 and which ever way you look at it I have a way more past than future. And my "high end" Studio ultra is going to be my last machine. Although, perhaps a replacement display or two

 

[R2DHue]

That is true but, to be honest, you can't be a visionary/innovate all the time. There are limitations. And there should be room for slowing down pace and for polishing and improvement of existing products, but Mr Cook deliberately chose the trajectory of pleasing customers and shareholders with bells and whistles, new-exciting-features™ and stuff, along with insane profits and market saturation, which cannot be sustainable log term, especially having in mind current state of the world economy, recession and all that.

Apple customers have transitioned from nerds, techies and pro users to upper middle class kids who love shiny gadgets, and that's double edged sword, because you have to feed them with candies 24/7. Not to mention hungry and demanding shareholders.

I agree 100%.

I’d only say that it’s best when the wishes of the Industrial Design team is balanced with the wishes of the hardware engineering team. Concessions on both sides.

And Jony Ive and his team also did incredible work in overhauling the iOS GUI and MacOS GUI.

Steve Jobs used to love — and believed it to be healthy — to pit teams against each other in competition.

The results of which were sleek, appealing aesthetics married to powerful, cutting edge technology. (Though I have to concede Steve Jobs leaned a little bit too much in the direction of the Industrial Design team over the hardware engineering teams, who wanted to make Apple products maybe a little bit thicker, maybe a little bit heavier, but 50% better in terms of power and performance. Apple could today be remembered as one of the first pioneers of wireless computing if the first WiFi iBook hadn’t looked like a toilet seat — or a Teletubby purse — and gained little recognition.)

As a result of Jobs’ bias toward ID, we had a few, “It may be underpowered, but look how thin and light it is!” products.

The problem now is that this balance seems gone from Apple. Look at the aesthetic of the (Ive team) Mac Pro compared to the aesthetic of the Mac Studio. The Mac Studio looks like it could’ve been designed ten years ago.

 

[rm5]

@R2DHue And, adding to your point, the whole idea of Pro Tools and Adobe being the "industry standard" for audio professionals and graphic designers respectively, is actually infuriating to me. But yet we're "forced" to use it. Look at Sibelius, another one of Avid's products. I use it not because I want to—it's a piece of crap! I use it because everyone else uses it. Most SAAS programs are far worse than prepaid or even free products. And the worst part is that Adobe and Avid's software optimization for Apple Silicon is plain awful. They claim it's optimized, and it probably is running Silicon-native, but it runs SO MUCH SLOWER than free or prepaid counterparts. Take Premiere for example. I was forced to use it in school because the curriculum for Film classes uses premiere, and I hated it. I would get around using Premiere by using Resolve on my own laptop. Premiere on my M1 was at least 5x slower than Resolve. It truly angers me.

 

[goMac]

It's a trade-off. Integrated RAM is not user upgradeable but it's far more efficient than non-integrated RAM. In general, you would need twice the amount of non-integrated RAM to equal the performance of integrated RAM. Example: 256 GB of integrated RAM is the equivalent of 512 GB of non-integrated RAM.

This isn't true. RAM is RAM and a megabytes worth of data is always a megabytes worth of data. Integrated RAM is not really more efficient except for GPU and CPU sharing. If anything you need more RAM because the GPU and CPU share memory.

 

[trusso]

Unfortunately, I'm no longer Apple's target consumer for the Mac Pro - they've priced me out - but a professional machine without upgradable RAM is a joke. The entire idea of the Mac Pro is to allow for upgradability: processors, memory, storage, expansion (PCIe). If Apple refuses to re-engineer its SoC design(s) to allow for this on at least their high-end professional Mac, they might as well cede the entire professional space to Wintel boxes once again. The richest company on Earth can certainly afford to design that, even if they wind up charging up the wazoo for it (that's an entirely separate discussion).

I love my M1 Air and I've invested quite a bit of money into the Apple ecosystem over the past 20 years. But if we continue down this lockdown path in the industry, I will take my music library (MP3s) and my family photos (JPGs) over to Debian or Ubuntu and not look back. Convenience may take a hit, but file formats are universal.

 

[ThisBougieLife]

Apple Silicon just doesn't fit with the Mac Pro ethos as well as Intel did. Apple Silicon is impressive, but it doesn't support the kind of modularity you can get with a PC or an Intel Mac Pro and that just seems to be unavoidable.

 

[DanVM]

I remember when you used to be able to own the bits of the software you purchased.

Now, you can only rent it, and, like with an apartment, you can get “evicted” if you stop paying the rent. Adobe can tell through invisible digital “tells” it embeds in things created with their suite by someone who has stopped paying rent! Adobe will send these “digital squatters” a legal letter essentially telling them to stop using the bits on their hard drives or be sued criminally for piracy!

Also, Apple long ago ran out of datacenter/data storage space for its iCloud, and a lot of iCloud accounts are “housed” on AWS, Microsoft Azure — even Google! (btw, Microsoft uses Amazon AWS for the cloud services it sells — kind of an “In-Inception.”)

AWS is the cloud storage service used by all 17 US intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security and the FBI — which, btw, has a very adversarial relationship with Apple!

Amazon is less than half as big as Apple by Market Cap value. Amazon is barely a tech company! Apple is 100% tech!

If Amazon can do it…

”The Biggest Company in the World” should be able to provide for itself all the cloud storage needs it and its customers require without outsourcing it to companies it can’t trust (and not telling its users!).

It’s probably a financial decision that they don’t.

Bean counters… smh…

It's the first time I read that MS use AWS for their cloud infrastructure. From what I know, MS has their own datacenters and don't use AWS, GCP or any other cloud infrastructure for Azure. Can you post a link with details about how MS uses AWS?

 

[R2DHue]

@R2DHue And, adding to your point, the whole idea of Pro Tools and Adobe being the "industry standard" for audio professionals and graphic designers respectively, is actually infuriating to me. But yet we're "forced" to use it. Look at Sibelius, another one of Avid's products. I use it not because I want to—it's a piece of crap! I use it because everyone else uses it. Most SAAS programs are far worse than prepaid or even free products. And the worst part is that Adobe and Avid's software optimization for Apple Silicon is plain awful. They claim it's optimized, and it probably is running Silicon-native, but it runs SO MUCH SLOWER than free or prepaid counterparts. Take Premiere for example. I was forced to use it in school because the curriculum for Film classes uses premiere, and I hated it. I would get around using Premiere by using Resolve on my own laptop. Premiere on my M1 was at least 5x slower than Resolve. It truly angers me.

Before Adobe bought them all, there used to be fierce competition and true software alternatives that benefited Users. Macromedia Freehand vs. Illustrator?

 

[theluggage]

I’m pretty certain when John Ternus teased the 2023 Mac Pro he was setting the scene for something pretty epic.

Really? I heard the sound of an inconvenient can being kicked a bit further down the road. "What about the Mac Pro?" was always going to be the hardest question about the Apple Silicon transition.

But for certain workloads, especially workloads that require a big machine like a Mac Pro, 128 GB is not enough. It sounds to me like Apple have painted themselves into a corner.

No, they've painted 3 corners of the room (iPad, MacBooks, Mini/Studio) run out of paint and are wondering whether they can get away with a rug and a potted plant in the 4th corner (Mac Pro).

They've had a huge success with Apple Silicon in the MacBooks and small-form-factor desktops, all with just 2 basic die designs per generation (Mx and Mx Max - the pro being a cut-down Max and the Ultra 2 Maxes stitched together) based on the same CPU and GPU cores, reaping the advantages of lower power consumption, fast & unified on-package LPDDR RAM. Their GPUs - though noting special by high-end dGPU standards - smoke any other integrated GPU, especially when running MacOS & Metal-based graphics.

Their problem is a small (but potentially profitable) group of users who genuinely need biblical amounts of RAM and PCIe bandwidth along with discrete AMD GPUs, which break the Apple Silicon model and for which - frankly - a Xeon or Threadripper tower is probably the best tool and power consumption really not a concern. There's no law of physics that says Apple couldn't design a Xeon/Threadripper-class chip with the ARM/Apple Silicon ISA, regular DDR5 RAM and a shedload of PCIe lanes - but that would probably mean designing a whole new die just for the Mac Pro - almost certainly their lowest-selling Mac - and would be really, really expensive at such small volumes. It also throws away the main Unique Selling Points of Apple Silicon except low power. Low power is valuable in tablets, laptops, all-in-one's, small-form-factor desktops and high-density computing "servers" - and the Mac Pro is none of those... It also throws away compatibility with x86 code (Rosetta is good but not as efficient as native code, and if you're paying Mac Pro prices for raw power...) which may be important if you have a complex, mission critical workflow using specialist software that can't turn on a dime because one plug-in doesn't like ARM.

So the question for Apple is whether it is economic for them to try and keep the Mac Pro customer base - which is probably shrinking anyway as they gradually take the chance to switch to cheaper, commodity hardware.

Plus, look at the history of (i)Mac Pros being launched, abandoned and replaced with "courageous new concepts" - including the 2019 Mac Pro being launched and then thrown into doubt 6 months later with the Apple Silicon announcement - followed by 3 years of the sound of crickets as to what form its replacement would take. I love my Macs for personal/fun/small-beer work but I pity anybody who has to put together a proposal budget for a 3+ year job without a clue as to what Apple will be offering by the time the work starts.

 

[R2DHue]

It's the first time I read that MS use AWS for their cloud infrastructure. From what I know, MS has their own datacenters and don't use AWS, GCP or any other cloud infrastructure for Azure. Can you post a link with details about how MS uses AWS?

Both.

My understanding is that Windows and Microsoft‘s own apps are made specifically AWS compatible and AWS has been the number one cloud service used by Microsoft customers.

Microsoft is rapidly building their own IaaS (Azure) which I recently read has finally surpassed AWS use by Microsoft customers.

Being that they’re Microsoft, they’ll probably make Windows incompatible with AWS as soon as their own IaaS is fully built.

(They almost did that with IEEE Web protocols until the gubment stepped in!)

 

[scottrichardson]

I think there’s a lot of false rumours at this stage. Imagine spreading all this false info and then bam! They drop an M2 extreme with expandable ram and all the slots.

Worth noting that the M1 ultra didn’t have enough PCIe lanes to handle the myriad pcie slots that a Mac Pro requires. So this M2 Ultra will need to have had a lot more pcie support added.

 

[petvas]

The upcoming high-end Apple silicon Mac Pro will feature the same design as the 2019 model, with no user-upgradeable RAM given the all-on-chip architecture of Apple silicon.

In his latest Power On newsletter, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has revealed that Apple's upcoming Mac Pro, which is the final product to make the transition to Apple silicon, will feature the same design as the current Mac Pro from 2019. Unlike the current Intel-based Mac Pro, the upcoming model will also not feature user-upgradeable RAM.

Gurman has reported that Apple has canceled plans to release a higher-end model of the upcoming Mac Pro with 48 CPU cores and 152 GPU cores given its high cost and likely niche market.

Article Link: Apple Silicon Mac Pro Said to Feature Same Design as 2019 Model, No User-Upgradable RAM

Who is this guy? What is his track record? I remember him saying that there will be Macs on the last quarter of 2022 and that there would be a special event. He then changed that and kept his mouth shut, because he just failed with this rumor.
Having a Mac Pro with non upgradeable RAM doesn‘t really make any sense, especially if using the same design as the current one. I will believe this only when I see it and would just ignore Gurman.

 

[tYNS]

This isn't Pro. This is introducing glue and production efficiency costs to the Mac Pro to maximize profits. Get everything down to an SoC and screw it into a box. What a complete joke. This company is off the rails with their greed for profit.

 

[sunny5]

Apple Silicon Mac Pro will fail. Apple Silicon chip itself is far from having a great GPU performance which has been proven a lot since Nvidia is the one who dominated 3D and AI markets. So far, Mac is only good for video and music stuff. Therefore, making Mac Pro with AS chip will be only good for high end video and music works. If you ever tried 3D or AI stuff with Mac, it's extremely slow. I'm using WebUI from Automatic1111 and it's def slow.

If they really wanna make Mac Pro so badly, Apple really need to start working with many softwares especially for 3D and AI where Nvidia invested so much time and money with CUDA. Blender is not good enough.

 

[Realityck]

Who is this guy? What is his track record? I remember him saying that there will be Macs on the last quarter of 2022 and that there would be a special event. He then changed that and kept his mouth shut, because he just failed with this rumor.
Having a Mac Pro with non upgradeable RAM doesn‘t really make any sense, especially if using the same design as the current one. I will believe this only when I see it and would just ignore Gurman.

The problem is that most of the industry sources of leaks all got the read on by Apple lawyers back in 2021. Goes for employee leaks too. So the apple activity blogs of product production are a lot more speculative then ever. Accuracy has gone way down, unless you generalize a rumor so much thats its hard not hit part of the target.

Example

https://twitter.com/x/status/1408395871180443652

 

[jz0309]

Damn, I sure hope all these analysts are wrong on most points.

plural? Gurman is the only one left and he's getting less and less credible

 

[MisterAndrew]

192 GB RAM is a huge downgrade from the 2 TB supported by the current model. They should have just kept this model Intel. The new Sapphire Rapids Xeons support 4 TB.

 

[dawnrazor]

Again, if these all are true, why is this different from a Mac Studio with an upcoming M2 Ultra??

This is the correct question. Forget the rumoured details, why would Apple create an M2 Ultra MBP when it already has the ability to create a M2 Ultra Mac Studio. There has to be more to the MP then the expandability of PCIE slots offer… If the M2 EXTREME is not going to happen what‘s the wow factor going to be with this Mac Pro? I don’t think the design needs changing… but how are they going to fill it? I guess what I’m saying is that the new MP needs to be something way more than a Mac Studio in a MP case with some slots… Otherwise its going to be a bit of a joke…

 

[deconstruct60]

This is amazing, but how on earth does Sonnet get Third Party GPU cards to work with Apple Silicon M[#] Macs and MacOS?!

They don't. In the Thunderbolt enclosure PCI-e card compatibility matrix PDF file attached to the tech specs, three major types of cards are not there.

1. Storage boot cards ( M-series Macs do not boot UEFI. Nor does Apple put much more than generic NVMe, USB storage model , SATA drivers in the "one true recovery' boot environment. )
2. GPUs
3. relatively very old cards ( for some cards new driver work has pragmatically just stopped. Even on Intel Macs when kernel extensions eventually get removed these cards are 'dead'. ).


Also noted in that document that the x8 PCI-e v3 cards they present are only partially supported ( since they'll have bandwidth issues to pushed to their spec's upper bandwidth requirements).


If drivers show up on a distant future version of macOS on M-series for Mac Pro that opens the door for 3dd party GPUs then more than likely those cards would pop into the TB enclosure box matrix also. All Thunderbolt really needs is a PCI-e driver that supports the optional standards for PCI-e hot plug. The rest is basically transparent (going from Mac to enclosure) to PCI-e devices and apps (Thunderbolt does its own thing.)

 

[Wanted797]

No user upgradable RAM? Is this a joke???

You know what a SoC is right…

 

[MisterAndrew]

So no more "half the size" of the current Mac Pro dear Mr Mark Gurman?
So no more M Extreme SoC, no more half the size Mac pro....why people should pick this instead of a future M2 Ultra Mac Studio?!
It must be something else here

Well, if the rumors are true that the Studio is being discontinued, then people won't have a choice. Apparently the new Mac Pro replaces the higher end Studio and the new Mac mini replaces the lower end Studio.

Mac Studio Was A Temporary Product, Apple Rumored To Replace It With The Mac Pro

The Mac Studio may have been just a placeholder product, and the Mac Pro may end up taking its place when it officially launches

wccftech.com

 

[rm5]

No...... the Mac Studio can't be a placeholder. Seems out of character to me, but I'm probably wrong about that.

 

[turbineseaplane]

But if we continue down this lockdown path in the industry, I will take my music library (MP3s) and my family photos (JPGs) over to Debian or Ubuntu and not look back. Convenience may take a hit, but file formats are universal.

I agree with you totally

I’m out on any future of lockdown