What do y'all speculate will be the specs and pricing of the upcoming Apple Silicon Mac Pro?
Certainly
not less than the current $6000.
Trouble is, going by the reviews, the M1 Ultra Studio really delivers the goods on raw CPU, video encode/decode (esp. with ProRes) and might have a bit extra up its sleeve when things like FCPx and Blender get updated to fully utilise it.
It's going to be good enough for a lot of people, leaving the
only market for a Mac Pro as people who need:
- lotsa PCIe slots, if not for GPUs, for the various specialist interface cards needed in audio/video production (we don't know how many PCIe lanes the various M1 variants can support)
- Over 1TB of RAM (even a "quad" M1 Max would top out at 256GB, maybe 512GB with a newer LPDDR spec)
- ECC RAM (even if it's only because there's a 'must have ECC' bullet on the tender that's been there since 1990)
- the sort of GPU power people get from the quad-AMD setups the Intel Pro can accommodate, esp. where software hasn't been perfectly optimised for Apple Silicon.
...trouble is, that's going to be an even smaller niche than the current Mac Pro, and low numbers => high prices, especially if Apple have to make custom silicon for it.
Also, it's a pretty incompatible with some of Apple Silicon's strengths - particularly the gains of having the CPU, GPU, and 'unified' RAM so closely coupled.
So let's have a couple of totally evidence-free, speculative guesses:
Guess 1:
Mac Pro is just the equivalent of a Studio Ultra in a 1U rackmount format, with matching rackmount Thunderbolt -> PCIe enclosure (the latter probably outsourced to a third party) for your AV interface cards. If you need grunt than a single Ultra can provide, rack up a cluster of them.
Guess 2:
Something that looks very much like the existing Mac Pro,
except instead of MPX modules containing AMD GPUs, you can plug in M1 Ultra "CPU/GPU" modules until you run out of space or money.
