I was thinking about this the other day. Not the same, yet the same. A Mac Pro would be a magnificent beast, now.
As some note, unified memory is the key, and for that the M series Mac Pro (model of one) was not exactly a step up from the Mac Studio. However, I imagine most people dreaming of a Mac Pro are dreaming of the 2019 machine, which had up to 1.5 TB of RAM available and you could buy aftermarket. And add GPUs. Flexibility was the point of the Mac Pro and the M2 Ultra version never had that beyond PCIe lanes, which are not nothing (but there are not enough of them on Apple Silicon but that’s a design choice not an inherent limitation), but without GPU and RAM expansion they were, and remain, quite limited.
Had Apple spent time and effort they likely could have crafted a system that offered the following, this year:
- an M5 Ultra chip (perhaps it’s the next generation Ultra that will allow the ability to choose more specifically CPU core and GPU core counts, perhaps this one allows it already… tbd) which supported more PCIe bandwidth,
- additional GPUs (Apple’s own? AMDs which are still supported on macOS on the old Intel Macs? nVidia back in the fold [so much money to make even Tim Cook giddy])
- RAM much like the old SLI days (its drawbacks matter in gaming but not much elsewhere) and on-chip cache RAM (L1, L2, L3 et al) in that you’d still have the super-fast unified “on chip” RAM of Apple Silicon but have a secondary cache of slower DDR5 to fill the gaps, like the Fusion Drive did in the days when Apple combined SSDs and HDDs to balance speed and space, a bit like a PHEV can be a “best of both worlds” at present.
All in a machine that did not change on the outside. No garish Frankensteinian towers, no expanding collection of wall plugs to power the beast, no external DAS [unless you wanted], and bandwidth exceeding the dreams of Thunderbolt 5 to share the data. And for the truly ruthless, you could still daisy chain Mac Pros with Thunderbolt to access dizzying levels of RAM that could be expanded when the market for it revives or budgets allow.
I would pay for that. I would never have paid for the M2 Ultra Mac Pro.
As some note, unified memory is the key, and for that the M series Mac Pro (model of one) was not exactly a step up from the Mac Studio. However, I imagine most people dreaming of a Mac Pro are dreaming of the 2019 machine, which had up to 1.5 TB of RAM available and you could buy aftermarket. And add GPUs. Flexibility was the point of the Mac Pro and the M2 Ultra version never had that beyond PCIe lanes, which are not nothing (but there are not enough of them on Apple Silicon but that’s a design choice not an inherent limitation), but without GPU and RAM expansion they were, and remain, quite limited.
Had Apple spent time and effort they likely could have crafted a system that offered the following, this year:
- an M5 Ultra chip (perhaps it’s the next generation Ultra that will allow the ability to choose more specifically CPU core and GPU core counts, perhaps this one allows it already… tbd) which supported more PCIe bandwidth,
- additional GPUs (Apple’s own? AMDs which are still supported on macOS on the old Intel Macs? nVidia back in the fold [so much money to make even Tim Cook giddy])
- RAM much like the old SLI days (its drawbacks matter in gaming but not much elsewhere) and on-chip cache RAM (L1, L2, L3 et al) in that you’d still have the super-fast unified “on chip” RAM of Apple Silicon but have a secondary cache of slower DDR5 to fill the gaps, like the Fusion Drive did in the days when Apple combined SSDs and HDDs to balance speed and space, a bit like a PHEV can be a “best of both worlds” at present.
All in a machine that did not change on the outside. No garish Frankensteinian towers, no expanding collection of wall plugs to power the beast, no external DAS [unless you wanted], and bandwidth exceeding the dreams of Thunderbolt 5 to share the data. And for the truly ruthless, you could still daisy chain Mac Pros with Thunderbolt to access dizzying levels of RAM that could be expanded when the market for it revives or budgets allow.
I would pay for that. I would never have paid for the M2 Ultra Mac Pro.
