Apple Teases Apple Silicon Mac Pro at Spring Event

[PinkyMacGodess]

Whats the betting with the new Mac Pro they change the Hardware design (to a smaller more compact tower with the same modular features, and different grill design) and completely wipe Jony Ive's influence from the existing product line up

Pretty good. I didn't realize that the Mac Pro tower was so awkward to use. All connections have to be removed to open the box. Awkward... I don't think I have ever seen a PC chassis with that kind of awkward. I'd consider using a hacksaw on the top, if possible, to remove that feature. But 'Mac Pro' has always meant HUGE, and to make the new new new new new Mac Pro 'small' would have been a disappointment for some. The size seems to justify the price, even though the expandability is rather limited.

Who knows... A smaller box would be seen as 'environmentally friendly' I'm sure, which is kind of a joke...

I was surprised though, how small the trash can was. They packed a lot into that can, and left a lot out of it too. I wouldn't be too hoping for a smaller Mac Pro. We might get it...

 

[mjtomlin71]

Whats the betting with the new Mac Pro they change the Hardware design (to a smaller more compact tower with the same modular features, and different grill design) and completely wipe Jony Ive's influence from the existing product line up

When Apple designed the latest Mac Pro, they were already in the process of planning this transition, so I'm betting it was designed with that in mind. I wouldn't be surprised if they come up with some kind of upgrade option, so that previous current Mac Pro don't have to buy a whole new system.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

And yeah, for the cost, this new Mac Studio makes the iMac Pro look like a joke.

My point exactly. Apple seems to be taking the pro user for granted, but who knows. I'm not a 'pro user', but have driven an IMP to its knees a few times. Will 'they' stay loyal? How many defected over the much delayed Mac Pro replacements in the not to distant past?

Is there anything stopping someone from buying 400 Mac Studios and making them a huge parallel compute cluster? Hmm. How does the Ultra look compared to the Thread Ripper chips? I haven't seen anything out yet, but plenty of comments wishing Apple would adopt them. *shrug*

Stay tuned?

 

[diamond.g]

Well, John said the Ultra was the last SoC in the M1 Family. I suspect, and surprised no one has considered that the Mac Pro will have its own ASi, vastly different from the SoC's we've seen.

I think the Mac Pro will remain the same, but with a discrete ASi CPU with up to 64-cores. Support for the same 1.5TB of RAM and 128 PCIe lanes (maybe even PCIe 4). It will also support 3rd party GPUs, one of which will be discrete Apple GPU (64 or 128 cores). They will also update the Afterburner card.

Wouldn't that go against their single programming model (UMA) for ASi by splitting these things out? Seems like they would lose all the massive bandwidth they have been touting by doing so.

 

[bradman83]

Wouldn't that go against their single programming model (UMA) for ASi by splitting these things out? Seems like they would lose all the massive bandwidth they have been touting by doing so.

I suspect part of the delay with the Mac Pro is to sort these issues out. The memory controller and kernel level memory management could be configured to prefer faster SoC memory first while allowing addressing of a larger expandable memory pool but with a slight performance hit. And while Apple's integrated GPUs are great they can just barely compete with the raw brute force of a high-end discrete GPU. Taking Apple's own GPU design off-die might allow them to scale it even higher or offer multi-GPU options which would offset the fact that it can't take advantage of being on the SoC like the rest of the M series.

 

[fuchsdh]

I'm definitely curious to see what the Mac Pro looks like. Having slots for storage or PCIe isn't really crazy, especially since the Mac Studio essentially fills the role of the workstation mini machine Apple has been chasing for years, including with the 6,1 Mac Pro. The RAM and GPU questions are bigger unknowns, given how much of the performance of these M1 chips is in their unified architecture, but I can't imagine Apple would want to produce bespoke chips just for the people who want 256 or 512 GB memory.

Maybe whatever chip they will use have a smaller pool of unified memory and then socketed RAM modules to cover the higher end use cases?

 

[guzhogi]

a big heat sink and fans (too big for the existing Mac Mini enclosure, essentially the Cube is back.)

Wasn't the G4 Cube passively cooled, though?

The Mac Pro is going to have to fit in the cheese grater with Apple Silicon and accept 1.5TB of RAM. The post production guys aren't going to edit Marvel movies with a dinky 128GB of RAM. If they start daisy-chaining Ultras together to achieve it, that's going to be one hot machine (literally.)

A little surprised at how big the fans have to be considering the plain-Jane M1 in the MacBook Air is passively cooled, right. Even the M1 Max in MacBook Pros has fairly small fans. I get the Ultra is two Maxes put together, but still.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

I'm definitely curious to see what the Mac Pro looks like. Having slots for storage or PCIe isn't really crazy, especially since the Mac Studio essentially fills the role of the workstation mini machine Apple has been chasing for years, including with the 6,1 Mac Pro. The RAM and GPU questions are bigger unknowns, given how much of the performance of these M1 chips is in their unified architecture, but I can't imagine Apple would want to produce bespoke chips just for the people who want 256 or 512 GB memory.

Maybe whatever chip they will use have a smaller pool of unified memory and then socketed RAM modules to cover the higher end use cases?

Considering how the total number of users that NEED to have 1.5 TB of memory specifically in a macOS compatible system is very likely EXCEEDINGLY small, it’s possible that we don’t see a future machine that offers that much RAM. They could give up that entire market and never see a blip in their yearly revenues.

 

[pilotsean]

My hope is that the Studio Display becomes the template for the 27 in iMac. Optional height-adjustable stand. Center Stage. No chin. Pro Motion? Starting at $1999.

 

[fuchsdh]

Considering how the total number of users that NEED to have 1.5 TB of memory specifically in a macOS compatible system is very likely EXCEEDINGLY small, it’s possible that we don’t see a future machine that offers that much RAM. They could give up that entire market and never see a blip in their yearly revenues.

I agree, but Apple's the one who, at what was clearly a rethinking of their entire Mac line in the latter part of the 2010s, consciously decided "let's make a high-end workstation again". Certainly few people were asking for that, versus a midrange slotbox like the Mac Pros of old (or the xMac). Apple decided it made sense for them.

And now they've introduced that long-missing xMac (sadly not in terms of internal expandability, but in terms of relative power/price position for a headless Mac, certainly.) Which means there's even less reason for them to have a Mac Pro... and yet they have committed to the Mac Pro being a thing (hell, it's still bizarre to me seeing them out and proud in the chip design segments of keynotes. They're clearly still proud of it as a product, and have actually supported it better than any pro Mac in the last decade.)

I just don't see why they would be continuing the Mac Pro line at all, if they weren't interesting in targeting those high-end cases. Most people's situations, even many professional use cases, are covered with 64GB of RAM, let alone 128 or 256. You could easily call it a day with the Mac Studio.

To me the argument for the Mac Pro seems to exist in "we can make a lot of money off this product despite selling very few", it works as a prestige/Halo car product, and that it's a way of getting more money from people for whom extensibility is possibly as great or a greater need/want than pure power (since even in the Mac Pro era you were able to get as fast or even faster Intel processors in iMacs for many use cases, and it was certainly much cheaper.)

I totally agree with people given all the products Apple has shown off with Apple Silicon, it seems bizarre they would have one product left in the lineup that still has expansion like PCIe slots and replaceable RAM and would be radically different because of it. But I just don't see why they would bother if that's not the case.

 

[ApfelKuchen]

Discontinuing the 27 inch iMac seems crazy to me. This remains a one of the best machine’s in Apple’s lineup. For me the 24 inch screen is a step back. And none of the external screens match the quality and simplicity of the 27 inch 5K iMac screen.

I've been patiently waiting for the 27-inch M1 iMac, but ya know, the more I think about it...

The new 27-inch display gives folks more options. For my current purposes (much more modest than they used to be), an M1 is all I really need. Both Pro and Max are overkill, and Ultra? Fuggedaboudit! The prospects of having to buy an over-specced processor just to have a display larger than the 24-inch iMac wasn't exactly stoking my enthusiasm for the rumored 27/30-inch iMac.

So the Studio Display, which unlike many displays bundles-in speakers and camera (not to mention 5K), plus either mini or Studio lines up as a versatile bundle that gives me more options than I expected.

Sure, I love my iMacs and would have liked to have another 27/30-inch on my desktop (long overdue, actually, considering I'll be replacing a Late 2013). Now I just have to decide whether I really need 27-inch, or whether the far more economical 24-inch is good enough.

A 24-inch iMac costs $1100 less than an identically-equipped mini + Magic Keyboard w/Touch ID + Magic Mouse + Studio Display. Yow!

 

[Unregistered 4U]

I agree, but Apple's the one who, at what was clearly a rethinking of their entire Mac line in the latter part of the 2010s, consciously decided "let's make a high-end workstation again". Certainly few people were asking for that, versus a midrange slotbox like the Mac Pros of old (or the xMac). Apple decided it made sense for them.

And now they've introduced that long-missing xMac (sadly not in terms of internal expandability, but in terms of relative power/price position for a headless Mac, certainly.) Which means there's even less reason for them to have a Mac Pro... and yet they have committed to the Mac Pro being a thing (hell, it's still bizarre to me seeing them out and proud in the chip design segments of keynotes. They're clearly still proud of it as a product, and have actually supported it better than any pro Mac in the last decade.)

The way I see Apple Silicon (and how it’s been playing out) is that CPU/GPU/RAM/Storage is common across several products now due to how they’ve designed the package. When you look at the product lines, they’re essentially those similar packages (no communicated variances in clock speed) with the defining differences being the form factor, how large the screen is, how many ports are available, touchscreen, etc.

Extending that to the current Mac Pro then yanking out all the things that Apple Silicon currently doesn’t allow or require (expandable RAM, Afterburner modules, internal GPU’s) I end up with the M1 Ultra (128GB RAM max) in a more compact case (perhaps using the same design language as the Mac Studio) with a number of slots designed specifically to meet the widest swath of the current Mac Pro use cases. I’m guessing at least 2 and at most 4… and I kinda think the 4 is a real stretch. It’d be far more tightly focused than the last Mac Pro.

 

[ChrisA]

Thunderbolt is not an equivalent to dedicated PCIe hardware. Even a cheap PCIe box is $200-300 and ultimately takes up more space than just having a slot in a tower.

The days of "busses" are over. Gone. They are just too slow. What we have now in an N by M switch that lice inside the M1 chip and allow unified memory. This is orders of magnitude faster then a PCIe bus and removes a bottleneck.

In the old days we placed Video RAM on a separate card then build a bus to move data to and from the card. Today, Apple says "Why move the data? Not moving it is way-faster." So the need for the bus goes away.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

The way I see Apple Silicon (and how it’s been playing out) is that CPU/GPU/RAM/Storage is common across several products now due to how they’ve designed the package. When you look at the product lines, they’re essentially those similar packages (no communicated variances in clock speed) with the defining differences being the form factor, how large the screen is, how many ports are available, touchscreen, etc.

Extending that to the current Mac Pro then yanking out all the things that Apple Silicon currently doesn’t allow or require (expandable RAM, Afterburner modules, internal GPU’s) I end up with the M1 Ultra (128GB RAM max) in a more compact case (perhaps using the same design language as the Mac Studio) with a number of slots designed specifically to meet the widest swath of the current Mac Pro use cases. I’m guessing at least 2 and at most 4… and I kinda think the 4 is a real stretch. It’d be far more tightly focused than the last Mac Pro.

I'm thinking that people can still use more than 4 slots. Unless things have changed that much, I think there are still custom cards out there that some users would need several slots for. I was fascinated to watch the Mac Pro rack mount video, and see him fill all of the slots. (Don't forget Apple takes one slot for their IO board out of the box, unless you don't need it. I've never played with an external card toaster so don't know the tradeoffs, but can't imagine there aren't any. *shrug* Enough people bought external toasters with the TC. Glad I don't have those worries.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

I'm thinking that people can still use more than 4 slots. Unless things have changed that much, I think there are still custom cards out there that some users would need several slots for. I was fascinated to watch the Mac Pro rack mount video, and see him fill all of the slots. (Don't forget Apple takes one slot for their IO board out of the box, unless you don't need it. I've never played with an external card toaster so don't know the tradeoffs, but can't imagine there aren't any. *shrug* Enough people bought external toasters with the TC. Glad I don't have those worries.

It would remain to be seen if those custom cards even would get their drivers updated as the owners of those systems likely aren’t interested in touching them at all for fear of introducing some instability (possibly not even running the latest OS for the same reason). If those are folks aren’t in the market for a new system due to being tied to a custom build, then, to them, it wouldn’t matter HOW many slots the new system had, they wouldn’t be buying one.

Apple’s website mentions “You can install many different PCIe cards in your Mac Pro, such as fibre channel cards, fibre networking cards, and pro video and audio interface cards.” Including storage cards, that’s about the entire list now that GPU’s are off the table. The question for Apple that will drive the design of the Mac Pro is “How many people would need more than (n) slots?” With each added slot considered, the number of people needing more decreases fairly significantly. And, Apple releasing the Mac Studio shows the outcome of the first round of those discussions… that being that a large number of folks in that performance window didn’t/don’t need slots.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

It would remain to be seen if those custom cards even would get their drivers updated as the owners of those systems likely aren’t interested in touching them at all for fear of introducing some instability (possibly not even running the latest OS for the same reason). If those are folks aren’t in the market for a new system due to being tied to a custom build, then, to them, it wouldn’t matter HOW many slots the new system had, they wouldn’t be buying one.

Apple’s website mentions “You can install many different PCIe cards in your Mac Pro, such as fibre channel cards, fibre networking cards, and pro video and audio interface cards.” Including storage cards, that’s about the entire list now that GPU’s are off the table. The question for Apple that will drive the design of the Mac Pro is “How many people would need more than (n) slots?” With each added slot considered, the number of people needing more decreases fairly significantly. And, Apple releasing the Mac Studio shows the outcome of the first round of those discussions… that being that a large number of folks in that performance window didn’t/don’t need slots.

I wouldn't want to be the guy that needs 'just one more slot', and it's not there.

 

[InuNacho]

The days of "busses" are over. Gone. They are just too slow. What we have now in an N by M switch that lice inside the M1 chip and allow unified memory. This is orders of magnitude faster then a PCIe bus and removes a bottleneck.

In the old days we placed Video RAM on a separate card then build a bus to move data to and from the card. Today, Apple says "Why move the data? Not moving it is way-faster." So the need for the bus goes away.

Cards and buses still exist in the real world outside of Apple-land and aren't going away anytime soon. Sure data can move fast in Apple's computers but at some point you're going to have to transfer said data to another device/s or medium.
The Good ole' USB-A is still around and people like to claim it's dead.

 

[CWallace]

I'm curious if the die is actually different on this model or if it's a chip binning strategy where one or two of the cores are defective.

No, Apple directly and clearly said the Ultra is the last M1 chip. Didn't people watch the event?

Being real it just means you haven't see the quad M1 Max SoC yet.

Well, John said the Ultra was the last SoC in the M1 Family. I suspect, and surprised no one has considered that the Mac Pro will have its own ASi, vastly different from the SoC's we've seen.

I still believe that the Apple silicon Mac Pro will have M1 Ultra and what will effectively be four M1 Max interlinked ("Jade4C-Die") as Mark Gurman reported back in May 2021, but in another thread one person is adamant M1 Ultra is the end of the line and that "Jade4C-Die" will not happen.

I disagree, but if Apple could not get "Jade4C-Die" to work and had to scrap it, what is Apple to do? William Ma claims that Apple will have a version of M3 with 40 CPU cores that will release in 2023. And now the pundits are claiming that Mac Pro will not ship until late 2023. So does this mean we have to wait for this 40 core M3 before Apple releases an Apple silicon Mac Pro?

And if they do, does that mean Apple might have "rushed" Apple Studio out yesterday because they are not in a position to announce an Apple silicon Mac Pro at WWDC in June when everyone is expecting them to? Will Tim will use the WWDC keynote to talk up M1 Ultra and Mac Studio and note that "Mac Pro continues to be a product in our line-up" just as he did with the Mac mini in 2017 prior to the new model dropping the following year?

 

[MrTemple]

cant exist...M1 ultra=interconnected fabric between 2 M1 max
So the mac pro needs the M2 family

Let me get this straight… You are saying the interconnected fabric technology that Apple said they kept hidden until the Ultra reveal, tech which would be EXACTLY what is needed to make a 4x chip, is actually not possible to do so, because they… didn’t reveal that before the next MacPro reveal?

That is some interesting logic to assume Apple could build this incredible technology from scratch, yet not have it work on more than one side of the chip.

This is modern chip making. See Tesla’s Dojo chips for exactly this kind of multi-directional uber-high bandwidth interconnect fabric. They are plopping their chips down like bathroom tiles, with insane data-throughput interfaces along all four sides.

Bonkers banana-pants crazy to think Apple couldn’t do that too.

 

[mjtomlin71]

Wouldn't that go against their single programming model (UMA) for ASi by splitting these things out? Seems like they would lose all the massive bandwidth they have been touting by doing so.

Mac Pro is more about expandability than “bandwidth”, so I don‘t see why they wouldn’t go for it on just the Mac Pro… a 64-core ASi CPU wold be absolutely bonkers… and could only exist outside of an SoC.

Edit: replaced 64-bit with 64-core

 

[CWallace]

I still see no reason why Apple cannot design a systemboard with two M1 Ultra SoCs electrically connected, even if they are not physically connected - so they would be in separate packages and therefore would not be a "new chip".

These separate packages could also have access to a pool of off-package memory to allow more than 256GB of system memory (the A5X and A6X had off-package memory).

 

[diamond.g]

Mac Pro is more about expandability than “bandwidth”, so I don‘t see why they wouldn’t go for it on just the Mac Pro… a 64-bit ASi CPU wold be absolutely bonkers… and could only exist outside of an SoC.

Yeah it is in conflict with what they have been telling developers how to treat Apple Silicon, so it will be interesting to see them walk that back with the Mac Pro.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

Mac Pro is more about expandability than “bandwidth”, so I don‘t see why they wouldn’t go for it on just the Mac Pro… a 64-bit ASi CPU wold be absolutely bonkers… and could only exist outside of an SoC.

They’re all 64-bit, though. Since the A7, all their processors have been 64-bit.

EDIT: If you meant 64 core, nevermind!

 

[diamond.g]

They’re all 64-bit, though. Since the A7, all their processors have been 64-bit.

I think they meant 64 core not 64 bit.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

I think they meant 64 core not 64 bit.

Which means server grade, or muscular workstation grade. Unlikely in a 'low end' machine today, but maybe the new Mac Pro? I could see Apple using two Ultra SOCs in a machine (Mac Pro again?), but the cost would be galactic, and the system would be seriously complicated, but imagine a 40 core desktop system that could have 256g of ram, and 64 'neural engines'. It sounds like the thermals are more like a workstation/server engine, but it would rip for sure. Wow...

228 BILLION transistors (double Ultra Mac Pro). Makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Wow...