Apple Unveils New Mac Pro With M2 Ultra Chip and More

Bokito said:
One (just 1!!) minute of keynote time says it all. It’s an afterthought. They could’ve done this last year.

Yes, there are less people that need a Mac Pro each year, but there are certainly people that need it. And a Mac Pro with just 192 GB just isn’t gonna cut it if you want to use this device for 5 years. As a Webdeveloper 32 GB RAM is the bare minimum these days. I can’t image people working with 8K+ video and RAW phots having enough RAM. Apple could probably introduce a 256GB model in 6 months, but that’s far off from the 1.5TB Mac Pro introduced years ago. The 1.5 TB might’ve been overkill, but in certain circumstances it’s useful (AI/data training). Apple now killed that marked.
Click to expand...
I think AI moved on to dedicated designs from AMD, etc
 
toke lahti said:
dGPU support?

eGPU support?

("It can't be done with M chips!")
Next year MP with expandable slower RAM starting from $7999!
Click to expand...
Maybe but I doubt it - LPDDR5X should allow them to do 256 GB next year, and if the M3 Extreme can be realized (and not cancelled like the M2 Extreme) hopefully we will see up to 512 GB… NVIDIA doesn’t offer expandable memory on their grace hopper super chip - instead they mix LPDDR and HBM but they too are limited in the max amount of LPDDR.
 
Gudi said:
No, they don't. The Mac Pro never was a product, merely a marketing gimmick. The vast majority of pro customers couldn't even take full advantage of the M1 Ultra Studio. It's just too fast already.
Click to expand...
What utter, uninformed, hot-take nonsense. Any physical media simulation will eat up every core you throw at it and bring any Mac to its knees. So will CPU/GPU renderers. So will many scientific apps or multi-track audio or video production apps. I’ve never heard any professional creatives complain that their machine was too fast!
 
Last edited:
Joe The Dragon said:
looks to still have sata ports.
why not add an m.2 slot as well?
but why not list the lane configs are they X16 X4 X8 shared with TB bandwidth?
what is the base ram?
is the CPU on an card? or does each cpu / ram config need it's own MB?
storage on cards that can be use changed?
Click to expand...
The things I like:
Seeing Sata ports, PCI-E, and even USB-A on the back. It looks somewhat modular In that Sense.
What I would have liked to see:
replaceable CPU So you can upgrade the core later.
The main PCB being specc’d to handle PCI-E 5 and maybe even 6 if the standards are far enough along even if the M2 is only capable of PCI-E 4. That would provide longevity for CPU upgrades.
Additional RAM that is upgradeable and outside of the SOC Ram. This RAM gets used when SOC RAM is exhausted (extends it, but at a cost to speed)
M.2 slots built right on the mainboard. There is PLENTY of room for it, or at least some daughter cards that have them.
Support for GPU’s that are not Apples.

If they delivered on ALL of that, the extra up front cost would have been worth it at the current price. Then update modules later on can be much cheaper and your chassis would be good for minimum of 10 years with the ability to upgrade the CPU/Storage/RAM being very flexible.
 
They said who this is for right in the announcement: it runs the largest transformer models. The issue with transformer models is the amount of video memory they need. People are buying the Nvidia high density datacenter products not because they need the cores, but because that's the only way they can get enough GPU memory. This announcement shows how brilliant the move to unified RAM was.

Right now, there is a huge shortage on Nvidia chips, and it is going to be many months before it gets better. If you can get the Mac Pro now, that means you can do training and inference now. Every day counts if you are in that business. (If you haven't noticed, there are plenty of deep pockets that are in that business.)

Apple is going to sell every one of these they make, and they are going to be racked in datacenters training transformers and doing inference.
 
skippermonkey said:
What utter, uninformed, hot-take nonsense. Any physical media simulation will eat up every core you throw at it And bring any Mac to its knees. So will CPU/GPU renderers. So will many scientific apps or multi-track audio or video production apps. I’ve never heard any professional creatives complain that their machine was too fast!
Click to expand...

Question, since I don't know, are these apps written for the Mac or windows based applications ported over to the Mac?

I would be curious on the audio and video production apps, as I haven't heard about those bringing the Mac to it's knees. Interesting.
 
For raw power the RTX4090 is still the king, but don’t forget that Nvidias most powerful card RTX4090 has only 24GB and the RTX8000 has 48GB, if you want to do AI with large models having direct access to 192GB is huge. We know that some of the parallel performance on Apple silicon is stunning like fluid simulation http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20220427/

And the IO when working with video is best in class when running a lot of video simultaneou. Also substance painter can easily eat 24GB of video memory if you use a many layers…
 
rhett7660 said:
Question, since I don't know, are these apps written for the Mac or windows based applications ported over to the Mac?

I would be curious on the audio and video production apps, as I haven't heard about those bringing the Mac to it's knees. Interesting.
Click to expand...

I can shed some light here. Yes, there are absolutely apps that can bring all existing Macs to their knees.

Blender, free, open source, multi platform 3d app that is very popular will use as many GPU cores as you can throw at it, and was recently optimized for M1 architecture. I routinely run hours long renders on my M1 Max Mac Book Pro, and if the new Studio or Mac Pro cuts those down to 25% of the render time, I'm in.

There are many other high end 3d, video, etc. uses like this that use every resource you can give them.

I'm in the niche of people who will buy one of these beasts fully loaded in a heart beat.
 
TheWatchfulOne said:
I think they got the names of these computers mixed up. They said the Mac Studio was built for pros. Then they talk about how the Mac Pro is used in studios. 🤔
Click to expand...

I dont know any audio studio that would NEED one over a Mac Studio.. PCI audio cards?? What is this 2005? I cant even think of anyone that still makes them except maybe AVID..

Everything MOTU/RME/Universal/Presonus/Focusrite/etc, pretty much everything anyone is buying nowadays, is all USB or TB. When the 'Mac Pro' was first released it was clearly for the video folks, this one looks just the same to me, although, how that is going to work now that they dont support any GPUs is up in the air..
 
DFZD said:
3x faster than the last Intel Mac isn’t the flex Apple thinks it is.
Click to expand...
Exactly my thought.

“Hey look, this new computer has a chip that’s faster than the 4-or-so generations old Xeon that we had the audacity to be selling at the same price since 2019”.

If anything, it’s scandalous.
 
I've been waiting so long for a M based MacPro - but adding it all up and looking at the limitations - the box just isn't worth the price tag.
 
Apple says the new Mac Pro is up to 3x faster than the fastest Intel-based Mac Pro.
Click to expand...
Yeah but the fastest Intel Mac Pro uses an ancient CPU which I think will lose in a lot of performance metrics vs mainstream AMD and Intel CPUs.
Rumors say AMD will have a Threadripper Pro version of their 96 core beast. That's your comparison point. The best vs the best.
 
Gudi said:
The niche is a Mac Studio with up to six ProDisplay XDR. The Mac Pro is a niche of a niche, like the last blue-eyed albino unicorn.
Click to expand...
Yeah, to be fair. I'm currently leaning Studio. But I am trying to do my due diligence to find out if there are any advantages to the Pro.
 
ssgbryan said:
Pcie 5.0 is available now on either Intel or AMD consumer grade boards. There are only 2x16 PCIe 4.0 slots in the machine - the other 4 are x8 - so forget PCIe 5 storage - bandwidth simply isn't there.


That is why I left in 2019.

You can get a much faster machine for about 1/3 of the price.



3d art, at the hobbyist level. Many poorly coded Adobe apps. This is a mac pro forum, not a mac mini forum.

The only reason I am not using 192gb of ram right now is because my AM4 platform doesn't support it. Consumer grade AM5 & X790 series (AMD & Intel) either do or will with a bios update. A CPU/MB transplant ($400 USD) and I am golden.



Not if Apple refuses sign off on drivers - Nvidia made OSX drivers for the RTX 2000 series, but Apple refused to sign off on them. That won't change going forward - it isn't a technical issue - it is a corporate ego issue. A long, long time ago, Nvidia cost Apple a lot of money due to a series of bad video cards.



That is some serious copium, Anaxarxes. This is a Mac Pro, not a Mac Studio (96gb limit - what I had in my Mac Pro 15 years ago).

Go read the press release again, and then go read the footnotes; there is a reason there are no numbers - if the numbers were good, they would have shouted them from the roof tops. Added bonus - those i9 Mac studios were down tuned from their base clock speeds because the enclosure couldn't keep them cool.

More importantly, it isn't what you need today - it is also what you will need tomorrow. This thing doesn't have a lot of tomorrows in it.

Now that the specs have gone live, it is even worse than I thought.

16 big/8 little CPU cores - this is a $600 CPU.

No H.265, No AV1 encoding

2 x16 PCIe 4 slots; 4 x8 PCIe 4 slots

1 PCIe 3.0 slot X4 for I/O?

This is AM5 or X790 level (consumer grade motherboards)

AFA GPUs from AMD/Intel/Nvidia - don't hold your breath - not enough power connectors to provide power to the cards.

This thing is for people that are trapped in the Apple ecosystem - it won't be bringing in new customers.
Click to expand...
Some fair comments there - however I honestly believe we're yet to see the ecosystem of Mac Pro come together this year.

I'll leave this here --> https://appleinsider.com/articles/2...-may-use-apple-silicon-pci-e-gpus-in-parallel Might solve the big graphics question. (For apple refusing signing off nVidia drivers, this might be the deal AMD struck with Apple for exclusivity or nVidia demanding for an agreement that is not beneficial for Apple vice versa)

PCIe 5.0 would have been nice of course, maybe that's coming with M3 Ultra, but I do not see a big miss here as fastest SSDs for PCIe 4.0 are barely touching the bandwith 8GB/s. The increased bandwith only makes the PCIe more attractive when working with the largest files as random read and writes are not limited with PCIe bandwith.

I would say my final verdict on the Mac Pro based only on GPU compatibility for AMD/nVidia. If this does not come, the Mac Prom is nothing but a Mac Studio enclosure. If this does come though, then this might just work well.
 
titaniumdoughnu said:
Yeah, to be fair. I'm currently leaning Studio. But I am trying to do my due diligence to find out if there are any advantages to the Pro.
Click to expand...
This is just one of the silliest comments I can imagine. "Leaning Studio". This shouldn't be something you need to decide. Mac Pro users already know that they need PCI expansion, which makes the Studio out of consideration.
 
US starting price of $7k...

The 2010 Mac Pro sold for between $2,500 and $6,200.

I've lived off the bones of high end Macs for a long while, since I bought my first Mac Tower in 1997 - a Quadra 840av.

With a starting price of $7k US - this is a very firm nail in that coffin of ever owning another Mac Tower, because by the time these machines are in my price range, the OS will be not only be unsupported, but completely useless.
 
anselpela said:
This is just one of the silliest comments I can imagine. "Leaning Studio". This shouldn't be something you need to decide. Mac Pro users already know that they need PCI expansion, which makes the Studio out of consideration.
Click to expand...
There's a lot of factors to consider.

- If I need multiple SSDs running simultaneously for various purposes (working cache for my vfx software, media source for massive video files, etc), is there any reason to consider installing those in PCI slots vs. slapping a few OWC ThunderBlades on top of the Studio. I'm having a discussion on another forum right now about the potential for improved random read/write speed via PCI vs Thunderbolt.

- The endless debate about whether third party GPUs of any kind will ever work in the Mac Pro.

- Edit to add: whether the Mac Pro has improved thermals, and would allow greater peak sustained performance.

The only silly one I can think of is whether I need wheels... ;)
 
mozumder said:
192GB max memory limit is incredibly small. Real workstations need terabytes of RAM. It's basically an overpriced Mac Studio with PCIe for IO, which can normally be done via Thunderbolt these days.

Really surprised Apple went with this kind of architecture. They needed a blowout product.
Click to expand...
I am not defending Apple. But just wondering, what tasks need terabytes of RAM? What are the possible scenarios?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Back
Top