You are comparing with 4 years old Mac Pro. If you compare with other workstations, it's a joke and you are justifying poor specs. Just one M2 Ultra for workstation computers? Seriously?
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Apple Unveils New Mac Pro With M2 Ultra Chip and More
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Agreed. People here tend to view everytingthing with their AppleLOVE blinders on.
I honestly think that you’re over thinking it if you’re getting down into the potential read write speed differences of PCI vs. thunderboltThere'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...
Not many. But lots of them can benefit from 192 GB of video memory.
Exactly, it’s been pretty clear since the introduction of the Mac Studio (actually, even BEFORE the Mac Studio) that any Mac Pro was going to be EXACTLY that, a Mac Studio with PCIe slots.
Would they really, though?
Even the 2019 Mac Pro matched a relatively narrow band of the PC workstation market as one could purchase cheaper (and less powerful) configurations as well as much more expensive (and much more powerful) configurations. And then there were the "high end PCs" using non-workstation CPUs, GPUs and RAM that were even cheaper than the "entry-level" PC workstations.
I feel the "John Siracusa Class" Mac Pro owner seems to make up a fairly large portion of the active posters in the Mac Pro forums - people who bought a Mac Pro (Pre-2012 or 2019) to use for a decade-plus running both macOS and Windows (via Boot Camp) and using it for general purpose tasks and playing (Windows) games. But realistically, how many of that class of user were buying 2019 Mac Pros and of those, how many would be interested in an Apple Silicon Mac Pro that can't play Windows games because it can't do Boot Camp?
3 times faster than the top Intel Mac Pro that came out 4 years ago and was never updated since.
It was a beefy chip, in 2019, but certainly it’s a lower bar to clear than comparing the M2 Ultra against a current i9 or a Sapphire Rapids Xeon.
Not likely, but I’m sure folks will be happy to post a few rumors saying it’s a certainty as long as they get clicks
One benefit of Apple Silicon is that pool is the same (and yes, I know that high-end video cards have faster dedicated VRAM, but I would not be surprised if many GPU tasks benefitted more from having up to 192GB of DDR-5 available than being "limited" to, say, 48GB of GDDR-6 RAM).
I hear the "Alex Lindsay class" always talking about needing CUDA... but the only way they can get that is on Windows machines.
That's what I was basing my comment on.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To be clear ... I think Apple silicon has been a great advance. I just think they hit their current ceiling with the Mac Studio and as a result, this Mac Pro is totally redundant and overpriced.
Fair enough, but that has been the case since 2013 (at least in the Mac Pro space).
Well in reality, it doesn't work that way. I'm using AI software and yet Apple Silicon is just way slower than Nvidia GPU with less VRAM. The memory bandwidth and other factors also matter so having a lot of VRAM does NOT means it's better. It only works better in specific tasks.
It is likely redundant for the significant majority of people because the Mac Studio was such a major leap forward in capability and external expandability.
But the 2023 Mac Studio is similar in design to the 2013 Mac Pro and enough "pros" found that external expandability had drawbacks for their workflows and use cases and Apple had to either address it (which they did with the 2019 Mac Pro) or forever abandon that market to PCs.
So that Apple is still offering a Mac with internal PCIe expandability implies those "pros" are still in the macOS ecosystem and they find the 2023 Mac Studio as limiting as they did the 2013 Mac Pro when it comes to connectivity.
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Ah that's true... Mac users haven't had CUDA since the trashcan!
But now Mac Pros do have PCIe slots again.
So even if Apple didn't want 3rd-party GPUs to run a monitor... they could at least allow the compute-capabilities of a GPU.
I dunno... this is all above my pay grade!
I get it. However, one of today's great mysteries is where the new Mac Pro gets its PCIe lanes from and what the actual bandwidth and number of available lanes is for those slots - so far all we know is that the physical size of those slots. The Sonnet adapters offer 16x and 8x slots but (as you pointed out) that doesn't mean they get 16x or 8x bandwidth.
As far as we knew, the Mx Ultra's i/o consists of enough PCIe to run the ethernet, SD slot and USB-A ports plus 8 TB4 ports. Either the M2 series has been keeping a shedload of unused PCIe lanes under a bushel or those PCIe slots are somehow sharing bandwidth with the TB4 ports. The "worst case" solution would be that Apple have just built a TB4 to PCIe bridge into the MP...
Well, that was an epic fail. The Mac Pro is their Halo product and they destroyed it. It was not a "one more thing" moment, rather a "by the way" moment. A drive by Mac Pro introduction.
They should have spent the billions they blew on the goggles on the Mac Pro ... they are gonna sell many more Mac Pro's than those goggles.
They should have spent the billions they blew on the goggles on the Mac Pro ... they are gonna sell many more Mac Pro's than those goggles.
The Mac Pro top configuration could certainly have 128 GB of high bandwidth VRAM (with 50 gigs for system RAM). Are there any non-Apple systems that can be configured with a 128 GB of graphics RAM?
The Mac Studio is not exactly what I would call expandable
The Mac Pro hasn’t been a Halo product in a VERY long time. If there was one today, it’d probably be the MBP. Especially since folks are buying Apple’s mobile systems way more than any Mac desktop.