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Apple Working on Redesigned Mac Pro With Smaller Form Factor and Apple Silicon Chip
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I would go for a Mac Mini but the GPU is not good enough and I hate clutter so the idea of an eGPU and another cable to hide is offputting.
Of course, it is smaller. It's basically just an iPad in a metal box. Some more RAM and some more ports but in the end. it is an iPad.
Apologies if this has already been brought up, but this could see the return of a multi-processor Mac Pro: the 'A' chips cost Apple next to nothing compared to the several hundred to a few thousand dollars that each Xeon costs. Sticking four twelve-core chips in there might cost Apple a hundred dollars, based on estimates of 'A'-series chips to Apple. Add to that the vast engineering simplification brought about by the reduced thermal load, and we might see the return of a £2500 Mac Pro... we can hope.
I think you are right in that it will sacrifice some expandability. BUT ... It will probably be announced after a revamped Apple silicon version of the current Mac Pro at the same event. Followed by the Mac Pro Mini announcement. Still be expandable and upgradeable, but aimed at less computational heavy professionals like designers and still photographers as opposed to simulation, 3D rendering, video post production etc. For a more affordable price.
... Pro, and with more cores, at a higher clock speed thanks to more liberal heat dissipation, and with one or more third party dedicated GPUs, and quite a few more I/Os actually, in fact enough to run dual 27” 5K monitors. Still an iPad? Really?
Maybe the Mac Pro Mini will Look like the current one but smaller with, say, 4 slots; then offer a separate chassis for more slots, a bit like how they did with the XServe and XServe RAID. Presumably Apple are hedging their bets on their own GPUs being better than the full sized cards it currently uses. Will it still support 1.5TB?
There are dual socket Intel processors, but Apple isn't selling any dual socket Macs. You'd need a _huge_ number of cores to have an ARM processor where making it multi-socket and putting two into two sockets is easier or cheaper or faster than making a single ARM processor with twice the number of cores.
As far as the RAM is concerned: No, you don't need twice the RAM for a dual socket system. You may have tasks that need say five GB of RAM per thread, so with twice the cores you'd like twice the RAM, but that's based on the total number of cores, not the sockets.
Apple has never done anything anyone asked for, that’s just not how they do things, and for that I respect them.
Why does everybody think it will replace the full size Mac Pro? Did the Home Pod Mini replace the Home Pod? Did the iPad Mini replace the iPad?
Ah my mistake; thought they maxed out at 1TB
But yeah (as a side-note, not in reply to the above), as always my beef with the Mac Pro is not the price of what you get, but that unless you want an all-in-one, they simply don't offer anything in between a Mini and a Pro. I.e., I don't have a problem with the Mac Pro per-se, my issue is the lack of something less high spec but not an AIO.
I mean what if I want to use a 55" display (for example)? I'm stuck with a Mac mini, a MacBook or some awkward iMac in the corner... and no, airplay to an AppleTV isn't really a great solution.
I get why, but as I'm sure everybody has heard many times before - I believe there's a definite market for something that can do some basic expansion with consumer parts.
e.g., something like an i7/Ryzen with at least
- 1x PCIe x16 (for GPUs)
- 1-2 PCIe x4 (for add-in card(s) of your choice)
- removable/replaceable RAM
- on board M.2 slots
- at least a couple of SATA ports and bays to put drives in.
Pretty sure apple will never build it (especially now that consumer machines will no doubt be built-in Apple GPUs only) but we can dream - there's a massive gap between "I'm happy with an AIO iMac with zero internal expansion" and "I want workstation components and 1.5TB of RAM capability".
The iMac Pro kinda misses this point, its just a higher spec iMac with many of the same restrictions. Which is fine if you want a fixed configuration box you buy for your business and then bin after 3-5 years, but if you're a hobbyist any of Apple's Pro desktops are big money for limited spec.
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We may have an idea on how well ARM itself can scale via Amazon's Graviton2.
If that was the case Nvidia wouldn't have put up $40 billion to try to buy ARM...though that has turned into a three ring circus of confusion.
One of the problems with having a large hardware variance (ie like a wide selection of discrete GPUs) is driver support and given how much a disaster of having a wide varience Apple had with the clone program in the 1990s they do not want to repeat that mess. Also ask yourself who wants a discrete GPU outside of high end professionals who will either have a GPU case via the USB-C or a card in a Mac Pro. Gamers? As has been pointed out the mac gamer market is so small fry that the number of games is way smaller then in the PC (which intern is even smaller then the console space)
Though I must admit that there are a number of game what run on linux and windows even through linux has even less of a marketshare than the MacOS does (and the excuses for this are such BS that I can't believe they are made)
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Well there is the eGPU option though I have to ask just how many people outside the low end Mac Pro crowd will use 1-2 PCIe x4 and given USB 3.1 Type-C is faster then SATA III why in the name of sanity would you want something with slower through put?! Never miming that if you ling out an iMac Pro you are going to go past the ~$7000 for the lowest end Mac Pro you can expand. iMHO you are suggesting a product that given its nitche audience is effectively the solution to a non-existent problem.
But given their design the Xeon's power comes with a cost in terms of price, power needed, and heat produced. Amazon wouldn't have gone ARM (Graviton2) if it thought the Xeon was "worth" it. In terms of processing power per Watt ARM cleans the Xeon's clock, cleans it again in terms of power per $ spent, and yet again in terms of processing power vs heat ratio.
The only thing Xeon really has going for it is the ability to run x86 natively.
this lineup is purely your imagination. it won't happen cause it will complete dispute the current Mac desktop lineup, including Mac mini and iMac or iMac Pro. your imagination pretty much wipe out all Mac desktops. like I said, why so serious on the rumours. apple lab can create different prototypes for R&D. for professional (not YouTuber) real professional they want expanailbilty and configurability so the size of the new Mac Pro won't be small; apple won't put themselves into the situation of Mac Pro 2013.
think of the whole apple lineup instead of your imagination.
With 3.5inch drive bays now antiquated and 2.5 inch drive bays antiquated and SATA antiquated ... and blown to bits by tiny NMVE M2 drives .. the need for large enclosures has been significantly removed for most users. I am quite excited to see this, and can see it as the replacement for my beloved R2D2 trashcan Mac Pro.
hopefully back to a trashcan design for that step between a consumer iMac and all powerful Mac Pro.
most systems don't have the lanes to drive more then 1-2 m.2 drives. And you want raid 1 min 2 disks Raid 5 3 Raid 10 4