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Apple Working on Redesigned Mac Pro With Smaller Form Factor and Apple Silicon Chip

-BigMac- said:
I dont quite understand who on earth a smaller Mac Pro would be for..
Mac Pro is either for professionals (expandability, cooling, space for dedicated gpus), or its a Powerful Mac Mini - which is a consumer item not prosumer.
But i’m happy to be proven wrong when it comes :)
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There IS a market for the in-betweens...

And if Apple could figure out the best options for this...then they have Mac options for all.

Except Gamers of course...but maybe this could also touch that segment...who knows.

Really...all that is needed in expansion for the smaller form factor (trash can design would be good) is RAM & an extra SSD added option (of course CPU and GPU but that would probably not be an option with Apple silicone).

Then include your normal usb-c 4, HDMI and ethernet ports and you got the middle in-betweens.
 
We all know that they are transitioning their CPUs to ARM.

What I am interested to know is the GPU that will be used.

Will it be Apple Silicon GPUs? Or will it still be 3rd party GPUs(AMD)?
 
guzhogi said:
I have to wonder what they'll sacrifice to make it half the size? Probably ditch the AMD GPUs. Maybe even several PCIe slots, as well. I fear we'll see another trash can Mac Pro, and then Apple will have to relearn that some people want modular computers.
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Thunderbolt 3/3.5 makes those points non-issues for those who don’t need the absolute bleeding edge of performance.
 
dogslobber said:
These will flop as no pro user will give up their pro apps.
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What Pro apps would people have to give up? All of Apple’s will be there when the first Apple Silicon Mac ships. So will Adobe’s and Microsoft’s. I would bet a lot of money that DaVinci Resolve will be there from launch, as will many of the 3D products that currently support Metal. The rest (of those that already made it on to Catalina) will be there by the time this machine ships.
 
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Alan Wynn said:
What Pro apps would people have to give up? All of Apple’s will be there when the first Apple Silicon Mac ships. So will Adobe’s and Microsoft’s. I would bet a lot of money that DaVinci Resolve will be there from launch, as will many of the 3D products that currently support Metal. The rest (of those that already made it on to Catalina) will be there by the time this machine ships.
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Pretty sure he’s referring to that copy of CS5 he bought all those years ago :)
 
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Something I posted back in June:

theorist9 said:
[The Mac Pro] Looks like a great machine for high-end pro users, including its 1.5 TB max RAM, numerous PCIe slots, and ability to handle four high-TDP GPU's. And I really like the lift-off cover. I don't know if Afterburner offers performance that's difficult to obtain with Windows/NVIDIA workstations, but if it does that's certainly an excellent way for Apple to distinguish its product from the latter.

My one criticism (and this is something I anticipated would be an issue, prior to the announcement) is that most companies that produce workstations for pro users understand that they're not a monolithic user group (i.e., there's a wide range of needs there) and thus, sensibly, produce more than one form factor (essentially, a larger box and a smaller box) to accommodate that range of requirements. Optimally, then, Apple would have offered two form factors as well. Given this machine's high capabilities, an obvious second form factor would be a smaller (but still modular/upgradeable) box that accommodated a maximum of two (instead of four) high-TDP GPU's (this by itself would reduce the TDP requirement by 500W), along with sensible corresponding reductions in other max specs, at a correspondingly lower base price.

And it's not as if Apple doesn't understand this concept. After all, they produce each of the MacBook Pro, iMac, iPad Pro, and iPhone in two (or more) form factors.

Perhaps they'll produce a smaller form factor in the future. I suspect much of the design work (and thus design cost) done for this machine could be used to engineer a smaller box.
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[https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...9.2183801/page-24?post=27421179#post-27421179 ]
 
BornAgainMac said:
I feel bad for the people that dropped over 50K for one of the Intel models.
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Yup.

I'm not sure how many people realise that the processors in those bad boys are a significant portion of the cost (sure, a lot of it is apple mark up, but the processors themselves are several thousand dollars each in quantities of 1000).

And by several thousand I don't mean two or three. Somewhere between 5k and 10k each (because we don't know what sort of discount apple get from intel if any).
 
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MikhailT said:
Only if the price is not insane. Given that Xeon CPUs in Mac Pros are insanely expensive, it will be interesting to see what ARM Mac Pro can do.

If it is 1999$ and has the same or exceed the current Mac Pro performance.....it will be an insane yes for me.
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As if to rub salt into that cost wound: "However, Intel’s technology situation doesn’t reflect their sales situation: rival AMD’s second-generation EPYC processors have Intel beat in almost every metric, offering better performance and greater energy efficiency, all at lower prices." (CPUs New Intel Cascade Lake Xeon 'Performance' CPUs: Cutting Prices Too)

Intel's solution is basically the old been there done that (before): throw more cores, higher clockspeeds, or more cache on the chip.
 
gugy said:
WOW, that will be huge. People have been clamoring for this as far as I can remember.

I for one would love the expandability at a more reasonable price. Please also bring a 5k display option that will not break the bank.
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Let's hope this is actually a consumer focused/priced expandable headless mac a lot of us have wished for. Of course, i will believe it when I see it.
 
This will be the most interesting form factor for the ArMacs to me. Will show the limits.

Performance per watt is not an important metric in this space. Will Apple ditch nVidia AND AMD graphics, even at the high end? If so, Apple is confident that their silicon competes not only with an i7, but with a Xeon, Geforce, Quadro, and FireGL, which is a very long way for a mobile chip architecture to stretch, competitively speaking.

Also, apparently Apple didn't learn that size for a workstation of this kind is not an important metric - speed and configurability is.
 
throAU said:
Yup.

I'm not sure how many people realise that the processors in those bad boys are a significant portion of the cost (sure, a lot of it is apple mark up, but the processors themselves are several thousand dollars each in quantities of 1000).

And by several thousand I don't mean two or three. Somewhere between 5k and 10k each (because we don't know what sort of discount apple get from intel if any).
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The specs on the Mac Pro are annoyingly vague on what "Intel W" Apple is using.

For example does "3.5GHz 8‑core Intel Xeon W" mean an Intel Xeon W-3223 which is just shy of $900 (yes that is nine hundred) on amazon or is it something else?

Similarly, does "2.5GH 28-core Xeno W" mean an Intel Xeon W-3275 Octacosa-core at ~$5,499 or is it an Intel Xeon W-3275M Octacosa-core at ~$9,000?

Is the reason Apple is a little vague is because what it got doesn't measure up to "standard" Intel Xeon W-whatever and doesn't want people to have expectation of performance Z when it is actually Z-x?

​

​

 
MikhailT said:
Only if the price is not insane. Given that Xeon CPUs in Mac Pros are insanely expensive, it will be interesting to see what ARM Mac Pro can do.

If it is 1999$ and has the same or exceed the current Mac Pro performance.....it will be an insane yes for me.
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Most likely the arm Mac Pro will sell for the same price while costing Apple way less to make, you get the idea
 
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cookedart said:
This will be the most interesting form factor for the ArMacs to me. Will show the limits.

Performance per watt is not an important metric in this space.
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That ROFLOL you are hearing over all the spit takes is all the laptop users. :p
 
EGPU compatibility will be key they just cant tease that and take it away.
the 2018 mini is a good kit would be a shame to lose that connectivity option.
 
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Maximara said:
Similarly, does "2.5GH 28-core Xeno W" mean an Intel Xeon W-3275 Octacosa-core at ~$5,499 or is it an Intel Xeon W-3275M Octacosa-core at ~$9,000?
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Those are the cores I was more referring to - not the low end 8 cores, which you're pretty insane to buy if you're going to bother with a Mac Pro imho.

For what it's worth I'd guess they're not using the M part as IIRC that's for bigger memory support beyond 1 TB...
 
loby said:
Really...all that is needed in expansion for the smaller form factor (trash can design would be good) is RAM & an extra SSD added option (of course CPU and GPU but that would probably not be an option with Apple silicone).

Then include your normal usb-c 4, HDMI and ethernet ports and you got the middle in-betweens.
Click to expand...
Mmm but Apple wants to sell you their RAM and SSD. Thats why most of their devices we cant even update those 2 if we want. We will see:cool:
 
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