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Apple's 2025 M4 Mac Pro: What to Expect
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Pro Mac desktops have been over engineered since the G5 anyway. Would be cool if they had the clean internal design of the Power Mac G4.
Daughterboards can use proprietary connections not PCIe so they can be as fast as they need to be, but no more.
But every connector and cm of distance you add, it becomes more and more difficult to make fast.
Apple is going to have to move to a full chiplet architecture eventually, and this will be the mechanism for future scaling.
They are not a cpu provider
They are an appliance company that happens to design their own custom cpus for said appliances
It's aimed at corporate buyers, it's a tool, and the cost of the machine is a rounding error in the total cost of employment of the people using it. *And* it can be written off on corporate taxes as a capital expense.
Just because you're not the target market doesnt make it a dumb product.
Semiconductor manufacturing equipment. These are 'darkfield' scan tools. They fire lasers across the surface of the wafer and identify defects based on how the light scatters on the far side. They can tell precisely (within 10 nanometers) where the defect is, the size in both x and y directions, and other characteristics.
Then, the tools process rules on these defects (is it too small, too big, too A, too B, too C, only seen by the left laser, only seen by the right laser and so on) to provide additional information on each defect found.
The scan fairly quickly, and are processing a ton of information on every wafer.
These have two ‘columns’ of Mac pros in them, there are also a couple of Windows PCs for a total of like 20 computers.
I'm curious about the software
what is ARM macOS doing exactly?
I would expect stuff like this to be linux or maybe even windows these days...
These aren’t ARM Macs (I don’t believe I ever said they were, but merely and example of something needing PCIE slots).
Processing data mostly. Interpretation of a scattered light into a wafer map. If you want to learn more, the major players are usually hiring, and I don’t want to step on any trade secrets.
There are tools that run Linux (and other stuff). I do not know why vendors chose this one over that. I will note that the Macs are less prone to crashing, even compared to some of our Linux tools.
Making a CPU of any kind in this day and age is a serious undertaking.
When your ‘appliance’ has more processing power than existed on earth in 1990…
That used to be the case more you know, with manufacturers using in house designs - DEC had alpha, Sun had SPARC, IBM's had a dozen archs, Motorola had 68k, Acorn (with Apple and VLSI) had ARM, older purpose driven machines like the Cray-1 had their own specific proc types, etc
Some folks are still making CPU upgrades for ancient systems. The Amiga not only still getting FPGA based upgrades but still getting new system roms too. It must be the oldest system still being updated by fans. It can now playback videos and mp3s and use some USB peripherals even though it is an 80s machine. Crazy ****.
Hey, the last Commodore Amigas were NINETIES machines. I know kids today think every year that starts with a 1 happened at the same time, but it was a different decade.
Yes, but only bundled with the appliance, they are not going to:
That's not their business model. So they aren't a CPU provider in the sense that you are saying. They design appliances, the cpu is part of the design. It is not a separate part that they are a provider of.
(Really TSMC is the CPU provider here, and they certainly aren't going to sell you any apple silicon.)
I'm sure Apple won't do it... but it would be interesting if Apple could sell SoCs and reference motherboard designs into the Linux server space.
Not quite right. Legally they can't sell Apple Silicon because the design really does come from Apple. TSMC has the fab plants to actually make the chips. They sell chips with other ARM designs, but some other client has to provide a design that the client legally owns.
I've give you that Apple is not going to license out their CPUs for anybody else to use, so they're not a CPU provider, but a system provider, with custom Arm-based CPUs.
...but saying TSMC is the CPU provider is the biggest twisting of truth I've heard in a while. By that logic AMD doesn't provide CPUs or GPUs either, as those parts also come from TSMC. And I guess Foxconn is the Playstation provider, as well as the Xbox provider, AND the Switch provider too.
I would say it's more a different way of looking at it than a twisting of truth. By the same token I would agree with those other assessments as well. Apple, AMD, Sony, et al. design chips and devices; and manufacturers like TSMC and Foxconn manufacture them. I suppose your opinion on who provides them depends on whether you feel the providing is the manufacture or the design.
It will be interesting to see down the road if Right to Repair will force Apple to sell SoC's.
Apple currently rides the line:
- they supply parts for the repairs that Apple themselves do.
- by their logic they don't need to supply parts for repairs that they don't do. Replacing an SoC (or even an SoC package) is not a repair that Apple can do.
Time will tell what the courts think.