Apple's Mac Pro Refresh: What We Know So Far

[Onelifenofear]

Frankly, if I were in the sort of business where $30k workstations were needed, had invested in a new Apple system in 2020 (possibly in the face of opposition from bean-counters pointing at $3k Dell systems), and in 2022 Apple suddenly said "Oh look! Aeroplane!" and replaced it with a radically different system with a laundry-list of new pros and cons, I'd be done with Apple (and we're talking "strike 3" here after they did the same thing in 2012 and 2017-19). Every time you force customers into a potentially expensive workflow change you give them another opportunity to switch to PC and make te bean-counters smile. I think that was one of the problems with the Trashcan - it was a radical change that Apple tried to force after the old, more conventional Mac Pro had been discontinued. If users had had a couple of years to adopt it, maybe it would have worked out better (...of course, there was also no CPU/GPU update path for it, but Apple Silicon should stop that from happening again).

I am sure they are supporting until 2027 at least.

The thing with the 2013 is it was very powerful for about 2 years then got rapidly overtaken. I used and made good money with mine for 7 years. But the lack of foresight was worrying. They assumed software would move more toward mutli gpu and in real life not many apps fully supported the dual d700s

As for the new one - I paid £14K all in with 3rd party ram - and that was paid for in one job / a month, It's a workhorse and should be treated as such - The grief and shock I got from friends that I paid that much for a computer was hilarious especially as a few of them are trademen and pay 25K for a Van and then same again in tools

This time they built the Backbone for the software developers - Metal and its platform independent. Sure the Binaries are different for intel and Apple Silicon - but it's really easy to recompile and lots have already done so - there are some intel only command work arounds though for some specific apps.

I am genuinly hoping that this is consdered a "Mac" they leave the current "Mac Pro" on sale until they can really blow that out of the water with some insane 64 CPU Core, Nvidia beating GPUs with the Same or more 1.5tb ram / loads of PICE slots ( though without discrete GPUs they won't need as many). Or who knows they may be able to continue to support AMD GPU cards. Just because they don't now... they had dual GPUs in the laptops for years.

 

[svish]

Might be seeing it at WWDC. Will be extremely powerful.

 

[Nicole1980]

If the small MP doesn‘t offer swappable components then sorry, but that‘s not a Mac Pro in my eyes. Call it MacMini Pro/Plus/Max or something please.

THIS. What makes a mac pro is not what it looks like, its the power and expandability.
The power is a given in any higher end M-based mac. The expandability of this particular machine is what will classify it as a 'Mac Pro'

 

[aeronatis]

I'm ammuning they smaller Mac Pro will have not PCI-e slots, which is a good way to slim it down. It will probably be a square version of the trash can design. Hopefully it isn't throttled down for the sake of heat issues like the trash can was.

I think so, too. It could ve a design of Mac Mini with a bigger height. Like trash can Mac Pro bot more square profile, or Xbox Series X with more rounded corners. I believe it would have no thermal issues as even the laptops are quite good in that regards compared to the x86 ones in the past.

Moving the line up to ARM doesn't mean "only making and selling ARM versions"

Important difference there.

Very rational to expect they might have some Intel versions still in the lineup for a while.

Actually, it does. When they tried to comfort Intel Mac user by saying their devices would be supported for years to come, they pretty much confirmed that Intel Macs would come to an end. I agree that the Intel Mac Pro could have some minor BTO options added for a while though.

 

[dysamoria]

It appears Apple is following in Intels footsteps. Instead of releasing higher IPC processors they're adding cores.

Is there any other path?

 

[2Stepfan]

As others have pointed out, for me a Mac Pro means expand ability.
at minimum that means adding in SSDs for more storage within the box.
RAM should be, but whether that can be done remains to be seen. Plenty on here have argued you can have ram on soc with expandability. This is a big and interesting question.

GPU - thus far Mac Pro has offered this as a core part of the offering. I would love to see this. I don’t know if it’s really feasible but again people here have argued that it is.

Persoanlly I’d like an economic alternative to an iMac Pro which I can fill with big cheaper SSDs. This may well be a vain hope. A Big Mac mini which you can’t expand would not fulfil the brief IMO.

 

[dysamoria]

All Intel Macs with a T2 are essentially that, though. It's basically a full-featured A10 with less GPU cores, according to Wikipedia.

While I don't expect Apple to go that route, it's not in the realm of impossibility that they would expand on that concept and further continue the hybrid route with a more powerful T* chip (if not an actual M* chip) that gets to do more tasks.

Yes, and the added complexity has brought with it new problems. As soon as they added a SOC as a replacement for certain dedicated hardware and as a sub-processor for select functions, my first question was “so what happens when that little computer crashes? What happens to the main computer?” And it did. And we saw. Then there were the other consequences (audio problems, power problems, etc).

I’m all for custom chips, but SOC systems, with their own operating system, placed inside the main system is a foolish multiplier of complexity, especially when we are watching to software bugs continuing to grow exponentially in existing operating systems and software from Apple, as they obsess over new releases and new “features”, rather than making existing software rock-solid.

 

[dysamoria]

Perhaps you're right, but the swearing isn't necessary.

What swearing?

I had the same reaction to your chain of argumentative posts. It got beyond tiresome.

 

[MacSince1985]

I think people are over estimating how small the small one will be. If the rumor is that the smaller Mac Pro is 50% the volume... then each of its dimensions would be 80% the size of the current Mac Pro (the cube of 80% is 50%). So something more like 16.5"H x 14"D x 6.8"W. Smaller for sure but not tiny.

I totally agree. If you take the 2019 MP, remove 4 of the 9 PCI slots and 4 of the 8 RAM slot, and use a smaller heatsink for the M processor, you're roughly at half the volume but still modular.

 

[dysamoria]

Would Logic Pro benefit from more graphics cores? Or are they really only for graphics?

I have never heard anyone make any suggestion that Apple are considering letting Logic use GPUs as DSP processors. It’s been an experimental concept for ages on the PC, going mostly nowhere, and there are audio interfaces offering their own DSP chips, but they’re more for locking software to hardware at this point.

It would be nice, but it’s an idea that seemed to have died on the vine. While general compute APIs exist, Apple announcing such capability in a new Mac and Logic version would be a first (to my knowledge), and surprising to me.

Logic doesn’t seem to get much focus at Apple. It’s seemingly maintained as bait. Great bait (I use and love it), but bait nonetheless.

 

[dysamoria]

There is no irony at all. Macs are well behind in lots of areas such as engineering software and especially specialised software for running instruments and fabrication machinery of various kinds. A pro choses the computer that can do the job and that is Win PC in most cases. Remove Windows and the world would literally stop. Remove MacOS, nothing significant will happen to our daily life.

It’s been telling that Apple haven’t eaten their own dog food for some time. With their monstrous amounts of money, you’d think they could actively pay the companies making WinTel-only industrial & engineering software to make Mac OS native versions, pushing things along. Yet...

 

[dysamoria]

Welcome to a RUMOR site. Yikes

Take issue with the language of the article, then.

 

[dysamoria]

I think so, too. It could ve a design of Mac Mini with a bigger height. Like trash can Mac Pro bot more square profile, or Xbox Series X with more rounded corners. I believe it would have no thermal issues as even the laptops are quite good in that regards compared to the x86 ones in the past.



Actually, it does. When they tried to comfort Intel Mac user by saying their devices would be supported for years to come, they pretty much confirmed that Intel Macs would come to an end. I agree that the Intel Mac Pro could have some minor BTO options added for a while though.

Yeah, I instantly saw that the “for years to come” language was to stop potential sales of intel Macs from being dropped at the Apple Silicon announcement.

 

[AndiG]

I would expect PCIe 4.0 at the least, but would hope for PCIe 5.0...?

Without discrete GPUs, I would think RAID & networking cards would be the main use for PCIe slot bandwidth...?

Samsungs PCIe-5.0-SSD is about to start summer 2022

 

[AndiG]

OpenGL is awful now. Vulcan better but Metal is far superior in every way.

Outperformed? Um M1 alone was killing the competition on price / perf let alone the max and M2s etc.

1) No one in the world cares about Metal
2) OpenGL applications are massively widespread in scientific/research use
3) Lots of OSS Games choose OpenGL
4) Metal Layer to transform between OpenGL/Vulkan ist aaaaaawully slow

5) I think next Intel generation/AMD generation will be competitive and then you go again - $2000 Linux PC faster than $6000 Mac Pro (entry level price) - history repeats.

Will the M2 CPUs be server grade like Xeon?

 

[theluggage]

As for the new one - I paid £14K all in with 3rd party ram - and that was paid for in one job / a month, It's a workhorse and should be treated as such - The grief and shock I got from friends that I paid that much for a computer was hilarious especially as a few of them are trademen and pay 25K for a Van and then same again in tools

Are you saying that you actually made $14k more profit in one month, thanks entirely to your Mac Pro, than you would have done with your old computer? Not saying that's impossible - but it sounds a bit exaggerated. "Paying for itself" over a few years is perfectly believable, though. I'm not going to go down the "Mac Pros are too expensive" rabbit hole, but at those prices you do need to be able to justify them in terms of profitability.

As for your tradesmen friends - like me, they have no idea whether or not your work could feasibly be done on a $2000 Dell or a $3000 iMac, but you don't have to be a master builder to work out that you couldn't deliver a cubic yard of ballast in a cheap city compact...

Then, of course, if you work in a larger organisation, good luck with the "...but this will pay $20k a year in increased productivity" when the bean-counter in question is only concerned with saving on the equipment budget and doesn't give a wet slap about their mortal enemies in HR.

THIS. What makes a mac pro is not what it looks like, its the power and expandability.
The power is a given in any higher end M-based mac. The expandability of this particular machine is what will classify it as a 'Mac Pro'

What we have seen so far of Apple Silicon is that the RAM and GPU are built into the SoC package. So far there's no suggestion of M1 support for AMD GPUs, and part of the performance advantage comes from having the proprietary, Metal-optimised GPUs built into the processor with direct access to system RAM. The SSD interface is proprietary - so at best we'll get proprietary SSD modules as per the Mac Pro, but again there's an advantage to surface-mounted SSDs with the least possible copper between them and the SoC, so maybe not. So far, all the M1 processors have been soldered-in so SoC upgrades look unlikely. I don't think anybody knows how many PCIe (as opposed to TB) lanes an M1 can support (it must be more than zero, unless that 10Gb Ethernet controller in the Mini is running on sunshine and good wishes).

So there's really not so much scope for expandability in an Apple Silicon system beyond possibly offering some PCIs slots (which could be used for adding extra storage or specialist I/O cards - but probably not GPUs).

The silver lining is that (unlike, say, the TrashCan) Apple Silicon Macs partly compensate for lack of expandability by squeezing extra performance from having stuff on-die, on-package or surface mounted as close as possible to the SoC.

 

[Mirachan_007]

Next Mac Pro should be called the “Mac Pro M1 Cube”.

 

[rjzak]

It would be awesome if macOS would support Intel's SGX and ARM's Realms/CCA.

 

[CWallace]

- NVidia cards won’t work, so forget about ML

Well ML relying on CUDA.

An "M1 Max Quadro" will have (at least) 64 Neural Engines so if your ML workloads use Core ML or Create ML it should do quite well.

 

[m1maverick]

Is there any other path?

We were told the x86 architecture stagnated because it was too complex to realize and significant IPC gains from generation to generation. Apples move to ARM was supposed to address that.

 

[Bandaman]

What swearing?

I had the same reaction to your chain of argumentative posts. It got beyond tiresome.

Taking the Lord’s name in vain.

 

[seek3r]

That's not ever going to happen. The days of Hackintoshing are coming to a close. Once Apple finally kills off Intel, the Hackintosh hobby is only going to be viable for older hardware until eventually it just fizzles out entirely. I used to build Hackintoshes and it was fun, but Apple doesn't want anyone doing that anymore.

I suspect that by then the Hackintosh community will move to commercial ARM machines for their Hackintoshes, they dont have to stick with x86 either as more things move to ARM

 

[CWallace]

I suspect that by then the Hackintosh community will move to commercial ARM machines for their Hackintoshes, they dont have to stick with x86 either as more things move to ARM

This presumes that future versions of macOS will be allowed to run on non-Apple Silicon platforms.

 

[seek3r]

This presumes that future versions of macOS will be allowed to run on non-Apple Silicon platforms.

Technically MacOS on x86 isnt allowed to run on non-Apple hardware either, that’s the Hack part of Hackintosh

 

[turbineseaplane]

Actually, it does. When they tried to comfort Intel Mac user by saying their devices would be supported for years to come, they pretty much confirmed that Intel Macs would come to an end. I agree that the Intel Mac Pro could have some minor BTO options added for a while though.

That's all anyone is really saying (part in bold) -- and yes obviously Intel versions will come to an end at some point.