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Bloomberg: Apple Silicon Mac Pro May Feature Up to 32 High Performance Cores, 128 Core Option for Graphics
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Because companies don't maximize prices, they maximize profits. By using their own silicon, they have better margins than when they had to source from Intel. They'll sell all of their products at their profit-maximizing price, and I'm pretty sure that's well south of US$6k for a base SKU Macbook Pro.
Like this?
Apple Working on High-End Mac Mini With Additional Ports and More Powerful Chip From Next-Gen MacBook Pro
Apple is working on a high-end version of the Mac mini, featuring a more powerful Apple silicon chip and extra ports, according to Bloomberg's...
www.macrumors.com
You have literally a Gurman rumor from today about the 14" and 16" MBP with 10 cores (8 perf + 2 eff)
No. It isn't very odd at all. Apple probably sells less than an 100K units of Mac Pro in a year. It is pretty unlikely Apple is going to design a chip with a less than 1M run rate.
The M-series design is primarily targeted at laptops and mobiles ( iPad Pro). That is the vast majority of what Apple sells. If Apple is completely dumping discrete GPUs from all laptops ( never were in iPad Pro) then they have a quite weak interest in composing large PCI-e I/O subsystems with huge bandwidth. Apple is going the best iGPU possible path ( Apple is about minimizing external high bandwidth .. SoC is a 'black hole' ; it is suppos to be pulling that inside the package) . So some high multiple x16 PCI-e 4 (or 5) lane bundles are probably not interesting to them at all.
Likewise with the memory system in their baseline design. LPDDR5 yeah sure... that aligned with their overwhelmingly laptop focus. DDR5 with module ECC ... nope. They have used it in the iMac Pro and Mac Pro because it was there in the basic Intel Xeon W class feature set. But are their laptops on the ECC module evolutionary path for the next 4-5 years ? Nope .... not even close. So Apple probably has very low motivation to persue that.
Apple is on the path of soldered on package RAM and iGPUs. They may go so some chiplets on package to get scale ( and keep about a 250-350mm cap on die size). Like the main iPhone and iPad offerings their primary strategy has been to make one SoC and use it in as many products as they can. That is a lower risk and higher profit path for them that they probably are not keen on getting off of. Making "Mac Pro" folks only buy Apple RAM probably has some folks inside of Apple salivating on the fat profit margins.
The large breadth of the Mac line up in terms of I/O bandwidth is going to make that "laptop baseline principles " hard to follow. The fully populated Mac Pro is far outlier from their laptop line up. The folks who at the upper end of the range they may just "write off" on M-series targeting for more than several years .
If Apple isn't using chiplets to get scale is an even bigger issue. Apple stays "ahead" by using bleeding edge process. That is much harder to do with large monolithic dies. If Apple has to wait until 5nm because a "much cheaper , bulks" process then could ( very probably 'will' given wafer/chip supply shortages ) take lots more time.
The upside of Intel is that they have their own fabs and available capacity. As a 3-4 year stop gap... it would make sense to do another Intel Mac Pro. If next gen Sapphire Ridge makes it out by early 202 into the Xeon W series then it wouldn't be all that strange.
Apple will do an I/O expansion chopped down "Mac Pro" and claim "Mac line up" transition victory.
Even more so if at WWDC 2021 that 3rd party GPU driver support in the ARM variant of macOS is still completely blocked. If Apple is engaged in some holy war against all 3rd party GPUs then that's even more credibility to do a substantive update of an Intel Mac Pro. [ If that opens up then yeah, another Intel Mac Pro gets more doubtful. Likewise if this new "half sized" M-series Mac Pro gets some slots. That would show Apple is willing to put some minimal effort into high end I/O in bulk. ]
There is a huge inertia of Intel Macs sold over the last 2-3 years. Those are going to require macOS Intel updates for many years. The average user is holding onto systems for longer amounts of time. ( Apple is still selling the non-Retina "edu iMac" with a quite old MBA class processor inside . Apple has some long term buy-and-squat customers. ) . So it isn't like they aren't going to be developing intel macOS updates anyway.
Apple could wait for 3nm ( or 2nm ). At some point they will probably stop adding high performance cores to keep Mac OS scheduler more tuned to the current data structure limitations ( < 64 processors ). At that point throwing in a chunk of PCI-e hub that may/may not use on the laptops will be much cheaper for them to do as a "throw away" on most systems the chip is used in (e.g., across imac , mini , mbp 16" , and Mac Pro ). If there are enough full sized Mac Pro who are still around then it would be a later move another design iteration substantively further down the road.
Because this allows the computer to get just enough performance for what it needs at a given moment, meaning it would produce the minimum amount of heat. The majority of background tasks are pretty light for modern CPU cores.
Your argument falls down in several places, claiming "it's not worth it".
Before the 2019 Mac Pro, all T2-enabled Macs used soldered 'naked' SSD chips. What did they do for the Mac Pro? They created daughter cards to achieve the same logical setup (T2 controlling the chips, doing transparent encryption).
Before the 2019 Mac Pro all TB3 enabled Macs used GPUs either incorporated into the CPU or soldered to the mainboard, allowing video output to be routed to TB3 controllers. What did they do for the Mac Pro? They created a customised version of a PCIe slot, and custom video cards to achieve the same end result (display output on any of the system's TB3 ports, not just those on the card).
I'm not suggesting that the replacement for the 2019 Mac Pro will be a like-for-like swap, but with an Arm CPU. I have no idea what it will be. But given there are no 'easy' CPU upgrade options for the current Mac Pro (besides starting the base at a higher tier, and perhaps offering the non-M version CPUs with a lower memory ceiling), the idea of an actually 'new' Intel Mac Pro seems quite odd.
But then your explanation also seems even more odd, to me: it's "not worth it" to build high-end CPUs (and apparently going back to multiple discrete CPUs to allow re-use of shared silicon is just completely off the table in your mind) for a product that's low-volume, so they're inevitably going to just EOL it, but before that, let's push out a new version with a new Intel CPU... which is what? A downgrade to an i9, which loses any benefit the Mac Pro had, or switch over to server-series like Xeon Gold/Platinum?
I could see them selling the current one for an extended period before either EOL that level of functionality or replacing it with something vaguely similar with an Arm CPU(s).
I could see them just EOLing that level of flexibility (again) 'immediately' (i.e. at the end of the ~2y transition period) and producing an Arm equivalent of the 2013 Mac Pro (remember they said "painted ourselves into a thermal corner", not "misjudged what pro users actually want to use")
I can't quite see them releasing a significantly different Intel Mac Pro as a stop-gap before EOLing it anyway.
Not sure the value of a smaller Mac pro. That significantly impacts the upgrade paths you can have–especially to use MPX modules & PCIe GPUs that still should be way faster than any iGPU option they can come up with today.
Pros don't want a mini Mac Pro. That's a consumer grade product at that point.
Having a Mac Pro today, it makes sense for such customers to have an upgrade option for their Intel Chips be replaced with a MX chip; more than anything, they need to make it possible to add GPUs like a 3090 on a software level to a Mac Pro.
Pros don't want a mini Mac Pro. That's a consumer grade product at that point.
Having a Mac Pro today, it makes sense for such customers to have an upgrade option for their Intel Chips be replaced with a MX chip; more than anything, they need to make it possible to add GPUs like a 3090 on a software level to a Mac Pro.
Hoping the gap down the price a lot. It would great to get this home. So far most I've put in was bit over 3k EUR for iMac 5K.
You'll need a ~204+ core Ampere at more than double the power consumption (each 80-core Ampere Altra is 250W) to beat a single AMD Threadripper 3990x or Epyc 7763.
https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/stockfish
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The world and it's ecosphere do care if you waste energy or not...
Could just be a CPU upgrade. That should be a pretty simple update and throw a bone to those that need to remain on x86 for foreseeable future.
To what though? There’s no socket compatible upgrade option, afaik there’s no W series upgrade available regardless of socket.
So this Mac Pro you are proposing would have ... what exactly? Both an Intel and an Apple Silicon CPU that it would dynamically switch between? This would be most certainly completely impossible, and if not, would require so many redundant parts that the price would be prohibitive. And wouldn't really provide any advantage. If you are going to have a workstation with two CPUs, you want to be using them both, not dynamically switching between them.
So things that haven’t been discussed is form factor. The cpu may well run more efficient but it would have to still be big.
would have to be include
4+ Full length PCIe slots - current has 8!
Huge amount of RAM capability.
Loads of ports.
They screwed up with 2013 and this could go the same way if the GPU can’t be upgraded! It is fundamentally import for pro machines. CPUs could last 7 years plus but GPUs get swapped every few years.
it’s also very concerning for everyone that bought the 2019 Mac Pro. Where are the MPX upgrades we were promised. Where is the Vega pro 3? Or will the GPU cores be separate on an MPX card?
would have to be include
4+ Full length PCIe slots - current has 8!
Huge amount of RAM capability.
Loads of ports.
They screwed up with 2013 and this could go the same way if the GPU can’t be upgraded! It is fundamentally import for pro machines. CPUs could last 7 years plus but GPUs get swapped every few years.
it’s also very concerning for everyone that bought the 2019 Mac Pro. Where are the MPX upgrades we were promised. Where is the Vega pro 3? Or will the GPU cores be separate on an MPX card?
Curious:
Why full length PCIe slots? What would go in them (seriously, beyond GPU’s I don’t know what would go there).
RAM doesn’t require a lot of space. RAM with connectors do, but if it’s surface mounted, it takes up much less space.
You could put…18 Thunderbolt ports on a Mac Mini sized device. Is that loads?
If this scales linear, we could see a Geekbench score of 51000 (the fastest Mac Pro has a 20000 score).
The efficiency cores are used for low-priority tasks like Spotlight indexing.
Cores shouldn’t all be the same: M1 Macs do better
How the M1’s asymmetric cores can run background tasks more efficiently, or deliver high performance, according to Quality of Service.
eclecticlight.co
I just have to hope that they will offer a version of it that is a bit cheaper than the current Mac Pro. I am waiting to get a long-term replacement for our MacPro 2010. The wait continues.
I’m thinking your wait will end with buying one of the current ones used for a good price. I’m always cautious, but it feels like that’s the last system of that kind of form factor they’re going to make.
That may end up being the case. I just wanted more memory, a bigger hard disk, and avoiding having to buy a lot of thunderbolt hard disk enclosures to put all of our disks in them. But I guess that will have to be the route we will have to go if the prices are still enormous.