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Coming Attractions . . .
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Rumors are the Mac Pro will not come until sometime next year at the earliest. The next mac event is rumored to be either in October or November of this year - however only MacBook Pro's and maybe the mac mini are rumored to be announced. Higher-end models like the 27" iMac and Mac Pro are not expected until next spring at the very earliest, and likely later in the year of 2022.
Apple has only announced macs in November once, and that was last year. Not enough info to say if they will continue to do so going forward, or if this was a necessity due to covid and scheduling.
The next Apple event will be October 19, and will not include the mac pro
@cmaier is the resident expert in CPU design, he is VERY credible ...
Yes, being an expert in one thing makes me an expert in all things.
It’s a burden, really…
Apple will need to extend the Apple Silicon designs as far as it can to meet the needs of the Mac Pro. It will be very interesting to see how to address large amounts of RAM and multiple fast GPUs. Can they do it all on SOC like the M1 or will they be forced to split those out into separate units? Will they support user upgradable RAM? Will they support third party GPUs. Those are all big unanswered questions. The chips for the Mac Pros are likely to be very different than the ones for the low end Macs or even the prosumer Macs like the MBP or the iMac biggie.
Expect that to be the very last machine that Apple updates to the new chips. You will see all of the other Mac on Apple Silicon first. Once that happens, you can reasonably start looking for Mac Pros on the horizon.
I will answer the unanswered questions.
1)they could do it all on a single SoC the size of TSMC’s reticle, but they won’t. Instead they will use a multi-chip module, in order to provide multiple configurations.
2) they will probably not support user upgradeable RAM.
3) they will definitely not support third party GPUs, but they already have a discrete GPU ready to go, which will live in the MCM.
I assume they will continue with the unified memory design ? If the memory is on the cpu chiplet, and the gpu is on a different chiplet, does this have a lot of performance implications ?
Some. It increases latency, but that can be compensated for by faster or wider buses, more cache, etc. Unified memory will continue -it’s now the apple way.
Hence your reasoning that apple won’t support third party gpu as they use their own memory ?
Does this design mean that all cpu and memory have to be on one chiplet ? If you have two chiplet each with their own cpu/ memory then don’t you have a lot of hassle if a cpu on one chiplet wants to access the memory on the other ? Ie does it become a non unified model ?
So one possible design would be to move all the gpu and neural engine etc to one chiplet and cram the other chiplet with cpu and memory ? But this will limit the total amount of memory .. ie you won’t get a 64Gb memory chip for the next few years ?
Physical location is unrelated to whether you can have a unified memory model. But packaging the memory with the CPUs/GPUs reduces latency, so it’s good for other reasons.
The memory will never be on the same die as CPU or GPU, as it is fabbed with a different process - dynamic RAM processes are optimized differently than logic processes.
The word “chiplet” is not a meaningful word. You have die, each of which is singulated from a wafer, and they may or may not be int he same package. Chiplets is just one architecture for multi-chip packages.
An Apple Silicon Mac Pro is not expected until 2H 2022. Bloomberg has reported it could use two and four "M1X" SoCs with 20 CPU/64 GPU cores ("Jade2C-Die") and 40 CPU/128 GPU cores ("Jade4C-Die"). No information if these configurations will use "chiplets" or a larger die or multiple chips.
I would think AS Mac Pros will sport ECC DDR5 DIMM slots, with 512-bits data busses.