Title. Do you think apple will announce the mac pro with AS by the end of the year and complete the transition? What do y'all think will happen to the mac pro?
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Do y'all think apple will meet their 2 year AS transition deadline?
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Real expensive! Next year too I would bet. The global chip shortage is the culprit.
What's the point of a Mac Pro anyway? What's the point of the Mac Studio even? These chips are only good in iPhone's, iPad's and laptops. They don't belong in desktops.
If you want to upgrade something or something breaks, you got to replace the whole machine. With a real desktop, you can upgrade / replace any component you want for cheap.
If you want to upgrade something or something breaks, you got to replace the whole machine. With a real desktop, you can upgrade / replace any component you want for cheap.
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I think you may have a point. They are going to have to engineer some way to upgrade components, like supporting upgraded pci-e gpus and ram off the chip. Of course, I'm sure they would have say maybe 256gb of ram on the soc itself, but then the rest say 1.2tb of ram would be dimms off the SOC for slower but more ram. That's the only way I can think of to even meet the ram that the last mac pro had. However, maybe they will just max out with lower ram like how the m1 imac maxes out at 16 gb while the 21.5 inch imac had up to 32gb ram.
That is your interpretation of what a desktop computer is, based on your historical experience.
It is not Apple's interpretation of what a desktop computer is.
I suspect a lot of younger computer users would visualise a "non-upgradeable laptop" when asked to describe "a computer". I understand that total desktop sales are somewhat less than half that of laptops, but many of the desktops will be office machines, so amongst consumers the percentage of desktop users is probably smaller. In most cases, people owning a desktop are gamers or "power users" of some kind (some IT developers, 'advanced hobbyists', or users of specialist software that needs more computer power or internal peripherals).
For the majority of computer users, there is very little justification for owning an expandable desktop computer. In many places, more people use phones than computers for their regular computing needs.
The "truck vs car" analogy made by Steve Jobs holds true I think.
Yes, for sure to be announced by the end of 2022.
Shipping will start sometime in 1H23.
That's the only trick I foresee Apple could fulfill its 'two-year transition' pledge.
Some people will fork the money to buy a base model perhaps. Most people (who want a Mac Pro) won't spend the money to customise the machine to fly in its true color. So the initial customer base will be very limited, to video production studios for example.
For the people looking to buy 2nd hand parts at discount, to spec up their base model, it'll be a few more years' waiting. And the prices won't drop like Intel era because supply is very limited, and the only vendor of these supplies to begin with is only one vendor, Apple.
If the Mac Pro successfully take off in volume ramp-up, branching into a wider user base in a few years time such as scientific calculations, ML training, financial modelling & etc, people will be able to buy new & cheaper future generations of Mac Pros.
Companies who are willing to pay dozens of thousands for a workstation don't care about "upgrading components for cheap". They care about getting work done. You are describing a point of view of a private hobbyist who has the time and passion to deal with these things. In the professional setting none of this matters.
To use the ever popular car analogy — a company does not care whether a car is easy to maintain or repair. They have a lease that includes a service agreement with a professional workshop. It's much cheaper and easier than maintaining a team of mechanics to take care of these things.
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Companies use servers for high performance computing, not a Mac Pro or a Mac Studio.
And if they don't use their own servers, they are probably using the cloud.
You have no idea what you are talking about.
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Real real desktops let you replace the FPU. Nothing screams 'Pro' harder than working on a Macintosh IIvi with a fully user-replaceable FPU. Some people wrongly argue that the benefits of integrating the FPU as part of the CPU outweighted the benefits of being able to replace it, but what if it breaks, huh? There's gotta be at least a dozen people in the world who had a FPU fail.
And it has replaceable VRAM modules too!
So who do you think buys professional workstations worth $20k or more? YouTubers? I wonder why every major computer vendor like Dell or HP sells high end workstations towers if companies exclusively use "servers" or "the cloud".
Laugh all you want, but these new Apple Silicon “desktops” are not a real desktop as it got all the downsides of a laptop now without having the portability.
You bought not enough RAM initially? Got to buy a whole new machine unlike a real desktop where you can plugin additional RAM.
This obviously good business for Apple, so I can understand why they have chosen to go this direction.
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But the RAM is *precisely* one of the things that now makes sense to solder down, even in desktops. On laptops, it reduces power usage (better signal to noise ratio allows to power the RAM with lower voltage). That's not hugely useful for desktops, as power usage probably isn't a huge concern for a personal workstation. So why not use DIMMs on desktops?
Well, the M1 Ultra has 32 LPDDR5 channels to allow for the massive 800GB/s bandwidth. As you can only have one channel per DIMM, you'd need 32 individual RAM sticks to match the M1 Ultra bandwidth. Want to upgrade the RAM from, say, 32 to 64 GB of RAM? You'd need to swap all 32 1GB RAM sticks to 32 2GB RAM sticks. That's not hugely practical. And even then, with all 32 channels populated (which would use at least an order of magnitude more power for the memory subsystem) you'd have increased latency, even if just for the extra path length required for the sheer size of housing 32 DIMM slots.
Take for example the Mac Pro. You already have to match specific RAM configurations to use all 6 DDR4 channels. And yet, due to it only having 6 channels, the maximum bandwidth is around 140GB/s. Lower than a single M1 Pro, and almost 1/6th of the bandwidth of a M1 Ultra.
But why does Apple Silicon even need that kind of bandwidth? Well, on Apple Silicon the GPU is on the SoC, and uses the same memory subsystem as the CPU. GPUs can process a lot more data per second than a CPU, so they naturally require more bandwidth. Does that mean that Apple could have gotten around by using separate VRAM for the GPU instead of going with the UMA? Nope. You still need to sync data between CPU/GPU in a lot of points. In a system with separate VRAM, synchronization points usually mean passing around the data to system memory... through the RAM channels, which is limited to 140GB/s even on Apple's top tier Intel Mac. This is a bottleneck that simply does not exist in Apple Silicon.
And it doesn't stop with the GPU: AnandTech found that a *single* performance core of the M1 Max CPU could use up to 102GB/s of bandwidth. That's almost the entire bandwidth of the 2019 Mac Pro! Using the full 10 Cores of the M1 Max CPU only got them as far as using 246GB/s of the 400GB/s of the M1 Max bandwidth (the rest is used by the GPU, as explained before). That would translate to about 492GB/s used by the CPU of the 800GB/s bandwidth of the M1 Ultra, where the 2019 Mac Pro is limited to 140GB/s. So the M1 CPU clusters would be massively memory-bound (on that same benchmark) had Apple used regular DIMMs. And that's a CPU task, no GPU involved.
You can’t upgrade RAM on a GPU either. So why don’t I see you complaining about Nvidia and AMD preventing user upgrades? Sure, Apple doesn’t give you upgradeable RAM but they also give you RAM bandwidth that no other computer can reach while retaining zero-copy, zero-latency communication between the CPU and the GPU.
Upcoming AMD Genoa will feature 12 DDR5 Channels per CPU (24 Channels in a dual-socket mainboard). This will make it possible to deliver 1.2TB/s or higher bandwidth to up to 192 CPU cores while retaining socketed RAM. Of course, I can’t fathom the cost of such a solution, the mainboard alone will likely be thousands and thousands of USD. Not that it will allow you to upgrade RAM “for cheap” - you’d likely need to match all RAM modules to keep performance and stable operation.
Keep digging your own hole.
You are only proving that you have no idea what you are talking about.
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Well I’d hope the new AS Mac Pro would be somewhat different than the current lineup of Macs. Some kind of tower case, slots for cards, etc.
What would be sweet is if Apple made the motherboard a whole upgradeable module - with the Mx chip, RAM, SSD all together. So you could easily upgrade a Mac Pro with more RAM, SSD, or newer versions of the SoC.
Then they may also still have an iMac Pro, which I think *would* be much like the current Mac lineup - probably no way to upgrade it, etc…but a sweet, powerful machine with a XDR display which would probably make 90% of pro users (who’d consider buying an all-in-one) pretty happy.
$699 for four wheels
$999 for a monitor stand
I believe people are okay with Apple charging $2499 for an Aluminum Mac Pro Tower Case. I mean just the case..
Although some will disagree with your sentiment, you have a point. If this Mac Pro is as utterly non-modular as every other Apple Silicon Mac, it’s not going to make much sense. If everything is still SoC, it will be absurdly expensive to repair, even with Apple Care.
How many Mac Pros did you buy in your lifetime? Just curious.
Yeah, that’s what I am expecting/hoping. M-series SOC on a modular board - maybe even multiple such boards - and maybe shared socketed RAM. That would be a killer workstation.
Then again, Apples current lineup has taught me to manage my expectations 😅
You should ask someone who's left an expensive AWS instance accidentally running whether they see value in local compute
Do you know if there are any clues in macos that show Apple might support 'multiple socs' (or even more than 2 dies) in the future?
Not that I know of. If something like that existed someone would have probably caught it by now. Metal does have multi-GPU APIs, so who knows, maybe something like that can also be used for other processors.
I'm going with a no unless they pull something magical out the hat before November. I think they could have done and would have done had it not been for the chip shortage, covid and other issues.