I bought Dune in 2019. Still waiting for my case.
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First Benchmark Result Surfaces for Mac Pro With M2 Ultra Chip
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But the M2 Ultra single core should be the same is the M2 Max and Pro more or less, no? The single core performance shouldn't change...
I’ve never seen it done this way, professionally, in organizations large, small, and governmental.
Over a certain size you also just have procurement agreements with set lease times.
True, but this core technology finds its way into Xeon offerings, does it not?
What is the most comparable Xeon to a 13900KS?
Buzzz, wrong. Been wrong since 2021.
Sonnet Technology has been keeping PCI-e compatiblity lists for Thunderbolt PCI-e expansion boxes for years (before the 2020 transition started)
https://www.sonnettech.com/product/echo-3-desktop/techspecs.html#techspecs
Scroll down and there is a PDF document with a matrix of cards and whether compatible with Windows/Linux/Mac/M1-Macs.
By last Summer there were about 50+ cards on that list compatible with M1. That list is also a bit dated ( especially where Sonnet sells a competititor PCI-e card to other 3rd party vendors. ).
That list was much shorter in 2021, but it has steadily been getting better and better coverage in the "M1" column for that last 2+ years. So much so that it really would a huge 'bonehead' move for Apple not to do a Mac Pro with slots. There was already a viable ecosystem there. A Mac Pro would only make it a more healthy ecosytsem.
There are also footnotes on that capability list were cards are tagged as being hobbled by Thunderbolt so that their full functionality is being suppress by the expansion box. Again pointing to a market already being underserved.
There is one lingering problem with some of these cards that have support. A subset of vendors have done it by porting kernel Extentions (kext) over. Apple delcared kext as being deprecated several years ago. The new paradign is driver extension and it is a whole new framework on both Intel and Arm Macs ( and iPad power M-series ones also). At some point Apple is going to dump kexts; next couple of years. (possibly when macOS on Intel fades out). So some folks still have work to do even though it "happens to work" now.
P.S. a decent chunk of those unsupported cards in Sonnet's matrix are basically zombie cards. It isn't that there is no Arm driver for them , there isn't any active driver development on the Intel side either. The drivers just happen to still work with the newer kernels. At some point they will die because the whole kext foundation they are built on is dying.
P.P.S. Apple is doing a craptastic sales job with the Mac Pro. You'd think they would brag a little about the 50+ cards that work. Put some explicit quantitative floor on the concept that it is far bigger than 'zero'. But no. Not in keynote and even LESS about enumerating the PCI-e card options on the product's overview sales marketing page. Just 'Bozo central' on that front.
( and the Mac Pro tech support page
https://support.apple.com/mac/mac-pro
is largely pointing at a product they don't sell anymore! Way to go crack sales team!!!!! *cough*
)
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I think the criticism is that Apple is out of touch with its professional/high-end/creative users. Apple clearly knows what the larger consumer market needs with the Macbook Air line. However, the Mac Pro line specifically has been floundering since the trash can model, particularly if high-end GPU performance is a necessity.
Put it this way, with this current refresh, we're seeing approximately RTX 4070ti levels of performance from the M2 Ultra. Keep in mind, this is the cap for the entire platform of Apple Silicon Mac OS - no machine has higher performance and this is the ceiling for what developers can target curently. Apple is nowhere near the performance of the Quadro 6000 series of workstation cards. The M2 ultra specifically only caters to those who can benefit from the shared memory architecture that Apple Silicon benefits from (i.e. large Houdini Simulations come to mind), but even in those cases having more than 1TB of system memory and 48GB of VRAM will largely suit that user's needs.
It's all rather sad to think the army of people creating 3D immersive content for the Vision Pro will largely not be using a Mac because of this.
I lot of folks brag about the lack of the 1.5TB memory expansion, but who in their right mind, is going to buy a 55K mac, with overpriced memory to do large datasets or data science?
Romain is not wrong. Duty to Shareholders, as bad of a name as it gets, actually the RESPONSIBILITY of the Board of Directors of any company. In addition to keeping to all the rules of Wall Street and the regulations of the US and dozens of countries smaller than Delaware, but thinking they're more powerful than God himself.
Sometimes, I am amazed to know that there are actually over 9,000 companies in the US that even WANT to be publicly owned. Most days, the hassle is worse than a rotting skin disease, exceeded only by being a US government contractor (which Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Boeing, and hundreds of others are) and having to follow THOSE rules and regs to the point that you're basically selling your soul to
Yeah I think people are complaining just to complain. I do this this was a last minute thing to say they completed the transition. I expect M3 Mac Pro will be better. But come on. The sales are probably so low on 1.5 TB it’s not even worth considering looking at. But people will find anything to complain about.
One could argue that pros have been flipped the middle finger so many times by Apple in the last 10 years that they either probably can get by with 192 GB of RAM, or have long migrated on to other platforms anyway.
With some of the Mac Pro rumours that were flying around before the intro, where Apple may have been trying to pull an "Extreme" variant of the AS (where the Ultra is two Maxes, the Extreme would be 2 Ultra/4 Maxes or more), but the architecture got in the way and things didn't quite scale as hoped. The RAM limit is a side-effect of that inability to scale the AS beyond the current Ultra.
Maybe they will get there eventually, I wouldn't rule it out, but it's certainly getting Apple to wonder how to make the architecture scale for the future.
i checked out the product page yesterday and it said "+$400"
(this still seems absurd)
okay, so the first parts of this make quite a bit of sense
the second seems to not so much address what they're actually saying which is: apple is charging $3k for a bigger case and their proprietary motherboard. *and then* one may purchase that other stuff that you mention here
edit: holy. i missed the part where adding GPUs is no longer supported.
i swear, this company works so hard to be wonderful and facepalm worthy at the same time
I'm baffled to why there is no M2 Extreme available for the Mac Pro. The thermal solution for the Mac Pro seems more than capable. The only way I hear the M1 Ultra Mac Studio fans spool up is purposely running both the CPU and GPU at 100% for an extended period of time, otherwise the machine is silent. A dedicated Apple Silicon GPU for the Mac Pro with a proprietary Apple Fabric connector would be a great way for the machine to compete with the RTX 4090 and RX 7900 XTX.
Hector Martin (@marcan@treehouse.systems)
Yeah okay so they are totally cheating. They have two big PCIe switches and are hanging everything off of them. From the device tree: # 8x Gen4 lanes on die 0, switched: - x1 to USB internal - x2 to SATA internal - x4 to I/O card (USB, probably single lane connected) - x8 to slot6 - x1 to...
social.treehouse.systems
It has something to do with the cost of the x 4 M2 Max SoC die interconnect implementation and the number of buyers that use it. I think it ended up being more of a rumor then it would ever happen.
Well there will always be some variation in benchmarking, but in general they should all be within a few percentage points of each other, which is in the statistical margin of error.
The Mac Pro and Mac Studio do have the most-effective cooling system so it could be that Apple feels comfortable running a single core at a higher clock-speed on those models or that cooling allows that single core to maintain it's maximum clock-speed across the entire benchmark run, resulting in a higher number than an SoC that has to throttle that core at times during the benchmark run to keep it within it's thermal envelope.
And yet Phil Schiller explicitly stated in the 2017 "Mac Pro mea culpa" meeting that Apple had been receiving constant feedback from their Mac Pro customers since the 2013 model had been introduced about what those customers liked and what they did not like about that model. He also stated that 30% of Mac customers were what Apple defined as "professionals" and that 1% of those "pro customers" purchased Mac Pros (the vast majority purchased MacBook Pros and the remainder iMac 5Ks).
They also noted the importance of that 1% because of the sheer number of Mac Pros they bought (being mostly enterprise customers, I imagine, who ordered them by the pallet). And that feedback had driven them to accept the Mac Pro needed a "fundamental re-think" that more closely resembled the design philosophy the 2006-2012 Mac Pro embraced. And they did mention that there were segments of those "professionals" who needed massive GPU performance in addition to those who needed massive CPU performance, but that there were limits to what Apple could reasonably deliver in those areas.
The executives also stated that Apple had a group of hardware and software engineers that worked with "professionals" on Mac hardware, macOS and Apple's professional software (XCode, Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro) to find the "pain points" for end users and address them.
I do not believe for one moment that once Apple released the 2019 Mac Pro, they stopped listening to Mac Pro customer's feedback and I do not believe for one moment that they developed the 2023 model in a complete vacuum and did not leverage that pre-existing hardware and software team to gather feedback on the machine as it went through design and validation. Perhaps the result of that is the 1% is now 0.5% or even 0.1%, but they are still there and still ready and willing to buy the bloody thing.
Considering if Apple lost them all, that would be 1% of a 30% market that makes up like 10% of Apple's total revenue so would it really be so sad?
But even if it is sad, as others have noted, Apple's core expertise is consumer products. The new Macs launched at WWDC that have been dismissed this week by some as "toys" bring in more revenue than HPE or Dell or Lenovo do in servers and workstations. And I don't say that to dismiss people's arguments that Apple could and should do better with the Mac Pro, but to show that Apple is focusing on consumer laptops, desktops and workstations because that is where they make their money just as HPE/Dell/Lenovo focus on business desktops, laptops, workstations and servers because that is where they make their money.
From what I read, Apple was originally going to release the new Mac Pro with the M3 but the M3 was delayed. Ii looks like Apple decided to release the new M2 version instead to get all its current computer designs using Apple Silicon.
The big question is
- Did Apple release this with the idea that the planned Mac Pro with the M3 and improvements will come out next year ?
or
- Is Apple pulling the plug on the Mac Pro and this will be the last release ?
*sigh*
I'm all nostalgic for the good old days… sure it weighed a ****ing ton, built like a tank, but what a workhorse, MacPro5,1.
I'm all nostalgic for the good old days… sure it weighed a ****ing ton, built like a tank, but what a workhorse, MacPro5,1.
Dang, I thought these were already available. Looks like bit off more than they could chew expecting mutiple random Chinese manufacturers to create Apple-quality clone cases. I guess it goes to show just how much engineering and attention to detail goes into the Mac Pro - maybe they do cost alot more than I estimated.
Going by the comments it could be a while yet ... appears to be a one-man operation at this point. That sucks.
I wonder if anyone has considered the possibility that Apple made this machine to fulfil the promise of releasing a Mac Pro … but they’d rather you didn’t buy it … 🤔
Mentioned this before, but the reason you can’t have a graphics card in a Mac Pro is because you can’t have a graphics card in an iPhone.
The memory bandwidth is 100GB/s on the base M2, 200GB/s for the Pro, 400GB/s for the Max and 800 GB/s on the Ultra, which can make a big difference depending on what the benchmark is testing.
Also there's clock speed to take into account. Historically, Macs with more cores tend to run at lower clock speeds for thermal management reasons (for example the 12 core 'Trashcan' MacPro scores a lot lower on single core benchmarks than it's 4,6 or 8 core variants). The new MacPro has a massive heatsink, so it may well be capable of higher clock speeds than the Studio.