Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
First Benchmark Result Surfaces for Mac Pro With M2 Ultra Chip
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Yes we have, but it does not make logical sense for Apple to have done so as they were under no legal contractual obligation to release it. They could have just said "we tried, it didn't work, buy a Mac Studio or a PC" and moved on.
Instead, they spent money designing it, developing it and validating it and the logical reason for them to do that is enough of the 1% of the 30% of "pros" who make up the annual Mac sales customer base said "we like it!" to make it worth Apple's effort.
Oh look I totally get it. And I’m fully aware of the crap they peddle. I mean look at the MacBook Pro with touchbar which had a primary marketing gumf of emojis at a click which totally lost me. I had one for 3 years (a replacement unit) and I think the only reason I used the touchbar was to pause and play music /video content. It just frustrates me that they “listen to pros” and I’m like which ones because none I speak to get it or agree.
Now that they've transitioned, I don't see it sitting as-is. Basically, all they have to do is put the updated chip in it. I know that's over-simplistic, but updating to the newest isn't going to take as much effort as it used to.
One of my friends works in “computational research” at his company and amongst much more powerful supercomputers, they’ve used Mac Pros and other consumer computers with 500GB+ worth of RAM. Part of the reason I bring it up, really.
A very niche customer, but one that is real and had Mac Pro customers (previously).
I was going to post this exactly.
It has to be. There is no reason for the $$ difference other than to keep the same price pint for when they release the real Pro.
With all the complaining about just PCIe expansion, it's obvious none of you are a target user. Even with just PCIe 4, the Mac Pro can offer a massive amount I/O bandwidth, that the Studio would never be able to match. That alone could be worth tens of thousands of dollars to someone who needs it. (Thunderbolt and PCI breakout boxes aren't a viable option.)
The OP said he thought is was “a blatant rip off” and you interpret that as praise??
It was a really really small niche, something that Apple doesn't care about, and there are better options in the market today for doing that (HP servers with nvidia n100)
The performance will change depending on thermal boundaries. Under any kind of normal workload, yes, they should always be about the same. Under longer, heavier workloads, the system will throttle performance as each boundary is approached. The Mac Pro has a higher thermal boundary than the Mac Studio, because of 1. larger case - more open space, and 2. more air being pushed through the case.
TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️
Suspended
Not going to lie the Mac Pro looks stunningly good! 👀
Not that it makes this comparison invalid, but the problem is the M2 Ultra is still an SOC -> Apple is devoting less than 10% of the die area to CPUs. Almost the entire chip is GPUs and accelerators. It would be amazing what Apple could do with putting all that area and power into JUST a CPU, but that would then be a totally different part than what other Apple devices are using.
I am sensing a certain degree of AAPL naivety with this apparent shock on your part . . . 🤷♂️
My 5,1 is uses PCIe 2.0, and it is extremely performant.
Heck, myPCIe 3.0 x4 nvme's reveal operations on the 2.0 bus that are, basically, instantaneous.
I'm not trying to say that AAPL is not interested in eeking-out as much performance as it can, but there's nothing in Her history that indicates that She is interested in adhering to the Technological Play-Book of Bleeding Edge
They should have kept the Ultra config just for Mac Pros if they wanted any of these units to sell.
Seems I'm the odd guy out, as I'm going in on the Mac Pro over Studio. The $3K I/O tax is absurd, and wish RAM was expandable, but already have 12TB of M.2 (sunk cost in my 2019 MP) which will benefit from the faster PCIe 4. I much prefer to have storage in the box than dangling off of it, and to have box sitting on floor instead of taking desk space -- so these reasons alone are enough for me to opt into Pro over Studio. If I were to get Studio I'd be inclined to get the 8TB internal (v 2TB pro, as ordered), which alone is $1,800 savings. I do think/hope 2023 MP is stopgap though. If Apple kills the line, I'll go back to Windows PC. I really want nothing to do w/ a fugly block sitting on my desk that takes a single SD card, when pros are shooting CFExpress / CFast. Next-gen iMac Pro on other hand, I'd feel differently about.
My guess is that the M2 Ultra Mac Pro is a stopgap until an M3 Extreme Mac Pro can be built.
I would offer that the M3, on a 3nm process, would offer more features such as hardware raytracing encoding and more Neural Engine processors. If they can glue four of them together into an M3 Extreme, it should be by far the fastest Mac Silicon of all time and should hold its own or better against its Intel and AMD contemporaries.
If the M3 Extreme is unfeasible, the Mac Pro will either be canceled or radically altered with a smaller form factor.
Another thought: if they're going to keep Cheese Grater 2.0 as the Mac Pro case, they should run the P-Core clock of the M3 (and future Mxs) Extreme at a 30-50 percent higher clock than the M3 Plain, Pro, Max, or even Ultra.
True that. And today, AMD announced and demoed Instinct MI300A [24 core Zen 4, 128GB HBM3, CDNA 3.0 Compute Graphics on an 896GB/s unified memory architecture with that 8192 bit HBM3 path way.
Then they announced the MI300X without the 24 Core Zen 4 [swapped in more GPU for CDNA 3.0 Compute Only.
MI300 > 146 billion transistors
MI300x > 153 billion transistors.
AMD Data Center & AI Technology Premiere
Join us live on June 13th at 10am PT/ 1pm ET to see how AMD is advancing the data center and AI. Discover more: https://www.amd.com/en/solutions/data-center/...
www.youtube.com
AMD just trumped Hopper.
Mmm.. Synthetic benchmarks.. 13900K performs better single core still and at a fraction of the cost. What a great choice going to their own processor. Apple is doomed. People paying this much money for a machine like that literally have too much money and little common sense. Not to mention you can put a 4090 or soon to be 5090 in the 13900K machine and blow the socks off the Mac Pro at any compute task. and STILL be a fraction of the cost. Apple is literally doomed to repeat the 80's-90's again.
There's no shock more like an underlying disappointment. 2 features I wish they were present gen 5 pcie and GPU support. I appreciate when flagship products carry cutting-edge tech and more future proof.I am sensing a certain degree of AAPL naivety with this apparent shock on your part . . . 🤷♂️
My 5,1 is uses PCIe 2.0, and it is extremely performant.
Heck, myPCIe 3.0 x4 nvme's reveal operations on the 2.0 bus that are, basically, instantaneous.
I'm not trying to say that AAPL is not interested in eeking-out as much performance as it can, but there's nothing in Her history that indicates that She is interested in adhering to the Technological Play-Book of Bleeding Edge
As a former Mac Pro owner up to and including the 2009 model, I can attest to the fact that there is, still a niche that this tower is for.
Yes, a small portion of that niche may have just been alienated by the lack of RAM slots, and maybe another subset of those the lack of being able to run multiple GPU’s.
HOWEVER, some pro users, and prosumers, might want the best Mac CPU, with a great GPU, and room for things inside the tower, allowing for the tower itself to be all-inclusive. I can think of production studios doing video and FX work. Tons of storage on a PCI card in raid would allow for over 24GB/sec which would be ideal when working with 8K media. Add in capture cards. Now this pro can wheel his tower around the studio, go on-site at filming locations, and not need to take a single cable other than the power and a thunderbolt cable for his Pro Display XDR. His tower has the cards and the storage on board.
Sciences, media, fx, video, graphics, engineering, audio…. There’s still a ton of people who can make use of this right now. It’s not as big a market as Mac Studio, but it still exists.
I love my minimal desk top set up. I’d hate to have more cables and more boxes dangling everywhere. Some people value this, AND power.
Yes, a small portion of that niche may have just been alienated by the lack of RAM slots, and maybe another subset of those the lack of being able to run multiple GPU’s.
HOWEVER, some pro users, and prosumers, might want the best Mac CPU, with a great GPU, and room for things inside the tower, allowing for the tower itself to be all-inclusive. I can think of production studios doing video and FX work. Tons of storage on a PCI card in raid would allow for over 24GB/sec which would be ideal when working with 8K media. Add in capture cards. Now this pro can wheel his tower around the studio, go on-site at filming locations, and not need to take a single cable other than the power and a thunderbolt cable for his Pro Display XDR. His tower has the cards and the storage on board.
Sciences, media, fx, video, graphics, engineering, audio…. There’s still a ton of people who can make use of this right now. It’s not as big a market as Mac Studio, but it still exists.
I love my minimal desk top set up. I’d hate to have more cables and more boxes dangling everywhere. Some people value this, AND power.
It's been a mess. Lots of lies and empty promises. I have attempted to dispute my charge for years now but Indiegogo is always chosen as the "winner" saying I received my "perk". Uhhhh no I haven't! You literally have the campaign under review for about a year now! Sheesh. That is just money I am NEVER getting back and I am very angry about it.