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First Benchmark Result Surfaces for Mac Pro With M2 Ultra Chip

this is a big miss in the mac lineup. Apple have weird reputation with it's mac pro users, they spent a lot of money on those systems and yet apple can't decide what to do with this small but important part of their users.

I still remember people crying for a new mac pro, only to get the trashcan mac back in the day, they where furious with the lose of expand-ability and upgradability of the system and then apple said ok we got it and gave the last gen mac pros (although not without hicups like the crazy expensive wheels and the monitor stand...) but at least it was what a mac pro was supposed to be.
Now what happened again and they changed course? Especially now with the mac studio that can cover the pro users who where happy with the compact trash can.

If the unified SoC system is not ready for this yet, just don't release it...
 
Galve2000 said:
they are already using outdated technology
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AAPL has always been on the backside of the Standards wave, and probably always will.

'stability' is a strong driving force in most peoples' lives; especially in computing.

AAPL has consistently helped support that goal (at least on the hardware side of things (*cough*)) :)

Not really an apple:apple comparison, but Debian offers three Distros: Stable, Testing, and Sid.

For sure; I am drawn--and acclimated--to using well-vetted, and conservative, hardware. . . even though I can't avail myself of all the cool new features that are available to those who choose to do otherwise.

It's not that I don't want to have the latest@greatest at the tips of my fingers, but I can definitely appreciate a somewhat staid approach.

The PCIe 6.0 spec increases the per-lane peak transfer rate to 16GB/second (and the PCIe 7.0 Draft spec doubles that)....

I don't know, Man . . . perceptibly immediate access to my data on an eleven-year-old PCIe 2.0 system does not lend itself well to supporting the idea that AAPL is (consciously, or unconsciously) gimping their systems by not cutting the Edge <smile>

peace
 
canadianreader said:
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.
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Yeah; but, this has been the Theme over the years with AAPL. No surprise there, really :)

PCIe is a bus, and--as such--is a stop-gap design that attempted to meet a need.

INTC and AMD are fully on-board with supporting ideas that further-address that need.

AAPL is consciously trying to (multi)stair-step the idea, and approach the goal from a different direction.

Of course, we've all been indoctrinated into the in "Viva la PCIe" Revolution, so it's kinda hard to think outside that box.

Heck, SuperMicro still offers (really, really expensive) new-gen boards with PCI slots <shrugs>

AAPL Si now offers a new Flagship paradigm that embraces cutting-edge tech, and (appears to be) future-proof. So-be-it that they now offer (a) device(s) that tries to accommodate those still scrumming in the arena of the interconnect-battlefield (if you really want to pay for it).

Personally, I hate 'Standards', as every Co seems to have their own (if they have the market-share to enforce such a thing) . . . it's really taking a toll on resources, wallets and those of us who find they have to fund all these cyclical tech cull-de-sacs.

For ex, AAPL's 'Lightning' "pins-on-the-outside" strategy is, IMO, much more structurally-sound than the USBc idea of having the pins on a fragile center-post, but smh

I really don't care about the matter, but it usually amuses me to hear convos about whether a V8 has more power than a V6 ;)
 
tYNS said:
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.
Click to expand...

That's what I'm saying, but a lot of people will pay whatever amount of money to stay on Mac OS, they think Windows is still windows 95.
 
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zoozx said:
Remember when the top end Mac work station cost $1499.00
and now the low end is $ 7000.00
That's not progress for the consumer
And nothing else from apple these days is...
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Yep, I was interested in one of those Mac Pro Power PC G5 back then but they moved to intel, and never released a product that I wanted, to me iMac, Mac Mini, are a no go, and this Mac Pro M2 is just so overpriced and no expandability for being a workstation.
 
NT1440 said:
Why would you put the capital investment in retooling a production line so soon after setting it up for this chassis?

That’s not “lazy”, that’s smart logistics.
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It is smart for Apple, but bad for customers. You (as a customer) pay for useless enclosure made by various pounds of aluminum with expensive polishing, brushing, etc and you don't need any of that. Apple could have designed compact PCIs enclosure/dock with either 3 and 6 slots that hooks to a Mac Studio which already have the necessary thermal architecture. Mac Studio should have be designed so that it can be docked in this PCI enclosure seamlessly and you get the expansion you need.
 
You could build you own pc to do the exact same kind of work that the Mac Pro could do for a 1/4 of the price and it would smoke that thing.

James
 
JForestZ34 said:
You could build you own pc to do the exact same kind of work that the Mac Pro could do for a 1/4 of the price and it would smoke that thing.

James
Click to expand...

Yep, but people a lot of people here are apple fans that are going to pay whatever price apple puts on their computers.
 
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splifingate said:
For sure; I am drawn--and acclimated--to using well-vetted, and conservative, hardware. . . even though I can't avail myself of all the cool new features that are available to those who choose to do otherwise.
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I see your point, but you are ignoring mine.

so I will restate it here for clarity:

Apple has released a very expensive, shiny, new PC and it can already not compete -- on the GPU side -- and i'd wager on the CPU side as well -- with the offerings from competitors.

I love mac0S, but once again, Apple has given it's pro users "the middle finger"
 
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nikaru said:
It is smart for Apple, but bad for customers. You (as a customer) pay for useless enclosure made by various pounds of aluminum with expensive polishing, brushing, etc and you don't need any of that. Apple could have designed compact PCIs enclosure/dock with either 3 and 6 slots that hooks to a Mac Studio which already have the necessary thermal architecture. Mac Studio should have be designed so that it can be docked in this PCI enclosure seamlessly and you get the expansion you need.
Click to expand...

As a customer, you are only paying an extra $3000 for that "useless" enclosure because you have $30,000 to $60,000 of very much "not useless" PCIe cards you need to plug into it.

As for the idea Apple could make an external multi-slot PCIe dock for the Mac Studio, instead, you do know that Apple would ensure that dock had expensive polishing and brushing, as well. And then there is the cost of the TB4 interconnects in it. So if you were lucky, it would only be a $3000 option. Then add the fact that enclosure would have significantly less total bandwidth available to it due to only having a single TB4 connection, so that $30-60 grand in PCIe cards you have had all better only be x1 types. :D
 
Galve2000 said:
Apple has released a very expensive, shiny, new PC and it can already not compete -- on the GPU side -- and i'd wager on the CPU side as well -- with the offerings from competitors.

I love mac0S, but once again, Apple has given it's pro users "the middle finger"
Click to expand...

The 2013 and 2019 models could not compete on the CPU or GPU side with offerings from competitors (PC OEMs), either.

It should be abundantly clear by now, a decade on, that Apple has no interest in competing with the PC OEMs. And if your needs or wants are ones that only PC OEMs can meet, buy a PC. And if you really like macOS, buy a Mac, too. That is what I did in 2018 and both machines are still serving me well five years on.
 
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Ethosik said:
I also am able to export my video much much MUCH faster (even with the poor scaling issues of the M1 Ultra) compared to my Windows system.
Click to expand...

Then you use VideoToolbox, which is the Apple hardware encoder.
Hardware encoders are also available for other platforms.

Hardware encoders are worse than high-quality software encoders, such as x264 or x265, in terms of quality and file size.
It is known here in the forum that the Apple hardware encoder is not that great (at least for M1)... unless you only look at speed (and ignore quality for file size).

e.g. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/m1-handbrake-performance-very-disappointing.2345720/
 
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nikaru said:
It is smart for Apple, but bad for customers. You (as a customer) pay for useless enclosure made by various pounds of aluminum with expensive polishing, brushing, etc and you don't need any of that. Apple could have designed compact PCIs enclosure/dock with either 3 and 6 slots that hooks to a Mac Studio which already have the necessary thermal architecture. Mac Studio should have be designed so that it can be docked in this PCI enclosure seamlessly and you get the expansion you need.
Click to expand...
Why? That’s a niche beyond niche, but the Mac Pro is somehow a miss?

Why do all of that?
 
k27 said:
Then you use VideoToolbox, which is the Apple hardware encoder.
Hardware encoders are also available for other platforms.

Hardware encoders are worse than high-quality software encoders, such as x264 or x265, in terms of quality and file size.
It is known here in the forum that the Apple hardware encoder is not that great (at least for M1)... unless you only look at speed (and ignore quality for file size).

e.g. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/m1-handbrake-performance-very-disappointing.2345720/
Click to expand...
You can’t really tell the difference especially when high nitrate is used. And my clients don’t see any issue either. File sizes are about the same actually.
 
Ethosik said:
You can’t really tell the difference especially when high nitrate is used. And my clients don’t see any issue either. File sizes are about the same actually.
Click to expand...
This is where you are to be told by someone not in your line of work that your output is “technically” inferior and therefore the Ultra is somehow a flop. To be somehow circled back to “I can’t gamez on my *work* machine”.
 
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NT1440 said:
This is where you are to be told by someone not in your line of work that your output is “technically” inferior and therefore the Ultra is somehow a flop. To be somehow circled back to “I can’t gamez on my *work* machine”.
Click to expand...
I’m not making a Pixar movie. Maybe it matters for that. But for what I and my clients do, there is no difference unless you look with a magnifying glass or blow up the video and zoom in to 5,000 percent.

What what I work on, speed matters. I deal with 8 or even sometimes 10 hour footage. So shaving a few seconds from a 5 minute test these reviews do, literally save me a couple hours. Even Windows vs Mac the delta in macs favor has been a max 2 hours difference. So yes I’ll use a visually identical but technically inferior method if it gets me more clients or let’s me do more work. Nobody I know cares anyway. I could make to 1000 times clearer but they couldn’t tell.

Die hard would complain about NVIDIA NVENC too, but it’s quite popular.
 
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Galve2000 said:
I see your point, but you are ignoring mine.
Click to expand...

It's not that I am ignoring your pov, but more that I experience things differently :)

Galve2000 said:
so I will restate it here for clarity:


Apple has released a very expensive, shiny, new PC and it can already not compete -- on the GPU side -- and i'd wager on the CPU side as well -- with the offerings from competitors.

I love mac0S, but once again, Apple has given it's pro users "the middle finger"
Click to expand...

I appreciate the feeling, and I've experienced/heard/seen similar sentiment since the transition from PowerPC to Intel.

Coincidentally, the early Intel Period was, imo, a really great time in the evolution of Apple hardware . . . I finally had an AAPL computer that I could (reasonably) tweak like one of my other PCs.

Still do a lot of weird ***** with my 2012 5,1 ;)

Sometimes I look <- left, and right ->, at the others who are able to do even more weird ***** than I on their systems, and, *sigh*, the inevitable tecno-envy begins to creep.

I purchased a 'Shipping' 1,1 Full Retail for USD3K in August of 2006. I boosted that fsck'r as far as I could through ElCap.

I eventually found my {current} 2012 5,1 on Craigslist for USD2K (which came with a pristine 27" Cinema Display "for no extra charge"). The 580 I found on teh Bay for USD170 is still keeping my two Dell P2715Q's shining Monterey.

The once-beloved nVidia 980Ti (which I purchased from teh Bay, with AAPL firmware) now happily resides in my Dell T5500.

I'm currently deliberating the financial wisdom in acquiring a Studio, as I don't think I have the stamina to tweak this stuff, any more ;(

In all this time, i've never, ever, felt that AAPL was tossing a FU in my face.

On the gripping hand, I've never, ever felt that AAPL even appreciated or understood my needs (on a personal basis) at any step in this Process.

They just gave me things that I could use, and explore.

It was always up to me to decide and resolve what I could actually do with the HW at-hand.

11y/o HW, and it still provides currency to my shivers ;)
 
mdriftmeyer said:
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.
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mdriftmeyer said:
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.

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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/...
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AMD just trumped Hopper.
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MI300 is being well received, and it too has 24 core CPU, on package GPU and fixed 192GB RAM. Are we being too harsh on Apple here?

I am certain this Mac Pro was the fallback option when their M2 Extreme plan fell flat. There are minimal internal changes, old PCIE v4, recycled case design, same M2 Ultra as the Studio just has “minimum effort made” written all over it.

The question is, going forward does Apple have the appetite to fully invest in a truly pro/server grade architecture that is optimised for power, and not just reuse a system optimised for efficiency? Apple’s entire AS lineup is now so architecturally homogenised that it’s unlikely.
 
cassmr said:
Ultimately, I have been pretty disappointed by the M2 generation, as I was hoping to see apple keep pushing a very aggressive pace.

I think the fact that the MacPro case hasn't really changed and has pretty excessive cooling, to me indicates they probably do have a bigger plan long term for the system.
Click to expand...
I suspect they have a major-minor release cadence. M2 was a minor increment whereas M3 will be a more significant one. so yea I’m thinking the 3nm M3 Mac Pro will be the model they wanted to showcase, not the M2.
 
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