A Mac Studio is not a workstation.yeah...and so is the Mac Studio.
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Gurman: All-New Mac Pro Still in Testing, But 'M2 Extreme' Chip Likely Canceled
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Gotta love how after reporting on this chip for 2.5 years, it just now occurs to him that maybe it is too expensive for Apple to produce.
Just upgrade the current one to a new Intel chip and be done with it, now when Intel really has gotten their **** together. AS doesn't really make sense for the Mac Pro I think...
Apple continues to test an all-new Mac Pro with an M2 Ultra chip, but the company has likely abandoned plans to release a higher-end configuration with a so-called "M2 Extreme" chip, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
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In the latest edition of his newsletter today, Gurman said the Mac Pro with the M2 Ultra chip will be available with up to a 24-core CPU, up to a 76-core GPU, and at least 192GB of RAM. Like the current Mac Pro, he expects the new model to remain expandable, allowing for additional memory, storage, and other components to be inserted.
The higher-end model with the M2 Extreme chip would have been available with up to a 48-core CPU and up to a 152-core GPU, according to Gurman, but he believes that this configuration was scrapped due to cost and manufacturing complexities.
"Based on Apple's current pricing structure, an M2 Extreme version of a Mac Pro would probably cost at least $10,000 — without any other upgrades — making it an extraordinarily niche product that likely isn't worth the development costs, engineering resources and production bandwidth it would require," he wrote.
The current Intel-based Mac Pro was released in December 2019 and starts at $5,999 in the United States. Barring any further delays, the new model will presumably launch at some point in 2023, but Gurman did not provide an updated timeframe.
Article Link: Gurman: All-New Mac Pro Still in Testing, But 'M2 Extreme' Chip Likely Canceled
A this point if Apple releases a new Mac Pro it will just be a Mac Studio in a big case with better cooling. Apple would be better off to just discontinue the Mac Pro until they really have a workstation class computer even though that might be another two years or more.
The other issue with moving to a workstation class on Apple silicon is software. The software out there these computer run is Intel and/or Unix based and it's real expensive software to port so even if Apple gets workstation class computer what workstation software is it going to run. I think Mac Pro with Apple silicon might just end up on the shelf like the old Apple Servers did.
I'm surprised more people don't understand that.
People just go "a Pro can afford the power" or making other commentary about hardware not understanding there Software is the bigger part of the equation.
* There are people using "legacy" Firewire decks that cost 10x as much as a Mac Pro and Firewire seems to be on the cutting block on MacOS
* AVID is still Intel which makes owning an ARM machine for AVID a moot point
* I'm not sure how much scientific software still exists for MacOS but I'm sure it's far behind where it was in the G5/early Intel days
* 32-bit while maybe not pressing for the casual person here could be detrimental if your plugin no longer works
How many native 3d apps are available on it?
And, lucky for Apple, they don’t have to compete in the workstation space. If a user doesn’t NEED macOS or macOS apps, Apple’s happy to take actions that signal to those folks, “You know, there’s an entire universe of other solutions out there that are very likely a better fit for you.”
Folks like to read about a company doing the things they imagine it should be doing. So, just check out some forums, see that people want to read about an “M2 Extreme”, then report that for 2.5 years regardless of it really exists or not. Gain a bunch of followers based on that in the intervening years and eventually report, “Ohhh, so, like NOW they’re not going to do it, but they totally were. But, keep following me because I’ll be sure to report rumors that align with what you want to hear every now and again!”
Yeah, but that isn't what they have done, now is it?
When they did the apology tour back in 2017, they didn't say there's an entire universe of other solutions. It was just that they heard us, and were working to deliver a solution.
And then they gave us a $6,000 workstation that was outperformed by a $1,200 consumer grade Ryzen based system.
Today in Ars Technica… They are pretty pessimistic on the Mac Pro.
“It might be time for Apple to throw in the towel on the Mac Pro”
arstechnica.com
“It might be time for Apple to throw in the towel on the Mac Pro”
It might be time for Apple to throw in the towel on the Mac Pro
Opinion: Making the case against Apple’s most expensive—and most ignored—Mac.
arstechnica.com
By “take actions that signal to those folks” I mean “releasing a $6,000 computer that’s outperformed by a $1,200 consumer grade Ryzen based system.” There’s not much a more clearer way to say “if you want performance more than you want macOS, then you want that Ryzen based system that’s WAY cheaper AND more performant.”
To be sure, some still haven’t gotten the message and are waiting for Apple to release that Apple Silicon system that will run Intel coded benchmarks better than Intel, Nvidia coded benchmarks better than Nvidia all while pulling surprising amounts of power, requiring impressive active cooling, a clear side panel and festooned with LED’s a-plenty. It’s not coming, just like eGPU’s of any kind, but it makes for good rumors and that’s what MacRumors is kinda about.
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Could we potentially see Apple make use of the greater power and heat headroom afforded to them by the larger chassis and run the M2 Ultra at higher voltages and faster clock speeds?
M2 Ultra X? M2X Ultra?
Push it up to 4GHz up from the rumoured 3.6Ghz giving us a further 11% boost in performance over the rumoured M2 Pro/Max.
M2 Ultra X? M2X Ultra?
Push it up to 4GHz up from the rumoured 3.6Ghz giving us a further 11% boost in performance over the rumoured M2 Pro/Max.
The current mini is < $1000, not that I expect a sub $1k mini with 64GB ram but the studio is specialized. Not everyone needs 24+ GPU cores. It’s overkill for a lot of use cases. The mini used to fit that bill nicely.
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On a PC, increasing the voltage and clock speed of JUST the CPU by itself is fairly straightforward if the CPU is overclockable. One may have to adjust some motherboard configurations to deal with a different multiplier, but once done, one has a CPU that’s been overclocked. Apple’s SoC is the CPU AND the GPU AND the RAM AND all of the support chips that makes all that happen. It’s impossible to overclock the Apple Silicon CPU by itself without potentially adversely affecting something else. I’ve read elsewhere that it could be that the clock rates we see on Apple Silicon are because those are the ones where, for the chip in question, all those various parts actually work. As a result, the speeds Apple arrives at aren’t the ones that will provide peak raw performance (though they do pretty good), they’re the ones that yield a functioning chip.
If Apple ever releases a 4GHz core architecture (that goes in a MBAir, for example), that’s when it’s most likely to see a 4GHz higher class chip.
Ah thank you for the reply. Now that makes sense. I totally forgot to consider that the package is all the various components tied together and you can’t just up the voltage to one part without affecting the rest.
what's beyond extreme?
Mac Pro Apple M4 Unobtainium - mined from a faraway planet, blue creatures be damned, but you're gonna love the price... Starting at $24,999
The studio is the new Apple answer . And now I have learned something new that makes it even more true. Almost 80 percent of high end video editors report that they and their studios have switched to Linux. 29 percent of them use Windows. The Mac OS percentage is terrible. That’s because Apple abandoned them in the software world. No serious professional uses Final Cut Pro anymore.
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That’s a shame and a total failure by Dell. I promise you that she and you both would be so much happier with windows 11. I am cantankerous enough, that I would try to upgrade it to windows 11 anyway no matter what Dell says. It’s a free upgrade. Microsoft says it will work. Because everything updates according to them. Microsoft says that if it runs 10 that unless it is so old that it has a CPU before version 9 from intel, it works. (And even some of those systems will work. I am running a Dell laptop that has a version 8 intel CPU. It works just fine. I had to work around the Microsoft warning that it would not work, but after I did it has worked completely fine. You just have to make sure that you have TPM turned on. I am a Windows Insider member so I am even on the far out beta version and it works perfectly.)
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Get ready. It’s going to be one according to Apple. They just have not told you yet. I live in the Windows world so I already know what you are talking about. But Apple has never seen workstations like we do in the Windows world.
This. This is what changed everything for real pro’s. Apple has abandoned them in software. And so they’ve abandoned Apple and gone to both Windows and Linux.
This is an amazing article. I encourage everyone to read it. It added even more to my existing notion about the Mac Pro. I think it’s doomed. Please pay special attention, to the part about what software real professionals are using, and what operating system it runs on. (And yes, I gave it away above.)Today in Ars Technica… They are pretty pessimistic on the Mac Pro.
“It might be time for Apple to throw in the towel on the Mac Pro”
It might be time for Apple to throw in the towel on the Mac Pro
Opinion: Making the case against Apple’s most expensive—and most ignored—Mac.
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Max Tech has commented that their testing shows that the GPU portion of the M1 family does not scale very well as you add cores, with the Ultra performing many tasks barely faster than the Max. They believe the issue is the size of the TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer), though their conclusions have been criticized by some with knowledge about GPU architectures and programming.
Their latest video suggests that if the GPU of an Ultra is constrained, doubling the cores would offer little to no improvement and if Apple is asking many thousands for such an option with that constraint, nobody would bother ordering it and Apple could see PR blow-back if such a GPU falls well-behind the AMD options available on the Intel Mac Pro.
Their latest video suggests that if the GPU of an Ultra is constrained, doubling the cores would offer little to no improvement and if Apple is asking many thousands for such an option with that constraint, nobody would bother ordering it and Apple could see PR blow-back if such a GPU falls well-behind the AMD options available on the Intel Mac Pro.