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Given its performance threshold, it is pretty clear that the Mac Studio is a Mac Pro replacement for a huge chunk of Mac Pro users.

Apple has plans for another Mac Pro with 2x performance of the Studio. That will be for the smaller segment of the Mac Pro market.
 
Pro Tools and almost all of the third party plugins i use for it.
Okay, well the problem is in the first two words of this sentence. AVID has been garbage at keeping up with hardware and software updates for at least a decade now, both in Media Composer and in their stewardship of Pro Tools.
 
The Wife said 'Don't cry for the Mac Pro owners. They likely burn through money like flash paper. They will survive.' Sure, they will, but I am thinking of the 'little guy' who ponied up HUGE CASH (for them) and now find out they could have waited x amount of time and be farther ahead. The Studio isn't a Mac Pro replacement, but for the cost, and performance, I'm sure a few new Mac Pro owners are seeing red in more ways than one. But such is the market. You never know what can happen until it's happened.
Is the CPU speed the entire point of the Mac Pro? I thought these creative pros needed it for its expandability more than anything else. They've got pro GPUs and other things like sound cards over PCIe, and they sometimes have massive amounts of RAM. That's why nobody wanted the 2013 model despite it being faster than the earlier ones.

Aside from the presence of a new faster machine having no effect on their older ones, the Mac Studio doesn't seem comparable to the Intel Mac Pro at all. If the new AS Mac Pro doesn't offer PCIe, it'll at least need built-in GPUs that compare to the AMD Radeons.
 
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The "code games for M1" debates are always the same. The delusional side seems to believe that the primary programmer motivation is about the power of the chips. It's not. It's about the money. Programmer can code for the relative tiny market that is ALL MACs... or- per the delusion- they can code for the much tinier slice of that market to code for those with Macs with Silicon (which, I would guess is still dwarfed by the installed Intel-based Macs in operation).

OR, they can code from the relatively GIGANTIC market that is Windows. Whether that means they are coding for weaker or stronger chips, weaker or stronger GPUs, chips that can run on a watch battery vs. chips that need a personal nuclear reactor, doesn't matter so much. Where is the money? Where is the money? Where is the money?

In one market you have giant programming studios being paid huge amounts of money to code for specific platforms. The leaders of that space pour huge money into motivating the programming of big games for their side. In the other corner, you have a much richer company that- to the best of my knowledge- has never purchased a gaming studio... even one to drive games for their most lucrative cash cow (which is not the Mac).

Programmers who don't want/need to get paid (or paid relatively much) may in fact be attracted to prioritizing coding for Apple Silicon. Those who want to make as much money as possible for their work simply go where they will get paid the most money. If classic Amiga, Atari, Commodore or Radio Shack came back to life and offered them the most money to code for 68000 or 6502, etc, you'd see "exclusives" coming out for ancient chips less powerful than the one powering a Home Pod.

All logical or illogical issues/questions start here: what yields the most profit? Apple could "own" the gaming space by taking a bigger chunk of idle cash and buying up Studios as we see Apple competitors doing on a regular basis. They do not. In lieu of that approach, there's simply not enough Apple Mac owners to create greater motivation to code for Silicon vs. coding for Windows. Where you get exceptions is where the motivation strays from the most fundamental one: profit potential.

I don't foresee this changing unless Silicon overtakes Windows PCs so that it is THE bigger market and/or Apple decides to part with some of the cash hoard in the vault to buy a good number of Studios to get "big" games written exclusively for Silicon.

This idea that because Apple (marketing) says these are the most powerful chips ever made doesn't automatically translate to the world wanting to code on them for upwards of a year+ to then sell only a fraction of those who happen to own those specific Macs (and would probably be griping about the price unless it is about iPhone app pricing of $5 or less in general).

Where is the money? Where is the money? Where is the money? If you can show big game programmers a better answer to that question, they will pour into coding for Silicon. Else, one needs Apple to step up (with cash) or wait for Silicon "PCs" to become more numerous than Windows PCs.
Short version, Apple doesn't have exclusives or video game market presence, and that takes years and $$$ to build up. Same reason Google Stadia isn't doing well.
 
Performance hasn't been the reason for 15 years. It's all about money.

Right... and yet every post focused on Silicon performance inevitably gets many people in there seemingly confused why programmers are not falling all over themselves to create their best games for Silicon... or why everyone has not dropped all other projects to go Silicon native ASAP.

If Silicon owners show them a way to make MORE money than they get by spending their valuable time coding for Windows or gaming consoles, they will come

OR if Apple tosses some of the hoard at some of them to insure they get paid as much as they would make coding the next game for Windows or Xbox or Playstation, etc., that would work too.

OR both would really work.

But generally Mac people don't want to pay more than about iPhone app prices for apps (if that). But even those willing don't amount to very many people vs. all of the games in PC land. And Apple never shows tangible interest in games such that they would toss some AppleTV+-like money at it. If we step outside of our Apple adoration mindsets and into the shoes of the programmers, why do they want to code their next big games for Silicon?

It seems the group-think answer is "because these are the most powerful chips ever" but that is to be OBJECTIVELY proven when it's not Apple Marketing trying to make a sale sharing some cherry-picked comparison numbers in the big pitch... and programmers care most about doing what Apple cares most about too: maximizing profits vs. sacrificing/deferring their paydays so they can code first for a relatively tiny slice of the whole market that might buy their game(s).

I'm confident these chips are remarkable- bought Studio myself ASAP yesterday. But that's not enough to motivate the investment of time and payrolls of dedicated coding when the same time & payroll can code for a market far, far larger and thus make much more ROI.
 
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Performance hasn't been the reason for 15 years. It's all about money.
Why 15 years? I recall performance not mattering even in the 90s when everyone was boasting how many "bits" their game consoles are. It was all marketing and exclusive deals.
 
I sure as ... that Apple finds a way to allow Mac Pro owners to "refit" their investments with the M1 offerings for a reasonable price. Sadly, I'm gonna guess this is wishful thinking on my part.

Remember when people thought that surely, Apple would have a program to retrofit 21,000 dollar gold Series 0 Apple Watches with newer hardware, so they wouldn't be so quickly obsolete?

Yeah...About that...
 
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At 128GB of RAM and 20 CPU cores, the Mini Studio pretty much can take care of 98% of the high-end workflows at this point. The only reasons you'd need the bigger Mac Pro is for the slots, internal storage, and intel compatibility.

The new Mac Pro will be plenty interesting, that's for sure. I mean what's next, 2 M1 Ultras?
 
Yeah, not impressed. Are we already at the stage of the G5 where they had to make a dual G5 (with diminishing returns) because they were stuck with the speed of the silicon itself?

The same core at the same clock speed warmed over after 18 months is discouraging for $4000. And now we need 3” of cooling space?

I am happy with my 16” Pro, but I would expect more for $4000. The premium for the Ultra chip over the Max is $1400 at the base GPU count. That’s an iMac.
Regarding the G5, you are completely, absolutely missing the point on this M1/M1 Pro/M1 Max/M1 Ultra/Mx Whatever strategy. Using several versions of the same chip design and even configuration, including binned versions and chiplets made of pairs and quads glued together, comes down not to any limitation in processor node progression, but to economies of scale both in design (it's much easier to design one of each of the architecture's internal modules) and manufacturing (because of limited yields, due to defects, binning and gluing chips together – instead of designing a crapton of differently sized chips – makes much more sense).

Expect Apple to repeat the same release cycle with the M2 (or M1X) family, again starting at the bottom, and with modest gains year over year which won't muddy up the product line too much (much like they do with the A series already). If they keep doing that at a steady pace, they'll be set for the next decade or so, and if the competition doesn't go the same route, they'll absolutely be slaughtered.
 
At 128GB of RAM and 20 CPU cores, the Mini Studio pretty much can take care of 98% of the high-end workflows at this point. The only reasons you'd need the bigger Mac Pro is for the slots, internal storage, and intel compatibility.

The new Mac Pro will be plenty interesting, that's for sure. I mean what's next, 2 M1 Ultras?
Honestly? That's my guess. Apple said the M1 Ultra was the last "chip" in the M1 family, and yes, they spent a lot of time talking about how "two CPUs on a motherboard" introduces inefficiencies and complications. But I think it's way less likely that they debut a CPU designed with a new architecture inherited from the A15 (or presaging the A16?) at both the low end AND highest end at the same time. The M1 followed the exact same "small to large" strategy that Intel has followed for years, where new microarchitectures debut in the smallest die size chips first (in M1's case, the A14 in the iPhone) to work out yield issues with the least waste, and then scale up from there as the manufacturing becomes more mature.

I think it's more likely that Apple semi-backtracks on "2 separate CPUs is bad!" with the Apple Silicon Mac Pro and it debuts with two M1 Ultras on the board, potentially alongside a non-unified second level DRAM pool to match the up-to-1.5TB RAM capacity of the Intel Mac Pro, plus PCIe slots for additional GPUs or other accelerators/internal board peripherals (networking, audio, storage, video capture interfaces, and the like). I don't think we'll see an M2 MacBook Air/Mac mini/et al + an M2 Ultra/M2 MEGA (or whatever the heck they'd call a 4-chip version) Mac Pro at the same time. And I definitely don't think we'll see an M2 architecture chip debut at the highest end and then go down.
 
Honestly? That's my guess. Apple said the M1 Ultra was the last "chip" in the M1 family, and yes, they spent a lot of time talking about how "two CPUs on a motherboard" introduces inefficiencies and complications. But I think it's way less likely that they debut a CPU designed with a new architecture inherited from the A15 (or presaging the A16?) at both the low end AND highest end at the same time. The M1 followed the exact same "small to large" strategy that Intel has followed for years, where new microarchitectures debut in the smallest die size chips first to work out yield issues with the least waste, and then scale up from there as the manufacturing becomes more mature.

I think it's more likely that Apple semi-backtracks on "2 separate CPUs is bad!" with the Apple Silicon Mac Pro and it debuts with two M1 Ultras on the board, potentially alongside a non-unified second level DRAM pool to match the up-to-1.5TB RAM capacity of the Intel Mac Pro, plus PCIe slots for additional GPUs or other accelerators/internal board peripherals (networking, audio, storage, and maybe even third-party GPUs). I don't think we'll see an M2 MacBook Air/Mac mini/et al + an M2 Ultra/M2 MEGA (or whatever the heck) at the same time. And I definitely don't think we'll see an M2 architecture chip debut at the highest end and then go down.

There really isn’t an easy way to even do two sockets unless they’ve designed an entire interposer die to sit between two max’s in order to sequence and share the bus. As it is, it appears that the ultra fusion stuff is a synchronous interface with fifos and not an asynchronous bus, so extending it would be painful. That, and the fact that there are indications that the CPUs have 1-bit CPU id fields suggests that it would be a world of hurt to try and dual-socket with these. I just don’t see it happening.
 
The world already knows how to handle two chips (or N chips). A mac pro with N number of M1 Ultras would give Apple bragging rights, but it would be ridiculously overpowered for everything except scientific, ML, and maybe bitcoin work.

A 128GB GPU is big. 2 M1Ultras together would imply 2 128GB independent GPUs with 40 CPU cores, 128GP cores, and 64 neural engines. There are people who would love that, but the market for them will be super-tiny. It might be more cost-effective to just bond a couple of Mini Studios together with multiple thunderbolt 4 connections, which might get you around 160Gb/s of theoretical networking performance.
 
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This is awesome for folks like myself (large software builds) that need CPU horsepower and are fine with lower end GPUs (e.g. the tMP is still enough GPU for me)...

4200Eur (2TB... biz so no VAT) for that level of performance is great... but alas my M1 Max MBP is been an excellent performer so need to do some more mental gymnastics to justify the buy

I'm just still peeved about the 400Eur for height adjustment on the display.
 
There really isn’t an easy way to even do two sockets unless they’ve designed an entire interposer die to sit between two max’s in order to sequence and share the bus. As it is, it appears that the ultra fusion stuff is a synchronous interface with fifos and not an asynchronous bus, so extending it would be painful. That, and the fact that there are indications that the CPUs have 1-bit CPU id fields suggests that it would be a world of hurt to try and dual-socket with these. I just don’t see it happening.

You are right Let's not even talk about additional cache coherency communication. I can't imagine this processor in a machine that requires additional I/O and peripherals.

They still need plenty of lanes of Gen4 PCIe, external ECC ram, etc. to even think about replacing a MacPro in a critical computing environment.

The TDP of the current Apple processors looks great. It's not going to look as good when you start adding all the differential high speed I/O and external memory busses.

The maximum memory on a MacPro is 768GB or 1.5TB of DDR4 ECC.

We do not have a MacPro replacement at this time. There are workloads that the new Mac Studio cannot support.
 
Lower their prices? Many gamers pay thousand of dollars for GPU upgrades and gaming laptops sale pretty well. In fact, Apple is only laptop brand that does not have gaming line of machines. There is a lot of money in the gaming industry. If Apple can equip a 14inch MBP with M1 Pro/Max version designed specifically for gaming and throw some millions to the big developers to release their most popular titles for Apple Silicon, then, the industry, including smaller developers would follow. Mac should not be the top gaming platform for AAA games, but it should be a decent platform, so that people dont decide to go for Windows machine only because the Mac is crappy for any gaming activity. Many many potential buyers are pushed away from the Mac just because you cant play the games that your friends play on their PCs.
Yes, people choose Windows over macOS for the games, but also for the lower price. Let me split this gaming target group. Group 1: If gaming is all one cares about, then going for the more affordable system is the reasonable choice. Even if Apple was on par with Windows in terms of developer support, etc. I would go with Windows. Apple doesn't want those cost-sensitive users. Group 2: Then there are Mac users who love the Mac for what it is and also happen to love playing games. Where is the incentive for Apple to invest in game developers bringing AAA to the Mac when this second group has already bought a Mac?
 
Right... and yet every post focused on Silicon performance inevitably gets many people in there seemingly confused why programmers are not falling all over themselves to create their best games for Silicon... or why everyone has not dropped all other projects to go Silicon native ASAP.

If Silicon owners show them a way to make MORE money than they get by spending their valuable time coding for Windows or gaming consoles, they will come

OR if Apple tosses some of the hoard at some of them to insure they get paid as much as they would make coding the next game for Windows or Xbox or Playstation, etc., that would work too.

OR both would really work.

But generally Mac people don't want to pay more than about iPhone app prices for apps (if that). But even those willing don't amount to very many people vs. all of the games in PC land. And Apple never shows tangible interest in games such that they would toss some AppleTV+-like money at it. If we step outside of our Apple adoration mindsets and into the shoes of the programmers, why do they want to code their next big games for Silicon?

It seems the group-think answer is "because these are the most powerful chips ever" but that is to be OBJECTIVELY proven when it's not Apple Marketing trying to make a sale sharing some cherry-picked comparison numbers in the big pitch... and programmers care most about doing what Apple cares most about too: maximizing profits vs. sacrificing/deferring their paydays so they can code first for a relatively tiny slice of the whole market that might buy their game(s).

I'm confident these chips are remarkable- bought Studio myself ASAP yesterday. But that's not enough to motivate the investment of time and payrolls of dedicated coding when the same time & payroll can code for a market far, far larger and thus make much more ROI.
The issue is that AAA game development today is in exactly the wrong place to start tackling new platforms. They cost insane amounts of money to make (nearly as much as blockbuster mega-franchise CGI films), and if they are very lucky will make 100% ROI. That may sound like a lot, but it isn't considering the size of the initial investment, and that not every game does that well.

This doesn't leave much room for adopting a new market or platform in the process.
 
this is really imperssive, top XEON always suffer from the same illness: the more cores, the slower single core, wich makes those processor very specific for some situations but not for everybody (besides price obviously)

But M1 is achieving something we have never seen in computing, multiple cores still single core as fast as the others.

X86 has NOTHING to do here to solve this problem.
 
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