I don’t think ‘extreme’ would have been the best approach for professionals. Pros need scalability, and at a certain point, no one will seriously consider investing $10,000–$50,000 in a non-upgradable machine. It’s astonishing how Apple’s best Mac Pro model (2009–2012) was followed by a series of missteps: the Mac Pro 2013, 2019, and 2022 gradually became non-options, forcing professionals to shift from Macs to PCs. I really hope Apple refocuses on the pro market, but I’m not sure it’s possible. The ‘all-in-one chip’ design offers tremendous advantages but also presents a hard barrier for pros: scalability.
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'M4 Extreme' Chip Unlikely After Apple 'Cancels' High-Performance Chip [Updated]
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Was not one of the earlier rumors regarding an "Extreme" variant of the high-end ASi chips saying that Apple would not implement such a chip until M5 or M6...?
Yeah ram is the big one.I'm not in this group, but it doesn't seem that hard to understand. People who want more CPU know they want more CPU, the exact performance number isn't needed to know that a bigger chip will be closer to what they want.
But more than CPU power, plenty of vocal people want the RAM that the old Mac Pro offered, and have been complaining ever since the switch to Apple Silicon. Here it's easily to play the extrapolation game. 2x Max's RAM for an Ultra, and 2X-4X Ultra's RAM for an Extreme (if an Extreme is a 2X or 4X ultra). Considering Apple RAM pricing, selling just one unit would cover all the R&D costs.
I think they almost need to do another tier of ram for the pro with some sort of caching architecture.
The old pro can do 1.5tb and that just won’t fit on a single package any time soon.
Include 256gb on package and then a bunch of slots for some slightly slower memory that the on package RAM can cache.
But again, that’s assuming Apple see a workload for the Mac Pro to justify the investment.
I’m not sure I do right now. The current workloads that Apple machines run fit in less.
Terabytes of ram is the domain of servers. Which is kinda why the Intel pro can do it. It’s running a workstation variant of a server targeted CPU.
Okey, so if this is not happening, basically the CPU will be same as in Mac Studio. Then I have a question. Do all these PCI slots need all that bandwidth? I am trying to understand if there is such a card on PCI that could utilize the M4 Max Pro Turbo Mega, and not be limited by the bus speeds.
If the only reason for MacPro is the PCI expansion, maybe Apple could get away with making an additional expansion unit, lets say connected by 4-5 TB4/5 ports, and just liked to Mac Studio. Then we could just use studio, and add the expansion box if needed (video, music and other pro applications). It wouldn't look cool, but it would be just another big dongle, and Apple loves them
Would this solution make sense?
If the only reason for MacPro is the PCI expansion, maybe Apple could get away with making an additional expansion unit, lets say connected by 4-5 TB4/5 ports, and just liked to Mac Studio. Then we could just use studio, and add the expansion box if needed (video, music and other pro applications). It wouldn't look cool, but it would be just another big dongle, and Apple loves them
Would this solution make sense?
Okey, so if this is not happening, basically the CPU will be same as in Mac Studio. Then I have a question. Do all these PCI slots need all that bandwidth? I am trying to understand if there is such a card on PCI that could utilize the M4 Max Pro Turbo Mega, and not be limited by the bus speeds.
If the only reason for MacPro is the PCI expansion, maybe Apple could get away with making an additional expansion unit, lets say connected by 4-5 TB4/5 ports, and just liked to Mac Studio. Then we could just use studio, and add the expansion box if needed (video, music and other pro applications). It wouldn't look cool, but it would be just another big dongle, and Apple loves them
Would this solution make sense?
The big bandwidth consumers for a Mac Pro as I see it (now third party GPUs are out) would be network and storage (and also networked storage).
Lesser Macs now have 10 gig networking but that’s no longer fast, really. It’s only 1 gigabyte/sec roughly which is super slow vs onboard SSD.
For high throughput befitting a proper workstation you want 25/40/100 gig Ethernet (networking and iscsi) or other high speed interfaces for direct attached scsi arrays or fiber channel.
Because sure, you can internally expand to maybe 8tb or 20-30tb with slots but a network array can be multiple petabytes (read: far more than you’ll ever fit in a Mac Pro case) and you want high speed access to that.
The PCI thing is academic for me since I doubt I’ll have a Mac Pro. I agree with everything you said, it’s just interesting to me to see them promote PCI slots and then act surprised when people want to put GPUs in them.
Yeah without GPUs - what are we going to use slots for, realistically?
- High speed networking? can do 40/100 gigabit Nic via thunderbolt 5 now
- High speed storage? Can do 120 gigabit via thunderbolt 5 now
Without GPUs... there's uh... not much point outside of the above?
Given the above, I'm struggling to see the point of a Mac Pro any more, unless it has massive amounts of RAM or a bespoke higher tier SOC - and really, the traditional Mac workloads are struggling to justify it because even the Pro laptops crush those workloads now. I mean for most casuals, the baseline M4 crushes those workflows now.
If you're doing science... maybe? But you have clusters of servers to do the real hard work. Your Mac can act as a visualisation workstation, but the grunt work is probably better farmed out to a heap of cheap linux boxes in an air conditioned datacenter far away from you; you'll get far more raw compute for far less money, and can share it with other researchers when you aren't using it, if its in a datacenter somewhere.
Having that sort of compute in an individual Mac workstation just doesn't make sense outside of some real extreme niche use cases that probably don't justify the product line.
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Thinking some more.... until AR/VR development really takes off on the Apple ecosystem I don't see a new workload (at least not one that Apple have any care factor for - things like offshore oil and gas simulations are the domain of high end PCs due to the bespoke software involved) to justify the machine.
Maybe the Mac Pro will stagnate a bit until apple get their house in order with regards to AR/VR and the new Mac Pro will be focused on being a development workstation for that.
Maybe the Mac Pro will stagnate a bit until apple get their house in order with regards to AR/VR and the new Mac Pro will be focused on being a development workstation for that.
a: Most university researchers don't have clusters of servers to test their work on first. Those are always modeled on workstations.
b: The Audio Industry and Post Production industry use PCI-e cards all the time for very high bandwidth audio/video streams to work on in various formats connected to cameras, advanced DSP/FPGA cards, etc.
c: Data capture in engineering fields attached to machine prototypes use PCIe cards
d: In lab R&D testing of future NIC designs, CPU designs, IoT designs pushing the envelope have closed environment loops to test various fields
e: Digital/Analog Oscilloscopes attaching data streams to specialty PCIe cards
f: Military
g: Broadcast production facilities
h: etc.
I think Apple may be looking at a separate, singular chip die with nothing but GPU cores that is connected back to the main SoC on a high-speed data interface.
Their names are all terrible
"Pro Max" and "Ultra" sound like types of condoms
Honestly if your workloads are suited for it, 2 studios might even be a good go if you really need that amount of cores + ram
This. I suspect the AI chip is going to be dual use. Primarily for their own servers, which means orders will be high enough to justify releasing it as an “Ultra” in the pro.
Agreed, but it is funny how the industry eventually apes it. Dell has a Pro Max laptop now…
Oh, no question -- it's embarrassing for all parties
The copy cat game goes in all directions and it seems like so few have any good original ideas, Apple included
Personally, you could call it an egg and I wouldn’t care. I hate branding in the first place. I buy products for a purpose, I don’t care what nonsensical name is slapped on it 🤷♂️
Been in the windows world for a while with upgrade options galore.
I hate this about Apple. Waiting for the ONE machine I want to get updated... it was like that for my 27 inch iMac back in the day. Intel was having serious issues at the time.
Upgrade options galore but most of them are crap. Particularly when it comes to wake from sleep, battery life, forced updates, etc.
For all the whining people do about apple locking down macOS and turning it into iOS... Windows 11.....
What are you talking about? Geekbench charts shows the highest PC processor available, without overclocking, is a 13900KS, which scores 3138/21724. The M4 Max scores 3926/25725, giving Apple both the fastest single core, by a wide margin, and fastest multicore scores by a decent margin. They've not yet released the M4 Ultra which should cement the multicore lead further still.
Sure you can find individual scores for faster PC chips dipped in liquid nitrogen, or running in fake virtual environments, but nobody cares about such scores. Nobody else can expect such scores. The charts showing what you can expect buying a normal system puts Apple firmly in the lead.
How does releasing the fastest non-server chips (which Geekbench doesn't have a chart for, sadly) equate to disposable game console processors?
The real pros don't care about geekbench, gamers do. That's what GB is for. The pros look at specialized benchmarks relevant for their tasks. Just a simple example: what good is M4 GB score if your job requires, say, 2TB of RAM?
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I am not sure the even Gamers care about GB. GB is not will suited for measuring sustained performance, a critical performance parameter that gamers care about.
Oh yes. with nvidia's next GPUs dropping I'm tempted, but windows is like getting constant papercuts while using the mouse. And it's turned into spyware at this point.
I'm not a gamer, but countless people are talking about the potential of Steam OS being released. Gamers can't wait to leave windows behind. Doing work on windows is much worse, in my experience.