These computers are made for folks at companies like Pixar, where a department can decide they need to allocate money for it.. This is for folks that make a good deal of money off of their digital products. If I had $12k to throw around loosely, I'd get one, too.
For expensive assets like this, most wise companies want a higher degree of field swapability.
Yes, that is why a Mac Pro with PCIe slots has value for some people, although I am pretty sure that the audio cards could be Thunderbolt connected just fine (as could most of the required HyperDeck cards for video), but it would be much nicer to have them in the machine (and potentially faster). However, I agree with those who have said that RAM upgrades are just not done that often (if ever) in most professional systems, nor are GPU upgrades common. These are done most often by hobbyists or people who are not using these machines for paid work and so do not want to pay for everything up front (or historically, to pay less for the RAM than Apple charged). The speed difference between unified on package RAM and anything in a slot makes it very much a better solution.
If you still need yesterday’s technology, it can easily be connected via Thunderbolt.
The primary use for a Mac Pro would be PCIe slots which require both physical space and cooling. In addition, it might be possible to run the SoC at a higher clock speed generating more heat that would need to be exhausted. Exactly the same reason aMac Studio needs to be bigger than a Mac mini.
Yup, it would be possible, but the extreme NUMA architecture would make writing code for such a system very painful. Essentially, the non-on-package RAM would be more like VM than real RAM.
Just not true. People using these kind of systems to make money, just do not do RAM upgrades on them. They may need PCIe cards, but those would also be purchased when the machine was purchased, not added later (in most situations).
That is something that could work, although only for a cycle or two beyond which the PCIe slots would need to change.
Nah. The real problem is that many people want to be able to buy a Mac Pro, as that is what they always bought and it it makes them sad that they no longer need (nor can justify the price) of Apple’s highest end systems. The Mac Studio is more power than 90% of pro users need and a new Mac Pro will be targeted at that last 10%. People who need 25/40/50/100Gb/s Ethernet, NVMe storage, and other PCIe cards, not people who buy the cheapest configuration they can so they can upgrade it with non-Apple RAM to save money.
Valid points all. I just think Apple needs the final slam dunk on Intel that if they make a machine for which power consumption is not a concern that it exceeds Intel's best, while still maybe (or maybe not) being better for power consumption. I am all for computers that use less juice, however, I was hoping that Apple was going to release something ridiculously powerful too. Then it also needs to be upgradable and hopefully compatible with third party graphics cards instead of another closed system like the others.
You think that a substantially slower system that allowed for much slower memory expandability is what high-end pro users want? I highly doubt that.
This is just not true. When you build out machines like this, you certainly want the option to expand memory and add new PCIe cards rather than buy another 50k unit for 1k worth of upgradability.
People may add PCIe cards, they are not adding memory.
Your example makes clear why this is not how 98% of people using these machines for production work. At the many Visual Effects houses, post production facilities and pharmaceutical research labs where I have worked/consulted, the number of times anyone did what you said was about the same as your example of 2. In a world where the research is on the GPUs themselves, replacing them makes sense. In a world where people are doing work that uses these systems, replacing them does not.
The biggest benefit of Apple Silicon’s Unified Memory Architecture is that is no longer the case. However, arguing that everyone should give up the benefit of UMA because some people do not need it does not make a lot of sense.
I agree that there will be performance trade-offs, I just disagree with you as to which make sense. I think having PCIe cards is important, I do not think that having expandable memory is.
Yea, so there’s going to be some type of payoff on the high end for Apple Silicon at some point, unless they abandon it entirely which I don’t see in the cards.
