Mac Pro Enthusiasts Raise Concerns Over Upgrade Limitations of Apple Silicon

[neuropsychguy]

I've had no interest in Mac pros since the days of the powermac G4/G5. they priced them selves out of reach after that. iMacs became a much better value. now they screwed up the iMac and I don't even know what to buy.

An upgraded Studio will be about the price of a base PowerMac G4 ($1700 in 2000 is about $2900 now adjusting for inflation). The Studio that is this price has the M1 Max with 10-core CPU, 32-core GPU, and 16-core Neural Engine. It also has 64 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD (or you could stick with 32 GB RAM and get a 2 TB drive).

It's not upgradable though but Macs haven't really been particularly upgradable for a long time (and Jobs never really wanted them to be upgradable so this is nothing new).

 

[topmounter]

If they can't pull off the 'Extreme' M-something, then make the Mac Pro a blade chassis with a common backplane for storage and i/o cards. It would take some OS / software work to cluster and distribute workloads across multiple Ultra-blades, but who knows, it could be a boon to those 'pro app' workloads.

 

[Lone Deranger]

I doubt Apple would do something dumb like limit memory to 192GB on a Pro machine.

I really wouldn't bet on it if I were you. This is Apple, after all. There's always a catch. 😅

 

[guzhogi]

Apple silicon can’t be as good as a high end pc with nvidia 4090 etc so what’s the point the m1 ultra studio is fine for 99.9% of pros the Mac Pro was a huge con and waste of money they never really upgraded the cards so what’s the point of it exactly you spend £50,000 for what exactly nothing

I wonder how Apple Silicon compares to workstation-class GPUs?

 

[Adoniram]

If M2 extreme has been canceled, it’s because they realized all the above important points, or they shifted to M3.

My take is that they’re not complete idiots, they understand why the Mac Pro exists, and they’re going to create an M2/3 chip that has expandable RAM and GPU capability, just like Intel has integrated GPUs. Given the very impressive development over the past several years, I’m sure external GPUs and non-unified RAM options are not outside of their ability (frankly I think the unified architecture is more challenging).

Really looking forward to the update. These could be amazing scientific computing workstations for my team, and we could shift a lot of work away from a highly contested HPC for all but the most demanding jobs.

 

[neuropsychguy]

Apple silicon can’t be as good as a high end pc with nvidia 4090

It can't be or isn't? Apple can scale up the performance of CPUs and GPUs. What would performance be like if Apple allowed power draws like the 4090?

 

[hybrid_x]

This would be a HUGE mistake and would essentially be the end of the Mac Pro tower. There would be almost zero advantage of buying a Mac Pro over a Mac Studio, or a rack full of M2 Mac minis.

I'm not entirely convinced that Apple would be this dumb, only one generation after re-introducing a flexible modular Mac Pro after the disaster of the trash can generation of the machine.

 

[jakeowens]

Something definitely is missing from all this if they are just going to have an Ultra chip with the same specs as a Mac Studio. I come from a small animation/visual effects studio where we were once all macs but we’re forced to go PC because macs don’t have good enough GPUs for rendering. All I want is a Mac that has a GPU that can compete with high end discreet GPUs from Nvidia. Pleeeeeease give us that! Sure would be nice to upgrade it later but at this point I’ll take anything that can be used in the Pro Market. (I have a Mac Studio but the GPU is too slow to render compared to 3090s

 

[MayaUser]

This would be a HUGE mistake and would essentially be the end of the Mac Pro tower. There would be almost zero advantage of buying a Mac Pro over a Mac Studio, or a rack full of M2 Mac minis.

I'm not entirely convinced that Apple would be this dumb, only one generation after re-introducing a flexible modular Mac Pro after the disaster of the trash can generation of the machine.

hard to say when we dont know
Mac Studio cannot handle an M Ultra with clock speeds of over 4.5ghz...so it depends

 

[MayaUser]

It can't be or isn't? Apple can scale up the performance of CPUs and GPUs. What would performance be like if Apple allowed power draws like the 4090?

Exactly...we already saw that they can do it...M2 family can be modular in that regard...M1 was clocked limited at 3.2ghz

 

[blazerunner]

How the hell does Apple manage to screw up the easiest product? It's one they've been selling for decades, the one that started it all; a desktop computer. It's not even that difficult; just stick to what consumers want and it'll sell.

How greedy does this company need to be to take yet another class of consumers and try to screw them out of options as well? Why is NOBODY calling them out and why are they continually getting away with it?

 

[bsbeamer]

Those who have been paying attention already knew this. You'll be lucky to have Afterburner style FPGA's work with the new machine. Internal expandable storage seems to be the only real consumer benefit of a tower Mac from Apple's perspective.

 

[Adoniram]

Best case scenario, Apple makes M3 pro-extreme daughter cards that can be added or removed for RAM and CPU upgrades. One motherboard for those that want PCIe slots with fewer daughter cards and another motherboard for those that want more daughter cards with no PCIe.

I'd hope that they'd make the Mac Pro chassis for years letting an aftermarket grow for used modules every time they come out with a new SoC.

Intel did this. They had PCIe cards to add more CPU cores. Each card had something like 24-48 cores depending on the model. It was a huge win for people who wanted a local mini-HPC without paying enormous sums. I could see Apple doing this as it would allow them to expand RAM and cores without creating an entirely new architecture (CPUs disjointed from RAM and GPU).

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

So on the 59th second of the 23rd hour — enthusiasts are starting to squirm — based on rumors. Ha!

And yet , we clicked on that stupid article

 

[WestonHarvey1]

Why is everyone so sure there won't be internal PCIe slots? They can be connected internally via Thunderbolt 4. It's an internal "eGPU"... macOS needs driver support and drivers for the cards, but they have engineers that can do that.

 

[mrdoodle]

There’s no reason why the Apple Silicon Mac Pro couldn’t support upgradeable internal components. The Apple Silicon platform supports PCIe, and (I believe from my earlier research) the current lack of extensible GPU support is primarily due to AMD driver limitations for arm based processors.

I could see a set of Apple supported add on cards (storage, graphics etc) that extend via PCIe the same as past Mac Pro models. There will be more unsupported cards due to lack of drivers for arm-based systems for sure.

People don’t know what’s in store for this machine and jumping to conclusions too soon.

On the chip front, it’s very possible that Apple could introduce “dual M2 Ultra”, not necessarily a single “M2 Extreme” but actually two separate Ultra chips. We just don’t know.

 

[RedWeasel]

If all that is actually true, they might as well just discontinue the Mac Studio, make it a little taller and call it a Mac Pro

Mac Cube Pro confirmed

 

[aaronsullivan]

I do think Apple knows what needs to be done, but it is simply not possible at this stage for a variety of reasons. So the real question is how to release a Mac Pro that is a stopgap.

From the outside, I feel like improve the Studio and keep the Pro where it is at (discounted?) for as many years as it takes to get the Mac Pro to have more flexible and complete expansion or the unlikely scenario that the M-series can somehow eliminate the need... but then why do you need such a giant box, right?

 

[Lone Deranger]

I wonder how Apple Silicon compares to workstation-class GPUs?

There's a massive thread here on MacRumors that discusses this.

3D Rendering on Apple Silicon, CPU&GPU

This is a thread for discussing everything about 3D rendering on Apple Silicon, M1 and beyond. Whether you're using a dedicated CPU renderer like Keyshot, a plugin like Redshift, Cycles, Arnold or Octane for C4D, Maya or Houdini, or even if you're rendering inside ZBrush with its native...

forums.macrumors.com

TLDR: Apple Silicon GPU's are very good, but even the fastest M1x M2x GPU's get utterly destroyed humiliated by nVidia's best GPUs... for a number of reasons.

 

[Alexwastaken]

I don't care about upgrading the storage or anything else, just give me the most powerful Mac.

 

[RedWeasel]

I don’t know about you, but I pay more for Apple products *specifically* so I don’t have to customize them.
If I wanted to customize, I would’ve went with windows and Android.

That's a bit simplistic in certain professional areas. You might need to have PCIe cards, for example for video capture or audio (e.g. ProTools). You might needs lots of CPU power, but not so much RAM. You might need lots of RAM, but not so many CPU cores.

 

[blazerunner]

This would be a HUGE mistake and would essentially be the end of the Mac Pro tower. There would be almost zero advantage of buying a Mac Pro over a Mac Studio, or a rack full of M2 Mac minis.

I'm not entirely convinced that Apple would be this dumb, only one generation after re-introducing a flexible modular Mac Pro after the disaster of the trash can generation of the machine.

To be fair, the 2019 Mac Pro was a disaster as well; the pricing was just beyond insane, 6 grand minimum for a desktop? And one that came with a measly 256gb SSD and Radeon Pro 580X GPU.

I just don't understand how Apple gets away with insulting consumers like that. It's disgusting.

 

[Johnny Jackhammer]

The cost of making custom parts for it that make the computer totally upgradable is a huge waste of money for them.

So you are saying they intentionally "boxed themselves in" by constraining the Apple processor so they could remove options from component competitors that are available for far less on the secondary market... RAM, SSD, GPU, PCIe, etc. Can't decide whether to invest in or divest.

 

[skippermonkey]

The current Mac Pro is a perfectly fine machine (I have a 24-core). Just put some Apple CPUs in it, let us decide if we want to add additional GPUs (in addition to the on-chip GPUs) and just sell the thing. Honestly, why does Apple confuse and complicate things for every single Mac Pro release? People keep reminding us how little the damn thing sells – so why spend all this effort on a new design/architecture? Just upgrade it, and sell us MPX modules.

Oh, and if it doesn't support upgradeable RAM or PCIe cards, then fine – I'll just go buy another W6800X Duo, then I'm good for another few years.

 

[Promostyle]

I have to keep reminding myself that it’s an enthusiast product rather than an actual workstation. Although would be nice to see Apple someday create a workstation!