Apple didn't update the Mac Pro when they updated the Mac Studio with M3 Ultra recently. Is it possible that NVIDIA's DGX Station motherboard or a derivative of it will be used in a future Mac Pro? There could be an M4 Max on a PCIe card to drive the display and run the user interface. NVIDIA's Grace Arm CPU and Blackwell GPU would be used for AI training and other GPU number crunching. The DGX Station motherboard was shown at the GPU Technology Conference keynote here:
Apple's logo was on the screen at the beginning of the keynote here:
MacOS is a more user-friendly environment to work in than Linux. The advantage of having Grace Blackwell and M4 Max integrated in one computer is that it allows interactive simulations and number crunching to run on Grace Blackwell and be displayed by M4 Max in real-time. This is simpler than doing the number crunching and display on different computers connected by ethernet. Apple will still need a lower-end Mac Pro for customers who just want to add PCIe video capture cards. The system with Grace Blackwell and M4 Max could be called Mac Pro Ultra. Key specs of the DGX Station motherboard are:
72 Arm Neoverse v2 CPU Cores ("Grace")
496 GBytes of ECC-corrected LPDDR5X, 396 GBytes/sec
Blackwell Ultra B300 GPU with 288 GBytes of HBM3e, 8 TBytes/sec
CPU-GPU bandwidth of 900 GBytes/sec (450 GBytes/sec in each direction)
40 TFlops of FP64
80 TFlops of FP32
5 PFlops of FP16/BF16 with sparsity, 2.5 PFlops without sparsity
10 PFlops of FP8/FP6 with sparsity, 5 PFlops without sparsity
20 PFlops of FP4 with sparsity, 10 PFlops without sparsity
ConnectX-8 SuperNIC with 800 Gbits/sec of network bandwidth
1 or 2 InfiniBand ports or 1 to 8 Ethernet ports
three PCIe x16 slots
three M.2 NVMe SSDs
Apple's logo was on the screen at the beginning of the keynote here:
MacOS is a more user-friendly environment to work in than Linux. The advantage of having Grace Blackwell and M4 Max integrated in one computer is that it allows interactive simulations and number crunching to run on Grace Blackwell and be displayed by M4 Max in real-time. This is simpler than doing the number crunching and display on different computers connected by ethernet. Apple will still need a lower-end Mac Pro for customers who just want to add PCIe video capture cards. The system with Grace Blackwell and M4 Max could be called Mac Pro Ultra. Key specs of the DGX Station motherboard are:
72 Arm Neoverse v2 CPU Cores ("Grace")
496 GBytes of ECC-corrected LPDDR5X, 396 GBytes/sec
Blackwell Ultra B300 GPU with 288 GBytes of HBM3e, 8 TBytes/sec
CPU-GPU bandwidth of 900 GBytes/sec (450 GBytes/sec in each direction)
40 TFlops of FP64
80 TFlops of FP32
5 PFlops of FP16/BF16 with sparsity, 2.5 PFlops without sparsity
10 PFlops of FP8/FP6 with sparsity, 5 PFlops without sparsity
20 PFlops of FP4 with sparsity, 10 PFlops without sparsity
ConnectX-8 SuperNIC with 800 Gbits/sec of network bandwidth
1 or 2 InfiniBand ports or 1 to 8 Ethernet ports
three PCIe x16 slots
three M.2 NVMe SSDs
