Mysterious New 'Compute Module' Found in Apple Beta Code

[4nNtt]

Hence why I think when the Apple Silicon Mac Pro is introduced, I think it's going to be introduced with a set of proprietary Apple Silicon upgrade modules.

Here's an example: Microsoft's game console the Xbox Series X/S uses proprietary PCIE expansion cards to upgrade the SSD.

These expansion cards are the only way to upgrade the SSD in the Xbox, unlike the PS5 where you can use pretty much any M.2 SSD. While massively limiting in options (especially since the 2TB expansion card costs as much as a new Xbox Series S) it's a lot simpler and very easy that even the tech illiterate will have no issues with it, since you just slot the expansion card in.

I can see Apple doing this for the Mac Pro, since they're in full control of Apple Silicon, they can design future upgrade modules, which would also allow for the Mac Pro to get refreshes faster since instead of having to buy a brand new Mac Pro you can just buy the upgrade modules.

Remember that Apple SSD modules are *raw* SSDs using a controller on the processor so you can't just pop them in. They are not going to make it easy to swap them since you can easily scramble your data if you remove one. At a minimum expect "do not tamper" stickers on them. You also wouldn't be able to replace a compute card and just move the SSD over to the new one since the encryption keys are not transferable. This is a win for performance, virtual memory, not hogging bandwidth on the PCIe bus since it is right on the die, and security (since the data is always in a state of encryption and there is no possibility of ghost data), but it is less versatile.

Technically on Windows you need to do a multi-pass erase on an encrypted SSD for a NIST compliant erase because they use m.2 SSDs that might ghost data before they get to an encrypted state, but on a Mac's boot drive there is no need to do that– delete the volume or do a remote wipe and you are done. This is a big reason Apple does this and is one of the reasons Mac's are becoming more common in healthcare, finance, and other security conscious or regulated enterprise companies.

If there can be multiple compute modules, it would be cool if could just pop a new card in and have it transfer all the data from the old card to the new card in the same machine. This of course is taking in a lot of conjecture.

I'm sure it will take m.2 cards though for additional drives outside of the boot drive. If not directly, at least through expansion cards. I doubt Apple would create an Xbox style card. USB4 can already get close to that performance and USB4v2 will beat it when Apple moves to that. There might be a possibility of m.2 directly on the system board if they have a little extra space in a location with good airflow. The Xbox mainly does it so you don't need to open up the system. That isn't an issue on the Mac Pro. Trapping an SSD in a little plastic box will also make it hard to cool limiting what SSDs could be used.

 

[Spaceboi Scaphandre]

Remember that Apple SSD modules are *raw* SSDs using a controller on the processor so you can't just pop them in. They are not going to make it easy to swap them since you can easily scramble your data. You also wouldn't be able to replace a compute card and just move the SSD over to the new one since the encryption keys are not transferable. This is a win for performance, virtual memory (it doesn't clog the bus), and security (since the data is always in a state of encryption and there is no possibility of ghost data), but it is less versatile.

If there can be multiple compute modules, it would be cool if could just pop a new card in and have it transfer all the data from the old card to the new card in the same machine. This of course is taking in a lot of conjecture.

I'm sure it will take m.2 cards though for additional drives outside of the boot drive. If not directly, at least through expansion cards.

If they won't do proprietary upgrade modules then the only other options are go external with upgrades (which they won't do because of the Trash Can and the negative perception of external solutions and eGPUs because of that) or just tell the pro users "sorry no more expandability. Get the ARM Mac Pro or go to Windows. Your choice."

 

[4nNtt]

If they won't do proprietary upgrade modules then the only other options are go external with upgrades (which they won't do because of the Trash Can and the negative perception of external solutions and eGPUs because of that) or just tell the pro users "sorry no more expandability. Get the ARM Mac Pro or go to Windows. Your choice."

There will definitely be internal storage expansion options over PCIe slots or m.2 slots, just not likely for the boot drive. Some pro users actually need crazy fast storage like an SSD RAID array that far exceed the proprietary SSD. You likely would even be able to boot to expanded storage if you want to, but that would probably be a bad idea for various reasons. Apple Silicon Macs support booting to PCIe or Thunderbolt devices. They just can't boot to USB devices like Intel Macs could.

 

[4nNtt]

As others have noted, Apple Silicon is a very different architecture than Intel+AMD and that is likely causing headaches for Apple in transitioning the Mac Pro from the Intel+AMD model to the Apple Silicon model and this is pushing back the launch of the model and restricting the scope of the design.

It does appear Apple did create at least engineering samples of an M1 SoC that is the functional equivalent of 2 M1 Ultra / 4 M1 Max, but the production costs were so high that the base MSRP would be closer to a mid-range 2019 Mac Pro configuration (so probably double what the base 2019 model goes for). Hence the latest rumors that Apple will now only offer a single M2 Ultra option.

There were rumors that Apple was going to do a more typical discrete GPU (the silicon was code named Lifuka) then scrapped it and went in a different direction. That might be the reason for the delays, but no idea. After all there has been absolutely nothing strange going on the the supply chain for the last few years \s. You are right though that it is hard since they can't rely on partners like AMD to port drivers for a niche product. In addition to the architecture change they would have to keep up with new features like Metal 3 and whatever comes after that. It is just easier for Apple to stay on their own GPU architecture.

For compute, it is generally an easy port from other technologies like CUDA since Apple's Metal Shading Language (which also does compute) is just a dialect of C++. Generally it is just a bit of preprocessor magic. So AI, ray tracing, and other compute workflows should be able to adapt easily enough to running on a compute node. Real-time graphics might not work so well on a compute card since I doubt anything like SLI would work (I could be wrong). I don't think that is what people would buy this for though. The built-in graphics should be able to do pretty much anything you could ever want to do for real-time graphics. This card would be for more advanced stuff like 3D movie animators, AI researchers, etc.

 

[majus]

The case is made from Unobtainium.

That is just what the public has been told. The truth is that they are made from metal recycled from crashed self-driving Teslas.

 

[Bremse]

Maybe it’s an intel board like they used to have as an option in early PowerMacs.

 

[4nNtt]

they need something to be able to power high end VR applications, and right now they have absolutely nothing in their lineup that comes close.

Apple's GPU is pretty well suited for VR. Apple's upscaling tech upscales both resolution and fills in extra frames for higher frame-rate. It is also low latency. It can handle a lot of operations without needing to use RAM as a scratch buffer (like an AMD or Nvidia chip would) which is great for performance and power efficiency. Just a plain M2 or M3 is likely going to be enough for top-tier experiences and an M-series Ultra would certainly be a VR beast if the headset supports remote rendering at all.

If this compute module ends up being what we think it is, it will probably be great for pre-rendering light-field video content. That will likely be a huge deal for VR in the coming years. Maybe even as soon as Apple's headset launches.

 

[4nNtt]

I hope Apple is designing upgradable hardware which also gives rise to potential eGpu’s on Mac silicon.

If this really is a PCIe compute module, then yeah it may work over thunderbolt in an enclosure too. Just keep in mind that this would be unlikely to act as a typical GPU and may be able to only do compute operations. In other words it will speed up most professional workflows, but do absolutely nothing for gaming.

 

[4nNtt]

The fact that the module has a model identifier of "ComputeModule13,x" suggests that it is likely based on M1-generation silicon.

I can tell this because, among other things, the iPhone 12 (with A14, the same generation as M1) is iPhone13,x, and the Mac Studio (M1 Max/M1 Ultra) is Mac13,1 and Mac13,2.

It appears that the Mac Studio was the first Mac to have the enigmatic MacX,Y model identifier; the previous M1 MacBook Air, for example, is MacBookAir10,1.

Could be they are made of binned M1 Ultras. Maybe with fewer working CPUs. That should be fine. M1 vs M2 GPUs are not that big a difference. Mainly just M2 got more cores. If anything this might be a good thing, since Apple might be able to price this lower then the full price for an M2 Ultra.

 

[Onelifenofear]

Pre 2019 max pro release I posted that I thought the Pro would be a Mac mini sized stack - like a beehive or Dim Sum Stack with a power / bus / cooling backbone or core

Top to bottom
Apple logo cover / power
Storage unit(s)
CPU/Ram Slots ( compute unit )
GPU
I/O unit(s) - various and specialist ones
PSU / fan at bottom's

And you could quickly stack more units of what you need even CPU / GPU

Ah… the metre high Mac Pro you tube videos would have been epic

Maybe… just maybe…

 

[nicolas17]

Some researchers looked at Xcode and iOS and didn't find any of this to prove 9to5mac's claims. There isn't even a "Xcode 16.4 beta" so that's quite a careless article...

 

[kwikdeth]

This reinforces my belief the new Mac pro will use tray-like modules to add additional Apple silicon processing power as needed.

 

[dwaltwhit]

Au contrarie! Apple is currently selling the All New iPhone 14 and the most powerful iPhone ever, the iPhone 14 Pro. Additionally, Apple has best-on-class laptops, using the most powerful Apple Silicon ever available in a portable device. And Apple hasn’t stopped there. The most powerful Apple Silicon ever is now available in Apple desktop device, delivering pro-level performance in beautifully designed chassis. Finally, Apple just released Beats headphones in three incredible new colors and the AirPods and AirPods Pro continue to be the best, most integrated headphones Apple has ever released. Apple is so excited by all the innovative, best-ever products they currently have available and can’t wait to see the incredible things customers will do with them.

This feels like chat gpt from craig federighi

 

[4nNtt]

The "13" in the "ComputeModule13,1" model might mean these have the M1 Ultra chip. This has interesting implications for possible back-enabling hardware raytracing. Either the new Mac Pro just won't get hardware ray tracing which would be a disappointment to pro users in visual effects (a big market for the Mac Pro) or this may be the reason for the secret silicon discovered by Asahi Linux developers in the Max/Ultra chips. Read on for the technical explaination.

There is a mysterious section of 16 extra (32 total) Neural Engine matrix cores turned off in software in the M1 Max (64 NE cores in the Ultra). They take up a fair amount of space on the die. It is like they are scaling the NE cores 1-to-1 with the number of GPU cores. They are not used for binning and macOS hides the extras right after boot so they don't show up in hardware reports. Hardware ray-tracing is primarily a matrix math problem so the NE cores are potentially relevant.

These cores are smaller and more programmable than what would be in an Nvidia or AMD hardware ray tracing accelerator so they are easy to dismiss at first as unrelated. However, Apple's solution is not going to look much like the incumbents. Apple's future ray tracing tech was licensed from Imagination Technologies in 2020. Rather then cores with a large fixed pipeline like in Nvidia/AMD chips, Apple's chips will have a simpler ray estimator that will get close to finding a ray intersection then they will use the normal GPU compute units to refine that result down to the final answer. The GPU cores can find the intersection much more efficiently when they are starting from an estimate. Possibly these mysterious NE cores that are adept at matrix math will be used for the intersection estimators that then hand off to standard GPU cores. I think the fact that they are 1-to-1 with GPU cores and perform the right type of math makes it pretty credible this could line up with this algorithm. The details of Imagination's algorithm are likely to run better on a GPU of Apple's design that heavily uses on-core caches over the immediate-mode rendering style (using GPU RAM heavily as scratch storage) as employed by AMD/Nvidia.

If this is true, the Apple chip might potentially blow Nvidia/AMD out-of-the-water. An Nvidia chip just uses a small part of its silicon for raytracing while most of it sits idle. The design Apple licensed and may have implemented would use all the cores on the GPU and all the NE cores (including the secret ones) for accelerated ray tracing. There is probably a signifiant software component which is why this tech may have been sitting idle.

There is one other mysterious aspect. Apple was rumored to bring the same tech to iPhone, but apparently they had to postpone the next-gen A-series GPU design a year because hardware raytracing was using too much power. It isn't clear how this GPU relates the the M-series GPU. Possibly the hardware ray tracing algorithm needs more work for mobile devices, but it could be ready for desktop devices including older Apple Silicon devices soon.

There certainly is a fair amount speculation in this take, but the mysterious extra cores and Apple's licensing of Imagination Technologies hardware ray tracing method in 2020 are definite facts.

 

[goonie4life9]

You should stop with the kool-aid.

Apple has the best design, yes. However, Apple has been stagnant for a while. The M1 was a great start but it slowly faded. Transition is still not complete and Apple can't compete with high end GPU cards. HW Raytracing is still missing among other things. Sure, for video editing etc. their dedicated encoders help massively but overall they didn't overtake the market nor do they have the most powerful silicon. What they do have is the best performance per watt but thats not enough when you need to get the job done and the hardware&software combo is basically not working as good.
There is a reason why any serious 3D/VFX artist can't use Macs for work as its designed for it nor there is support. Apple always boasts about great relationship with this vendor or that vendor but they are not pushing anything. Maya is industry standard for 3D and yet most VFX houses use Linux and PC as the support is lacking heavily.

Nvidia smokes Apple out of the water on pretty much everything related to 3D. Just look how Apple killed Shake which at one point was industry standard.

Don't get me wrong, I love my Apple computer and Apple stuff but I'm also being realistic and critical.
M transition was a great start but thats about it. Apple is stagnant - just look how they updated one product with M2 chip and left iMac for example without anything. Some of their upgrades (like ram/ssd) are insanely expensive compared to alternatives and because they switched away from Intel we have to fork out money to Apple as we can't upgrade it ourselves cheaper. (27" iMac was awesome for ram upgrades!)
They charge $400 just so you have height adjustable stand for your monitor - that is not innovation, that is pure insult.

So, Apple does few things well but overall they are stagnant. Lets be more critical as Apple needs to know that they can't get away with anything

Ummm, who wants to tell the poster that it was a, what’s the word, lampoon?

 

[4nNtt]

You should stop with the kool-aid.

Apple has the best design, yes. However, Apple has been stagnant for a while. The M1 was a great start but it slowly faded. Transition is still not complete and Apple can't compete with high end GPU cards. HW Raytracing is still missing among other things. Sure, for video editing etc. their dedicated encoders help massively but overall they didn't overtake the market nor do they have the most powerful silicon. What they do have is the best performance per watt but thats not enough when you need to get the job done and the hardware&software combo is basically not working as good.
There is a reason why any serious 3D/VFX artist can't use Macs for work as its designed for it nor there is support. Apple always boasts about great relationship with this vendor or that vendor but they are not pushing anything. Maya is industry standard for 3D and yet most VFX houses use Linux and PC as the support is lacking heavily.

Nvidia smokes Apple out of the water on pretty much everything related to 3D. Just look how Apple killed Shake which at one point was industry standard.

Don't get me wrong, I love my Apple computer and Apple stuff but I'm also being realistic and critical.
M transition was a great start but thats about it. Apple is stagnant - just look how they updated one product with M2 chip and left iMac for example without anything. Some of their upgrades (like ram/ssd) are insanely expensive compared to alternatives and because they switched away from Intel we have to fork out money to Apple as we can't upgrade it ourselves cheaper. (27" iMac was awesome for ram upgrades!)
They charge $400 just so you have height adjustable stand for your monitor - that is not innovation, that is pure insult.

So, Apple does few things well but overall they are stagnant. Lets be more critical as Apple needs to know that they can't get away with anything

As someone interested in ray tracing, I've been following the details closely. See my post at #89 for an explanation of how hardware raytracing might be back-enabled to all of Apple's M1 and newer processors. Although there is a bit of speculation, it is pretty compelling that Apple might be ready to launch their hardware raytracing tech based on IP licensed from Imagination Technologies back in 2020.

 

[HeinMeling]

Could be related to a AR/VR headset.

 

[svish]

Looking to see the Apple Silicon variant of Mac Pro!!

 

[nicolas17]

macOS already supports symmetric multiprocessing, which extends to multiple whole CPUs, as well as multiple GPUs. It's entirely possible Apple will package multiple M2 Ultras in a similar manner. There's nothing about the SoC configuration that would prevent this on a hardware level so long as the OS/kernel are programmed for how to address these redundant resources.

The whole problem of having separate chips is that it's not symmetric anymore. It would involve NUMA which macOS does not support. M1 Ultra works because the connection between the two chips is so damn fast that they can ignore the complexities of NUMA and pretend all memory is the same. There's no way they can exchange data between pluggable modules at speeds comparable to two cores in the same chip.

 

[MisterAndrew]

I agree that it could be an AS daughter card for the Intel Mac Pro, which may be getting refreshed to Sapphire Rapids next month. Apple isn’t quite ready yet to fully replace the Intel model. They’re still working on adding discrete GPU support for AS and they don’t have high-end chips yet to replace the top Xeons.

The daughter card is probably M2 Ultra based on previous rumors.

 

[Kimmo]

IMO I don't think there is a market for the MAC PRO any Longer, unless they can get the Mac Pro aimed at a new market other than content creators, Mac Studio Ultra is plenty for 99.9% of content creators

Maybe I'm a market of one, but I'd really like to see the new Mac Pro before I plunk down $6,000+ on a Studio.

Why?

I've enjoyed having the ability to upgrade memory, storage and GPU on my Mac Pro and want to see how expandable the new Pro is before I go "backwards" to a box that can't be upgraded.

The current Ultra looks like a fine machine, but I would have to add a PCIe enclosure, NVMe drives and another enclosure for Time Machine backups to equal the storage I have in my old, trusty Mac Pro. Cost? Around $2,000. And instead of one attractive metal box sitting next to my desk, I'd have three enclosures, plus cables, on my desk. Not exactly, sleek. The Pro has an undeniable form factor advantage here, in my opinion.

What will $8,000+ buy in the new Mac Pro range? That's a lot of money, so I'd really like to know.

While I'm not in need of a fire-breathing GPU (the 48 core Ultra would probably be fine for my use case) there are users in the video space who need more than the Ultra and who are waiting "patiently" to see what Apple has up it's sleeves with the new Pro. Another reason for some customers to wait.

Regarding memory, I've always thought that I've bought the "right" amount. Eighteen months later I find that I need more. Will the new Pro allow memory expandability? My hopes aren't high, but I do know that the M2 Studio Max and Ultra (when they arrive) will offer higher memory options (96GB and 192GB) than the M1 Studios. So, another reason to sit on the sidelines.

I'm an Apple customer and shareholder. I've written Tim Cook three times encouraging more transparency about the the new Pro. I need a new machine, and I have a significant amount of money budgeted to buy one, but a clearer roadmap from "my" company would really be helpful as I try to make a wise decision.

I don't think I'm alone.

 

[Lihp8270]

So many new things constantly up-coming in short period. So difficult to make a purchase decision.

If you need more power than is offered by the current MBP and Studio. You have no real option other than to wait.

If studio/MBP offers enough performance you don’t need the Mac Pro.

Solved your decision

 

[D-a-a-n]

I hope for a compute module that will enable us to have upgradeable/repairable laptops, just like the intel compute module.

 

[Bodhitree]

It’s interesting that Apple would develop such a thing as a ”compute module”. It looks like they are going to compete more with Nvidia, probably in the Mac Pro. There are specific workloads for which Nvidia graphics cards are much in demand, and if Apple have created silicon for these kinds of workloads they may be able to do better than compute-on-graphics-cores. We will have to see.

 

[Mainyehc]

Au contrarie! Apple is currently selling the All New iPhone 14 and the most powerful iPhone ever, the iPhone 14 Pro. Additionally, Apple has best-on-class laptops, using the most powerful Apple Silicon ever available in a portable device. And Apple hasn’t stopped there. The most powerful Apple Silicon ever is now available in Apple desktop device, delivering pro-level performance in beautifully designed chassis. Finally, Apple just released Beats headphones in three incredible new colors and the AirPods and AirPods Pro continue to be the best, most integrated headphones Apple has ever released. Apple is so excited by all the innovative, best-ever products they currently have available and can’t wait to see the incredible things customers will do with them.

Sydney, is that you? 🤔