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MP All Models The Mac Pro is Dead, This is the End?
- Thread starter MoonCakeTropics
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Apple announces M3 Ultra—and says not every generation will see an “Ultra” chip
It could explain why we’re getting an M3 Ultra this deep into the M4 rollout.arstechnica.com
M4 Max vs M3 Ultra : l'étrange choix d'Apple avec le Mac Studio
Annoncé le 5 mars 2025, le nouveau Mac Studio passe des puces M2 Max et M2 Ultra aux puces M4 Max et… M3 Ultra. Un choix incompréhensible pour le grand public, qui devra choisir entre une puce de quatrième génération surpuissante et une puce de troisième génération encore plus puissante. Le...www.numerama.com
No M4 Ultra Chip? Apple Confirms the M4 Max Chip Lacks UltraFusion
A spokesperson for Apple has told French technology website Numerama that its M4 Max chip lacks an UltraFusion connector, which would have paved the...www.macrumors.com
These articles talks about maybe there will be an M5Ultra if the M5 has an ultra fusion. The M5 will still be 3nm if the rumors are to be believed. The big step up would be the M6 at 2nm. It's not clear if going to 2nm would somehow help bring back the ultra fusion, or as the article speculates, there would need to be an all in one M5 ultra rather than via the fusion connector.
The article points out and apple confirms that making the ultra version of the chip just takes more time. Which explains their ass backwards introduction o the ultra chip last, rather than first. Which makes you never want to get an ultra machine because as soon as you get it, a couple of months later the next Max version of the chip eclipses the current ultra. If they started with Ultra and went down to the other versions of the chip it would make more sense.
The price difference between the M4max (which has better single core performance) to the M3max really highlights how much of a lame value proposition the ultra version of the chip is when it's introduced this late.
But apple has shown, it just doesnt care.
Which gets to my belabored point. I think the Mac Pro is dead. They didnt even bother slapping the M3ultra in the current body of the Mac Pro. I see no reason to believe why they would make an M5 or M6 ultra when they couldnt even be bothered to update the current lame duck M2ultra Mac Pro, which they oddly are still selling. Out, not with a bang, but with a withering whimper.
Apple could not be more mismanaged, lazy, thoughtful, and unproductive, and the complete lack of statement towards Mac Pro users is more evidence of that assertion. I hope Im wrong on that.
And for those of us that need "real" storage, the joke 16TB for $4800 is spitting in our eye, when we can get probably 2 30TB U.2 drives for that price now, and for those of us that need the extra SSD speed and capacity, the lunchbox glorified MacMini is not enough. Sadly, this feels like the nail in the coffin of the Mac Pro.
So truly sad.
M4 Max has no “connector” design so there should be no M4 Ultra, while M3 Ultra should not for Studio only. M3 Ultra for Mac Pro should be coming soon.
Right, because smart business is to announce a new studio but say nothing about a mac pro you're going to anounce, so that folks either don't buy the studio holding out for the mac po, or they buy the studio, and then get pissed when the mac pro they actually wanted turns up, dumping the studio secondhand.
There is no Mac Pro coming. Nothing in the Apple ecosystem *requires* a pci card any more.
Well, yeah… That’s been standard operating practice for Apple for years - Studios etc. launching with, at best, vague hints that a Mac Pro of some sort definitely might be coming without any clue as to what manner of machine it might be. Silence on the 2013 trash can for 4 years until what was very obviously a crisis-induced damage control pre-announcement of a new “Modular Mac Pro” with zero detail until 2019.
If Apple sees a big enough niche of people who will pay $7k+ for a Mac with half-decent PCIe bandwidth (because it would cost them more to change their workflow) then it would not be rocket surgery for them to make a M3 Ultra pro. They will or they won’t - just don’t expect a roadmap from Apple in advance.
The M3 Max didn't have a fusion bridge either. The M3 Ultra is a new design between the M3 and M4.
So that does not prove that there will be none with a mix of M4 and M5
Sales number of Mac Pro is too low comparing to other Mac so Apple would not design a chip just for Mac Pro. Put m3 ultra in Mac Pro is so easy for Apple and costs them like nothing. They just let studio has it first so they can do marketing for studio to make it like the best deal ever, later when studio sales number go down then they will release it for Mac Pro.
M3 Ultra is built using Apple’s innovative UltraFusion packaging architecture, which links two M3 Max dies over 10,000 high-speed connections that offer low latency and high bandwidth.
Apple reveals M3 Ultra, taking Apple silicon to a new extreme
Apple today announced M3 Ultra, offering the most powerful CPU and GPU in a Mac.
www.apple.com
Conceptually, I don’t believe the Mac Pro is dead - rather Apple has been considering what direction to take the product with Apple silicon.
Keep in mind that the current Mac Pro was designed for an x86 architecture and enough flexibility to afford power with compatible components. For users who continue to use this product, the massive 1.5TB of RAM and high performance AMD graphics will still be useful for a few years to come; Apple will have known this when they originally designed the system.
The real question is what an Apple silicon Mac Pro will look like, and that is very difficult to answer.
Slot expansion is useful to a minority and that is largely why the product exists, but I believe that if the product has a long-term future then Apple will be looking at ways to minimise the cost of the product so that it is more competitive with equivalent PCs. Tricky though, considering an Ultra Mac Studio starts at around $4000.
Keep in mind that the current Mac Pro was designed for an x86 architecture and enough flexibility to afford power with compatible components. For users who continue to use this product, the massive 1.5TB of RAM and high performance AMD graphics will still be useful for a few years to come; Apple will have known this when they originally designed the system.
The real question is what an Apple silicon Mac Pro will look like, and that is very difficult to answer.
Slot expansion is useful to a minority and that is largely why the product exists, but I believe that if the product has a long-term future then Apple will be looking at ways to minimise the cost of the product so that it is more competitive with equivalent PCs. Tricky though, considering an Ultra Mac Studio starts at around $4000.
I remain skeptical that Apple wants the Mac Pro to be "competitive" with general-purpose PC workstations.
If the Mac Pro remains an active product in Apple's line-up over the next decade, I believe it will change format into a mini-tower that can hold one 16x single-slot and two 8x single slot PCIe cards for audio capture, networking and storage cards plus a fourth x4 slot holding the I/O card). The power supply will be much smaller due to not needing to feed Xeons or discrete GPUs. And I would hope this smaller and lighter chassis will allow Apple to reduce the base price down to $4999, but we shall see.
The original author's point is that the M3 Max used to create the Ultra has been modified from the original version because it supports Thunderbolt 5, whereas the M3 Max only supported Thunderbolt 4. The Thunderbolt controller is baked into the chip, which means Apple had to modify the die to add TB5 support. They also likely modified it further to add the UltraFusion connectors.M3 Ultra is built using Apple’s innovative UltraFusion packaging architecture, which links two M3 Max dies over 10,000 high-speed connections that offer low latency and high bandwidth.
Apple reveals M3 Ultra, taking Apple silicon to a new extreme
Apple today announced M3 Ultra, offering the most powerful CPU and GPU in a Mac.www.apple.com
The current Mac Pro case was designed for x86. The M2 Ultra Mac Pro exists purely for people who still need PCIe slots for specialised I/O, AV and storage cards - and there are only so many ways to design a box of PCIe slots. They could probably have made it somewhat smaller by cutting down on the cooling and making a custom case, but the form factor was always going to be dominated by the space needed to house that number of - potentially- full size PCIe cards.
Not really - it already exists and it is called the Mac Studio (because the “Mac Pro” name is already taken by the “Mac Studio PCIe edition”). That’s more or less the direction they were moving in with the “trash can” Mac Pro - except without the two major boo-boos of tge trashcan , namely:
1. Not also keeping a PCIe tower on the books in 2013 for those who really needed it. This time round they’ve had the 2019 and 2023 MPs to fill that gap.
2. The dead-end triangular chimney concept that locked it into a particular single-cpu, dual-GPU architecture that - well, even Apple admitted that was a mistake.
Now, maybe Apple will produce the rumoured “super chip” for AI server use, but I suspect that’s going to be more like the NVIDIA Grace/Hopper concept and even more “serious callers only” than the Mac Pro, not really a comparable product or successor.
I see no need for a Mac Pro unless they revamp the architecture to specifically allow add on device/hardware items. Whether it is a specialized video "module" for heavy lifting or perhaps something for 3D rendering. The goal is to offload these specific tasks. Just triple the height of the Studio, allow some drives internal, add proprietary hardware modules akin to cards that have very specific type of tasks they can do so one can custom their Mac Pro for video, audio, farm rendering etc. My needs are met with the Studio though I would much prefer swappable drives and perhaps a secondary drive that runs on TB internally.Apple announces M3 Ultra—and says not every generation will see an “Ultra” chip
It could explain why we’re getting an M3 Ultra this deep into the M4 rollout.M4 Max vs M3 Ultra : l'étrange choix d'Apple avec le Mac Studio
Annoncé le 5 mars 2025, le nouveau Mac Studio passe des puces M2 Max et M2 Ultra aux puces M4 Max et… M3 Ultra. Un choix incompréhensible pour le grand public, qui devra choisir entre une puce de quatrième génération surpuissante et une puce de troisième génération encore plus puissante. Le...No M4 Ultra Chip? Apple Confirms the M4 Max Chip Lacks UltraFusion
A spokesperson for Apple has told French technology website Numerama that its M4 Max chip lacks an UltraFusion connector, which would have paved the...
These articles talks about maybe there will be an M5Ultra if the M5 has an ultra fusion. The M5 will still be 3nm if the rumors are to be believed. The big step up would be the M6 at 2nm. It's not clear if going to 2nm would somehow help bring back the ultra fusion, or as the article speculates, there would need to be an all in one M5 ultra rather than via the fusion connector.
The article points out and apple confirms that making the ultra version of the chip just takes more time. Which explains their ass backwards introduction o the ultra chip last, rather than first. Which makes you never want to get an ultra machine because as soon as you get it, a couple of months later the next Max version of the chip eclipses the current ultra. If they started with Ultra and went down to the other versions of the chip it would make more sense.
The price difference between the M4max (which has better single core performance) to the M3max really highlights how much of a lame value proposition the ultra version of the chip is when it's introduced this late.
But apple has shown, it just doesnt care.
Which gets to my belabored point. I think the Mac Pro is dead. They didnt even bother slapping the M3ultra in the current body of the Mac Pro. I see no reason to believe why they would make an M5 or M6 ultra when they couldnt even be bothered to update the current lame duck M2ultra Mac Pro, which they oddly are still selling. Out, not with a bang, but with a withering whimper.
Apple could not be more mismanaged, lazy, thoughtful, and unproductive, and the complete lack of statement towards Mac Pro users is more evidence of that assertion. I hope Im wrong on that.
And for those of us that need "real" storage, the joke 16TB for $4800 is spitting in our eye, when we can get probably 2 30TB U.2 drives for that price now, and for those of us that need the extra SSD speed and capacity, the lunchbox glorified MacMini is not enough. Sadly, this feels like the nail in the coffin of the Mac Pro.
So truly sad.
This isn't a good idea, because knowing Apple they will each cost USD$5000 and will be available for a year or two then vanish never to be seen again - leading to second hand modules selling at obscene prices. Unless of course for "security" they tie them to specific machines so they cannot be sold on second hand.
what you say is very possible. Then again, it may be only the interface that is proprietary but not the hardware within. No matter, it won't happen as the Mac Pro will never exist in a mode where parts can be swapped within a chassis/case. My take is that the guts of a 'cartridge" would be possible by 3rd party but the cartridge interface would be Apple.
slot expansion that *requires* a slot for Apple Silicon is primarily for NVME storage, and we know that Apple didn't even bother to test that before releasing Sonoma, which gives you an idea of how big a priority it is for them.
Tht's largely covered by network rendering devices. Personally, I have no interest in a workstation priced device whose display graphics can't be updated independently of the processor.
So... an MPX module.
…Or maybe the M3 Max SoC already supported USB4v2 (the underlying protocol of TB5) all along, but Apple didn’t enable it in software. Don’t know if USB4v2 spec was published when the M3 Max/Ultra came out, but Apple are a prominent member of the USB IF…
Also, while the USB4 controller is baked into the SoC I believe there are discrete Intel “re-timer” chips on the logic board that drive the physical ports - the previous M3 systems may not have had USB4v2/TB5 versions of those fitted.
The UltraFusion connector could have just been left off the M3 Max chips - swapping out TB4 controllers for TB5 controllers sounds like a more major change.
Which is, really, the only thing worth looking at as the vast majority of computers sold are laptops.
And, if you look at “mobile” (they exclude iPads from the laptop numbers) the lead is enormous.
Yeah, most people want what’s familiar. MOST people aren’t familiar with macOS. Most people ARE familiar with the multitouch interface popularized by the iPhone AND the iPad outsells the Mac 2:1, usually more. If most people don’t want iPadOS, then they “don’t want” it enough to not buy it.
What's interesting now are the Nvidia DGX Spark and Station solutions.
The computers coming soon are small computers designed for AI, with lots of RAM and VRAM, which allow for faster creation but are also scalable. They need to be environmentally friendly and the storage must be easily swappable.
The computers coming soon are small computers designed for AI, with lots of RAM and VRAM, which allow for faster creation but are also scalable. They need to be environmentally friendly and the storage must be easily swappable.
They haven’t used Nvidia GPU’s in a long time, so it’s not the FIRST time by a long shot.
Plus, I’m quite certain that Apple knows every person that they know will buy a Mac Pro, no need to do any pre-announcement at all. They’ve been in communication with those folks about what the features should be, so there’s not even going to be a surprise to those folks that are absolutely going to buy it.