What's Next for the Mac Studio

[theluggage]

Here's a dumb question for purchase planning: Are we to compare the number of Intel threads to Apple Silicon cores?

Neither. I’d look for “real world” speed tests for the type of work you want to do. Some workloads benefit more from multiple cores than others, that goes double for “hyperthreading”.

 

[JS75]

Alright, Macrumors, sounds like if im jumping ship from the evils of Nvidia should I wait for M5 Ultra or get the M3 Ultra.

Heavy Lightroom for pro photography and quite a bit of Davinci Resolve is the primary use case. Thinking the base spec 96gb RAM is really good.

Cheers, Wild that $4000 is the whole computer next to a $4000 5090, plus right now 2-3K in some cases to equip out the rest of the computer. Not to mention size.

 

[tenthousandthings]

Alright, Macrumors, sounds like if im jumping ship from the evils of Nvidia should I wait for M5 Ultra or get the M3 Ultra.

Heavy Lightroom for pro photography and quite a bit of Davinci Resolve is the primary use case. Thinking the base spec 96gb RAM is really good.

Cheers, Wild that $4000 is the whole computer next to a $4000 5090, plus right now 2-3K in some cases to equip out the rest of the computer. Not to mention size.

You should wait if you can. It is rumored to have SoIC architecture. Typically at this point there would be no chance of the Mac Studio launching before June, but this cycle is not typical, so it could be soon, but my bet would still be June (at Apple’s WWDC).

 

[JS75]

You should wait if you can. It is rumored to have SoIC architecture. Typically at this point there would be no chance of the Mac Studio launching before June, but this cycle is not typical, so it could be soon, but my bet would still be June (at Apple’s WWDC).

I’d love to know how much of a jump we will see, but you may be right in waiting.

 

[tenthousandthings]

I’d love to know how much of a jump we will see, but you may be right in waiting.

Regardless of whether or not the Ultra launches next week, we will have a good idea of the jump on March 4, because it would be very surprising for it not to follow the M1-M3 pattern of using UltraFusion to connect two Max dies as one. Once we know the specs of the M5 Pro/Max, we can estimate the M5 Ultra.

The wild unknown is Private Cloud Compute, which requires Apple silicon. The Mac Studio could benefit from that investment.

All three generations of the Studio have launched five months after the corresponding Max launched in the MacBook Pro, but everything about this cycle is different, so it's hard to feel confident.

 

[BillyJoeJimBob]

Neither. I’d look for “real world” speed tests for the type of work you want to do. Some workloads benefit more from multiple cores than others, that goes double for “hyperthreading”.

Thanks for the input. I'm running a low-latency Pro Tools/Vienna Symphonic Library system, so I would need the Apple Silicon equivalent of a Intel i9 9900KS (multi-threading at high-performance all cores at 4.9 GHz) without cutting corners in performance. i.e., "efficiency cores" count as zero cores. Minimum of 64GB RAM.

 

[AF_APPLETALK]

The Mac Pro of the 2019 era was basically empty space in terms of the chassis.

If they do a Mac Pro it might have a different design, like this concept art.
View attachment 2604342

An actual successor to the G4 Cube. It would have been a smash hit if they did the Studio up like this!