MP All Models Everyone's complaining about the Mac Pro's 192 GB RAM limit and no video card support. Do older MPs with 1.5 TB RAM outperform it?

[ThailandToo]

Not every computer is for every use case. If you already know the new Mac Pro is not for you, why complain? You knew the first Apple Silicon Mac Pro would be a non-modular SoC with an upper bound on unified memory.

It’s not a complaint. It’s an observation that Apple doesn’t deliver when they bragged about four years ago being capable of. Limiting anything let alone RAM sucks. I think they need to ramp up their silicon allowing more RAM, more CPU cores and more GPU cores via some interconnection method. So the music producer can install 4TB of RAM, the video creator can load more GPU power, and those who need it more CPU cores. That would make more sense. It’s like when they let two SoCs connect to get to this Max x2 why not have it so it could allow more connections. I know it would slow down some but still be more capable overall. They have limited themselves. Just like they have with monitors and their scaling solution. They often pigeonhole themselves by making dumb engineering solutions. They’re cutting out a part of the market and the truth is they just don’t care. What’s that 1% going to do for them. They appeal to the masses intentionally where the niche users built the company! Tim Cook cares about money. That’s his job. Not saying he shouldn’t. But the shareholders ALWAYS win whereas the users constantly balance choices. I cannot believe Apple still sells Macs with 8GB of RAM. Why would that decision be there other than money??? It’s senseless and they know it so they can charge absurd amounts of money for the necessary upgrades even for the most minor use cases.

 

[AdamBuker]

That's what minority of Mac Pro users are bringing up... "no i9", "no 4090" = sucks/no buy

Like... it isn't even in the use case of Mac Pro target users.

For those who want

Yeah but how does it compare to the previous Mac Pro, maybe the current storage is fast enough to pull it off, for the use cases mentioned in this thread, as they seem to entail audio layers. What I’m trying to get at is real world performance compared to the Intel offering.

If I recall correctly, the 2019 Mac Pro gets about 2800-2900 MB/second as opposed to 7800 on the M2 Ultra Studio (I’m assuming the 2023 Mac Pro is similar).

In any case, when it comes to performance it always better to use RAM than swap. The faster SSDs won’t make much difference in using large orchestral libraries if you can’t hold it all in ram. Plus you have excessive wear on the SSD itself which will also degrade performance.

I have mixed feelings regarding the new Mac Pro. If Apple had retired the ‘Pro’ moniker and called it the Studio Plus and priced it starting at $4999, it would have been a smaller disappointment to the traditional Pro market.

What I would like to see (though it has little chance of happening) is a Mac Pro with room for the user to install up to eight MxUltra SOCs running in parallel along with PCIe 5 expansion.

 

[Zardoz2293]

The people that are actually purchasing these systems, are they the ones actually expressing these concerns and criticisms?

Not likely as those kind of people know from the specifications that they will not be able to do the work they need done. As is my case. I'll have to wait for the M3 version, unless Apple is on the Mac Pro upgrade model of every 4 years.

 

[Zardoz2293]

Clearly not everyone is complaining. I certainly am not

In that context-- What does the Mac Pro have that the Studio doesn't have for your application? What specifically does that extra $$$$ by for you?

 

[Boil]

• LPDDR5X RAM
• Mn Ultra - 512GB max capacity - 1TB/s UMA bandwidth
• Mn Extreme - 1TB max capacity - 2TB/s UMA bandwidth

 

[mattspace]

I am disappointed that a iMac 27" 5K M2 Pro is not available for sale. I am hopeful one will appear 2-4 months from now.

Seriously dude, that is more detached from reality than people hoping Apple is going to do discreet GPUs for the 2023 Mac Pro, more hopeless a hope than people wishing Apple will produce or allow 7xxx GPUs for the 2019 Mac Pro.

They have a "big screen iMac" - it's the Mac Mini and Mac Studio plus a Studio display. That's it, that's all you're going to get. Ever.

Want a bigger screen all in one device, they've already shown you what it is - it's a headset you wear.

 

[Boil]

But I want my fully-loaded $9K M2 Ultra Mac Studio, stuffed in a top-end $7K Pro Display XDR; and it should cost no more than $5K, thanks...

 

[impulse462]

My apologies for overstepping my bounds if I come across that way.

I appreciate the candidate response you gave.

I felt compelled to explain why businesses like Apple do what they do.

I'm like you, on the similar boat but with the iMac 27".

Apple decided to not refresh it with the iMac 24" but it was pointed out on MR that it is possible that the 27" wasn't that popular but considering there was the iMac 27" Core i9 & iMac Pro Xeon then it makes little sense.

I am hopeful that a refreshed model will be out 2 months from now for the 25th release anniversary. I do not mind if the RAM & SSD cannot be upgraded but when my use case changes then I'd replace it after 4-6 years.

Nah you're good bro. We're all pretty passionate about a very niche product lol.

They’re cutting out a part of the market and the truth is they just don’t care. What’s that 1% going to do for them. They appeal to the masses intentionally where the niche users built the company!

agree 100%

 

[Boeingfan]

Just build a PC 😂

Stands back 🎉

 

[Longplays]

Seriously dude, that is more detached from reality than people hoping Apple is going to do discreet GPUs for the 2023 Mac Pro, more hopeless a hope than people wishing Apple will produce or allow 7xxx GPUs for the 2019 Mac Pro.

They have a "big screen iMac" - it's the Mac Mini and Mac Studio plus a Studio display. That's it, that's all you're going to get. Ever.

Want a bigger screen all in one device, they've already shown you what it is - it's a headset you wear.

But but but an iMac 27" M2 Pro with keyboard/trackpad would be $1k cheaper than it be separates.

 

[mattspace]

But but but an iMac 27" M2 Pro with keyboard/trackpad would be $1k cheaper than it be separates.

and Apple competes on price with who?

 

[Longplays]

and Apple competes on price with who?

But but but I'm a niche that must be serviced even when it is a loss leader!

 

[mattspace]

But but but I'm a niche that must be serviced even when it is a loss leader!

I get that you're trying to make a cute point in the context of the Mac Pro, but it really isn't the same - a Mac Studio with a Studio display is everything an iMac is, and everything an iMac can be. It gives up nothing, and is in every way a superior solution, for a price difference that isn't really there, because the Mini covers far lower than a 27" iMac would cover.

It's a zero-compromise alternative. That is not the case for Mac Pro customers who now have machines that cover fewer use cases, while gaining no new use cases.

Honestly, I think the forum admins should set up a new section for the AS Mac Pro, so that the Intel folk can be left in peace. From what I've seen, the vast majority of new people to this group since the AS announcement are little better than trolls wrecking the signal/noise.

 

[uller6]

I work at a university. We keep some purpose-driven (read: pro) machines in service for a loooooong time - 10, 15, 20, 20+ years. I do appreciate the idea of being able to upgrade parts - in theory - but we purchase what we need upfront, then during the life of the machine never upgrade any components. The machine has to serve its intended purpose on day 1 and that single purpose does not change over the life of the machine. I'm interested in the ASi Mac Pro for the GPIB card and serial card potential - now I can finally integrate some research equipment directly with an ASi machine.

 

[mattspace]

The machine has to serve its intended purpose on day 1 and that single purpose does not change over the life of the machine.

The difference being that a Pro *Macintosh* can't just do the same thing every day for 20 years, because it's required to use the internet, which ceases to be secure for that machine after a few years, it has to access files whose format requires the use of certain apps, which can't stay the same for 20 years, it has to talk to other devices which cease to speak common protocols after a few years.

Right now, if I upgrade my iPhone to a new iOS version, I lose the ability for Safari to sync History, Reading List and iCloud tabs with my Mac, so the Mac has to be upgraded as well.

Th computer that runs a laser cutter is not analogous to a workstation.

My welder, and the software that controls it don't need upgrading, but then steel, electricity and Argon haven't changed that much in the past decade, nor are they likely to change in the decade to come. The same is not true for the raw materials my Mac works with.

 

[BeefCake 15]

I don't even have pictures to fill 192GB let alone RAM...what's everyone doing with all this RAM?

 

[flat4]

I don't even have pictures to fill 192GB let alone RAM...what's everyone doing with all this Re

I don't even have pictures to fill 192GB let alone RAM...what's everyone doing with all this RAM?

helping Skynet get online

 

[BeefCake 15]

Worthy cause!

 

[neuropsychguy]

Yeah, good point. The demand for hundreds of gigabytes of RAM in a Mac is pretty narrow at the moment, but for those who actually do utilize hundreds of gigs of RAM, the new Mac Pro is disappointing.

It's pretty clear this Mac Pro is not the Mac Pro Apple wanted to release but had to sell something just to keep to the Apple Silicon transition schedule. About two years ago there were rumors of a planned Mac Pro with 64 CPU cores, 128 GPU cores, and 512 GB RAM. While such rumors must always taken with a grain of salt, it's reasonable to believe that target is achievable on Apple Silicon, and it's downright bizarre for the CPU/GPU/RAM specs of the real-world Mac Pro to identically match the specs of the concurrent Mac Studio. Something must have gone wrong with Apple's more ambitious Mac Pro plans (with the just-release machine a stopgap on the way to something more firmly top-tier).

On the side topic of the 76-core GPU and the lack of GPU modularity (mentioned elsewhere in this thread), it should be noted that while the M2 Ultra GPU will surely post impressive numbers considering energy draw, it is still massively outclassed by current-generation of consumer-grade Nvidia hardware in terms of raw performance. A hypothetical 128-core Apple Silicon GPU would probably be competitive with Nvidia's top consumer-grade hardware.

Hopefully sooner rather than later Apple will release the Mac Pro it actually wanted to sell us.

Some of those benchmarks are extremely misleading at best (OpenCL, for example). OpenCL is not officially supported by Apple so the GPU benchmarks are not comparable. Apple could support OpenCL but they are all-in on Metal.

Should I use a car analogy? The OpenCL benchmarks are like having the nvidia/AMD cards drive on a race track with high end track tires but having Apple's GPU on a mud track with track tires. It's simply not a fair comparison.

What about this article posted by the same site? https://wccftech.com/m2-ultra-only-10-percent-slower-than-rtx-4080-in-metal/

Now it's 10% slower than the 4080. I don't think either set of benchmarks are valid, by the way, but posting something like, "it is still massively outclassed by current-generation of consumer-grade Nvidia hardware in terms of raw performance" isn't supported by the link you provided.

I recognize the limitations with this updated Mac Pro so I'm not defending the RAM limitation. It's not for me (a workstation for me has to have a CUDA-capable GPU) and the RAM limitation is a serious issue for some people and businesses. All I'm trying to point out is that some of those benchmarks can't be trusted.

 

[OneBar]

Not every computer is for every use case. If you already know the new Mac Pro is not for you, why complain? You knew the first Apple Silicon Mac Pro would be a non-modular SoC with an upper bound on unified memory.

You shouldn't be tied to a single use case on a compute device, though. If I purchase a Mac Pro today and think that 64 Gb of RAM is enough and then in a year, I need 128, what am I to do? Spend another $7000 plus on a second machine? Right now if I needed more RAM in my machine, I go purchase more RAM and install it. For a couple hundred bucks. It's not necessarily about needing huge amounts of RAM but the ability to adjust how much RAM you have on the fly, as you need it. Up to and including large amounts depending on use case. Now if you have a RAM module go bad, your whole machine is broke. That's not very economical for anyone, Apple included. They should have brought back the dual processor board and developed a true M2 Pro chip that offloaded the RAM onto the board for the ability to add to it. Granted that would still only have given a maximum of 384 Gb but you'd be able to customize your amount up to that point instead of only having 3 options that you're eternally locked into.

They may have shrugged at that 20% but those 75,000 sales per years are going to drop to like 15-20,000. Real quick.

 

[Unami]

The difference being that a Pro *Macintosh* can't just do the same thing every day for 20 years, because it's required to use the internet, which ceases to be secure for that machine after a few years, it has to access files whose format requires the use of certain apps, which can't stay the same for 20 years, it has to talk to other devices which cease to speak common protocols after a few years.

Where do you get that from? I know a lot of decade old mac pros that never got updated because of the old "never change a running system" adage. Music people usually aren't the most technophiles that risk breaking things with an update (and breaking legacy things apple does on a regular basis).

Those macs are sometimes also not connected to the internet because they are work-PCs, not for surfing the net - and those who are never had a problem with security. That's overrated anyway - macs are not secure because apple is so security conscious or offers fast fixes to every zero-day discovered but because they are still a niche market in the grand scheme of things. On hacker conventions, macs are usually the first to fall if attacked directly.

 

[nathan_reilly]

To be what? To be incompatible with arm64 macOS software, because it would be the only Mac without unified memory.

Wow you are saying its unreasonable for the customer base to want certain features? In a market-based society this is how the world works. You are nitpicking this single technical detail as if its the end all be all, but to someone who needs lots of ram, having unified ram doesn't matter! so nitpick away. The customer is always right.

 

[mattspace]

Where do you get that from? I know a lot of decade old mac pros that never got updated because of the old "never change a running system" adage. Music people usually aren't the most technophiles that risk breaking things with an update (and breaking legacy things apple does on a regular basis).

Those macs are sometimes also not connected to the internet because they are work-PCs, not for surfing the net - and those who are never had a problem with security. That's overrated anyway - macs are not secure because apple is so security conscious or offers fast fixes to every zero-day discovered but because they are still a niche market in the grand scheme of things. On hacker conventions, macs are usually the first to fall if attacked directly.

Right up until the point where your perfect system enconters a bug, and you need to do a software update, or someone requires you to deliver a file in a version newer than your ice-mummy system has, or your apps require periodic internet validation etc.

Ted Kaczynski typing manifestos in a shack is not a "typical use case" for a professionally used computer.

 

[impulse462]

I work at a university. We keep some purpose-driven (read: pro) machines in service for a loooooong time - 10, 15, 20, 20+ years. I do appreciate the idea of being able to upgrade parts - in theory - but we purchase what we need upfront, then during the life of the machine never upgrade any components. The machine has to serve its intended purpose on day 1 and that single purpose does not change over the life of the machine. I'm interested in the ASi Mac Pro for the GPIB card and serial card potential - now I can finally integrate some research equipment directly with an ASi machine.

This is a nice anecdotal experience. And I can share my anecdotal experience in a university setting that we have computers and upgrade parts modularly all the time. The difference is that your use case wouldn’t be affected with the 2019 Mac pro while my use case is now affected by the non modularity of the 2023 Mac Pro

 

[theluggage]

This guy mentioned why he prefer to keep the 7,1 that can have more than 192GB of RAM.

...and also said that, in the future, the solution might be a Mac Studio frontend with an optical TB cable leading to a rack, safely out of earshot, doing the heavy lifting - like the Vienna Ensemble software which is the RAM hog (he suggested keeping the old Intel Mac Pro just for that, but the software is also available for PC - its primarily the Logic "front end" that keeps him on Mac).

o keep latency low you need as much RAM as possible. Yeah there's swap memory but that causes more writes on the SSD and shortens it's lifespan and some don't wanna do that

That's all based on the assumption that the only two options are (a) have lots of RAM or (b) pretend you have lots of RAM and thrash the swap file, which is a ridiculously inefficient way of doing it...

Isn't SSD now sufficiently fast - several times faster than spinning rust for peak speed and an order of magnitude better for random access - that for audio purposes you could just stream the samples straight off SSD (maybe with just the first buffer-full preloaded) fast enough to play dozens in parallel?

It's certainly not the raw bandwidth that's the problem - with 6000 MB/s contiguous read speed - so it would come down to random access, which is harder to find figures for - but since a channel of high-quality audio is more like 1000 KB/s you've got some wriggle-room there, RAIDing several SSDs could help, let alone a 8 or 16-lane PCIe card optimised for that purpose. If we're talking about orchestral sample libraries, this is going to be a write-once/read-many situation, so wear isn't an issue (plus, it's non volatile - your orchestra could stay loaded permanently)

I know that might not be how current software works - but in terms of "running towards where the ball is going to be" is it perhaps the case that audio hardware/software needs a kick to get it to evolve beyond the days of spinning rust? Sounds to me like 100-simultaneous-voice sample players are something best built as a dedicated module.

...because the alternative is to buy a vastly overpowered (for audio work) CPUs and specialist motherboards just for the RAM capacity. Even with "cheap" PC hardware, its not like your typical mini-Tower i9 or Ryzen PC supports more than 128-256G of RAM: you'd be paying a huge premium for workstation-class Xeon, Threadripper Pro kit just to get the RAM. 2019 MP buyers were paying about $3000 extra to get the M-suffix version of the Xeon-W just to get that potential 1.5TB RAM capacity.

NB: I'm not saying I applaud Apple charging $3k over the Mac Studio price for a bigger box, a PCIe switch and half-a-dozen PCIe sockets - although I hardly think they'll be selling enough to rack-up the economies-of-scale that makes PC hardware so cheap.

Hopefully M3 supports 300 gb RAM configs for them.

...but even that wouldn't be enough for a lot of the people wanting to have hundreds of sample libraries semi-permanently loaded into RAM. To support the sort of 1-2TB figure (and PCIe bandwidth) that the 2019 offered Apple would have to "re-invent" Apple Silicon - which is hitting the spot in profitable the laptop and SFF markets - just for the Mac Pro.