I envision a M3 Extreme Mac Pro Cube on every desk & a backend of thousands of rackmounted ComputeModules grinding out queued render jobs...
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MP All Models Intel may be the only way to save the Mac Pro
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I envision a M3 Extreme Mac Pro Cube on every desk & a backend of thousands of rackmounted ComputeModules grinding out queued render jobs...
Now we are talking ... the MP will be the first M3 announcement, and it will be a biggie. Compute Modules for sure. My thoughts are each CM will consist of something like up to 48 cores, up to 152 GPU's, up to 384GB RAM, up to 8 TB SSD, PCIe Gen 5 x 128 lanes, 8 x TB5. Except, CM's will not be rack mounted, they will be MPX style modules that plug into the MP backplane.
The Mac Studio IS the trash can Mac Pro. That's why Apple wouldn't mind a few die shrinks before quadrupling a Max into an Extreme and soldering it into a Mac Studio, replacing the Mac Pro at a fraction of the cost.
The history of the transistor and the microchip is the history of shrinkage. Apple is catching the next wave, moving from dedicated microchips to integrated systems-on-a-chip. After the SoC era, computers will disappear from all reality, existing only in the Quantum realm.
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No, the Mac Studio, plus Studio Display is the 27" iMac to iMac Pro.
Today, sure. But tomorrow? Apple can cram a 2× chip in there today. But tomorrow, a 4× chip is going in there, and Apple will probably see Mac Pro sales cannibalized by the more affordable Mac Studio.
I don't see why a full Apple Silicon Mac Pro couldn't or wouldn't have expansion slots. It hasn't made sense for any of the Apple Silicon products thus far to have expansion, but it would for the Mac Pro.
Well the 2019 Mac Pro wasn't just the iMac Pro with slots eg. 128gb maximum ram -> 1.5tb etc.
I expect if an AS Mac Pro is made, it will be a similar order of magnitude greater in capacity, and price from the studio.
I believe there was a Seinfeld episode that delved into the topic of “shrinkage” as well.
4x chip would be in either the Mac Pro (with expansion slots) or the Mac Cube (added volume over the Mac Studio to allow for the increased size of the heat sink and fans)...
Excepting the 2013 SFF Mac Pro ("...can't innovate my ass..."), expansion slots are kinda what defines the entirety of the Power Mac / Mac Pro line...
If a M2 Ultra SoC is used, entry-level pricing should stay at the current $6K...
- 24-core CPU (16P/8E)
- 60-core GPU
- 32-core Neural Engine
- 64GB unified memory
- Six expansion slots
Apple doesn’t have the chops to make an AS based workstation. They are a lifestyle company not a workflow company. They have no answer for Sapphire Rapids and Threadripper. And they know it. They are being exposed as the fashionistas that they’ve always been. Expect Mac Pro 6,2 this summer baby!
P.S. I’m using reverse psychology on the universe since I’m nearly always wrong in my prognostications, here’s hoping my subterfuge brings forth a paradigm-shifting workstation design from Apple that simply shocks everyone and immediately obsoletes the competition.
P.S. I’m using reverse psychology on the universe since I’m nearly always wrong in my prognostications, here’s hoping my subterfuge brings forth a paradigm-shifting workstation design from Apple that simply shocks everyone and immediately obsoletes the competition.
If Apple can't do a "MacPro" with AS they will either kill the line or put the label on something that doesn't deserve it.
There was indeed something the lines of "more (new) Intel Macs still coming" at either WWDC_2020 or the M1 launch later that years. This might have been a upgrade to the Intel-Pro that just didn't happen and this ship had clearly sailed by the time they made that statement (in 2022).
There was indeed something the lines of "more (new) Intel Macs still coming" at either WWDC_2020 or the M1 launch later that years. This might have been a upgrade to the Intel-Pro that just didn't happen and this ship had clearly sailed by the time they made that statement (in 2022).
I'm assuming that for each iteration of the M-chips, there is a limit to the amount of RAM each supports. Are the chips we have now hitting that limit already, or is there more in reserve? The original base M1 topped out at up to 16GB, the base M2 is available with up to 24GB. Are these chips actually capable of hitting, say, a 32GB ceiling or are they already maxed out? I don't see how an AS Pro can top out at 1.5TB RAM. I guess that the AS comparison to an Intel MP having all the power of 1.5TB squeezed out of it could get away with a lot less, but how much, and can Apple achieve that limit? And more to the point, how much will that cost? Maybe Intel is the way...
They will be running the current Xeon generation on DVT boards for sure. If they weren't then that would be a total disaster on their part.
They will either keep the Intel Mac Pro indefinitely (likely) for now or just quietly cancel it when Mac Studo performance is greater than what the MP offers. The key here is value add for customers and that value decreases overtime due to technology advances in other products if the MP isn't updated.
Apple bought 4 and 8GB chips for anything M1 and added 12GB chips for the M2.
So that would be 196GB for a M2Ultra or even 392 for an M2Extreme (if that is a thing).
But.... there is no reason why Apple couldn't get bigger chips or allow 2 chips per channel (well that would affect speed/timing). Real question is how many MacPro users really need that much memory and would the be better served with less superfast RAM and a bunch of flash chip running in a RAID style setup?
The highend Mac Pro is the company's flagship product that shows they're the best of the best. If you throw in the towel and ignore that space then your credibility elsewhere is shot. MP isn't about shifting machines so much as market presence showing a range of products from low end all the way to the price busting extreme highend. Go do some Sales 101 training.
While I agree with you, Puget Systems are the current paradigm of workstations today. The company offers consultation and expert advice for the dedicated hardware that computer professionals need for their specific applications, whether that's Adobe Lightroom or something else. You are told what you need, and then you only pay for what you need.
Conversely, Apple's Mac Pro does the same job for a premium. What business can afford that? The Mac Pro 7,1 is not competitive in performance-per-dollar. If Apple only focuses on selling a boutique high-end product that appears amazing but makes poor business sense, that product line will go out of business. Flash does not sell workstations like it sells smartphones. The Mac Pro 7,2 or 8,1 will either be the transformation of the Mac Pro, or End of Line.
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”Go do some sales 101 training?” What’s the point of such an aggressive comment here?
If Apple were seriously interested in making a showcase computer, they wouldn’t have sold the 2013 Mac Pro, which was outdated on day 1, for 6 years with no updates, and they wouldn’t be still selling the 2019 Mac Pro in 2023 without having received any updates.
Apple moves enough consumer and pro level computers that they don‘t need to worry about credibility. They’d have more credibility in the top end workstation market if they had a regular and understandable upgrade pattern, but again, they don’t.
Not sure why you categorize this as "an aggressive coment". The point is that the art of selling is described in those intro Sales courses so I recommend checking one out if you want to fully understand the gap the lack of a Mac Pro would create.
What kind of updates do you mean? No GPU available now from Apple (standard or optional) was available when the machine was introduced. Sounds like updates to me.
Lou
99% of Apple’s revenue is generated by customers who couldn’t care less about a new (or previous) Mac Pro. It’s likely few if any Apple salespeople even carry quote for Mac Pros the volumes are so light. Most Apple customers have never even heard of things like PCIe and can’t even imagine the types of workloads and datasets that would require +1TB of memory, $x,000 graphics cards, or external RAID storage. Just take a look around here, you have people arguing/debating/discussing whether 8GB of RAM is sufficient for serious work, concerned about the SSD throughput on 256GB SSDs etc. The vast majority of Apple’s customer base and revenue wouldn’t even register the loss of a Mac Pro. It may be a black eye for Apple with the subset of pros that still care about a Mac Pro (I care btw), but of the billion-plus Apple devices in circulation and in landfills, how many are Mac Pros from any/all eras? 100,000? 5M? Apple’s market cap, margins, and huge pile of cash are enough of a halo. If Apple kills the Mac Pro, it will be a painful end of the road for some of us eternal optimists, but within a year, no one will even care or remember, except some scattered enthusiasts holding onto prior models until - at least in the case of select 7,1s - the wheels fall off.
Long live the 6,1!
Long live the 6,1!
Okay, normally I abhor the stupid Mac Pro wheel jokes, but that one was well done...
Plenty of Mac Pro users who need the slots, but I just want to see a Mn Extreme in an all-new Mac Cube...
197mm to a side, finished in Vantablack, with an emitter that displays an interactive holographic Steve Jobs above the Cube...
I mean, everyone who know knows that the consciousness of SPJ was uploaded to a cluster of NeXT cubes way back when; so it is a given that he has since reached the Internet and is the actual entity behind whatever AI Apple presents to us in the future...
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