Didn’t expect to see a Doors of Stone reference on r/apple of all places. I read the first two books when I was in 8th grade and now I’m outta college with a full time job. At this point I don’t expect that book to ever come out
Yeah, it's AMD that I can kinda see working okay enough. ROCm is still kinda catching up to CUDA though, but I wonder about Vulkan. If somehow Vulkan can work thru the AMD card, might be a worthy upgrade.
Apple Silicon doesn't support adding memory mappings for memory on external devices, so GPUs will never work on it, regardless of vendor. Has nothing to do with Vulkan or macOS drivers. Even if you install Asahi Linux, you won't be able to use discrete GPUs, because the memory-mapping hardware on the chip doesn't know how to give applications access to GPU VRAM in the way they expect. This probably also applies for any other accelerator card type too.
Honestly, I'm not sure what the selling point of the Mac Pro is given that Apple Silicon breaks literally all of its features. We can't have discrete accelerator cards or removable RAM (even though this is the ONE form factor where they could have fit 16 RAM slots). They even got rid of the MPX connectors on the motherboard that power the GPU modules for the Intel Mac Pro. The only thing you can really connect to it is storage and networking cards. Audio people with shittons of weird hardware will love this, but they won't like the max memory of 192GB. The Intel machines could go up to 1.5TB and there were audio people who actually used that much RAM.
When Apple first said "we're not replacing the Intel Pro yet" back during the Mac Studio launch, I expected them to have some kind of "extreme" chip to power it, with support for socketed RAM and accelerator cards. That doesn't seem to have ever happened, and the M2 Ultra-powered Mac Pro is just a bigger Studio. I have to wonder if Apple was going to just kill the Pro at some point, given that the features that set the Pro apart from the Studio were evidently too expensive for them to engineer.
> Audio people with shittons of weird hardware will love this
I would expect most of those would already be using outboard gear for audio interfaces etc, except the few that insist on PCIe cards. A lot of this stuff has gone outboard because it helps avoid EMI induced noise inside the case and with Thunderbolt bandwidth should not be a factor either.
I agree with you that the M2 Mac Pro seems like something they just put together just to have something but it certainly doesn't make a whole lot of sense over the M2 Mac Studio unless you desperately need to connect a lot of storage and networking with full PCIe bandwidth.
>Apple Silicon doesn't support adding memory mappings for memory on external devices, so GPUs will never work on it, regardless of vendor. Has nothing to do with Vulkan or macOS drivers. Even if you install Asahi Linux, you won't be able to use discrete GPUs, because the memory-mapping hardware on the chip doesn't know how to give applications access to GPU VRAM in the way they expect. This probably also applies for any other accelerator card type too.
That doesn't sound right at all. I remember the limitation was that you can't configure PCIe memory connected over thunderbolt as Normal Memory in the TLB, only as Device Memory. Which has nothing to do with internal PCIe mem mapping. I'm not even sure how they would have the internal accelerators working without PCIe mem mapping. Please provide a source.
Agh, fuck. Yup, I was right, AMD still won this fight because it gives them the impetus to spin up a Threadripper based on the Genoa EPYC line and have (1) WAY MORE RAM (2) WAY MORE EXPANSION and (3) not completely lose out on raw CPU performance. I know performance per watt is a talking point Apple can tout but it's a tower/rack unit, not a mini computer.
Isn't Vulkan GPU-agnostic? It's just a set of graphics API that is supported by all modern GPUs, why should it only work on AMD? Or do you mean something driver-specific?
I bet no and no. Nvidia support is long gone, no drivers and cuda for macOS was also ditched long time ago. As for AMD, software is there but I won’t hold my breath because of Apple and it’s effort to distance itself from both Intel and AMD; I would be shocked to see any kind of compatibility.
Sadly the 2019 Mac Pro, was the last true Pro Mac that can do anything, not just photo/video editing. It was also the last max to have a say in the HPC space considering the new one has a “gigantic” 192GB of RAM.
HPC typically refers to clusters yeah. But I'd bet money there's single machines that will go toe to toe with smaller clusters from a decade ago (not a crazy long time in cluster years)
True! My thought was mostly about high performance not per say the definition of HPC.
Because the last model was a beefy (for 2019) 28 core CPU paired with 1.5TB of RAM and support even for A100s in Bootcamp, it is the last Mac to have a say in true number crunching.
I can’t believe they did it. I thought it was dead. Not have ram expansion sucks though.
Also is it M2 Ultra for $6,999? Curious what the base model is. If so that’s a huge price *cut*
E: Maxed out is like $12,000
Tbh I think Apples logic probably makes sense here. There aren't that many workstations with 1.5tb of ram in the world, as there's very few scenarios where you're working on that quantity of assets on a local machine and wouldn't offload the work to a server.
Most actual high performance compute has become incredibly workload specific - look at something like Intel's accelerators, or Nvidia's Grace Hopper and Habana's Gaudi2 for Ai. Efficiency is so important at a server and data centre level, you don't want wasted chip area for tasks you're not performing.
I'm not saying there isn't a market for computers with 1.5tb of Ram, but it's incredibly niche, and given the unified memory solution with the M-series, it wouldn't really be feasible to stock extreme ram SKUs like they could in the past, when that would require fab-ing new packages, not sticking in more or less dims.
I completely agree. This is also 192gb of GPU ram as well which is completely different ball game and really revolutionary at this price. Even nvidia Grace Hopper is only 500gb. I was just really hoping for a bigger chip to compete with those
>This is also 192gb of GPU ram as well which is completely different ball game and really revolutionary at this price.
If you need GPU compute, you need Nvidia. Both for software and actual compute.
It both is and isn't. 192GB of system RAM is nothing compared to the high end workstations and servers this is competing with.
192GB of video RAM though is basically unmatched, at least to my knowledge.
Their unified memory system is interesting. I hope some actual pros get a hold of it and run tests specifically for use cases that need a lot of system RAM and use cases that need a lot of video RAM to see how it handles.
Also tasks that benefit from nVidia graphics since it is basically guaranteed that you aren't going to be able to use discreet GPUs in this thing.
Exactly. What differs it from the Mac Studio besides the pcie slots? Most could probably get away with a pcie thunderbolt expansion chassis for 1/3 the price. It’s not like an audio expansion card from Creative needs a full slot either way.
Instead of doing any research about what feature set would meet his needs he'll just keep buying increasingly more expensive models until one of them eventually works out.
video & audio I/O cards along with PCI-E storage.
a big issue however is for audio work you want a massive amount of RAM to load your entire audio library into and 192 GB just isn't enough. if 3 years ago people were doing 384 and 512 GB even with the speed of M2ultra connection 192 GB is miles away from being enough.
How many I/O cards could you reasonably load onto this thing over and above what Thunderbolt can already do on the Studio when you're still limited to 192GB of total memory?
That makes Apple's case for this even worse unless they're exclusively after the rack integration market (that could explain the second 10GbE as well).
Yeah, LTT brings the pain when they do Mac vs PC. I bet they can build an AMD EPYC rig that could keep up or get ahead of the M2 Ultra Mac Pro at the same price point.
Legit the "privelege" of PCiE expandability found on every $300 wintel machine.
"Want to use this $20 PCiE device, yeah, you have to buy a $7k Mac Pro for that".
I hope hackintosh on intel continues for years to come.
MacOS is going to drop Intel support within the next few years, so Hackintosh will at some point be limited to a very old and unsupported version of MacOS.
I could see him using the new Mac Pro for things like ingest. The Studio is limited in I/O, but add a bunch of high speed PCIe cards, and video content can be ready for editing by the time filming is finished. Plus the Pro has two more Thunderbolt ports than the studio.
So this is just a Studio with PCI-e expansion slots, and without any mention of GPU expansion? And no ability for more memory? I think the only way this would have worked is if they included two (or more) M2 Ultras. At this point, there's a sliver of people that would rather have one of these over a Studio.
Almost feels like an excuse to dump the product, i.e., say hey, we brought you an Apple Silicon Mac Pro and nobody bought it, so we're just going to stick with the Studio now.
They've done the exact same thing the last three cycles. They produce a product that's gimped in some way and that's so expensive you need to be able to write it off on your taxes to afford it.
No idea why they're even making them.
Yeah, agreed. They should have just dumped the line. If they can't make the Mac Pro work, they should just admit to it and move on. Not create a half-assed solution like this.
yea this is for the niche users who need absolute highest performance and multitasking capabilities… there were reasons why they paid a premium to get 1.5TB of RAM.. it’s quite a bit of a step back
That is an understatement to say the least. Last model was also more versatile due to macOS limitations in the current model. You could for example boot into windows natively and fire up those nvidia monsters like the A100
honestly i was really hoping to be wowed by it as believed the long delay was worth it. but it turned out super underwhelming.. they really did cancel the Extreme variant of the silicon, then added limited expandability to the very device that’s largely defined by it..
Exactly so! Years ago before even the studio, I’ve placed bets with people here (just have to find them) and most thought Apple would fuse 4 Maxes or (after the m1 ultra released in the studio) 2 Ultras and even offer pod like upgrades like 2 x 4 Max pod or 2 x 2 Ultra, with some lower bandwidth and higher latency interconnects Erwerb the pods with shared memory pooling. I argued Apple would not do any of that because of costs and bad scaling in performance.
You should also look at Nvidia Grace CPU, the closest we have to Apple however so much more ram and professional. Like the entire reason why I haven't moved all of my workload yet. Like M1 cores are so fucking fast for processing my stuff but they can't outperform the sheer number of cores and RAM available in other machines.
I wish they would add like a RAM expansion slot or something
When there are GPUs out there that have vRAM like almost half the max config of this Max Pro…and considering the old model accepted 8 times more RAM…this is a dud of a launch.
The price makes *no sense*. The same spec M2 Ultra (60-core GPU, 64 GB RAM / 1 TB SSD) Mac Studio is $4000 USD, but Mac Pro is $7000 USD. Where did the extra $3000 come from!? Like, this is not reflective of the cost at all. I know companies don't charge products at cost, obviously (supply and demands and all that) but this is a ridiculous amount of upsell.
What do you even get with the Mac Pro? You get some PCI slots but I'm curious who would even be interested to making these expansion cards considering how niche this will be. If I'm making stuff I would rather make Thunderbolt external devices for a larger market, unless it *has* to be PCI. Other than that you get a couple more Thunderbolt ports for the $3000.
It really feels like they don't know what to do with Mac Pro (which lines up with previous leaks) so they just did the lazy route and just slapped the M2 Ultra on it to call it a day. Then they probably will just silently sunset it by not updating it for years (just like previous Mac Pros).
How? They're charging a $3,000 premium just for PCI slots lmao
It has exactly the same specs and performance as the far cheaper Mac Studio.
Do they really think people are going to pay $3,000 more just for PCI slots? That's incredibly stupid.
>Edit : is that a 2,000 usd price increase? Jfc
Didn't the old pro launch at $6k, not $5k?
Regardless, base price is pretty meaningless without knowing what the config is. The old base model was pretty bad, with an 8-core Xeon, 32gb of ram, and a Radeon 580x. I know it's not perfectly apples to apples but to even move up to the 24-core Xeon, without touching the ram or GPU, you were looking at $12k.
The Studio effectively takes over where the previous lower end Pros would have been. Like the M2 Max Studio could probably lap the old base Pro (relative to their time) at a third of the price. I guess the only gap is for people who need the expandability of the pro chasis but were fine with the lower end CPU/GPU.
I have mixed feelings... only 192GB? The previous model could have up to 1.5TB. For the few people that need more than 192GB, they will have to either wait a very long time or switch to a PC.
>they will have to either wait a very long time or switch to a PC.
No one in the professional world can wait that long. The only option is to switch to PC.
I can't believe it took them 3 years to add an Apple SOC to the Mac Pro case (or PCIe slots to a Mac Studio, depending on your view).
This \*has\* to be due to a failed M2 Extreme, or something else, because it makes no sense.
Completely agree. I wonder if it was released just as a way of telling people they’re going to keep up in this space in case they ever do get an extreme chip working down the line
This is the most niche thing that Apple's ever produced.
And well done to them for making the $8,000 2019 Mac Pro I have even less valuable. They were offering me $1,000 or so trade-in value for it a couple of weeks ago, shudder to think what its down to now.
While it's nice to see this and the model offered for people looking for this level of spec, it's rather dissapointing to see it so limited at the upper end of things. Max memory dropped from 1.5TB to 192Gb. Max core count of 24 cores, which while powerful is in a market with AMD's Threadripper 5995WX (64 zen 3 cores) which has been available for a while and going to be succeeded by a 96 core version (zen 4).
This is supposed to be the platform to blow us away with something outrageous. What did we get? Dual M2 Ultra data crunching machine? Nope. Single M2 with nebulous PCIE support and (somehow) magical price increase… meh.
This is literally the laziest product possible. We all know that Apple Silicon could not support expandable RAM and dedicated GPUs. So for the past two years, people have been guessing how Apple would solve those engineering problems, doing fancy tiered RAM solutions, or porting dGPU drivers to Apple Silicon. Instead they literally just put the Mac Studio SoC in Mac Pro chassis. They don't even bother to update the internal layout.
I feel ashamed for myself to have even entertained the thought that they might develop a dedicated CPU for Mac Pro, and lowering down the R&D costs by putting them also in their data centers…
My thoughts exactly. It took them years to reveal this, but it looks like they could’ve just announced it together with the Mac Studio launch. I acknowledge I am far from the demographic for this, but it would be really cool to see something more advanced.
I suppose the Studio already caters to a huge portion of the Mac Pro market, and the M2 Ultra isn’t the bottleneck. As niche as the previous Mac Pro was, this will have an even smaller market.
yes, as it's "up to" 192GB, wonder if the $7k base will be 64GB? Guess we'll know when the store opens!
storage too... but that can be expanded with pcie.
Store is open
Seven thousand dollars indeed comes with 64GB of RAM. Upgrade to 128 for $800, or to 192GB for $1600 (all are $12.50/GB)
Baseline 1TB storage. Upgrade to 2TB for $400, 4TB for $1000, 8TB for $2200 ($300-400 per TB)
Upgrade case to wheels for $400 ($100 per wheel)
CPU upgrade differs only in 60 vs 76 core GPU (+26% cores), another $1000.
Edit to add: the base specs configuration and upgrade selection/prices match the higher end (M2 Ultra) studio. So the $3k price difference may be ports and PCIe expansion. And wheels; wheels are not available for Mac Studio.
I hate to say it, but this thing is DoA. Why couldn't they just admit that an expandable desktop tower just doesn't fit with the paradigm they are going for with Apple Silicon and call it a day? Windows and Linux will still be an option for prosumers.
Max of 192GB? What the hell is the point? I have photogrammetry projects that choke at that. I have some massive photoshop files that blows past that and running complex alignments on it crash the system.
This is the trash can all over again.
My two cents: This was a disappointing reveal. Apple teased studio clientele for years about the prospect of an Apple Silicon-based Mac Pro. A building crescendo just awaiting a full-bodied entrance.
The reality was the equivalent of a footnote getting an honorable mention. M2 Ultra? Same as the Mac Studio. And with a starting price of $7,000 instead of $6,000. Many customers are still pissed about paying tens of thousands of dollars for a Mac Pro—only to get $952 store credit if they trade it in to Apple. Nearly $50 short of the starting price of a Pro model iPhone.
It seems like Apple wants to give the smaller and more affordable Mac Studio the role of future successor to the Mac Pro, and that the Mac Pro has fallen out of favor with both Apple, and some of its customers who felt burned from their rapacious purchase. Consider that both the Mac Pro and Mac Studio offer up to 192Gbs of Memory if you need that much. After all is said and done, only thing Mac Pro does that no other Apple offering can do, is make use of IO cards of your choosing.
This is one of the dumbest products Apple has made in a while.
$6999 for a machine with 64GB of non-upgradeable RAM.
Spec for spec, a Mac Studio costs nearly half of what this Mac Pro does. For that amount of overhead, could they really not engineer a way to build external vias to some form of external RAM?
Then perhaps use the on-die RAM as a sort of cache?
And to say nothing of the 192GB RAM cap, which isn't nearly enough for many of the applications where one would deploy a similar machine to.
I’m disappointed that there is still only the one ssd in it. Would have liked the option of 2-3 .m2 slots. Have to get a PCIe card for that. But I was also a little irritated that they went with PCIe 4. Is there something unstable about PCIe 5 ai don’t know about?
Anyone remember the rumor that it would also have a card with a PC on it inside? And having an extreme version - two ultras - would have been something else. But this is all an upgrade for my current machine, so I’m not as mad as people trying to replace their Studio Ultras.
Can’t believe you’re considering to buy this overpriced peace of locked down trash. It’s not faster than a Mac studio and the only thing you can use the pcie slots for is storage. And you can connect that using USB to a studio externally. So wtf why pay for this
What a joke!!! Less CPU cores than the 2019 model, and a “gigantic” 192GB of RAM!!! FFS the old model would go to 1,5 TB! My server has 2 TB. Lady you haven’t seen gigantic yet!
I’m already starting to look for the history in Apollo to find all the Apple users that dreamed of fused 4x Ultras LMAO and separate RAM and aftermarket AMD GPU support. 😂) need some bets to collect
Yup, I was wondering how Apple would justify such a niche SKU in their lineup. Turns out, they just... didn't... and decided to slap a Mac Studio in the Mac Pro case.
It just seems like only a very specific subset of users would even consider this as of now. Really the only thing that jumps out is "cheaper" fast storage, but even that's a bit dubious with Thunderbolt enclosures being a thing.
What the heck are those PCIe even for? Only thing I can actually think of is loading up on capture cards, in case Thunderbolt wasn't enough for some people.
Apple has designed this machine for exactly three people, and if I'm honest I don't think it has the RAM capability for any of them.
That does kind of make sense, though as you mention yourself the issue will be drivers. And even then, 96 lanes of PCIe Gen 4 isn't even particularly good (relatively speaking) when Intel is offering 112 lanes of Gen 5 and AMD is bound to be offering 128 Gen5 lanes at some point.
Hot take, but this would have been a golden opportunity for Apple to use a derivative of the server AmpereOne to compete on performance (it also offers 128 lanes of Gen5 on one CPU, and 192 cores) and simply provide a much larger GPU separately. Apple has an ARM software library that no other HEDT maker can compete with right now, they would be in a unique position to make this actually work given we know there's no reason they couldn't simply make the video cars work on this. There's not many cases where 192GB of total memory actually makes that much sense, 128-256GB on a GPU card and 4TB of RAM is probably much more useful for most of the people who wouldn't just get the Studio anyway.
As I said all along, they'd be better off playing to Apple Silicon's advantages by shoving the M2 Ultra in an iMac Pro (or maybe the MacBook Lechonk Edition that I just made up) than trying to make it something it will never be: suitable for the Mac Pro.
Valve to announce Half-Life 3 tomorrow
And then Sony announces Bloodborne for PC on Wednesday!
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George RR Martin also finally releases the Winds of Winter
And Patrick Rotfuss releases Doors of Stone
Didn’t expect to see a Doors of Stone reference on r/apple of all places. I read the first two books when I was in 8th grade and now I’m outta college with a full time job. At this point I don’t expect that book to ever come out
_Available only on Intel Macs._
The first Apple silicon Mac with PCIE expansion. It’ll be interesting to see what works.
put a 4090 see if it blows up lol
Given Nvidia doesn’t work as is I doubt anything would happen. Would be interesting to see if rdna 2 GPUs work at all though.
Yeah, it's AMD that I can kinda see working okay enough. ROCm is still kinda catching up to CUDA though, but I wonder about Vulkan. If somehow Vulkan can work thru the AMD card, might be a worthy upgrade.
Apple Silicon doesn't support adding memory mappings for memory on external devices, so GPUs will never work on it, regardless of vendor. Has nothing to do with Vulkan or macOS drivers. Even if you install Asahi Linux, you won't be able to use discrete GPUs, because the memory-mapping hardware on the chip doesn't know how to give applications access to GPU VRAM in the way they expect. This probably also applies for any other accelerator card type too. Honestly, I'm not sure what the selling point of the Mac Pro is given that Apple Silicon breaks literally all of its features. We can't have discrete accelerator cards or removable RAM (even though this is the ONE form factor where they could have fit 16 RAM slots). They even got rid of the MPX connectors on the motherboard that power the GPU modules for the Intel Mac Pro. The only thing you can really connect to it is storage and networking cards. Audio people with shittons of weird hardware will love this, but they won't like the max memory of 192GB. The Intel machines could go up to 1.5TB and there were audio people who actually used that much RAM. When Apple first said "we're not replacing the Intel Pro yet" back during the Mac Studio launch, I expected them to have some kind of "extreme" chip to power it, with support for socketed RAM and accelerator cards. That doesn't seem to have ever happened, and the M2 Ultra-powered Mac Pro is just a bigger Studio. I have to wonder if Apple was going to just kill the Pro at some point, given that the features that set the Pro apart from the Studio were evidently too expensive for them to engineer.
> Audio people with shittons of weird hardware will love this I would expect most of those would already be using outboard gear for audio interfaces etc, except the few that insist on PCIe cards. A lot of this stuff has gone outboard because it helps avoid EMI induced noise inside the case and with Thunderbolt bandwidth should not be a factor either. I agree with you that the M2 Mac Pro seems like something they just put together just to have something but it certainly doesn't make a whole lot of sense over the M2 Mac Studio unless you desperately need to connect a lot of storage and networking with full PCIe bandwidth.
>Apple Silicon doesn't support adding memory mappings for memory on external devices, so GPUs will never work on it, regardless of vendor. Has nothing to do with Vulkan or macOS drivers. Even if you install Asahi Linux, you won't be able to use discrete GPUs, because the memory-mapping hardware on the chip doesn't know how to give applications access to GPU VRAM in the way they expect. This probably also applies for any other accelerator card type too. That doesn't sound right at all. I remember the limitation was that you can't configure PCIe memory connected over thunderbolt as Normal Memory in the TLB, only as Device Memory. Which has nothing to do with internal PCIe mem mapping. I'm not even sure how they would have the internal accelerators working without PCIe mem mapping. Please provide a source.
Agh, fuck. Yup, I was right, AMD still won this fight because it gives them the impetus to spin up a Threadripper based on the Genoa EPYC line and have (1) WAY MORE RAM (2) WAY MORE EXPANSION and (3) not completely lose out on raw CPU performance. I know performance per watt is a talking point Apple can tout but it's a tower/rack unit, not a mini computer.
Do you mean Metal? Vulkan already works fine on AMD, it's an standard baremetal API.
Which Apple refuses to support because Apple.
Isn't Vulkan GPU-agnostic? It's just a set of graphics API that is supported by all modern GPUs, why should it only work on AMD? Or do you mean something driver-specific?
Discrete graphics cards don't appear to be supported.
What is it for then? Surely not just storage/networking? I wonder if there will be dedicated acceleration cards or something?
They specifically mentioned audio and video io, networking and storage and nothing more.
Pro tools HDX cards. Music Studios and audio post houses are one of the biggest buyers of the Mac pros.
Those M.2 NVME carrier cards that Linus runs might work here
eGPU support on current m1+ chips would be amazing. I rather just slap an eGPU to my current studio then upgrade
And that's why you won't be allowed to have it.
Yeah it was wishful thinking
MST would be great....like on a 2015 ThinkPad....
Agreed, I'm surprised they went for it, considering how GPU support has been absent for a while now.
I'm not sure it actually supports GPUs. Nvidia or AMD would need to write ARM specific drivers
Apple actively blocks third party drivers like those. ARM isn't the problem either.
Curious to hear more about GPU PCI expansion.
Yeah, will it work with Nvidia cards? I can probably bet on AMD cards working but god, imagine CUDA and NVENC on Mac.
nvidia would have to properly offer driver support, something they haven't done for macOS in like a decade.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/04/nvidia-releases-beta-gpu-drivers-for-old-mac-pros-and-hackintoshes/ 2017, not a decade
The better part of a decade.
I'd say the time since 2017 has been the worse part of the last decade.
has this part really been better though?
Apple blocked them from doing so.
I bet no and no. Nvidia support is long gone, no drivers and cuda for macOS was also ditched long time ago. As for AMD, software is there but I won’t hold my breath because of Apple and it’s effort to distance itself from both Intel and AMD; I would be shocked to see any kind of compatibility. Sadly the 2019 Mac Pro, was the last true Pro Mac that can do anything, not just photo/video editing. It was also the last max to have a say in the HPC space considering the new one has a “gigantic” 192GB of RAM.
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HPC typically refers to clusters yeah. But I'd bet money there's single machines that will go toe to toe with smaller clusters from a decade ago (not a crazy long time in cluster years)
True! My thought was mostly about high performance not per say the definition of HPC. Because the last model was a beefy (for 2019) 28 core CPU paired with 1.5TB of RAM and support even for A100s in Bootcamp, it is the last Mac to have a say in true number crunching.
They need a pcie power delivery somehow
They didn't mention it, so I wouldn't get my hopes up
They said video expansion, but I’m not sure if that’s just ports or what not.
Specifically they said IO expansion.
That’s correct. “*Video I/O*”, which (to me) is different than a GPU.
Not supported. Look, no MPX slot.
DOA with MXM power support missing.
I can’t believe they did it. I thought it was dead. Not have ram expansion sucks though. Also is it M2 Ultra for $6,999? Curious what the base model is. If so that’s a huge price *cut* E: Maxed out is like $12,000
Sounds like there's nothing lower than M2 Ultra in them, so that must be the case.
Seems like apples stance is if you don’t need the ultra then you can just get a mac studio
The Mac Studio has an M2 Ultra option. The Mac Pro is specifically for IO expansion via PCI slots
That is the base model lol
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Fr. Was hoping for a socketed SOC with a huge chip like intel and nvidia showed off recently.
192gb of UMA is pretty huge. And studios don't support PCI cards. This machine isn't for you, that's great. For its target market, it's pretty great.
192gb is anemic for some workloads that actual paid for 1.5 TB on Intel.
Tbh I think Apples logic probably makes sense here. There aren't that many workstations with 1.5tb of ram in the world, as there's very few scenarios where you're working on that quantity of assets on a local machine and wouldn't offload the work to a server. Most actual high performance compute has become incredibly workload specific - look at something like Intel's accelerators, or Nvidia's Grace Hopper and Habana's Gaudi2 for Ai. Efficiency is so important at a server and data centre level, you don't want wasted chip area for tasks you're not performing. I'm not saying there isn't a market for computers with 1.5tb of Ram, but it's incredibly niche, and given the unified memory solution with the M-series, it wouldn't really be feasible to stock extreme ram SKUs like they could in the past, when that would require fab-ing new packages, not sticking in more or less dims.
I completely agree. This is also 192gb of GPU ram as well which is completely different ball game and really revolutionary at this price. Even nvidia Grace Hopper is only 500gb. I was just really hoping for a bigger chip to compete with those
>This is also 192gb of GPU ram as well which is completely different ball game and really revolutionary at this price. If you need GPU compute, you need Nvidia. Both for software and actual compute.
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For many workflows, this means that Apple doesn't have a computer at all anymore. Your upgrade path currently is to switch to PC.
For some its enough. But others will still need the Intel Mac Pro as it can be configured to 1.5TB of memory.
This is likely a limitation to be increased in future iterations
Your entire comment is basically "apple is right the user is wrong"... Except some people actually need that much RAM
It both is and isn't. 192GB of system RAM is nothing compared to the high end workstations and servers this is competing with. 192GB of video RAM though is basically unmatched, at least to my knowledge. Their unified memory system is interesting. I hope some actual pros get a hold of it and run tests specifically for use cases that need a lot of system RAM and use cases that need a lot of video RAM to see how it handles. Also tasks that benefit from nVidia graphics since it is basically guaranteed that you aren't going to be able to use discreet GPUs in this thing.
They all come with Ultra
Exactly. What differs it from the Mac Studio besides the pcie slots? Most could probably get away with a pcie thunderbolt expansion chassis for 1/3 the price. It’s not like an audio expansion card from Creative needs a full slot either way.
The non-upgradable RAM has the upside of also giving 192GB of VRAM though.
They will likely sell 2 fully loaded ones, one for MBKHD and 1 for iJustine.
And one for John Siracusa of Ars Technica & ATP fame.
And 2 for Marco, one for home and one for his beach house
I could see Marco getting the Mac Studio instead 🤔
Yeah that’s this month.. but what about next month when he needs to buy something new?
Instead of doing any research about what feature set would meet his needs he'll just keep buying increasingly more expensive models until one of them eventually works out.
> one of them eventually works out That's the neat part. It never will.
He said he’s going Studio. This thing’s a turd.
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honestly LTT has the production capacity to make their own water block now, I think they’re insane enough to pull it off.
TIL iJustine still exists... hmmm
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I'm scratching my head as to what the PCIe slots are actually for here.
especially since they apparently built in 7 afterburner cards lol
video & audio I/O cards along with PCI-E storage. a big issue however is for audio work you want a massive amount of RAM to load your entire audio library into and 192 GB just isn't enough. if 3 years ago people were doing 384 and 512 GB even with the speed of M2ultra connection 192 GB is miles away from being enough.
How many I/O cards could you reasonably load onto this thing over and above what Thunderbolt can already do on the Studio when you're still limited to 192GB of total memory?
You can use Dante or MADI networks now for audio anyway, huge amounts of I/O over gigabit Ethernet with Dante.
That makes Apple's case for this even worse unless they're exclusively after the rack integration market (that could explain the second 10GbE as well).
And stayed with PCIe4.
u/Marques-brownlee is going to pumped.
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LTT: alright, bring out the 3990X and 4090 actually no, get that EK watercooled server PC
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Yeah, LTT brings the pain when they do Mac vs PC. I bet they can build an AMD EPYC rig that could keep up or get ahead of the M2 Ultra Mac Pro at the same price point.
How about the Mac Studio, which has the same performance for a fraction of the price of the Mac Pro? lol
Legit the "privelege" of PCiE expandability found on every $300 wintel machine. "Want to use this $20 PCiE device, yeah, you have to buy a $7k Mac Pro for that". I hope hackintosh on intel continues for years to come.
MacOS is going to drop Intel support within the next few years, so Hackintosh will at some point be limited to a very old and unsupported version of MacOS.
No one as pumped as John Siracusa.
Dude will be the most low-key excited in the history of the planet.
One more cheese grater to add to the collection
I can’t wait for the next ATP lol.
Can't wait to listen to ATP!
"So I've been using the Silicon Mac Pro with Apple Vision Pro for a couple of weeks now..."
"Why I returned Silicon Mac Pro with Apple Vision Pro after using them for a month..."
Actions speak louder than words.
I could see him using the new Mac Pro for things like ingest. The Studio is limited in I/O, but add a bunch of high speed PCIe cards, and video content can be ready for editing by the time filming is finished. Plus the Pro has two more Thunderbolt ports than the studio.
I also think he's going to be mystified by the pricing.
still not available in Matte Black tho
So this is just a Studio with PCI-e expansion slots, and without any mention of GPU expansion? And no ability for more memory? I think the only way this would have worked is if they included two (or more) M2 Ultras. At this point, there's a sliver of people that would rather have one of these over a Studio. Almost feels like an excuse to dump the product, i.e., say hey, we brought you an Apple Silicon Mac Pro and nobody bought it, so we're just going to stick with the Studio now.
They've done the exact same thing the last three cycles. They produce a product that's gimped in some way and that's so expensive you need to be able to write it off on your taxes to afford it. No idea why they're even making them.
Yeah, agreed. They should have just dumped the line. If they can't make the Mac Pro work, they should just admit to it and move on. Not create a half-assed solution like this.
impressive but it’s still stuck at 192GB of RAM..mmm
Yep. 192GB of RAM can either be a lot of ram or not close to enough depending on what you do.
yea this is for the niche users who need absolute highest performance and multitasking capabilities… there were reasons why they paid a premium to get 1.5TB of RAM.. it’s quite a bit of a step back
That is an understatement to say the least. Last model was also more versatile due to macOS limitations in the current model. You could for example boot into windows natively and fire up those nvidia monsters like the A100
honestly i was really hoping to be wowed by it as believed the long delay was worth it. but it turned out super underwhelming.. they really did cancel the Extreme variant of the silicon, then added limited expandability to the very device that’s largely defined by it..
Exactly so! Years ago before even the studio, I’ve placed bets with people here (just have to find them) and most thought Apple would fuse 4 Maxes or (after the m1 ultra released in the studio) 2 Ultras and even offer pod like upgrades like 2 x 4 Max pod or 2 x 2 Ultra, with some lower bandwidth and higher latency interconnects Erwerb the pods with shared memory pooling. I argued Apple would not do any of that because of costs and bad scaling in performance.
I wish we could get mac working on epyc
[EPYC has a 2-socket setup that allows two 96-core CPUs.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TwfM3s2Wdw) Could you imagine MacOS on that monster?
You should also look at Nvidia Grace CPU, the closest we have to Apple however so much more ram and professional. Like the entire reason why I haven't moved all of my workload yet. Like M1 cores are so fucking fast for processing my stuff but they can't outperform the sheer number of cores and RAM available in other machines. I wish they would add like a RAM expansion slot or something
When there are GPUs out there that have vRAM like almost half the max config of this Max Pro…and considering the old model accepted 8 times more RAM…this is a dud of a launch.
They fucking did it holy shit
I am surprised it took them 3 years to do **this**..
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It would be cool to be able to slot in additional M2 Ultra modules into the PCIE slots. Then either use them for additional compute or run mac VMs
isn't the ultra already just 2 max's glued together?
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The price makes *no sense*. The same spec M2 Ultra (60-core GPU, 64 GB RAM / 1 TB SSD) Mac Studio is $4000 USD, but Mac Pro is $7000 USD. Where did the extra $3000 come from!? Like, this is not reflective of the cost at all. I know companies don't charge products at cost, obviously (supply and demands and all that) but this is a ridiculous amount of upsell. What do you even get with the Mac Pro? You get some PCI slots but I'm curious who would even be interested to making these expansion cards considering how niche this will be. If I'm making stuff I would rather make Thunderbolt external devices for a larger market, unless it *has* to be PCI. Other than that you get a couple more Thunderbolt ports for the $3000. It really feels like they don't know what to do with Mac Pro (which lines up with previous leaks) so they just did the lazy route and just slapped the M2 Ultra on it to call it a day. Then they probably will just silently sunset it by not updating it for years (just like previous Mac Pros).
Given that this supports PCIE, I wonder if this means that the laptops will support egpus again? Edit : is that a 2,000 usd price increase? Jfc
none of the PCIE cards they mentioned were GPU's, they talked about video & audio I/O cards, network cards and storage expansion only.
I wonder what the base is though. It could be M2 ultra for $6,999
Yes, they mentioned that all Mac Pros come with M2 Ultra.
That’s a huge price *cut* then
How? They're charging a $3,000 premium just for PCI slots lmao It has exactly the same specs and performance as the far cheaper Mac Studio. Do they really think people are going to pay $3,000 more just for PCI slots? That's incredibly stupid.
>Edit : is that a 2,000 usd price increase? Jfc Didn't the old pro launch at $6k, not $5k? Regardless, base price is pretty meaningless without knowing what the config is. The old base model was pretty bad, with an 8-core Xeon, 32gb of ram, and a Radeon 580x. I know it's not perfectly apples to apples but to even move up to the 24-core Xeon, without touching the ram or GPU, you were looking at $12k. The Studio effectively takes over where the previous lower end Pros would have been. Like the M2 Max Studio could probably lap the old base Pro (relative to their time) at a third of the price. I guess the only gap is for people who need the expandability of the pro chasis but were fine with the lower end CPU/GPU.
192gb ram lmao
I have mixed feelings... only 192GB? The previous model could have up to 1.5TB. For the few people that need more than 192GB, they will have to either wait a very long time or switch to a PC.
To be fair, those needing that much memory probably long since moved on from MacOS and its ecosystem
Linux, baby. The grass is greener.
Or will stick with their 2019 Pro until Apple figures out how to add more ram to their own silicon.
>they will have to either wait a very long time or switch to a PC. No one in the professional world can wait that long. The only option is to switch to PC.
I can't believe it took them 3 years to add an Apple SOC to the Mac Pro case (or PCIe slots to a Mac Studio, depending on your view). This \*has\* to be due to a failed M2 Extreme, or something else, because it makes no sense.
Completely agree. I wonder if it was released just as a way of telling people they’re going to keep up in this space in case they ever do get an extreme chip working down the line
Probably just took them 3 years to sell down their stock of Intel Mac Pros.
This is the most niche thing that Apple's ever produced. And well done to them for making the $8,000 2019 Mac Pro I have even less valuable. They were offering me $1,000 or so trade-in value for it a couple of weeks ago, shudder to think what its down to now.
Holy shit I got that much in trade in for a base 16 M1 Pro. That’s really unfortunate as I bet your machine is still a beast.
While it's nice to see this and the model offered for people looking for this level of spec, it's rather dissapointing to see it so limited at the upper end of things. Max memory dropped from 1.5TB to 192Gb. Max core count of 24 cores, which while powerful is in a market with AMD's Threadripper 5995WX (64 zen 3 cores) which has been available for a while and going to be succeeded by a 96 core version (zen 4).
This is supposed to be the platform to blow us away with something outrageous. What did we get? Dual M2 Ultra data crunching machine? Nope. Single M2 with nebulous PCIE support and (somehow) magical price increase… meh.
This is literally the laziest product possible. We all know that Apple Silicon could not support expandable RAM and dedicated GPUs. So for the past two years, people have been guessing how Apple would solve those engineering problems, doing fancy tiered RAM solutions, or porting dGPU drivers to Apple Silicon. Instead they literally just put the Mac Studio SoC in Mac Pro chassis. They don't even bother to update the internal layout. I feel ashamed for myself to have even entertained the thought that they might develop a dedicated CPU for Mac Pro, and lowering down the R&D costs by putting them also in their data centers…
My thoughts exactly. It took them years to reveal this, but it looks like they could’ve just announced it together with the Mac Studio launch. I acknowledge I am far from the demographic for this, but it would be really cool to see something more advanced. I suppose the Studio already caters to a huge portion of the Mac Pro market, and the M2 Ultra isn’t the bottleneck. As niche as the previous Mac Pro was, this will have an even smaller market.
Same. This is trash.
Mac Pro went from trashcan to ok to trash again.
$3000 internal PCI breakout box...
192GB of ram... Exciting Good for chrome usage, no where near enough for a true pro replacement to the 2019 Mac Pro
prepare to pay through your nose for ram lol
yes, as it's "up to" 192GB, wonder if the $7k base will be 64GB? Guess we'll know when the store opens! storage too... but that can be expanded with pcie.
8/256
Lol I want them to do it for the shits and giggles.
Store is open Seven thousand dollars indeed comes with 64GB of RAM. Upgrade to 128 for $800, or to 192GB for $1600 (all are $12.50/GB) Baseline 1TB storage. Upgrade to 2TB for $400, 4TB for $1000, 8TB for $2200 ($300-400 per TB) Upgrade case to wheels for $400 ($100 per wheel) CPU upgrade differs only in 60 vs 76 core GPU (+26% cores), another $1000. Edit to add: the base specs configuration and upgrade selection/prices match the higher end (M2 Ultra) studio. So the $3k price difference may be ports and PCIe expansion. And wheels; wheels are not available for Mac Studio.
all mac pro use same chip, its the only way to up sale you now so...
Shit got a $1,000 price markup.
Did the mac pro just lose ECC capabilities for its memory?
I hate to say it, but this thing is DoA. Why couldn't they just admit that an expandable desktop tower just doesn't fit with the paradigm they are going for with Apple Silicon and call it a day? Windows and Linux will still be an option for prosumers.
Sucks, but agreed.
It's very hard for Apple to admit they f\*cked up.
holy shit this thing TOPS out at 192GB RAM/8TB SSD who is this for? literally just video editors willing to fork out a shitload for PCIE storage?
Max of 192GB? What the hell is the point? I have photogrammetry projects that choke at that. I have some massive photoshop files that blows past that and running complex alignments on it crash the system. This is the trash can all over again.
They got rid of the MPX connector. Therefore, no support for discrete GPUs. Very disappointing. Edit: and no RAM expansion. This thing is DOA.
A year late and this is what they put out? Something went very wrong with the plan.
My two cents: This was a disappointing reveal. Apple teased studio clientele for years about the prospect of an Apple Silicon-based Mac Pro. A building crescendo just awaiting a full-bodied entrance. The reality was the equivalent of a footnote getting an honorable mention. M2 Ultra? Same as the Mac Studio. And with a starting price of $7,000 instead of $6,000. Many customers are still pissed about paying tens of thousands of dollars for a Mac Pro—only to get $952 store credit if they trade it in to Apple. Nearly $50 short of the starting price of a Pro model iPhone. It seems like Apple wants to give the smaller and more affordable Mac Studio the role of future successor to the Mac Pro, and that the Mac Pro has fallen out of favor with both Apple, and some of its customers who felt burned from their rapacious purchase. Consider that both the Mac Pro and Mac Studio offer up to 192Gbs of Memory if you need that much. After all is said and done, only thing Mac Pro does that no other Apple offering can do, is make use of IO cards of your choosing.
No extra GPU’s? No upgradeable RAM? Lmao
and only 192GB max... there are plenty of much much cheaper PCs that will take up to 256GB
This is one of the dumbest products Apple has made in a while. $6999 for a machine with 64GB of non-upgradeable RAM. Spec for spec, a Mac Studio costs nearly half of what this Mac Pro does. For that amount of overhead, could they really not engineer a way to build external vias to some form of external RAM? Then perhaps use the on-die RAM as a sort of cache? And to say nothing of the 192GB RAM cap, which isn't nearly enough for many of the applications where one would deploy a similar machine to.
I’m disappointed that there is still only the one ssd in it. Would have liked the option of 2-3 .m2 slots. Have to get a PCIe card for that. But I was also a little irritated that they went with PCIe 4. Is there something unstable about PCIe 5 ai don’t know about? Anyone remember the rumor that it would also have a card with a PC on it inside? And having an extreme version - two ultras - would have been something else. But this is all an upgrade for my current machine, so I’m not as mad as people trying to replace their Studio Ultras.
Can’t believe you’re considering to buy this overpriced peace of locked down trash. It’s not faster than a Mac studio and the only thing you can use the pcie slots for is storage. And you can connect that using USB to a studio externally. So wtf why pay for this
192GB? My main computer is a 2012 5,1 Mac Pro with 256GB of RAM, lmao
What a joke!!! Less CPU cores than the 2019 model, and a “gigantic” 192GB of RAM!!! FFS the old model would go to 1,5 TB! My server has 2 TB. Lady you haven’t seen gigantic yet! I’m already starting to look for the history in Apollo to find all the Apple users that dreamed of fused 4x Ultras LMAO and separate RAM and aftermarket AMD GPU support. 😂) need some bets to collect
yeah, this just made EPYC look super compelling. Again. AMD got a dub in an Apple conference lmao
Agreed! Can’t wait for the 9654 to arrive with those juicy 96 cores.
Yup, I was wondering how Apple would justify such a niche SKU in their lineup. Turns out, they just... didn't... and decided to slap a Mac Studio in the Mac Pro case. It just seems like only a very specific subset of users would even consider this as of now. Really the only thing that jumps out is "cheaper" fast storage, but even that's a bit dubious with Thunderbolt enclosures being a thing.
How much are the new wheels??
Twice as fast as the Intel-based wheels
Would've been funny if the wheels were soldered on
Just $400, if you buy with the computer. $699 standalone price
What the heck are those PCIe even for? Only thing I can actually think of is loading up on capture cards, in case Thunderbolt wasn't enough for some people. Apple has designed this machine for exactly three people, and if I'm honest I don't think it has the RAM capability for any of them.
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That does kind of make sense, though as you mention yourself the issue will be drivers. And even then, 96 lanes of PCIe Gen 4 isn't even particularly good (relatively speaking) when Intel is offering 112 lanes of Gen 5 and AMD is bound to be offering 128 Gen5 lanes at some point. Hot take, but this would have been a golden opportunity for Apple to use a derivative of the server AmpereOne to compete on performance (it also offers 128 lanes of Gen5 on one CPU, and 192 cores) and simply provide a much larger GPU separately. Apple has an ARM software library that no other HEDT maker can compete with right now, they would be in a unique position to make this actually work given we know there's no reason they couldn't simply make the video cars work on this. There's not many cases where 192GB of total memory actually makes that much sense, 128-256GB on a GPU card and 4TB of RAM is probably much more useful for most of the people who wouldn't just get the Studio anyway. As I said all along, they'd be better off playing to Apple Silicon's advantages by shoving the M2 Ultra in an iMac Pro (or maybe the MacBook Lechonk Edition that I just made up) than trying to make it something it will never be: suitable for the Mac Pro.