Just looking at the economics of the Mac Pro based on sales of the machine itself doesn't quite capture the full picture. An Apple Silicon Mac Pro could have many roles:
- A flagship product that demonstrates just how powerful Apple Silicon can be. This in turn could enhance the Apple / Mac brand for a certain group of users.
- An aspirational product for users who think that they might need more power in the future.
- A means of keeping companies that need a small number of powerful machines in the Apple camp.
- A proving ground for technology that ultimately makes its way into volume products.
All of these factors could make the product justify its development costs even if actual sales are small. I doubt that the highest end models of some premium car brands recoup their development costs but their value to the brand offsets those costs.
Yes, exactly. Add two more: a prestige product that motivates top talent, and senior management likes these products.
Halo cars like Corvette Z06 are exactly the right analogy. They sell at most 8000/year; there is no way it’s profitable as a line item. But it gets made for all of those indirect reasons.
> A flagship product that demonstrates just how powerful Apple Silicon can be.
The danger there is what if it isn't? Apple's riding high right now but what if AMD or Qualcomm or whoever takes the next crown? This is one of the things that almost killed the company back in the G4 days. Jobs would be up there on stage essentially lying to our faces about the "Personal Supercomputer" when any of us could look at the literally-twice-as-fast Coppermine boxes on our desks to see the truth.
Computers and technology are ephemeral and quirky. Apple's brand isn't and has never been[1] about selling "chips" or "computers". They sell "modes of interaction".
[1] The last pure-tech play from Apple was the Apple II+.
Hmmm, performance has been a key part of Apple’s branding for decades from Power PC (don’t disagree with your point on G4 though) through Intel in the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro and now on iPhones and M series Macs.
Edit - this is a comment about branding ie how Apple presents itself not actual performance.
I think the marketing of performance has always been a subthread.
But the actual machines have always been merely "good enough". The 68k macs lagged PCs significantly. PPC had a brief moment where it was faster than 486/P5 devices but then got demolished by P6+ cores, to the extent that Apple had to switch to Intel themselves. Then for almost two decades they shipped what amounted to the same silicon as high end windows laptops. MacBooks were "high performance", but not in a way that wasn't accessible to HP or Lenovo.
But all that relies on it not being a lie. If you lock your platform marketing not into merely "Insanely Great" but into the idea of Apple Silicon being best, then you need to make damn sure it actually is. And right now it is! But it needs to stay that way if you're going to bet the platform on it.
You're talking about laptops. To me, a heavy computer user, the case is more important than CPU performance. There Apple has always been second-to-none. Lenovo has always been second but one look at their laptops and I want to fall asleep.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say efficiency instead? It's to my understanding that the latest offerings from both AMD and Intel are competitive in regards to synthetic benchmarks at the cost of higher power consumption.
The other problem with Apple is just how expensive the RAM/SSD upgrades are now.
I've got a Mac Mini M1 as soon as it came out.
I recently got a Ryzen PC, 6 core 5600G w/ 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD. Cost approx £500. Upgrading the M1 spec from 256GB SSD to 1TB (£400) costs basically the same as the entire PC I bought. I'm impressed with the 5600G, it is super cool and quiet compared to what I was expecting and the 32GB of RAM makes much more of a difference to performance than the extra CPU perf of the M1.
It's really a bit ridiculous that Apple is still selling products with a base config of 8/256. I'm pretty sure that hasn't increased since I got the retina macbook pro in 2012 unless I'm mistaken?
> I'm pretty sure that hasn't increased since I got the retina macbook pro in 2012 unless I'm mistaken?
They were still using 128GB SSDs in the entry-level 13" MBP from 2015 (replaced by the touchbar MBP in late 2016, but not actually discontinued until sometime in 2017).
But are you not implying it with original statement?
Apple has publicly stated during their keynotes (albeit with slides that present minimal information) the efficiency their CPU holds over the aforementioned companies. And that isn't even going into the mobile space where Apple still holds the crown when it comes to performance on synthetic workloads.
Revisiting the keynote where the M1 was introduced [1] at 8:48 Apple states that the M1 uses the world's fastest CPU, which ties back into your argument, but then at 9:51 talks about performance per watt.
Apple does it again when the M2 was announced [2] at 58:21.
This isn't to say your argument isn't a valid one, and I hope I didn't give the impression that it is wrong; the optics has, at least in my perspective, shifted towards preferring power efficiency over raw performance output. What with tech news of x86 CPUs and GPUs from Nvidia and AMD consuming more and more power the M1 and M2 sip power by comparison.
No one doubts the performance of Apple devices, it's mainly efficiency by which it does so that has everyone paying attention to it.
. . . and much louder, and much bigger, and running Windows.
Macs have never been about highest possible performance at any price point. But there is a niche where people want a very fast computer that is quit and not too ugly (and who can find their apps on macOS).
Sorry, I don't think I was clear earlier. I blame post-Covid fatigue. I meant it more as a comparison to the Mac Pro (based on parent/grand parent comments). The Pro is expandable and upgradeable. And it - at least when introduced - was always basically the most desktop workstation you could buy short of sticking a server farm under your desk. The Studio is none of those things. So, while an equivalent Windows machine in the same pricing on a Studio can easily trounce a Studio, when thinking of what the next Mac Pro would theoretically deliver, there would be no equivalently priced Windows machine to trounce it. More like equal it but on Windows.
Given that TB3 and TB4 provide PCIe, Apple has retained their strategy of expansion that way as opposed to add-in cards. That was the approach of the trashcan and it's been retained in the Studio.
It's a valid approach in theory but it seems pretty clear that the market hasn't embraced it. The most recent Mac Pro recognized that people weren't embracing it, but really, are there many (or any?) 3P cards that can be plugged into a Mac Pro?
The Mac Studio is what the Trashcan Mac Pro tried to do. Only through efficiency will you get something that almost gets everything right of what the trashcan tried to do.
Putting two GPUS in a tight spot and the limitations of the time basically doomed it to failure but now we have much better data rates and better iGPUs.
Maybe much louder and maybe much bigger. Mac Pro's aren't exactly small either.
You can build/get quiet PCs too. Theres a whole PC accessory company called be quiet! even. And there's some very nice IMO cases that look better than the Mac Studio or Pro...
I screwed up and forgot to mention that this was more about the Mac Studio vs the Mac Pro and how they compare differently to the Windows side: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34222220
My comparison is up to date as the top end chips from Intel and AMD and the top-end Nvidia GPUs handily outpeform the top-end silicon in the Mac Studio's highest end configuration. And for a lower cost. The Studio is a solid machine, but it doesn't have the same 'this is about as good as you can get without a server farm' performance of the top-end Mac Pro when it launched.
"Apple is Dooomed!"
Google: 8,310,000 results in 0.38 seconds
NOBODY has transitioned to an other architecture like Apple has, nor has the industry been kicked in the shorts as many times as by apple. (wholesale inclusion of GPU in the OS, migration from Motorola, to Power PC, to Intel, to Arm to X Efficienty + Y Performance Cores...and nobody wrings as much out of the ARM architecture as Apple.
It's 'the same OS' from the watch, TV, Airpods to the Mac Pro.
There is no cost cutting the top end because it's ALL the same Platform. The Top end is the same as everything else with an additional parlor trick.
You're missing the point. Apple's decisions and methods have been criticized for longer than many HN viewers have been alive. The OP is making a claim that Apple's decisions are unwise [i]despite the fact that it's the most profitable company evar[/i] cite: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/apple-3-trillion-market-cap-fir...
What chance can anyone else have if the Mac Pro is doomed if iPhone sales dip?
People have not updated their opinions with regards to facts since 2008. It might actually be new information to that person that Apple is now the most profitable company in the existence of the human race.
The reason Apple is so profitable is because of the iPhone. The Macs aren't bringing in all that much money and I'm postulating that Mac will lose a lot of market share because they ditched the x86 architecture.
Although revenue for Mac is still increasing (most likely because they're making even more profit by using their own CPU) the sales are already softening.
For the foreseeable future the development costs of the Mac Pro will be a rounding error on Apple's P&L.
More of an issue now and in the coming years is bandwidth to do work on low volume products. They may be happy to spend the money but diverting key staff who could be working on a volume product, say the next iPhone SoC, that's a tougher call.
The Mac are what sustained Apple pre- and post-Jobs, when it WASN'T YET about "unprofitable vanity products". If the iPhone goes down, the Macs are exactly what Apple still has going for them...
I'm not sure. I'd love to share your optimism because, perhaps like you, I am not a "phone guy" and I probably never will be.
Increasingly though it feels like those of us who prefer a laptop (or desktop machine!) over a phone are like HAMs ... or perhaps guys that like manual transmissions.
It seems more likely that it will be the Macs that go down, and not the iPhones a decade or so from now.
That’s…so long ago. The Apple with a two trillion dollar market cap and a spaceship campus is not the Apple of that era. The wider market and world aren’t what they were then, either. It doesn’t mean very much at all.
The problem they had was that they sold individual standalone products, not platforms. There was very little to keep a user with the same vendor other than liking the next product. A platform is a different beast completely, and once a platform or set of platforms gets established at scale in a market, it’s almost impossible for a new entrant to compete with it.
This is because platforms have three advantages. The first is a user’s sunk investment. I own hundreds of pounds worth of iOS software, and even the free software I use took an investment of time and effort to learn. Plus I now have considerable assets in those file formats and storage systems. Switching to a new platform would be expensive in money and time. The second advantage is network effects, my whole family is on the same platform, so is my company and many of my friends using the same services. The third advantage is the ecosystem. There is a plethora of software and services available for iOS that a new entrant won’t have, many offered by third parties. In competing with iOS and Android you’re not just competing with Apple and Google, but also the entire ecosystems of companies that complement them. These three advantages also apply to Android and its users.
This is why even Microsoft could not break into the modern mobile smartphone platforms market, they were too late. Android and iOS had critical mass in all three areas. Google was incredibly lucky they managed to get Android up to being a viable platform before Apple had the entire mobile platform market sewn up. Fortunately the Android team at the time knew the new game they were playing when they saw the iPhone announcement, and realised they were in a race against time for survival.
This is also why the desktop is dominated today by the same platforms it was in the 90s. Mac and Windows. Arguably we could extend that to the 80s with Mac and DOS. That’s around 3 decades of stability. The mobile market in its current form was established around 12 years ago. I would not be at all surprised if the mobile market is still dominated by Android and iOS in another 20 years. There are incredibly powerful forces driving this.
> My surprise is that Android is the "other one" and not Windows Phone.
I'm not. Microsoft, with WP, copied the weak things from iOS (like being locked down, but also with very poor walled garden; single platform, Snapdragon reference design only), but not the strong ones. Android did it the other way, so I'm not surprised at all.
Microsoft actually had workable tablets by the mid-2000s. With Windows XP Tablet Edition. Then they wasted time and effort trying to push a crappy tablet UX (Windows 8) to desktop users.
Windows XP Tabled Edition was to tablets as Windows 8 was to desktops and laptops: a solid (for its age) OS, but with an interface that was not adequate for that form factor. Using it on a tablet was just as annoying as using Windows 8 on a laptop. I hated it, my colleagues hated it -- I don't know anyone who didn't hate it.
>Microsoft actually had workable tablets by the mid-2000s. With Windows XP Tablet Edition.
The problem was that the "Windows XP Tablet Edition" was utter crap. A desktop OS and its mentality shoved into tablet form with modifications that fell way short of what was actually needed for that form. The iPad was the first tablet that got it right - and feel like a tablet meant for tablety things, as opposed to a PC without a keyboard and crippled in all sorts of ways.
The Apple before being reverse acquired by NeXT was at the edge of bankruptcy, so Macs hardly sustained them back them to the point that they even got Microsoft's money to keep going.
They had sustained them for close to 20 years before that point of "edge of bankruptcy", and they soon grew into a great business post the colored Ive's iMac. It's only the iPod's phenomenal success that obscured their Mac unit, but the iMac and Powerbooks were already a big success when Jobs returned.
As for the "edge of bankruptcy" was due to a series of bad business decisions, not the Mac line itself. If anything, the Mac line and Mac customers was the only thing they still had going for them. It was the OS that was old and tired in an era of good enough Windows, Apple wasting resources in Copland, Newton and other endeavors without results, the blunder of allowing clones that ate into their Mac lunch, and so on.
Amazing mac haters still exist in 2023. The products have proven themselves in the market and with developers. Ignoring that is head-in-the-sand behavior.
What I find most surprising is that people think the computer industry is somehow immune from the most basic of human qualities: choice. It's perfectly fine if some people don't choose or don't like Apple products. Just as it is perfectly fine for some not to want to use Linux or buy Windows. It's just choice. How silly that for some it is a strange, almost religious, war.
my unscientific opinion, but i feel like people unconsciously associate validation of other (products, lifestyle etc) with an invalidation (ego) of their own choices... they are personalizing things...
Apple’s Mac business has been highly profitable relative to its PC competitors for several decades now. Their habit of consuming the lions share of the profits in an industry, from a small fraction of the sales, started with the Mac and was extended to the iPod and then the iPhone.
Siemens NX used to be available on macOS, up until about 5-6 years ago. However, Siemens found few customers were adopting it, so they discontinued it.
If Apple really cared about it, I'm sure they could have worked out some deal with Siemens to keep the macOS edition viable, even improve its UI to be native and more usable. It would require them to move away from viewing themselves just as a customer, into more seeing it as an investment into their own platform (making it viable for more use cases.) Sad to say, Apple doesn't seem to think like that much (or maybe some people there do, but not the people whose opinions really count)
Why Is it that the Mac Pro has so little Pro software available for it? Could it be the neglect? AV software used to be Apple's tentpole for Pro's, until they decided Prosumers were more profitable and lost mindshare of actual Pro's as a result (see the great migration after the releasee of the first Final Cut Pro X)
For CAD specifically I'd say "high end" are CATIA, NX and maybe Creo? SolidWorks and SolidEdge would form the tier below that.
For CAx in general it's difficult to say, because there's such a huge variety of software and every little niche has its own highly specialized (and usually very expensive) tools. I've never seen any of these support anything other than Windows and/or Linux. Some of them have Win32 GUIs and Linux is headless only (for running simulations), some are fully cross platform, some are Linux-only.
Most CAE engineers around here work on Linux, mainly because they prefer how easy it is to script and automate things and because the headless HPC/batch environment is of course also Linux. Meanwhile CAD and design only happens on Windows because CATIA is Windows only, like the various Autodesk tools used for CAID. From the late 80s to the early 2000s this place had a ton of UNIX workstations (SGI, HP, Sun) and even UNIX clusters (IRIX and SUPER-UX among others, the latter having virtually no representation on the internet today). There's also still IBM AIX systems around, as well as IBM mainframes. Not my department though.
> There's also still IBM AIX systems around, as well as IBM mainframes. Not my department though.
Are you saying some people still use IBM mainframes for CAD/CAE/etc applications? If yes, that's unexpected yet intriguing information, and I'd love to know more.
Although maybe you were just stating the obvious that IBM mainframes survive in general even if no longer in this particular domain.
Thanks for your answer! What makes it so that AutoCAD is not high end? Like what features does it lack or what workflows does it not support?
Suppose something like CATIA was available on Mac and offered lets say a performance benefit. Would you consider Mac? Or would you for example still need a whole other set of tools to be available as well for it to be even possible?
I have seen some posts on the Intel FPGA community forum about using Quartus Prime Pro (FPGA design software) on Apple Silicon. Apparently, it works, even though not officially supported.
I haven't had the time or the desire to take it for a spin yet, but I'd love to be able to compile FPGA designs on a nicely configured and quiet M2 system.
Xeons have many, many PCIe lanes. Apple Silicon only needs enough HSIO for SSD and Thunderbolt ports, and they’ve released all of the non-internally-expandable machines already. They needed a chip that added 48+ PCIe lanes to the package so they could satisfy the relatively few Mac Pro customers.
And without external DRAM, they’ll never be able to provide as much memory as a low-end Intel chip in the Mac mini at the same price point. In-package DRAM is better performing but it changes the price/perf graph.
Apple simply optimized their silicon packages for 90% (or more?) of their users over the outliers.
The on package DRAM for the current macs isn't anything special. It's just normal LPDDR running at normal LPDDDR speeds, same thing you find in your phone. On package has many advantages, but it's not a hard requirement.
The bigger is how much LPDDR5 memory they can hook up to their 512bit memory controller.
Maybe the very ability to make a 512 bit-wide memory controller stems from the very short, very tightly controlled and shielded lined between the DRAM chips and the controller?
(No idea if it's so, but DRAM is such an analog HF beast that a controller needs training before it can work with a particular chip, in a particular slot on a particular system board. It's automatic but it's there, and it must have limits.)
Considering that Mac Pro is a special purpose machine, maybe it can be possible to have an architecture with multiple M2 Ultra chips and expansion options for special purpose hardware? Highly parallelizable workloads and use cases with special hardware requirements(like encoding media, ML computations etc.) can benefit from this stuff. Apple already sells cards like this for Mac Pro.
Surely that would require architectural changes and the software would need to be adapted but since these machines are niche, so is the software and Apple can sponsor the development of the few software people are using on that kind of machines. Apple is sponsoring Blender for example.
Well, the Ultra is already multiple silicon dies (chiplets) on an interposer. So this would have to be multiple packages, sitting in separate sockets on the same logic board. I agree that this seems like it could be a viable strategy to get around any packaging constraints that they might have.
I see 3 steps: a) Mac Studio, b) MacPro with PCI/MPX modules, c) Dedicated HW boxes.
I think the size of the step between a and b is becoming too small to be viable: not enough extra performance, and too high price compared to step c.
Dedicated HW boxes connected using Ethernet/Thunderbolt/USB-C have the great advantage that you are no longer bound to whatever Apple offers this year. You will just use the Mac/Windows as a "advanced graphical terminal".
Same for hardware developers. Looking back at the past 10 years of MacPro shows great uncertainties in what Apple offers going forward. Why would you spend time making a PCI card for MacPro when Apple so easily abandons support for PCI with the TrashCan while you could have a reliable market with a thunderbolt/ethernet accessory?
IMO I think the reason why they didn't release the M1 Pro mini is because they didn't want to cannibalize their mac studio release. The M1 mini chassis has a ton of empty space, and the m1 pro is easily cooled by that space and is already cooled fine by the tiny macbook pro coolers, which also means an M1 Max mini would've worked fine also.
IMO the M1 Max studio body is unnecessary too, it's only really needed for the M1 Ultra, which would lead to barely anyone buying the mac studio form factor.
There’s some very interesting speculation on the ArsTechnica forums about how expandable RAM on a Mac Pro might look. It’s not my speculation but it’s definitely not all said and done from what I’ve read.
The Mac Studio was a new product category, sitting just beneath the Mac Pro. I suspect during development they were unsure of if it would actually be the Mac Pro, that would have probably been another 2013 Mac Pro debacle though.
The Mac Studio must be decimating Mac Pro sales, it must fit what 70-80% of Mac Pro users wanted. It's going to be incredible hard to Apple to justify development of an extended M architecture for a product used by a tiny fraction of their customers.
It wouldn't surprise me if they didn't press go on full Mac Pro development until they saw how the market reacted to the Studio.
One possibility is they reintroduce the XServe (and maybe XServe Cloud) with the larger expandable architecture to help justify its development.
The only other option is expanding the Mac Studios capability with external "stackable" peripherals, such as eGPUs.
I think it would be enough for the Pro to just be the same as the highest spec of the next generation Mac Studio, in a form factor that has PCIe and RAM slots. (I wonder if they could do some kind of memory hierarchy where you have, say, 32GB of the on-board unified memory soldered on to the processor like they have now, and then another eight slots or something of regular DDR5 sticks).
XServe would probably be pretty popular with the recent shift to ARM based servers for their lower power consumption. The problem would be their insistance for them to run full blown macOS instead of a dedicated Linux based server OS.
I think there's a chance they'd give you a thin iOS-based server OS (think watchOS or tvOS) with Hypervisor.Framework and let you choose what you run on it.
> XServe would probably be pretty popular with the recent shift to ARM based servers
I've been thinking for a while they'll bring XServe back (or the Mac Pro will be rackable) because they'll save a TON of money.
1. Lower power usage in their own data centres - that's gotta be huge.
2. Buying processors from themselves instead of from Intel.
Hopefully it will help get whatever chip they're going to use in the Mac Pro to some kind of production number that means economies of scale come into play.
The only thing I can see that the Studio can't do is access hardware directly. My M1 Ultra is beyond anything I could need performance wise (I mostly do complex generative art, but I only need all 20 cores only occasionally). I imagine a few people might need more than I have but it's probably not a large number.
Apple’s high end desktop strategy has been confusing to me for several years now. They made a big deal out of the iMac Pro, even though that seemed like an obvious quick fix for power users since the new Mac Pro wasn’t ready at the time. However, I never understood why Pros would want to pay more for an an all-in-one they couldn’t self service or upgrade when they probably already had monitors they preferred using.
Then they finally released the 2019 Mac Pro at a cost that I thought was prohibitive to all but the highest end professionals. I don’t remember previous Mac Pros being targeted this exclusively; heck, somebody in my freshman dorm in 2006 had the cheese grater Pro at the time for music production.
When they unveiled the Studio, I thought that they were replacing the Pro line with that product…but then they confirmed the Pro is still coming. I really do not know what differentiation there will be between the Studio and the new Pro. I’m curious to see what they do with expansion and dedicated GPUs, but considering they don’t play ball with Nvidia anymore it’s probably still going to be a niche product
In 2006, computing was less generous. A music producer probably needed a Mac Pro for their workflow to be efficient. Since then, Intel has massively reduced the delta between laptop and desktop chips. Coupled with the increase in computing ability of our processors while most tasks do not increase their needs (that music producer does not need more computing than in 2006) and desktops slowly faded to nothing but the most demanding tasks (ML, 8k video production, science, etc.) and Apple has gone upmarket with the Mac Pro to chase this market.
With that change, laptops have become the computer market. Look at Apple's iMac offering; they no longer have multiple models and the insides are now laptop parts. The Mac Studio is simply the desktop computer that gets the Macbook Pro chips. Since they don't want to engineer a cooling solution behind a monitor every time, we get a simple box with a ginormous fan.
The Mac Pro was supposed to be the computer with the truly desktop-only ARM chip. Even that seems cancelled now. I don't know what Apple is planning.
> […] and the insides are now laptop parts. The Mac Studio is simply the desktop computer that gets the Macbook Pro chips.
«Laptop parts» connect M1 CPU clusters to RAM via a 512-bit wide (M1 Max) and a 1024-bit wide (M1 Ultra) memory bus yielding 100 Gb/sec (per a CPU core), 200 Gb/sec (per a CPU cluster) and 400 (M1 Max)/800 (M1 Ultra) Gb/sec cumulative data transfer speeds. GPU and ANE cores access the main memory via the same wide memory bus. L1 caches (I+D) are 128kB+64 kb (efficiency cores) and 192+128 kb (performance); L2 caches are 24 Mb (M1 Max) and 48 Mb (M1 Ultra), and L3 cache is 48 Mb (Max) and 96 Mb (Ultra). Auxiliary tasks (disk encryption, video encoding/decoding etc) are off-loaded to dedicated processing units which is reminiscent to that a typical mainframe architecture with channel processors and channel programmes rather than that of a laptop.
Most «hi-end» servers today do not come anywhere close to such configurations leave alone the form factor and the net system efficiency. 512-bit wide memory bus is currently only found inside hi-end GPU cards, and the compute off-loading / accelerating units are an add-on feature for a server that may or may not be available.
Only POWER10 and Telum systems from IBM offer similar (albeit far more scalable and feature rich) designs and at a completely different price scale.
… which is another testament to the fact that a wide memory bus is an attribute of server or hi-end components rather than «laptop parts» that one can throw into a bucket, stir vigorously, cook on a slow fire and get a M1 Ultra with a 1024-bit wide memory bus.
I ought to have used «typically» rather than «currently» as wide memory buses were coming and going more mainstream in the server space, whilst not yet being widely available today. The hardware transition cycle will take a few years, and as of today «currently» still holds true, semantically and factually, as cloud platforms and data centres run nearly entirely exclusively on Xeon something Lake and EPYC 3rd Gen CPU's, and neither has such a wide memory bus.
> … per socket.
Does that mean that 2x socketable EPYC CPU's (say, 512-bit wide each) will be able to access RAM via a 1x 1024-bit wide memory bus? If yes, how will access to RAM work, i.e. access multiplexing – memory banks? time interleaved access? something else?
> Does that mean that 2x socketable EPYC CPU's (say, 512-bit wide each) will be able to access RAM via a 1x 1024-bit wide memory bus?
No. All recent dual-socket platforms are NUMA, meaning a CPU only has fast access to its local memory, and accessing memory attached to the other CPU socket requires going through a slower link between sockets.
NUMA-aware operating systems and applications try to avoid allocating memory on a different NUMA node than the processor cores that will be using that memory. On AMD EPYC, the internal structure of the IO die (memory controller) means it is sometimes advantageous to enable the option for the system to report more than one NUMA node per socket.
I am no stranger to NUMA since SGI days, and AMD EPYC is a ccNUMA.
If I read it correctly, 512- and 768-bit wide memory bus is available to access the socketed CPU's local memory only (which is relatively small), and access to the shared memory (which is large to very large) seems to be still via a switched Infinity Fabric memory controller.
How wide is the Infinity Fabric nowadays? I can't easily find the conclusive evidence.
That's an interesting point. Do you know a good reference comparing laptop vs desktop cpu performance? I'm always confused by comparisons that inevitablty are affected by other laptop specific components (differences in mgpu / motherboard chipsets etc).
Let's forget the whole Apple Silicon thing, and look at 2020. The difference in single core is minuscule, but the big difference is multicore. Unless you need those extra cores, those computers are equivalent.
Now compare a 2010 Mac Pro and the 2010-2012 consumer laptops. Single core is 100%, multi-core is at least 400%. That's a big delta and that's only 2010.
If you go back into the past, it would surely ebb and flow but surely stay in that zone. I'd expect a laptop to be half the speed of a big pro desktop all the way to the prehistoric times when all computers were beige and laptops charged extra to get rid of screen ghosting.
The MBP was plenty sufficient for most music production tasks even in 2004 when I got my first one. If I were running a pro studio with a 32+ channel mixing desk, I could see needing more, but I was able to manage 16 channels of live recording and at least 64 channels of live mix on my 2004 TiBook.
Of course my point is not super strict about dates, it's about trends. I'm sure you were fine in 2004, but the more you go back into the past, the more a desktop is required.
And the more you move into the future the more a laptop is fine.
That's a really good point. I think it would be far more likely to see that same freshman with a Mac Studio in their dorm now instead of a Mac Pro even if it was at a similar price point as the Studio - just smaller and more practical.
> I don’t remember previous Mac Pros being targeted this exclusively; heck, somebody in my freshman dorm in 2006 had the cheese grater Pro at the time for music production.
Well, even before the rise of covid-induced work-from-home, Apple has been shepherding almost all of their users onto laptops.
That college student's 2006 Mac Pro might have had 1GB RAM [1] - but these days, Apple has a laptop for users wanting 64GB RAM. And it isn't a suitcase-sized mobile workstation either.
People wanting more power than that for things like ML and scientific computing will often be shifting their workload to the cloud or a cluster anyway - it's only people doing interactive tasks like CAD and high-end video editing who are buying the Mac Pro.
The switch to working from home made high-end workstations a bit more relevant. While offices had fast and reliable internet connections, the quality of home internet is often much worse. You can't rely on the cloud as much from home as from office.
I develop bioinformatics methods and software, and I see significant productivity gains when I can run tests with full datasets locally. So far I've been using an iMac with 128 GB RAM, but I'd like to upgrade to something with 256 GB or even 512 GB. As the Mac Studio is pretty underwhelming from my perspective, the options are basically a hypothetical Mac Pro and a Linux box.
> While offices had fast and reliable internet connections,
most offices I’ve been around have internet that tops out no more than a little faster than a decent home connection, but have dozens of people sharing them.
A while back I built a linux box for bioinformatics and was happy with the performance [1]. You might need to look for suitable main boards to support your RAM requirements, though.
I think its fairly obvious they've hit some problems. I know they lost a lot of key people in their silicon development team so perhaps thats the reason.
Whatever it is they're struggling to get the performance they need for a Mac Pro level machine.
I'd imagine part of it is going to be that they'll want to continue using Nvidia or AMD GPU's to allow for higher performance. That can't be an easy or simple thing to get working with their custom ARM based architecture.
Also, there’s a tension between the tightly integrated M1 Ultra and the expandability implied by the Mac Pro in its classic form (which the 2019 model revived). It almost seems like they need to go multi-socket with NUMA to scale CPU and memory further. This presents a very different programming model than the shared everything model of the Mac Studio.
Hopefully what’s also left is a 27-inch iMac with M2 or M2 Pro chip inside. The current 24-inch iMac just doesn’t cut it, and the Mac Studio + Apple Display combo is way to expensive compared to the price point of Intel iMacs.
Yeah, I was going to mention 27 inch iMac as well. I used to work for a design agency and we used to buy 27 inch iMacs with upgraded CPUs and 16GB of RAM, and then we would install another 32GB of RAM ourselves. The quality of the 5K screen was good enough, savings on the RAM upgrade were significant, they were quite good computers for the price. We used them for all designers that didn't need to attend too many meetings. More senior people got laptops. During COVID we moved everyone to laptops, but I was still curious what Apple will do with the powerful iMac. Let's not forget they also offered iMac Pro, with a Xeon CPU and 128GB of RAM.
I'd imagine most people going for the Mac Studio arent touching the balked Apple Display. It's been riddled with problems and at that price point you can get far better displays now. The panel they're using dates back to 2017 so it's not exactly like you're getting the latest and greatest in screen technology.
Other displays have higher refresh rates, but the resolution is still special. Color accuracy is also great.
The annoying bug with choppy repeating audio stays unfixed 8 months after introduction and fix with the hassle of disconnecting the monitor from power for an extended time is just ridiculous.
When you really look into what's available, there's a fair bit of variation in the market for different customers, but there's incredibly few 5k+ displays at 27 or ~30 inches. Like zero if you discount the LG. Everything else is kind of ok, but not always a good replacement.
"The ViewFinity S9 (Model Number: S90PC) is Samsung’s newest addition to its monitor lineup. It features a 5K 27” screen for the first time and is optimized for creative professionals such as graphic designers and photographers. Its 5,120 x 2,880 resolution combined with its wide color gamut of 99% DCI-P3, provides crisp and true-to-form details, and its average Delta E ≦ 2[1] color accuracy also produces clear and precise color representation, even in complicated or nuanced visual environments."
Wow, that's extremely timely and is pretty much exactly what I was hoping someone would link to correct me. I'll keep my eye on that, thanks. I'd personally still only be in the market for a >27" size, just because I feel like 27" is too small, but this would open the floor for competition in that range.
I really like the 30" Ultrasharp, and would consider a 32" as long as the resolution, connectivity, pixel density, and panel tech are in place.
> This is about to change with higher spec connectors being more widely available.
Thunderbolt 3 has been around for over five years on mainstream Mac (and Windows) machines, so what’s the excuse again?
I can count the number of monitors in the same resolution space (or higher) on one hand! ;) There’s the insanely priced XDR 6K, there’s the not much better priced Dell 8K, then there’s the LG 5K that’s cheap plastic build quality and hasn’t been refreshed in 5 years. Anyone else? … Bueler?
I have one, and from a pure display standpoint, it's the second best display I've ever used right behind the latest MBP 16". I don't use the speakers or webcam, and wish Apple would have left them off and dropped the price. Unfortunately there just isn't any 5k competition out there so Apple can do what they want. If it was cheaper I would have bought two, but as it stands I'm using an old 4k as my secondary monitor.
I had to replace my 27-inch iMac anyway (it just died). But I agree with you, I haven’t found a display as good as the iMac’s that isn’t €1500. I settled with what was supposed to be one of the best Dells for that size (4K, which is itself a compromise); the viewing angles are suboptimal and luminosity is not that great.
How will Apple recoup the cost of designing a powerful chip for a product like the Mac Pro, which is presumably their lowest-selling product?
Most of the M-series chips are shared across multiple products, but the Mac Pro seems to be a clear case where using a powerful off-the-shelf Intel chip makes more business sense right now.
I don’t see Apple doing it simply as a vanity project, so there will have to be some innovation or new product line coming if an Apple Silicon Mac Pro is to ever exist.
It may be that an Apple Silicon Mac Pro isn't profitable, but it's still good business sense to produce it. It gives them a way to push the cutting edge in a way that none of their other products do, and the things they invent for it may filter down the product line. At the same time, the sort of professionals that buy Mac Pros are good customers to have, even if there aren't many of them. Ignoring them has hurt Apple in the past. At the end of the day, Apple can afford to lose a bit of money on a small volume product for a few generations while they work out the kinks.
Yeah, that’s a common analysis people seem to miss even though Apple is very clearly vertically integrated. Software maintenance costs are so much significantly higher that unifying HW is significantly more value even if the margins aren’t as good. The high end macs serve as cachet status symbols amongst the creators and designers which tend to contain a lot of trend setters + mind share + creative software being optimized around the macs which then means that hardware is purchased at disproportionately higher levels (+ potential downstream effects where if you’re mostly a max shop already, shouldn’t you just get the MacBook Air and other Apple devices to simplify corporate device management?). Also a unified HW platform ALSO reduces software maintenance costs for partners and which is a nice virtuous cycle of encouraging that porting to happen. Apple has a uniquely holistic view of the market place that they’ve cultivated over decades and I’ve seen no sign that they’ve ever lost sight of that like many competitors due at much smaller market caps.
Exactly this. There's a cost to supporting Intel forever only for the Mac Pro and nothing else.
Not only a cost to Apple, but also a cost to 3rd party Mac developers, who would be even less likely to have the resources to support the Mac Pro for its own sake.
Apple dropped PowerPC support in Mac OS X (10.6) 3.5 years after the Intel transition started, and they dropped Rosetta support in Mac OS X (10.7) 2 years after that.
IIRC the last PPC Mac hardware was discontinued very soon after the Intel transition started.
Certainly not for 3rd party developers, who get $0 from Mac Pro sales. Hard to sell a machine if there's no software support.
Anyway, no, not for Apple either, because Mac Pro unit sales are already low, and trying to make that one Mac model cover the cost of all macOS Intel support will make the already expensive and low volume Mac Pro even more expensive, and thus even lower volume, making it harder to cover the cost.
I wouldn't be surprised if they keep internal Intel support anyway - as well as other architectures.
The difference would be supporting Intel publicly - with third-party developers. As the target for Mac Pros won't just be running a load of electron apps.
I feel like Mac Pro purchasers also have an accompanying MacBook Pro and iPhone and are more entwined in the ecosystem than the typical user.
Frustrating those people likely comes with a risk of losing high value customers.
I think it’s similar to the model a lot of game consoles have. They make little to negative profit on the console itself during the first couple years, but make it up on software and other benefits of hardware lock-in.
> They could accomplish that by simply killing off the Mac Pro line.
In the time after the trashcan Mac Pro they lost a significant portion of the professional market. And while that market is relatively small, it's highly influencial.
By the time Final Cut Pro X was unveiled Apple could boast that 60% of Hollywood movies are edited on a Mac. Now? Not so much. And this probably extends into other areas, too.
Indeed. Releasing FCP X as an MVP (a concept no-one outside of software dev understands), without the features in FCP 9 that professionals expect, was a bad idea. I know a couple of filmmakers that switched to PC, partly due to the cost of Macs but also because of FCP X.
Do we know how long it will take? Apple doesn't have a huge history of backward compatibility. This could be a not so subtle nudge to force everyone to re-buy their hardware at a time people are keeping their computer hardware for longer.
Presumably it isn't that low volume. Just low volume compared to their other products.
They can probably heavily base a more powerful chip on their existing designs but with more cores & cache, so design should be relatively cheap. Manufacturing the masks etc. is probably around $10m which is probably fine given how expensive Mac Pros are (and it would simplify their software if they can ditch Intel entirely).
>How will Apple recoup the cost of designing a powerful chip for a product like the Mac Pro, which is presumably their lowest-selling product?
Which is the question I have been asking since 2015. From a cost prospective it never made any sense. Presumably they will wait until Mac Studio becoming powerful enough to fill the gap.
>but the Mac Pro seems to be a clear case where using a powerful off-the-shelf Intel chip makes more business sense right now.
It surely does. Except it will be the only Mac in the lineup without Metal Support and Apple's increasingly important NPU for Machine Learning features. I dont see it as a good trade off.
Which is the question I have been asking since 2015. From a cost prospective it never made any sense. Presumably they will wait until Mac Studio becoming powerful enough to fill the gap.
To me the only reason they still make products like the Mac Pro is for brand reputation and face-saving. It’s like when a big auto maker sponsors a formula 1 racing team. There’s no profit in formula 1 (for the auto makers). It’s just a giant money pit!
Right, as a brand reputation item, if you're building an ecosystem you need to have a clear upgrade path for all your users.
If I'm starting out today and looking to choose a PC or Mac ecosystem, if I see that the Mac has an upper bound that's lower than the PC, then in my starry-eyed optimism as a newbie I'll think I might as well start as the PC since one day when I'm super successful and I need more power I'm going to have to change platforms anyway.
Even if none of those users will ever end up using any more power than the Mac Studio, if they're convinced they will then they will not choose your ecosystem.
I have a 2011 Mac Pro that supports Metal. ;) I think it was Mojave (10.14) that required Metal support for all graphics cards, which effectively killed off a bunch of older machines, but the Mac Pro was the one that had Metal support going back the furthest to I think 2010 (most others were 2012 or later).
I corrected my comment as I realized I was mistaken? I didn't see that I had a reply, and I wasn't able to delete my comment. You must have replied instantly because this all happened within a couple of minutes of me originally writing the comment. I frequently update comments like this.
Fair enough. It does show a 5 minute difference between the comments, so not instant but I recognize edits happen. It’s just that each of your edits were so wildly different.
As for your latest update, I had already mentioned that in my comment as a caveat, though I hadn’t shared the link which is always great to have.
Silly idea: could they put a M-series processor connected to a Xeon as a coprocessor to get the “benefits” of both wrt. adding their NPU stuff? Would that even make any sense?
Hardware level stuff is a bit lower than my area but...
The two tricky things I'd anticipate are:
What does it look like to hardware? Different CPUs speak different protocols to maintain a cache coherent view of memory. So they couldn't easily share memory in a completely natural way - but GPUs manage to share memory between host and GPU, so it can be done (just not necessarily as conveniently to software).
What does it look like to software? Lots of weird options here. Most convenient for software compatibility is it the Intel is also somehow running MacOS (or appears to be). I guess you could do that - it'd be like having a two node cluster in one machine. But that's not as convenient as being able to distribute computation between compatible CPUs.
None of that is a complete technical blocker to a company that controls their stack, I'd just guess it would make it too inconvenient / expensive for them to do.
That said - as an intern, years ago, I once had access to a piece of prototype hardware that had an x86 chip in one motherboard CPU socket and a non-x86 chip in the other (with various adaptation hardware to allow them to play nice). I think that was more a proof of concept than anything else, not necessarily viable without other hardware changes. Interesting nonetheless.
Sun used to sell PCI cards with a complete Intel computer on them. You'd use your Sun workstation for the hard stuff, and then you'd let the P3/Celeron running Win2k handle Outlook or whatever other Win32-only software you needed.
I saw a lot of new-in-box examples cheap on eBay prior to Sun's implosion, so I suspect they weren't particularly popular and were primarily targeted at a few important customers that had some box to tick.
Funnily enough, that's what I had in mind when I asked! Other companies have done similar in the past, though with modern chips, chipsets and protocols/timing requirements on lines, I think it might be more difficult?
> How will Apple recoup the cost of designing a powerful chip for a product like the Mac Pro, which is presumably their lowest-selling product?
They are not starting from scratch. The Apple Silicon MX chips all share a common base, and are related to the AX chips. When every product Apple sells is using some version of the same family of chips, a lot of the design cost is spread across all Apple devices.
Then it's just the incremental design cost that must be recouped for things like (speculated) off die RAM.
Low volume simply means higher unit prices, doesn't it? The Mac Pro as an explicitly professional high-end machine is OK to be expensive. Its USP compared to fast x86 machines is that it runs macOS.
A 32-core or 64-core Threadripper Pro workstation with a few hundred GB of RAM can easily run north of $10.000 and people buy them. The price is not an issue if the computer is fast enough. The question is how fast would a hypothetical 40-core or 48-core M2 Extreme be.
Sure, Threadripper makes economical sense for AMD only when "subsidised" by EPYC/Ryzen sales and the shared chiplet architecture. But Apple has deep enough pockets for halo products. They are allegedly repurposing some of the binned/sub-par silicon into internal server hardware anyway.
I am under the impression they do not run macOS in their own datacenters. And, unlike mortals, if they need to run macOS in datacenters, they're not bound by their own license to never virtualize macOS on non-macOS hosts, they can do as they please.
macOS or Linux, it doesn't matter - all hyperscale datacenter operators are going to move as much as possible to the highest perf/watt platform (ie ARM). Apple is a hyperscale datacenter owner and operator, if only for iCloud.
AWS is already doing so with Graviton.
It has nothing to do with macOS.
Graviton CPUs are not for sale. If Apple wants a million ARM cores to run iCloud, they are going to have to get TSMC to fab them.
A high-end chip usable in the Mac Pro will draw more power than the M1 Ultra at 60W. I don’t think they are gonna fit a chip like that into any wearable unless the device comes with a backpack with the processing elements (and battery) in it.
I don’t know if it’s the fault of Apple Silicon, but on my Mac applications regularly crash. That includes ACDSee, IINA, qBittorent, Edge, KeePassXC, Sublime Text, Sublime Merge… There is at least one crash every 3 days. Nothing like it happens on my Windows, Linux or FreeBSD systems. It’s my first Mac, so I can’t compare this experience to Intel Macs, and so I don’t know if it’s just that MacOS is so unstable in general, or if those are still pains of migration to a new ISA.
(Often, when one application crashes, a couple others follow not long after.)
> It’s my first Mac, so I can’t compare this experience to Intel Macs, and so I don’t know if it’s just that MacOS is so unstable in general, or if those are still pains of migration to a new ISA.
Your issues are not normal. For example, here on my Studio, the uptime is 9 days, with Sublime Text started from the beginning and used quite heavily during most days. It has 5 windows with 5 to 10 tabs in each with no issue whatsoever. My experience with my previous (Intel) Macs was about the same; I haven't seen visible effects of the ISA change besides not hearing any fan anymore (and a speed bump, but I tend to use my computers for a very long time, so there is always a speed boost when I get a new one).
If it is under warranty, it's probably worth having a chat with Apple support. Otherwise, I would recommend trying to diagnose hardware failures (particularly RAM; beyond 8GB it should not swap regularly-used applications).
MacOS is rightly criticised for becoming less robust in several ways, but that is mostly fancy new features. And Time Machine. For some reason they cannot seem to get it perfect, which is a shame because it is the best backup solution I have used yet. The core OS is quite reliable and really should not crash things like that.
I’ve never had Sublime Text crash on any platform. I‘ve used it for years. Sounds like a hardware problem. Or if you’ve never done a clean install, bad configuration/apps buried in old data.
In general I find macOS very stable. Though I do not use any of the same apps you do aside from Sublime Text and qBittorrent
On qBittorrent specifically the application can often "feel" like it is hanging because it brings up modal windows behind the main window, meaning you need to drag the main window away to interact with the modal and the main window will be unresponsive in that time. This may make it feel like it is hanging, when really it's just down to a non-native macOS application not using the correct APIs to display modal sheets
I do occasionally get other application crashes, maybe a couple per month, usually it's down to the application doing something it shouldn't. My current macOS uptime is 28 days, which is when I last installed an update that required a restart
I can't remember the last time I had something crash on one of my macs, though I don't run any of the above. But it seems like it could be a problem with your machine
I am not experiencing any crashes on mine. Of the listed apps I use IINA, qBittorent, Sublime Text. I use around 30 apps frequently, none of them are crashing.
Have you tried reinstalling everything from scratch? If yes, then it is very likely a HW issue. If others suggest a better method for checking where the fault lies, other than reinstalling, then follow their advice.
Yeah, compared to my 12th-gen i9 XPS laptop, my M1 Pro *never* crashes. Granted, the XPS now crashes much less since I switched to Linux 5.19, but it still hangs (mostly due to wake from sleep issues) much more often than my MBP.
There was info a while back that memory management issues become more obvious on Apple Silicon, problems that x86 is more forgiving of. Can’t find the source unfortunately.
What I like about Apple is that they have such a clear product lineup that it allows for speculation like this article.
On the other hand Microsoft's surface lineup makes no sense and is super confusing. That's true for Samsung as well. Even if these companies had the engineering capacity to make chips like M1; I doubt they would attract even a fraction of the media attention enjoyed by Apple.
Apple has done this since Steve Jobs returned to apple the late 90's, they cut down all of the unnecessary models and products lines that were causing this kind of confusion.
They've kinda gone that way again with sticking the "Pro" and "Max" terms onto everything, especially the iPhone models.
It seems strange to include the Mini. As it is more of an Intel Mac for those who somehow still need Intel macOS for whatever reason. The memory capacity is limited in ARM Mac. So if you want high capacity memory you go to Mac Studio.
And with Mac Studio, which brings us the next question. What are the Market Mac Studio couldn't compete with Mac Pro. If it is not powerful enough now, will possibly another doubling of LPDDR6, that is 512GB with 1.5TB/s of bandwidth with M3 Ultra be enough?
The only market I could think of right now is Audio Professionals with specific Plug in Sound Card. Could that market not be served if Apple had made a few more Thunderbolt 4 port available?
The market of VFX, which without an Mac Pro, might end up going back to Windows or custom built Linux desktops, like many Hollywood studios did when migrating away from SGI, and Pro wasn't still an option.
VFX has largely been on Linux workstations since the demise of SGI. There’s never really been a Mac presence at the workstation level at those studios.
Windows is already in many studios due to VR or Virtual Production work, since Unreal Engine kind of sucks on anything that isn’t Windows, and the same goes for VR.
However there are a few areas that Macs are used heavily and where I don’t think Apple need to be worried:
- artists that need to use Adobe products or anything non Linux. Macs offer better Linux like workflows for pipelines since it’s Unix like, so is favoured for pipeline integration and macOS has much better colour handling than windows. So you’ll see in house concept artists, matte painters and the like on macs. VFX editors tend to be on macs for the same reason. Those are the folks that a Mac Pro would be handy for.
- dailies review boxes. Macs again are better for playback and the arm macs are so quiet they’re perfect for a review room. More RAM is always welcome here.
- coordinators and producers are almost always on Mac laptops. They’re unparalleled for battery life in a compact body. Plus since macs need to be supported for the above two use cases, it makes sense to use them as well.
- conform machines to handle media conversions often are macs. Though this depends greatly on what formats are being used
"macOS has much better colour handling than windows". How is that ? Do you just mean apple screens have a better color calibration when you get them ? Or the OS come with some tools to handles colors in some ways Windows can't ?
Windows has fairly poor colour management throughout the OS.
If you stick to apps that are specifically colour managed, and manage your own screen profiles, it’s fine, but compare it to the Mac where:
* you get much better EDR/HDR support at the OS level, so it tries to handle perceptual EDR ranges when apps switch to EDR.
* the OS itself has better management for colour profiles for the screen (also better refresh rate management when it comes to common film rates)
* Macs come with P3 colour handling for their first party displays https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT210435 , and while you can colour manage a windows/Linux machine post facto, it’s nice to have a system come with a good baseline that reflects their screen properties. For example, coordinators don’t need colour accuracy BUT it does help when their laptops present it well. Most desktop users would use an Eizo instead.
* safari does a better job than chrome/Firefox at handling embedded image colour metadata , and also managing EDR colour.
* similarly Preview, QuickTime and Finder are better at respecting embedded colour profiles and EDR where applicable than Windows Media Viewer and Explorer.
Most of this can of course be replicated on Windows, but you have to go out of your way to do so. Plus you’d still lack the macs EDR handling that is great for review sessions etc…
macOS doesn’t cover everything of course. Images with custom LUTs still need their own viewer apps, but I can’t emphasize how nice it is to have much more trust in what you’re seeing and reducing the mental friction while doing a lot of your ancillary work outside specific apps. It’s not perfect, but so much better then Windows where it’s a crapshoot what colour you’re going to see depending on how you view it.
It's a mixture of the calibration and the quality of the panel. You can have a color accurate panel that you calibrate if yourself, but if the max output is 250nits it won't be useful.
Tile based rendering wouldn’t matter for VFX work. They use path tracing. Nobody is really using rasterizers except for viewports, where it’s rare to be pushing so many polys that you’d bog down the GPU first (you’d almost always hit memory limits or CPU limits first dealing with that many transforms).
I’m not sure I agree that a TBDR is bad for high poly counts. There’s nothing inherent to the architecture that I can think of that would limit it for pure polygon work. Usually the biggest hold up is full screen effects that need to work on the entire buffer but those are rare for VFX.
What's needed to complete the Apple Silicon transition is TSMC's recent start to 3nm volume production.
Originally, TSMC projected 3nm risk production to start at the tail end of 2021, so Apple would have had chips for multiple product lines that were designed to be fabbed at 3nm in 2022.
Given how efficient Apple chips are, doesn't it make sense for them to make a chip that can be used both in the next Mac Pro and in the cloud servers? They can at least use their own chips in their data centers and save on power usage
I’m fine with the current mini but need to be able to use three 4K displays. That either means using some kind of hack to do that or buying a Studio. Or waiting for maybe a Mini Pro.
I'm in the same boat. I have no problem with the processing speed of the Mini but I want to be able to drive my 6ft of monitors on my desk. Right now I'm using a hackintosh, but I'd switch in a heartbeat if I could
What is the biggest hurdle for the M2 Mac Pro? Is it connectivity that isn't suppported by the chip? E.g. when they want external DRAM and GPU, the M2 SoCs simply don't have that capability so a whole new SoC would be required, with features that would only be used in the Pro, making it a questionable investment?
Or is there a more technical hurdle, e.g. that supporting external Dram and third party GPU would require more fundamental changes than merely building a new SoC?
Could it be many still need CUDA and hence unless they can somehow fit in Nvidia they … But they do not want to. Hence not sure what is the point other than they can win the war against CUDA.
CUDA or not, I don't think many will buy a mac pro unless it delivers what the last one did in terms of Graphics. And that probably requires at least using separate graphics card in the several-hundred-watt class. They obviously aren't going to shove a 400W graphics card into the SoC and they aren't going to shrink the power requirements by an order of magnitude for GPUs. An they also aren't going to enter the business of making discrete pro graphics cards. nvidia and AMD can afford to do that research work because it trickles down to consumer/gamer cards. But Apple surely can't motivate that research expense.
So the only thing that makes sense is to either make no Mac pro tower workstation with discrete GPUs at all, or doing what they did last time, using third party cards.
Couldn't you connect external DRAM to a Mac Studio via Thunderbolt if you really wanted to? Or is that still missing the same memory coherence semantics as actual DRAM sticks?
Thunderbolt has around two orders of magnitude less bandwidth and two orders of magnitude higher latency than the DRAM in that machine. Viewed through the narrow <40 Gbit/s TB3/4 funnel, you'll have trouble telling DRAM and a PCIe 4 SSD apart.
IMHO Mac mini isn't going to die any time soon; it is there in the lineup to be hostable/rackable operations glue for running old software and (old operating systems) headless.
I doubt they will release a M2 Pro Mini. They will instead update the Mac Studio. Conversely, if they make a M2 Pro in the current Mini form factor, they'll likely use that as an excuse to redesign the regular M2 Mini to be smaller (Mac Micro) and more compatible with DC-power data centers.
I buy Mac Mini because OSHA once demanded (and I find it’s not a bad idea) that I use screens instead of laptops to avoid employees spending 7hrs bending to neck. So they have 2 displays at work and 2 displays at home, and a Mac Mini, total 2300€, better than a 2800€ Macbook Pro + screens.
What is the state of the art, do all of you simply buy a top-notch Macbook Pro and work on it all day?
I have a Macbook Pro but keep it plugged in for longer stretches of work. I couldn’t give up the convenience of being able to just unplug and sit on a couch from time to time. Not mentioning working from places outside of office and home.
Can't say I'm state of the art, but I pretty much work on an M1 Max MBP all day, and I'm completely happy with it as a dev + art/design machine. Plus a tablet screen for drawing and sculpting.
It's the best machine I've ever had. But then again I've only owned laptops since 1998. Still keep my 2014 Macbook Air on the desk just as a conferencing / music box.
[edit] I also only work from my home office when I have to... the rest of the time I'll be working on the porch, at the kitchen table, out at a cafe, etc.
Right now I have a 16" MBP connected to a TB4 dock. A 5k Studio Display is my primary monitor with a 27" 4k LG display as a secondary. The MBP screen is my tertiary screen.
What if instead of the pro they brought back the server. Since they own all the hardware and the OS, I wonder if they could make some kind of magic task scheduling engine to seamlessly run jobs on the MServer. It sees you are rendering 3d animation so it just sends it to the server for you.
I don't see a reason the Mac Pro has to have a more powerful CPU than the Mac Studio. For example the Macbook Pro and Macbook Air also share the same CPU at certain levels.
The difference could be in expandability (PCIe slots) and RAM if they are able to either move the RAM off-die or have a NUMA architecture.
Interesting to speculate though. So far they also haven't launched a multi-socket product, maybe that's what the Mac Pro could launch with.
Niagara makes HVAC control software and there's a big push to get it Mac compatible. Seems like a terrible time to make the investment now with two architectures involved. Prolonging the transition isn't in anybody interest.
Developers either target apple silicon and ignore intel, ignore apple silicon and rely on rosetta2 for as long as that's here, or invest in both to optimize performance and just eat all the extra work both require? I'm not a mac user, is there such a thing as making a app targeting apple silicon work on a x86 machine?
If someone is looking to add their application to Mac it really seems like a bad time to do it, wait a year and more apple silicon will be out there and you could reasonably target just that and be OK. Apple prolonging the transition is not good for anybody, but I guess we can blame this on supply chain.
Why would anything in HVAC control software be written in a way that is at all specific to a particular CPU architecture? Most software really doesn't need to use inline assembly or SIMD intrinsics, so usually the only extra effort to support both x86 and arm is in configuring the build system correctly.
I admit I don't know the software at that level but I think you would be surprised, it's a web server, db engine, and all sorts of things rolled up into it. This is commercial/industrial HVAC, it has more in common with emulating a PLC on PC hardware than say a nest thermostat app. I know it interacts with serial and ethernet ports to speak multiple languages (BACnet/LonWorks/Modbus/hundreds more) and they like to have some close relationship with the hardware, some of which is for licensing...
They currently support windows, redhat, and just added Ubuntu. Very much similar version of the software runs on their "native" jace 8000 (PLC lite) hardware, which is ARM under it all so you would think they already have experience in that area.
> which is ARM under it all so you would think they already have experience in that area.
I think you are probably still incorrectly assuming that the CPU architecture and instruction set have any relevance. What you've described sounds like the kind of software that is a portability challenge due to being tied to specific operating systems and their particular APIs for interacting with peripherals. It doesn't sound like anything that should much more than a recompile to target a new CPU architecture, provided that the application has already been ported to the operating system that will be used on that architecture. Certainly nothing you've described would require hand-tuned assembly code to reach adequate performance on a decade-old laptop.
Apple literally had the Avengers of the chip industry working for them until the M1, which was a groundbreaking chip and still is for its unmatched performance per watt.
Just like sports, a team can’t stay at the top forever. Now that Apple has lost many of their Avenger members in their chip division, they need to be humble and go back to the drawing board. AMD and Qualcomm are getting closer to their performance per watt.
The M2 showed that the M1 architecture is done. They need to build something new up from the ground up but that’s going to challenge. Let’s see if they can pull it off.
Several key M1 designers left to start a new processor design company called Nuvia, which was exciting for a while.
In some respects it didn't work out well as an independent, as it was later acquired by (absorbed into) Qualcomm, which is already a large processor design company. But if it was cash the founders wanted, they got themselves a good exit.
Are they not visible on LinkedIn? Reminds me of Gibson novels like Count Zero with top technologists as key parts of sprawling interstellar corporations requiring mercenaries to extract a researcher to basically change jobs [1.].
I'm seeing a ton of "nobody would but a $10.000 Mac Pro when Mac Studio exists" opinions here. But, like... why?
Threadripper Pro exists and as far as I can tell, certain industries are practically begging AMD to keep updating it. A system with 32-core TR Pro and a few hundred gigs of RAM is easily $10k. With a 64-core CPU, you are probably closer to $15k. If a Mac Pro can give you 40-60 cores, 128-512GB of RAM plus a powerful GPU for $10-20k, its certainly niche, but not dead on arrival.
I think the main issue is that while AMD can "justify" TR Pro by having disaggregated compute and IO chiplets, Apple does not. AMD can just "print" as many CPU cores as it likes (within the power budget), and then slap on a different IO tile depending on what product it's making.
Currently, Apple isn't doing that. Furthermore, they put themselves into an even bigger corner by gluing their CPU and GPU onto one die. Most professional tasks are fine with a monster CPU and no/little GPU, or a monster GPU and an ok CPU. Adding PCIe with support for GPUs would help with that. For memory heavy tasks, you could add CXL memory expansions. But that then adds a new problem: what dies would Apple fab for this product?
With M1, there were essentially 2-3 dies: The power efficient M1, the M1 Max/Ultra with the interposer, and M1 Pro (there were rumours some Pros are just failed Max-es with a part of the chip cut off, but afaik nobody was able to verify this, so 3 dies it is). For M2, we have only seen the power efficient die so far. If M2 Extreme would be 4x M2 Max, then the previous strategy could work. But if Apple wants PCIe or CXL memory modules on M2 Extreme, they have to put it on all of their Max (and maybe Pro) dies as well. Even though these will be in laptops/all-in-ones that won't use any of that. In other words, a ton of analog circuitry that's a complete waste of silicon. The only other option is to fab special dies for M2 Extreme, which might have been the plan, and what probably made it a very bad ROI.
It's kind of like Sapphire Rapids: SR is certainly fast for what it's doing, but it's super expensive compared to EPYC and less scalable exactly because you need different dies to implement different SKUs (SR is monolithic up to afaik ~20 cores and the "chiplets" only appear above that, plus the IO you get depends on the chiplets). And SR doesn't even include a GPU...
Finally, Apple's GPUs don't appear to be really scaling as great as they were hoping. I have yet to see a real-world M1 Ultra review that wouldn't end on a "it's +20-50% more performance for +100% price" note. The CPU cluster seems to be doing much better. But by tying four of them together for M2 Extreme, people who need CPU would have to pay for the whole thing, and people who need GPU would be probably left disappointed.
My personal "best bet" would be to just keep releasing a power efficient "consumer" die, but disaggregate everything on the "pro level": A single CPU-heavy "Pro" die with a bit of GPU and a bit of IO, then a GPU-heavy die that slaps onto that to make the Max, and then an IO-only die for the Mac Pro mixed and matched with a combination of CPU and GPU dies. I wouldn't be shocked if this was the plan for M3/M4, the question is if the packaging technology will be there in time (and economical; wink wink Intel).
What excites me about apple Silicon is this: performance that is roughly on par with competing x86 CPUs combined with ~5x lower power usage.
My M1 MacBook Pro can run full throttle on all 8 "performance" CPU cores for an hour without the fans ever spinning up.
This tells me that Apple could fit 32 performance cores in a laptop CPU, which is simply not possible with x86 (unless you severely compromise on the definition of "portable").
This is not comparing like for like, as we have yet to see how x86 does on those device fabbing nodes. And other ARM vendors are not really in the same space, but within the mobile form factor they're hitting comparable performance numbers.
> This tells me that Apple could fit 32 performance cores in a laptop CPU
I'm not too sure about that. The current 20-core CPU from Apple is inside the Mac Studio, and it has quite a monster of an air cooler. It's obviously going to be much harder to put that (or something more powerful) inside a laptop, even with all the chip improvements...
Something’s not adding up here, though. 8 cores = “tiny fans basically always off” vs 20 cores = “two huge fans”. Either those two huge fans are running at a very low RPM, or the fans in the laptop are almost as efficient as the huge ones. I highly doubt the latter, so I assume the former is the case.
Well of course it does, who wants to be thermally throttled on a desktop-class machine? You're assuming that desktop and laptop use must support the exact same scenarios which is not true among x86-64 users either.
The M1 Ultra in the Studio apparently peaks at about 60W, so a laptop based on it would have lower peak power usage than an old 15" MBP (45W CPU, 35W GPU, usually).
I have famously predicted that sales of Mac's will decline and could even lead to a rout. Many professionals need Intel CPU support in order for them to run Windows on their Macbooks natively. And no, emulation isn't an option.
I predict that Mac sales will sag and that this will lead Apple to slash more and more models, eventually undermining the legitimacy of the platform. Most users will switch to Linux on Intel laptops from various other vendors.
While Bootcamp worked admirably I hardly ever see it used at work. I don't think 'professionals' would be buying Macs to run Windows native very often while Windows laptops exist and would be providing much more value for their money.
Meanwhile, Mac sales are up and the current crop of M1/M2 machines get top review marks.
I have been using linux as my main desktop for more than 2 decades already but I think you are living in a parallel world.
The amount of users using windows on a mac is a negligible fraction of the customers. I personnally don't know a single person using a mac either for personnal or professionnal use that is firing up a windows OS on it. People loving the windows platform or who need to run some apps on it are choosing computers from other brands.
Booting windows on a mac appeal only to some developers who need both platform but they can easily remote connect to a windows if they need to.
Eventually everyone that can afford a laptop will own one, and only replace them when it dies, the days of upgrading hardware every three years is long gone.
There's an ARM64 build of Windows. And Linux on Apple Silicon is getting to the point where it's almost viable as a daily-driver OS. It's not there yet but quite close.
- A flagship product that demonstrates just how powerful Apple Silicon can be. This in turn could enhance the Apple / Mac brand for a certain group of users.
- An aspirational product for users who think that they might need more power in the future.
- A means of keeping companies that need a small number of powerful machines in the Apple camp.
- A proving ground for technology that ultimately makes its way into volume products.
All of these factors could make the product justify its development costs even if actual sales are small. I doubt that the highest end models of some premium car brands recoup their development costs but their value to the brand offsets those costs.