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While you may well be correctly reading between the lines, you are reading between the lines -- the article doesn't say anything about future "Mac Chips," as th

While you may well be correctly reading between the lines, you are reading between the lines -- the article doesn't say anything about future "Mac Chips," as the headline puts it, definitively being SoCs. There's nothing about a unified memory architecture that requires the GPU and CPU to be on the same die, let alone requires the RAM to be in the same package as both processing units. (People may no longer remember that Silicon Graphics was using UMA in their workstations a quarter century ago!) I expect all their portables, and probably all the iMacs to be SoCs, but I'm not sure the Mac Pro -- and the iMac Pro, if it continues -- will follow that path. > We are back to TrashCan Mac Pro again... we would have reached the thermal ceiling again... This is kind of drawing new lines to read between. :) Apple almost certainly developed their current uber-expensive, trypophobia-triggering Mac Pro design knowing that they were also working on Apple Silicon processors. While it's possible they intend that whole case design to be a one-time thing, it doesn't seem likely to me -- and if that wasn't the intent, then it's also not likely they want to ship a teeny tiny Apple Silicon logic board in that huge case with the rest of the space going unused. I think they're going to do their best to make an Apple Silicon-based Mac Pro that can be upgraded and expanded. (With all respect to Mark Gurman, I think that "half-sized Mac Pro" is going to be a different product entirely if it ships, with a different branding. Mac Mini Pro?)

spideymans 6y ago
>With all respect to Mark Gurman, I think that "half-sized Mac Pro" is going to be a different product entirely if it ships, with a different branding. Mac Mini Pro? The ever illusive xMac, aka "the affordable Mac tower"
- jskajakzkjx 6y ago
  Somebody once said that that Apple’s business model is charging a very high markup for flash memory (currently it’s $50 per 64 GB to upgrade storage on an iPhone or MacBook). The margin on other parts is also high. The user-upgradeable Mac Pro provides an escape hatch from these expensive upgrades. Therefore the entry price has to be much higher to make up for it. An affordable tower would cannibalize Mac Pro sales by providing businesses with a cost-saving opportunity that’s too good to refuse.
  - sgt101 6y ago
    One does not simply create a $2trn business by selling flash memory.
  - randall 6y ago
    This is good analysis, but there's some other effect I'm unable to put my finger on. The iPad is at least an order of magnitude better than comparable netbooks (though chromebooks, depending on manufacturer, can be competitive thanks mainly to ChromeOS's reduced footprint). So even though the margins are high, the perceived quality, regardless of raw benchmarks, is still something. It's not just marketing to me to say the marriage of software and hardware is unique. (Gruber's observation about NSObject alloc's being a lot faster on Apple Silicon, for instance). Now that I think about it, honestly Google is the only other company playing by these rules... ie pixelbook, pixel phone, etc. But they're much earlier in the evolution, and have less upstream control in software (especially since Fuchsia seems to be somewhat lower priority than before, though this is second hand knowledge).
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      Adjust reference counts on an NSObject, allocating one is mostly just a calloc ;)
  - oneplane 6y ago
    That somebody is probable only partially right about a partial business unit within Apple. People tend to buy it for the package deal, not for individual specs. At volume, those are the much more valuable customers than the 'buy a single computer' crowd that often talk about their modifications they want to make.
    - EricE 6y ago
      Exactly - Apple "sells" experience, not parts or specs.
- naravara 6y ago
  Considering how the M1 SOCs are, the possibility of a future "affordable Mac tower" looks more remote than ever. Apple seems to be aiming towards piling as much into their dedicated SOCs as they can. I expect what "pro" capabilities they do build for it going to be in the vein of the cool stuff they were doing in the Mac Pro, like the FPGA "Afterburner" and will probably cost way more than any person with generally "consumer-level" use-cases would want to spend. As a technology enthusiast I'm excited to see what bonkers stuff they'll be announcing. But, since I am not doing climate models or rendering hollywood movies, I don't expect I will never work on any of them since I don't want to drop a new car's worth of money on one.
- fomine3 6y ago
  The "Mac" is what I want.
modeless 6y ago
> There's nothing about a unified memory architecture that requires the GPU and CPU to be on the same die, let alone requires the RAM to be in the same package No, but unified memory does require starving the GPU of bandwidth. There's a reason high end GPUs use different types of memory than CPUs. Either Apple will be content with Mac Pro not having the absolute graphics performance lead, or they will make a discrete GPU with dedicated memory. I'm not sure which they will choose but I suspect the latter.
- ganoushoreilly 6y ago
  I agree, i'd also expect more integration of the Afterburner tech with support for multiple codecs beyond the current version.
- phonon 6y ago
  The Xbox Series X (retail price $499) uses a 7nm SOC, where the GPU has 12 TFLOPS of single precision performance. The fastest single GPU Apple sells on the Mac Pro is 14 TFLOPS (with a step-up fee of $2,400!). There doesn't seem to be any reason why Apple couldn't integrate a 16 TFLOPS GPU on an SOC using a 5nm or better process. The M1 GPU is 2.6 TFLOPS, they can x6 or more it, and obviously change the memory subsystem (HBM?).
  - modeless 6y ago
    Xbox Series X is very far from the top graphics available. GTX 3090 at 35 TFLOPS is what Apple needs to compete with for Mac Pro. Those chips are reticle limited which means there's simply no room to add a CPU, let alone 32 cores. You need separate dies. Also, Xbox uses GDDR which trades off CPU performance for GPU performance. Apple probably wouldn't do that for a Mac Pro. The high end needs separate memory so the GPU can have bandwidth and the CPU can have low latency.
    - phonon 6y ago
      Well, depends. If they're looking to replace the low- and medium end of the Mac Pro offerings, a SOC would be fine. If they are looking to exceed it in every way, then a separate GPU with 16x the current M1 GPU cores is necessary. (The GPU on M1 takes up about 30mm2-40mm2). Put that on a TSMC N5P process, and that will be quite the setup...
buu700 6y ago
Is there any reason the Mac Pro couldn't or shouldn't combine an SoC with upgradable components? So you get a certain baseline level of specs, but also have the opportunity to tack on a beefier GPU (which may or may not use UMA), additional slower memory, additional slower storage, maybe even additional CPUs, etc.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  > Is there any reason the Mac Pro couldn't or shouldn't combine an SoC with upgradable components? I don't think so, with the asterisk that I don't know enough to say whether mixing higher-speed and lower-speed RAM is really feasible in that scenario. (IIRC, if you do that in computers now, all the RAM will operate at the lowest speed.)
  - jsjohnst 6y ago
    > if you do that in computers now, all the RAM will operate at the lowest speed That’s correct, but irrelevant in this context. In that scenario, the memory is all on the same memory controller, and the memory controller used wants to run a single speed, so it has to be the highest universally supported speed. Apple could have multiple tiers of memory with different characteristics, but just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. I don’t have access to such a test bed, so I can’t speak to what the experience would be like.

spideymans 6y ago

>With all respect to Mark Gurman, I think that "half-sized Mac Pro" is going to be a different product entirely if it ships, with a different branding. Mac Mini Pro? The ever illusive xMac, aka "the affordable Mac tower"

jskajakzkjx 6y ago
Somebody once said that that Apple’s business model is charging a very high markup for flash memory (currently it’s $50 per 64 GB to upgrade storage on an iPhone or MacBook). The margin on other parts is also high. The user-upgradeable Mac Pro provides an escape hatch from these expensive upgrades. Therefore the entry price has to be much higher to make up for it. An affordable tower would cannibalize Mac Pro sales by providing businesses with a cost-saving opportunity that’s too good to refuse.
- sgt101 6y ago
  One does not simply create a $2trn business by selling flash memory.
- randall 6y ago
  This is good analysis, but there's some other effect I'm unable to put my finger on. The iPad is at least an order of magnitude better than comparable netbooks (though chromebooks, depending on manufacturer, can be competitive thanks mainly to ChromeOS's reduced footprint). So even though the margins are high, the perceived quality, regardless of raw benchmarks, is still something. It's not just marketing to me to say the marriage of software and hardware is unique. (Gruber's observation about NSObject alloc's being a lot faster on Apple Silicon, for instance). Now that I think about it, honestly Google is the only other company playing by these rules... ie pixelbook, pixel phone, etc. But they're much earlier in the evolution, and have less upstream control in software (especially since Fuchsia seems to be somewhat lower priority than before, though this is second hand knowledge).
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Adjust reference counts on an NSObject, allocating one is mostly just a calloc ;)
- oneplane 6y ago
  That somebody is probable only partially right about a partial business unit within Apple. People tend to buy it for the package deal, not for individual specs. At volume, those are the much more valuable customers than the 'buy a single computer' crowd that often talk about their modifications they want to make.
  - EricE 6y ago
    Exactly - Apple "sells" experience, not parts or specs.
naravara 6y ago
Considering how the M1 SOCs are, the possibility of a future "affordable Mac tower" looks more remote than ever. Apple seems to be aiming towards piling as much into their dedicated SOCs as they can. I expect what "pro" capabilities they do build for it going to be in the vein of the cool stuff they were doing in the Mac Pro, like the FPGA "Afterburner" and will probably cost way more than any person with generally "consumer-level" use-cases would want to spend. As a technology enthusiast I'm excited to see what bonkers stuff they'll be announcing. But, since I am not doing climate models or rendering hollywood movies, I don't expect I will never work on any of them since I don't want to drop a new car's worth of money on one.
fomine3 6y ago
The "Mac" is what I want.

modeless 6y ago

> There's nothing about a unified memory architecture that requires the GPU and CPU to be on the same die, let alone requires the RAM to be in the same package No, but unified memory does require starving the GPU of bandwidth. There's a reason high end GPUs use different types of memory than CPUs. Either Apple will be content with Mac Pro not having the absolute graphics performance lead, or they will make a discrete GPU with dedicated memory. I'm not sure which they will choose but I suspect the latter.

ganoushoreilly 6y ago
I agree, i'd also expect more integration of the Afterburner tech with support for multiple codecs beyond the current version.
phonon 6y ago
The Xbox Series X (retail price $499) uses a 7nm SOC, where the GPU has 12 TFLOPS of single precision performance. The fastest single GPU Apple sells on the Mac Pro is 14 TFLOPS (with a step-up fee of $2,400!). There doesn't seem to be any reason why Apple couldn't integrate a 16 TFLOPS GPU on an SOC using a 5nm or better process. The M1 GPU is 2.6 TFLOPS, they can x6 or more it, and obviously change the memory subsystem (HBM?).
- modeless 6y ago
  Xbox Series X is very far from the top graphics available. GTX 3090 at 35 TFLOPS is what Apple needs to compete with for Mac Pro. Those chips are reticle limited which means there's simply no room to add a CPU, let alone 32 cores. You need separate dies. Also, Xbox uses GDDR which trades off CPU performance for GPU performance. Apple probably wouldn't do that for a Mac Pro. The high end needs separate memory so the GPU can have bandwidth and the CPU can have low latency.
  - phonon 6y ago
    Well, depends. If they're looking to replace the low- and medium end of the Mac Pro offerings, a SOC would be fine. If they are looking to exceed it in every way, then a separate GPU with 16x the current M1 GPU cores is necessary. (The GPU on M1 takes up about 30mm2-40mm2). Put that on a TSMC N5P process, and that will be quite the setup...

buu700 6y ago

Is there any reason the Mac Pro couldn't or shouldn't combine an SoC with upgradable components? So you get a certain baseline level of specs, but also have the opportunity to tack on a beefier GPU (which may or may not use UMA), additional slower memory, additional slower storage, maybe even additional CPUs, etc.

chipotle_coyote 6y ago
> Is there any reason the Mac Pro couldn't or shouldn't combine an SoC with upgradable components? I don't think so, with the asterisk that I don't know enough to say whether mixing higher-speed and lower-speed RAM is really feasible in that scenario. (IIRC, if you do that in computers now, all the RAM will operate at the lowest speed.)
- jsjohnst 6y ago
  > if you do that in computers now, all the RAM will operate at the lowest speed That’s correct, but irrelevant in this context. In that scenario, the memory is all on the same memory controller, and the memory controller used wants to run a single speed, so it has to be the highest universally supported speed. Apple could have multiple tiers of memory with different characteristics, but just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. I don’t have access to such a test bed, so I can’t speak to what the experience would be like.