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The current Mac Pro supports up to 1.5TB of RAM and with DDR5 memory capacities about to increase, I wonder how Apple will compensate for the much lower RAM.
by prng2021 4y ago
The current Mac Pro supports up to 1.5TB of RAM and with DDR5 memory capacities about to increase, I wonder how Apple will compensate for the much lower RAM.
- 7speter 4y agoBut don't you know? The ram is much faster because its close to the die? /s
- TillE 4y agoThey know how many people are ordering that much RAM, and probably have some guesses about how many actually need it. Apple won't mind losing 5% or whatever of their Mac Pro customers if it means not fundamentally redesigning their SoC architecture.
- KVFinn 4y ago>The current Mac Pro supports up to 1.5TB of RAM and with DDR5 memory capacities about to increase, I wonder how Apple will compensate for the much lower RAM. Probably by just not supporting that market. But maybe they could implement some kind of Optane/CXL type SSD-as-memory solution?
- tanelpoder 4y agoOr just support additional memory boards, full of DRAM DIMMs, plugged into PCIe slots, accessed over CXL protocol (no need to use Optane, Intel killed it off anyway).
- techdragon 4y agoThey would have to give up on the “unified memory architecture” (their terms) and sacrifice some of the simplicity they get by being able to not care about anything important Being outside the one big pool of fast addressable memory. This would have major impact on their GPU firmware/drivers as it would now need to handle data in the CXL hardware… all if this is extremely normal in the PC / wider hardware world, but Apple are going down the hardware optimisation path like consoles used to, and this overhead can be cut quickly to get the kind of gains that have made the M1 generation seem so much better than the previous intel hardware. In essence, if they aren’t going to enable high power GPU compute (external AMD/Nvidia cards) for things like machine learning and parallel physics simulations in many industries various analysis software suites… then there’s little to be gained from anything remotely like this, CXL or otherwise.
- 1123581321 4y agoI'm hoping they'll make it available via a special board on an interconnect. Based on the M2 topping out at 24GB, the Extreme should top out at 384GB on chip. I'm sure that would address most needs, but the ones outside of that range are interesting and prestigious and provide a lot of useful feedback to the teams that study and interface with professionals, that benefit everyone.
- synicalx 4y agoI'd be willing to bet their data shows only some fraction of their Mac Pro buyers actually max out the RAM, so they're fine with discarding that group in favour of the majority.
- tanelpoder 4y agoYep. The 1.5 TB max capability came “for free” with the Intel Xeon architecture (if you chose to populate the 12 DIMM slots with the expensive 128 GB ones). Might be that very few people (if anyone at all!) actually did that or needed that. Edit: However, 384 GB of RAM seems a too low maximum though for a maxed out 2023 professional workstation.