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The interest in the Mac Pro is rather weird. It's an incredible niche product which should really only be covered by select publications for niche industries.

The interest in the Mac Pro is rather weird. It's an incredible niche product which should really only be covered by select publications for niche industries. The "trash can" was the last Mac Pro that you should realistically consider to be at least partly targeted towards end consumers. The problem is that Apple won't come out and tell us exactly who the envision as the customers for the to last generations of the Mac Pro. My best guess is that they either have NO IDEA who should buy this and only created it to shut up people on the internet and officially complete the ARM transition. Alternatively they have a few high profile customers who specifically asked for it and the "feature set" is tailored to those select customers. People online, like myself, took a huge interest in the Mac Pro, not because we'd ever get one, at least not new, but because the prospect of a high power ARM motherboard with replaceable RAM, storage and PCI-E ports was just to enticing. We just wanted to see how they'd pull it of, and then they didn't.

cmsj 3y ago
Apple knows exactly who the 2019/2023 Mac Pros are for - people who will pay for the best specs and need PCIe cards. The 2019 was a very flexible machine, the 2023 is a lot less flexible. Don't expect that to change - the GPU and RAM will be staying on the SoC because that's the architecture every other Apple device has. You really wouldn't want to be in a world where the lowest selling Mac is the only one that still uses NUMA.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Except many of those people need GPU cards, and they won't get it in this model.
  - zarzavat 3y ago
    Apple hasn’t supported Nvidia for years. Those people already switched a long time ago. Apple silicon is rather competitive with AMD, especially with all that unified RAM.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Yeah, if you compare single cards, instead of cards that can be plugged together, with higher in-device memory storage. And then there are capabilities that Apple silicon doesn't do, like storage device DMA into GPUs, GPU Work Graphs,...
      - zarzavat 3y ago
        If your GPU workflow is the classic kind of parallel processing with a compute bottleneck, then a couple of discrete GPUs is going to be faster, for sure. If your GPU workflow is instead VRAM bottlenecked with unpredictable data access patterns then Apple silicon has the potential to be faster with that crazy amount of uRAM. There’s also a dark tail of applications currently using the CPU because CPU-GPU-CPU latency is too damn high. Having everything on the same SoC will be a substantial latency improvement, which will enable using the GPU in places that discrete GPUs can’t go. So if you’re doing 3D/vfx you’re probably unhappy, although as far as I know none of these people use Macs anyway, they all use PCs with high-end Nvidia cards. On the other hand, this chip is going to be incredible for audio, once applications start taking advantage of it. Audio programming is really latency sensitive so discrete GPUs are right out, but with an SoC you can start to rely on the GPU being able to serve your request on time.
    - pzo 3y ago
      But at least the did supported eGPU on intel max - maybe not Cuda but metal, OpenGL, OpenCL. Now eGPU is gone as well in Apple silicon even though we latest MacBook Pro supports TB 4.0
matthew-wegner 3y ago
I don't think the interest is that weird. Before Apple Silicon, the performance ratio between a Mac Pro and the rest of their lineup was large. I think people were hoping the same ratio would somehow hold true today (i.e. rumors of a new M2 variant that was somehow two M2 Ultra stitched together, in the same way the Ultra is two Max, and the Max is two Pro...) I'm sure someone out there is running a gigantic local storage setup with U.2 drives and the new Mac Pro, and is doing something that would require so many PCIe slots, but it does seem very niche.

cmsj 3y ago

Apple knows exactly who the 2019/2023 Mac Pros are for - people who will pay for the best specs and need PCIe cards. The 2019 was a very flexible machine, the 2023 is a lot less flexible. Don't expect that to change - the GPU and RAM will be staying on the SoC because that's the architecture every other Apple device has. You really wouldn't want to be in a world where the lowest selling Mac is the only one that still uses NUMA.

pjmlp 3y ago
Except many of those people need GPU cards, and they won't get it in this model.
- zarzavat 3y ago
  Apple hasn’t supported Nvidia for years. Those people already switched a long time ago. Apple silicon is rather competitive with AMD, especially with all that unified RAM.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Yeah, if you compare single cards, instead of cards that can be plugged together, with higher in-device memory storage. And then there are capabilities that Apple silicon doesn't do, like storage device DMA into GPUs, GPU Work Graphs,...
    - zarzavat 3y ago
      If your GPU workflow is the classic kind of parallel processing with a compute bottleneck, then a couple of discrete GPUs is going to be faster, for sure. If your GPU workflow is instead VRAM bottlenecked with unpredictable data access patterns then Apple silicon has the potential to be faster with that crazy amount of uRAM. There’s also a dark tail of applications currently using the CPU because CPU-GPU-CPU latency is too damn high. Having everything on the same SoC will be a substantial latency improvement, which will enable using the GPU in places that discrete GPUs can’t go. So if you’re doing 3D/vfx you’re probably unhappy, although as far as I know none of these people use Macs anyway, they all use PCs with high-end Nvidia cards. On the other hand, this chip is going to be incredible for audio, once applications start taking advantage of it. Audio programming is really latency sensitive so discrete GPUs are right out, but with an SoC you can start to rely on the GPU being able to serve your request on time.
  - pzo 3y ago
    But at least the did supported eGPU on intel max - maybe not Cuda but metal, OpenGL, OpenCL. Now eGPU is gone as well in Apple silicon even though we latest MacBook Pro supports TB 4.0

matthew-wegner 3y ago

I don't think the interest is that weird. Before Apple Silicon, the performance ratio between a Mac Pro and the rest of their lineup was large. I think people were hoping the same ratio would somehow hold true today (i.e. rumors of a new M2 variant that was somehow two M2 Ultra stitched together, in the same way the Ultra is two Max, and the Max is two Pro...) I'm sure someone out there is running a gigantic local storage setup with U.2 drives and the new Mac Pro, and is doing something that would require so many PCIe slots, but it does seem very niche.