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I think that's an expected thing. G5 was the thing. And companies were buying G5 and other macs like that all the time, because you were able to actually exten
by IFC_LLC 6mo ago
I think that's an expected thing.
G5 was the thing. And companies were buying G5 and other macs like that all the time, because you were able to actually extend it with video cards and some special equipment.
But now we have M chips. You don't need video for M chips. You kinda do, but truthfully, it's cheaper to buy a beefier Mac than to install a video card.
Pro was a great thing for designers and video editors, those freaks who need to color-calibrate monitors. And right now even mini works just fine for that.
And as for extensions - gone are the days of PCIe. Audio cards and other specialized equipment works and lives just fine on USB-C and Thunderbolt.
I remember how many months I've spent trying to make Creative Labs Sound Blaster to work on my 486 computer. At that time you had to have a card to extend your system. Right now I'm using Scarlett 2i2 from Focusrite. It works over USB-C with my iPhone, iPad and Mac. DJIs mics work just as good.
Damn, you can buy Oscilloscope that works over USB-C or network.
It's not the Mac's or Apple's fault. We are actually live in the age where systems are quite independent and do not require direct installations.
- Lucasoato 6mo agoScarlett 2i2 has been amazing for me, I’d say unbeatable in terms of quality/price ratio.
- magic_hamster 6mo ago> gone are the days of PCIe. My GPU, NVMe drives and motherboard might disagree.
- aprilnya 6mo ago- GPU is integrated into the SoC - Surprisingly, it is possible to plug a drive into a TB/USB port …so what do you actually need PCIe for?
- gizajob 6mo agoThings that aren’t graphics cards, such very high bandwidth video capture cards and any other equipment that needs a lot of lanes of PCI data at low latency.
- HeWhoLurksLate 6mo agobut what about second GPU?
- wtallis 6mo agoMultiple GPUs was tried, by the whole industry including Apple (most notably with the trash can Mac Pro). Despite significant investment, it was ultimately a failure for consumer workloads like gaming, and was relegated to the datacenter and some very high-end workstations depending on the workload. Multi-GPU has recently experienced a resurgence due to the discovery of new workloads with broader appeal (LLMs), but that's too new to have significantly influenced hardware architectures, and LLM inference isn't the most natural thing to scale across many GPUs. Everybody's still competing with more or less the architectures they had on hand when LLMs arrived, with new low-precision matrix math units squeezed in wherever room can be made. It's not at all clear yet what the long-term outcome will be in terms of the balance between local vs cloud compute for inference, whether there will be any local training/fine-tuning at all, and which use cases are ultimately profitable in the long run. All of that influences whether it would be worthwhile for Apple to abandon their current client-first architecture that standardizes on a single integrated GPU and omits/rejects the complexity of multi-GPU setups.
- jltsiren 6mo agoHigh-end Macs have moved to PCIe 5.0 speeds in their internal drives. Thunderbolt 5 is not fast enough to get the same performance from external ones. Thunderbolt is also too slow for higher-end networks. A single port is already insufficient for 100-gigabit speeds.
- vlovich123 6mo agoWhen people talk about 100gigabit networks for Macs, im really curious what kind of network you run at home and how much money you spent on it. Even at work I’m generally seeing 10gigabit network ports with 100gigabit+ only in data centers where macs don’t have a presence
- Forgeties79 6mo agoI work in media production and I have the same thought constantly. Hell I curse in church as far as my industry is concerned because I find 2.5 to be fine for most of us. 10 absolutely.
- nine_k 6mo agoI suppose the throughput is not the key, latency is. When you split ann operation that normally ran within one machine between two machines, anything that crosses the boundary becomes orders of magnitude slower. Even with careful structuring, there are limits of how little and how rarely you can send data between nodes. I suppose that splitting an LLM workload is pretty sensitive to that.
- AdamN 6mo ago100gbps is going to be for mesh networks supporting clusters (4 Mac Studios let's just say) - not for LAN type networks (unless it's in an actual datacenter).
- jltsiren 6mo agoLocal AI is probably the most common application these days. Apple recently added support for InfiniBand over Thunderbolt. And now almost all decent Mac Studio configurations have sold out. Those two may be connected.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- wpm 6mo agoVideo capture I/O expansion Networking
- pjmlp 6mo agoTo have lots of them plugged together, high end audio cards, electronics integrations, disks with having cables all over the place.
- rayiner 6mo agoThe top Mac Studio has six thunderbolt 5 ports, each of which is a PCIe 4.0 x4 link. Each is a 8GB/sec link in each direction, which is a lot. Going from x16 down to x4 has less than a 10% hit on games: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/sbegpb/gpu_in_pcie_40_x4_slot/ https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/sbegpb/gpu_in_pci...
- washadjeffmad 6mo agoGaming isn't what people are using Mac Studios for. Thunderbolt also isn't a substitute for OCuLink.
- rayiner 6mo agoSure, but it’s probably reflective of the fact that GPUs generally aren’t PCIe-bandwidth bound. Also, TB5 and Oculink2 both use PCI 4.0 x4 links.
- angoragoats 6mo agoOculink is generally faster than TB5 despite them both using PCIe 4.0, because Oculink provides direct PCIe access whereas Thunderbolt has to route all PCIe traffic through its controller. The benchmarks show that the overhead introduced by the TB5 controller slows down GPU performance.
- rayiner 6mo agoApple Silicon has an integrated thunderbolt controller so that should have less latency than PCs that use a discrete thunderbolt controller.
- adrian_b 6mo agoMany recent laptop CPUs from Intel and AMD have integrated Thunderbolt controllers (i.e. USB 4), so that has not been a difference for a long time.
- tylerflick 6mo ago> gone are the days of PCIe Thunderbolt is external PCIe.
- eigenspace 6mo agoNo, oculink is external PCIe. Thunderbolt can kinda-sorta mimic PCIe, but it needs to chop up the PCIe signal into smaller packets, transmit them and then put them back together and this introduces a big jump in latency, even when bandwidth can be rather high. For many applications this isn't a big deal, but for others it causes major problems (gaming being the big one, but really anything that's latency sensitive is going to suffer a lot).
- angoragoats 6mo ago> gone are the days of PCIe This is a wild and very wrong take. Just about every single consumer computer shipped today uses PCIe. If you were referring to only only the physical PCIe slots, that's wrong too: the vast majority of desktop computers, servers, and workstations shipped in 2025 had physical PCIe slots (the only ones that didn't were Macs and certain mini-PCs). The 2023 Mac Pro was dead on arrival because Apple doesn't let you use PCIe GPUs in their systems.
- GeekyBear 6mo agoThunderbolt is PCIe running over a cable.
- angoragoats 6mo agoYes, I know; this is part of what I was implying when I said "Just about every single consumer computer shipped today uses PCIe." I don't understand how this is a response to anything I said.
- labcomputer 6mo agoSure, with expensive line drivers to send the data 1+ meters, instead of 10ish cm. And with only 2 channels instead of up to 16.
- hazz99 6mo agoPlus modern interconnects like CXL are also layers on top of PCIe, and USB4 supports PCIe tunnelling. PCIe is a big collection of specifications, the physical/link/transaction layers can be mixed and matched and evolved separately. I don't see it disappearing, at most we'll get PCIe 6/7/etc.
- johnebgd 6mo agoMy post Mortem sentiments exactly. The lack of Nvidia GPU support for the M series Mac Pro models kneecapped the platform for professionals. If Apple had included that in those they’d be the defacto professional workstation for many more folks working in AI tech.
- whalesalad 6mo agoit's not just about pcie, it's socketed memory and disks. I guess disks are just pcie technically - but memory sockets are great. hell, in the pro chassis I am surprised they didn't opt for a socketed cpu that could be upgraded.
- zozbot234 6mo agoThe latest M2-based Mac Pro did not take socketed memory AIUI.
- angoragoats 6mo agoThis is correct; Apple has refused to implement socketed memory on any M-series machine.
- oefrha 6mo agoDoes M5 series have better video encoding chip/chiplet/whatever it is called than M4 series? Because while I’m happy with my M4 Pro overall, H.264 encoding performance with videotoolbox_h264 is disappointingly basically exactly the same as a previous 2018 model Intel Mac mini, and blown out of water by nvenc on any mid to high end Nvidia GPU released in the last half-decade, maybe even full decade. And video encoding is a pretty important part of video editing workflow.
- zamadatix 6mo agoIf you mean editing ProRes is a better fit, if you mean final export software always beats hardware encoders in terms of quality, if you mean mass h.264 transcoding a Mac workstation is probably not the right place though.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- labcomputer 6mo ago> And as for extensions - gone are the days of PCIe. Audio cards and other specialized equipment works and lives just fine on USB-C and Thunderbolt. Grumble grumble. Well, there used to more than audio cards, back before the first time Apple canceled the Mac Pro and released the 2013 Studio^H^H Trash Can^H^H Mac Pro. Then everyone stopped writing Mac drivers because why bother. So when they brought the PCIe Pro back in 2019, there wasn't much to put in it besides a few Radeon cards that Apple commissioned. The nice thing about PCIe is the low latency, so you can build all sorts of fun data acquisition and real time control applications. It's also much cheaper because you don't need multi-gigabit SERDES that can drive a 1m line. That's why LabVIEW (originally a Mac exclusive) and NI-DAQ no longer exist on Mac. USB-C oscilloscopes work because the peripheral contains all the hardware, so it doesn't particularly matter that the device->host latency is high. They also don't require much bandwidth because triggering happens inside the peripheral, and only the triggered waveform record is sent a few dozen times per second. > It's not the Mac's or Apple's fault. We are actually live in the age where systems are quite independent and do not require direct installations. It is, and we don't. Maybe you don't notice it, but others do.
- rkagerer 6mo ago> USB-C oscilloscopes work because the peripheral contains all the hardware, so it doesn't particularly matter that the device->host latency is high. Yeah, that's basically the way accessories have gone. Powerful mcu's and soc's have gotten cheap enough to make it viable. Makes me a little sad though, I liked having low latency "GPIO's" straight to software running on my PC (but I'm thinking as far back as the parallel port... love how simple that was).
- jmalicki 6mo agoIt's not just that - anything working with analog signals benefits hugely from not living inside the complete EM interference nightmare of the computer case.
- buccal 6mo agoWell there is https://www.crowdsupply.com/eevengers/thunderscope https://www.crowdsupply.com/eevengers/thunderscope With USB4/TB you can get quite far in both latency and throughput. Actually there are network adapters with TB connection that are just TB to PCIe adapters and PCIe network card.
- TheCondor 6mo agoI’m at peace with the memory and PCIe basically flows over thundebolt. At one point external gpus were a thing. I think what I’d really love would be a couple or few m.2 slots in my studio for storage expansion.