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MP All Models 2023 Mac Pro! [MERGED]
- Thread starter OW22
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Yes the amount of tech being crammed into Apple's SOC is very impressive; nobody is discounting that.
What you just said was the exact reason the 2019 MacPro should exist and why Apple failed on the 2023 Mac Pro.
We want to be able to swap out CPUs, GPUs and RAM; as performance requirements change and technology advances. I am going to be super pissed if Apple does not release at the very least, drivers for the AMD W7000 series GPUs. After all, us 2019 MP owners spend a hefty amount of money for these, we deserve to get support for future products that will work in our machines. It isn't like 2019 Mac Pros are going to be thrown away; they will still be in use for many many more years.
Apple could have alleviated this 2023 mess just by making the SOC *part* hot swappable with newer SOC parts as they become available.
Exactly. If this new SOC means memory, video, etc. are not independently upgradable (not sure I'm buying that's technically impossible, but let's say it is for now) then make the SOC itself upgradable. That would actually satisfy pros.
But that doesn't make for a disposable machine, so there you have it.
I would agree with you about SoC being a dropped in upgradeable part. I enjoy the improvements of the 2012 iMac 27"s user upgradeable memory that allowed me to cheaply bump it from 8GB to 32GB without Apple's involvement.
But have you considered that the remaining connectors left behind on the 2023 Mac Pro would become bottlenecks for the 2025 M3 Ultra 1-die or 2-die drop in SoC?
That SoC SKU would likely come out Q1 2025 assuming Apple keeps to a 19.5 month refresh cadence from M1 to M2.
PCIe 5.0, that was introduced in 2019, will likely be used for the 2025 Mac Pro M3 Ultra. This would double throughput. This would require a full change on the logic board. I very much doubt Apple will sell logicboards as a stand alone product. I'd love that to happen for all Mac Pro users but I do not see that occuring unless right for repair laws remain what they currently are.
How do we know the motherboard is not PCIe 5.0 ready already? It would make sense for it to be if the plan is to drop in a M3 chip which would most likely be PCIe 5.0. Or am I giving Apple too much forward thinking engineering credit.
The sad thing is that it has become an either or with Apple whereas with other manufacturers the amount of RAM is essentially a non-issue.
How many years have Mac enthusiasts been debating the question of RAM size? It's stupid that Apple has made something so simple so difficult by removing the ability to upgrade RAM. It's idiotic.
I would gladly take the slightly slower RAM speeds for upgrade capability. Unified memory would still be doable.
Upgrading always means you're accepting certain bottlenecks, like the 5,1's GPU performance could get bottlenecked by the old PCIe revision. But when the alternative is you can't upgrade the processor, memory, or graphics chipset at all, I think most people would prefer the alternative.
If Apple was wedded to not having a very niche product pipeline and carveout for a single product with stuff like GPUs and RAM (which is understandable), allowing an SOC upgrade path would have still made it a much more attractive product, as well as justifying its increased cost.
MR users are claiming 2023 Mac Pro have PCIe 4.0 slots. In the 2 days the M2 Ultra has been known no one has countered that point.How do we know the motherboard is not PCIe 5.0 ready already? It would make sense for it to be if the plan is to drop in a M3 chip which would most likely be PCIe 5.0. Or am I giving Apple too much forward thinking engineering credit.
I guess it only uses regular, non-ECC RAM, so 512GB would currently be about £1500 - or only about 20% of the cost of the base Mac Pro. And the cost of the RAM would fall over time.
Edit: forgot, the MP 2023 can only take 192GB. You can't get 12GB sticks, but assuming 16GB DIMMs at £50 each, that's £800 (or 2x that from Apple).
Actually with such a low RAM limit, you may as well just get the max from the factory.
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It would be better than not being able to upgrade. But why would this be the case?
Also we are ignoring the implementation we've seen on the intel side. I forget what thread it was in, but there was an article showing an intel SOC with some amount of shared memory, but ALSO traditional memory outside with upgradable DIMMS. The machine let you set up to use the memory, I think in 3 different ways. One, I think was traditional, where the xtra dimm/memory would just extend the amount of ram, but I think the other way was that the SOC ram would work as a cache and use the dimm/ram as the address space. That seems like a really cool solution and no reason apple couldn't do the same thing.
The SoC connects to the RAM via 16 channels. It's why the memory bandwidth is so high compared to CPUs (which tend to use 2-4 channels).
But if you're spending this much anyway, and need a Mac Pro, why not just get 192GB from the factory? Unless the limit is just governed by the density of current RAM chips, and future ones could be a drop-in replacement.
I suppose too that Apple could make custom memory modules with 4 or 8 channels per DIMM, but we probably wouldn't like the price.
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What are you talking about?!
Apple themselves "claimed" it when they unveiled the M2 Mac Pro during WWDC, wake up.
Here you go, straight from the horse's mouth:
SOURCE
That's because of the way that it is and not because of the way it has to be. As avkills said sometimes having a larger amount of slower RAM is better than having a small amount of fast RAM.
At the price the Mac Pro is selling for I'm surprised the base configuration isn't 192GB. IMO 192GB is insufficient for some use cases. I have 1TB installed in my Z840.
I think the most telling thing about the new Mac Pro is that there is hardly any discussion about it the day after it was announced. Not a lot of enthusiasm for it.
The issue is that main RAM is also the VRAM. So slower RAM would be fine for the CPU cores, but would slow down GPU performance.
Apple’s Mac Pro strategy seems like Windows releases: XP to Vista to Win7 to Windows 8.
Looks like MP 9,1 will be Win 10.
P.S. Don’t feed the Appologist troll, for sanity’s sake.
Looks like MP 9,1 will be Win 10.
P.S. Don’t feed the Appologist troll, for sanity’s sake.
The 2 X 6 pin power connectors and 1 X 8 pin, tells us there is no chance of fitting a AMD GPU with dual 8 pin or 3 x 8 pin like the gigabyte 6900xt with 3 x 8 pin connectors. 300W of auxiliary power says no GPU's supported.