Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK, Gurman has not said if there are any PCIe slots.
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MP All Models 40 core ASI with PCI-E slot is around the corner!!
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Most of what Gurman says is (sometimes) educated predication, I’d be very surprised if he has any real or tangible links to unreleased hard/software.
While you are correct that Gurman hasn't stated anything around PCI-E slots, I DID resurrect this thread with THIS POST
Immediately following that resurrection, @Amethyst posted the following:
Furthermore, yesterday he added the following:
So to all the people that are still speculating, can we please stop?
@Amethyst has been spot-on with every single one of his leaks, so I believe his word over anyone else's at this point. All of the speculating (ESPECIALLY WITHOUT FIRST READING THRU THIS THREAD) is conjecture, and shouldn't even be posted IMO.
Immediately following that resurrection, @Amethyst posted the following:
Amethyst said:
Furthermore, yesterday he added the following:
Amethyst said:
So to all the people that are still speculating, can we please stop?
@Amethyst has been spot-on with every single one of his leaks, so I believe his word over anyone else's at this point. All of the speculating (ESPECIALLY WITHOUT FIRST READING THRU THIS THREAD) is conjecture, and shouldn't even be posted IMO.
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Yes, I already posted his update in response to the claim there are no PCIe slots.
What is more weird is everyone saying no 3rd party graphics when the post explicitly says there is a gpu in there. Apparently the point of that gpu is just to warm the insides and never to work. It couldn’t be as simple as it takes some time to write/get drivers working for it? Nope, it’s just a migrant gpu passing through, nesting there for a while before flying south for the winter. 🙄
GPU support is coming.
I think you misunderstood the posts. The 3rd party GPU in question here is NOT part of the dev box.
Or at least, that's how I understood it.
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The post says they tried a 6900XT, not that a discrete GPU was sent along with the ASi Mac Pro prototype...
If you mean for ASi-based GPGPUs, with multiple (two, four, eight...?) GPU-specific SoCs, then yes, that could very much be a possibility...! ;^p
Not good enough for me. It needs 3rd party support to matter imo. Apples track record on 1st party cards/support is legend and mostly bad.
I also believe GPU support will come in the form of AMD card support, because they want to maximise every opportunity to sell this thing has being high performance. And when you consider the performance of the ‘Duo’ MPX modules and alike, the support already exists.
I’m not saying Apple won’t compete within the same ballpark, but for them it’s a greater sales proposition to offer support for AMD cards and have the best possible opportunities than to offer PCIe but only support Apple Silicon GPUs, which likely wouldn’t be class-leading.
Again, there is no point developing a modular system if you’re not going to open it up to what customers want.
I’m not saying Apple won’t compete within the same ballpark, but for them it’s a greater sales proposition to offer support for AMD cards and have the best possible opportunities than to offer PCIe but only support Apple Silicon GPUs, which likely wouldn’t be class-leading.
Again, there is no point developing a modular system if you’re not going to open it up to what customers want.
1st party Apple Card support is a joke. That afterburner will get an update any day now....
They have a lower attention span than a ADD meth addict at an all you can eat buffet in a methlab. The idea they could provide sufficient GPU support that is competitive with 3rd parties, is sadly laughable.
That said, I'ld love to be proven wrong, but the track record for apple in this area is grim.
Apples gpu direction and commitment has not played out well all the way back to their invention of opencl and going dual amd gpu in the thrashcan. Currently it is so laugable that it is way more sane to use CPU rendering where the m1 max/ultra at least is just a little worse than last gen amd. New 7950 amd cpu is in general 1.5-2x perf in renderers like vray, 3delight etc. The only gpu renderer that works reasonavle on mac right now is redshift and there the basic benchmark renders in 7 min on an fully specced ultra while a 4090 does it in close to 1 min. An amd 6900xt manages in about 4:30. So basically my old macbookpro from 2017 with the razer egpus I have is way better for 3d rendering. Such an unbelievably pathetic situation
It's the other way around. Wait untill you can and you will buy the cheapest Mac Pro 7,1.
So long as the AMD GPUs is are NOT some custom form factor like in the trashcan .. the Trashcan had workstation class AMD GPU's - two of them .. ( 1 yr behind in tech at launch - classic apple 3d graphics) .. but the killer was that no Board partner could be bothered to make new GPU's that could only fit in the trashcan, there needs to be room for proper full length double or 3tiple wide cards - hence there were zero GPU upgrades for the trashcan.
.. the Trashcan had workstation class AMD GPU's - two of them .. ( 1 yr behind in tech at launch - classic apple 3d graphics) .. but the killer was that no Board partner could be bothered to make new GPU's that could only fit in the trashcan, there needs to be room for proper full length double or 3tiple wide cards - hence there were zero GPU upgrades for the trashcan.
1st party Apple Card support is a joke. That afterburner will get an update any day now....
Going from a honking big PCIe card that works in one model of Mac, to a subsystem on (nearly all excepting the OG M1 SoC) ASi SoCs seems like an update...?
OP seems to think Apple may have some performant (GP)GPUs on the horizon...?
So long as the AMD GPUs is are NOT some custom form factor like in the trashcan
There were zero upgrades for the 6.1 Mac Pro because GPUs going forward from that point in time just kept getting hotter and more power hungry...
I would expect any ASi GPGPUs to follow the MPX format, especially in regards to cooling, with that massive 4-slot "passive" heat sink...
Not to the people holding on to the boat anchor afterburner which Apple alluded there would be updates to because it’s an fpga. So nope.
If you plug an eGPU into an Apple Silicon Mac, it will be properly recognized, but the drivers aren't there. Thus far, it sounds like the same thing is happening with standard PCIe graphics cards. Until Apple actually makes an announcement, we won't know Apple's stance on that functionality, unless of course our reliable leaker says otherwise, and @Amethyst is apparently done asking about it. Other than confirming Gurman's reporting, I don't see much new here.
I am very curious on the new Mac Pro. Its very likely something novel, its just the question what that novelty is, what technology Apple comes up with.
The caveat (for me): it des not matter, really, coz its almost certainly priced like the 7.1 or even higher (suspect the latter), outageously expensive. So unfortunately it won‘t be for me
The caveat (for me): it des not matter, really, coz its almost certainly priced like the 7.1 or even higher (suspect the latter), outageously expensive. So unfortunately it won‘t be for me
What we know so far...!
( ...getting ahead of the next MacRumors front page article... )
;^p
ASi Mac Pro:
Call it US$45K fully loaded with all the above add-in cards...!
( ...getting ahead of the next MacRumors front page article... )
;^p
ASi Mac Pro:
- M2 Extreme SoC
- 48-core CPU (32P/8E)
- 152-core GPU
- 64-core Neural Engine
- 384GB LPDDR5 SDRAM
- 1.6TB/s UMA bandwidth
- 8TB SSD - (2) 4TB NAND blades
- (2) 10GbE ports
- (6) PCIe slots
- Gen4 - x4 - Apple I/O card (USB/TB/3.5mm headphone jack)
- Gen4 - x4 - third-party audio DSP card
- Gen4 - x8 - third-party 8K video I/O card
- Gen4 - x16 - third-party 64TB M.2 NMVe SSD RAID card
- Gen5 - x16 - Apple ASi MPX GPGPU card
- Gen5 - x16 - Apple ASi MPX GPGPU card
Call it US$45K fully loaded with all the above add-in cards...!
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The weird thing is that apple seems to have missed that 3d design and rendering is something enthusiast do. A person that want to be the next 3d artist or vfx person can get a plethora of cheap sw now that used to cost a lot. A guy wanting some great performance in blender for example can have that on basic gaming pc with a single nvidia gpu like a 3070. If that person then gets serious he can add another of those cards etc. For some strange reason apple doesn’t cater to this crowd and imagines that 3d work is hollywood only and can pay for a 10000$ workstation easily. Even all the shows produced by apple themselves uses a lot of freelancers for things like concept art ant that sure as h*rll are not overpaid and splurge and n fancy gear but rather go for bang for the buck. Ever since the drop of nvidia there has been a steady drop of people in this business going windows even though they are mac people at heart. With egpus some could cling on to a mac solution based on imac or imac pro but there was a gap from 2017-2021 where gpu rendering was totally messed up on mac. When renderrs finally started to support mac again through metal there was almost nothing to run on. No serious 3d artist would consider a single m1max gpu decent. And the ultra is as we all know all to well not scaling great for these workloads. Awesome for sim work though. All this could easily be resolved by supporting egpus and amd cards again. Sure it looks like **** and have noise issues, but work could get done. A bad but not horrible secondary solution is that apple releases their own egpu pucks to stack on a mac studio or beside a macbook pro to add some punches. Guess we’ll know soon enough.
How is "software optimization" when the AMD GPU drivers do not exist on macOS on Apple Silicon? You need to have something working to optimize it. "the drivers exists on the macOS intel kernel so therefore they exist on the Arm branch also" isn't necessarily true. macOS on Apple Silicon sprouted from iPhones and iPads which never had more than one GPU vendor. That really hasn't changed in two years ( WWDC 2020 - 2022 not a peep about adding depth to macOS on Apple Silicon on the GPU coverage front or substantive changes to DriverKit in the GPU stack space. )
It isn't just Apple's "Marketing focus" . It has been their technical focus also. There is nothing in DriverKit about Graphics stack specific extensions. There is no technical movement at all on 3rd party stuff inside the kernel going forward (kernel extensions have been deprecated and will disappear in some future version of macOS. Probably not soon but it is coming. Not some marketing slogan; a technology announcement. ).
There is deep fallacy in the notion that "PCIe == GPU Display output cards" . That is closer to being a "marketing focus" than a technological one. GPU Display output cards are a narrow subset of "PCIe slot cards".
When has Apple put a huge marketing focus on completely stock , general market GPU cards? Apple didn't do that in the Mac Pro 2006-2012 days. There was a subset of cards commissioned by Apple for mac boot ROMs and for sale at the Apple Store. But Apple was never trying to be Newegg/Microsoft and sell every generic GPU card possible? That never was their marketing strategy at all.
Macs on M-series have walked away from UEFI boot. So all the native boot support in generic GPU cards is gone. There was a quirky "happens to work" period that the Mac Pro 2019 walked into where happened to coincide with some incrementally better support of generic market cards working. Most GPUs that "happen to work" coverage came from other Macs using dGPUs as embedded GPUs ( iMac , MBP 15" , iMac Pro got drivers so happens to work in eGPU/Mac Pro also). By 2019 Nvidia support was dying ( so large chunk of generic off-the-shelf card market gone). The Pro Vega and W6x00x were as much Pro card coverage as generic desktop retail add-in card coverage driver development.
Apple doing a AMD MI210 wouldn't be too surprising. Apple chasing the generic Windows gamer card market would be. An AMD for 'extra' computational add-in TFLOPs. (if a bit easier perhaps with one or two Pro GPU packages that overlap pro/mainstream ) But for GUI display whatever Apple ships with the system is a GPU technical focus. And that will likely be Apple GPU. Apple's technical focus will highly likely be on getting more developers to write highly optimized Apple GPU code first and foremost.
A non-boot , non-GUI 'compute' GPU card would more easily get around the lack of UEFI and 'native' iPhone/iPad apps running on macOS (that expect only Apple GPU environments. )
Apple's run rate on Macs is around 20M per year. About to enter year 3 of M-series deployment. Meaning not all that long from now will have 60M M-series systems out there. That is a sizable user base not to be optimizing code for. Throw the M-series iPads on top and it is even larger. Those the systems "paying the freight" for the CPU/GPU/NPU core R&D; not the Mac Pro.
A major component of "practical way to go" is pragmatically going to be "economical way to go". Modularlity without economics of how much the bespoke/custom costs is not going to lead to practicality on Apple's balance sheet. Mac Pro is probably in the sub 100K/yr run rate product.
The Mac Pro doesn't sell in high enough volume to have 100% completely custom parts. If it did then Apple could just sell Threadripper and Radeon parts.
There probably is some customization ( subset of components added that won't appear in Mac laptop SoC. ), but "start over from scratch" isn't likely going to come to the Mac Pro. Mac Pro will likely get more of the cores that are target developed from the laptop & mobile in for CPU/GPU/NPU . Economics of the bespoke/custom RAM packages that Apple is using ... same thing economies of scale to pay for R&D are likely outside the bounds of what Mac Pro can pay for solely on its own.
Apple is likely selling 5-10x as many Mac Studios ( mid-upper end iMac 27") as they are Mac Pros. Cobble the Mac Pro + Mac Studio and perhaps a 'large screen' iMac Pro together and probably can stop slavishly using the MBP 16" Max dies as a building block. (e.g., at about x9 as many at about a 1M/year run rate). But Mac Pro still would be tightly coupled to embedded SoC systems for critical volume ( just not immediate directly to laptops). The monolithic Max is a rather chunky 'chiplet'. Scaling past two probably creates undesirable issues. Apple probably needs a better factored functionality chiplets for desktop. However, it would still be chiplets on a package as the core's foundational design was based on that base SoC package approach.
Probably could get a die building blocks that are more optimized to building "duos" and "quads" ( Ultra and Extreme class) that could happen to work for a desktop "Solo" for a 'Desktop Max' for the Studio. The laptop (and lower 'half' of desktop ) would just be purely monolithic chips ( at least until Apple weaves in cellular radios chiplet).
There's a phrase much used in adverts for financial products, at least in the UK. 'Past performance is not an indication of future results'. There is no support for any discrete GPU, internal or external, on Apple Silicon systems. Yet. That does not answer whether (i) it is technically possible, or not, nor (ii) If Apple intends to add such support, or not. If they can do and want to do it, they will. Arguing it's not worth the bother for a multi-trillion dollar company strikes me as a bit ridiculous. Even the Mac business if valued as standalone is a hugely valuable concern. The Mac Pro is being replaced. Apple does want it to sell, and it has to satisfy the needs of customers in order to sell. It might lose expandable RAM, or discrete GPUs, or expandable storage…but all of it? After going to the nth degree to meet customers' needs with the 7,1? Nope, sorry, I don't buy it. And if they did, neither would anyone else…
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