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MP All Models 40 core ASI with PCI-E slot is around the corner!!
- Thread starter Amethyst
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This machine is a joke for the $ unless the CPU is clocked much higher than the Studio. This is worse than trashcan-bad, at least that was small and innovative design-wise.
Everyone holding out for GPU support is going to waste years of time, just switch platforms if you need it. This Mac Pro is literally only useful for Audio folks who need HDX cards (even the Apollo use case is pretty void because UAD is switching to Native) or massive amounts of internal fast storage.
They are killing off the line on purpose (no one is going to buy this and it will justify killing the line to the executives), or this is a stop-gap for the eventual M3/M4 Extreme, in which case spending $7k+ now is ridiculous.
Where's your magical HPC LLM super-compute power box now, everyone? "Apple is going to launch with M3 Ultra/Exreme, N3 has been in production for months at bla bla bla" ...you were as I said completely making things up, and don't understand modern Apple at all.
Sad day for those that want a true high end, and they had the gall to raise the price a thousand dollars just to stick it to those VERY FEW who need internal slots.
Everyone holding out for GPU support is going to waste years of time, just switch platforms if you need it. This Mac Pro is literally only useful for Audio folks who need HDX cards (even the Apollo use case is pretty void because UAD is switching to Native) or massive amounts of internal fast storage.
They are killing off the line on purpose (no one is going to buy this and it will justify killing the line to the executives), or this is a stop-gap for the eventual M3/M4 Extreme, in which case spending $7k+ now is ridiculous.
Where's your magical HPC LLM super-compute power box now, everyone? "Apple is going to launch with M3 Ultra/Exreme, N3 has been in production for months at bla bla bla" ...you were as I said completely making things up, and don't understand modern Apple at all.
Sad day for those that want a true high end, and they had the gall to raise the price a thousand dollars just to stick it to those VERY FEW who need internal slots.
AMD has been providing the dGPUs for the Intel-based Mac Pro, so there has been a relationship between the two companies. Nvidia was left out of the conversation years ago.
Intel. Intel GPUs. Suck your thumbs and cope.
Edit: I ended up having to peel off my socks as normal. They weren’t blown off, as one poster promised. Mac Pro 8’1 was…cringe. Almost angry even. There. We’ve done as you suckers demanded. Where’s your GPU now?
Edit: I ended up having to peel off my socks as normal. They weren’t blown off, as one poster promised. Mac Pro 8’1 was…cringe. Almost angry even. There. We’ve done as you suckers demanded. Where’s your GPU now?
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Options ( as in plural)? I only know of one; the R4i
Promise Pegasus R4i 32TB RAID MPX Module for Mac Pro - Apple
Apple Store Search Results
www.apple.com
That was a dubious product from the start. It largely didn't need MPX connector at all. I suspect this was similar to Apple going to LG to do the Ultrafine 21.5" and 27" monitors where Apple is 'back seat' driving some spaces ( e.g., monitiros .. one and only one input. Storage ... get rid of all the aux power wires).
If started the 4 drives in serial order and only needed 15W per drive... it could all fit inside 75W. That thing needs now where near 300-400W of power in the nominal mode. The power capacity of the MPX connector is gross overkill. That wasn't a good 'solution' for the 'problem' present. The 6 pin connector of the MP 2019 would have worked. It seems possible there are some power spike bursts if start turning the platters all at the same time ( or someone wants old power sucking drives.)
The J2i has a power cable and the sky didn't fall in. The R4i could have easily had one too.
Blowing away two double wide slots for some spinning 3.5 'rust' is one heck of a trade off. I'm sure there are some folks who bought who were super dogmatically hooked to the 4 drive sled notion of the MP 2009-2012, but I extremely doubt there were very many buyers.
Two , dual U.2 SSD cards would crash that in raw storage I/O performance bandwidth. The newest >10TB drives will win in Max capacity but RAID 5 rebuild on there hyper large drives is a problem. And if it just RAID 0,1,10 what is it doing better than Apple or SoftRAID software solutions?
RAID 1 of two 22TB drives in a J2i would be basically be relatively close to the same max capacity, if just doing 'slow' bulk storage.
The J2i file lists as compatible with the MP 2023.
That's a weird statement to make if one considers that a comparable x86 CPU alone would set you back around $3000...
This kind of hints at the issue though.
How much would an equivalent PC GPU cost? $500?
Who would buy a desktop PC with a $3000 CPU and a $500 GPU? A few people I'm sure, but not most.
The Pro W7900 is not out yet, I've seen mentions of $3999 as a price point. Already Nvidia's A5000 which is slower and only has 24GB RAM is $2000. The selling point of the M2 Ultra in the GPU department is not the raw compute performance (which will be somewhere around A5500/RTX 4070 Ti probably), but the huge amount of RAM. If you only care about raw compute but work on low-complexity data, you obviously get a cheaper gaming card.
There's "comparable with the Mac Pro" and then there's "comparable with what you want".
Personally, what I could do with is M2 Pro-level power but with space for some internal storage and some extra PCIe-to-USB cards. Take MacOS out of the equation (which wouldn't be impossible for me - Apple are really exploiting customers who are locked into MacOS) and you can do that with a PC for a lot less...
This was always the case with the 2019 Mac Pro - a PC that could match it point-for-point on spec was always reassuringly expensive, but if you asked "do I really need that much PCIe bandwidth" or "do I really need more than 500GB of RAM" far cheaper options opened up. E.g. the 24 and 28 core MP added thousands to the price just for the potential to have more than 1TB RAM. (Intel Xeon prices: W-3275, max 1TB RAM = $4894, W-3275M, max 2TB RAM as used in the Mac Pro = $8198). You could get PC towers for a fraction of the price and while they would loose a game of Top Trumps with the MP they might be more suitable for what you actually wanted.
@theluggage Yep, so things didn't really change. If you wanted to fine-tune for your needs and budget, the PC market always offered much more flexibility.
The m2 ultra studios selling point is best of breed imac level performance. Had apple not dropped intel/amd we would have had 13900 cpu coupled with a downclocked 7900 by now. About the same perf as a m2 ultra 24/76 but with higher power draw. Such an imac should have costed about 4000$ specced out. Now we pay about 8000 for that perf level with an apple stuido display. Where i live, the price for an imac 27 used to be a good value.
Biggest diff now is ther is no real pro tier hardware at all. No xeon or threadripper equivalent. No multi gpus, no egpus. All in all a massive downgrade of the platform. Is it enough? Maybe it is since high end has been slowly dying since 2010 for mac. We old folks just hoped it wasn’t true.
Oth, I only need really extreme perf for Ai and rendering, two things that can be offloaded to cloud. Hmmmmm
Biggest diff now is ther is no real pro tier hardware at all. No xeon or threadripper equivalent. No multi gpus, no egpus. All in all a massive downgrade of the platform. Is it enough? Maybe it is since high end has been slowly dying since 2010 for mac. We old folks just hoped it wasn’t true.
Oth, I only need really extreme perf for Ai and rendering, two things that can be offloaded to cloud. Hmmmmm
I believe it was the same 40-core one that Gurman said was cancelled
He said it sometime in 2022, but here is a more recent article:
Gurman said:
SOURCE
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What? Outside of a very very very small niche where you need the embedded memory and ultra-fast storage I don't understand the current Mac Pro at all. You can buy an entire pretty good PC for the $3,000 difference and boot into linux for work and windows for games but that isn't really my point.
No version of linux runs well / fully operational on Apple Silicon after 3 years so you are locked into Apple's OS ecosystem at least for the time being, which basically forces year-over-year updates on everyone and sets back productivity a lot because pro software has to be validated. That's a big strike against Macs and it's a pain if you work in Audio, especially now that a lot of licenses need to talk to the internet - even with ilok dongles. They are already on thin ice in that community, Bitwig is gaining traction and Ableton had their best update in years last month. UAD Luna will eventually be on Windows, hopefully.
But anyway...
My point is that due to the "high end" being available in a small $4000 box it makes more sense to buy that one, sell it in 2 years, and buy a new one that will be WAY faster and have functionality that can never be added to a $7,000+ Mac Pro, no matter how much people in here want that to be the case. The neural cores will be revised, increased, and gain new functionality - and you can NEVER add that to your $7,000+ computer. That sucks, and it doubly sucks when the value proposition for this machine is that "you get slots" and literally nothing else as far as we know. Your Mac Studio M2 Ultra will be worth a thousand dollars in 2025, at minimum - and you gain the latest technology vs. having an old more expensive Mac Pro. If Apple kept the price at $6k maybe I could see a slight possible justification, but how they priced this is egregious given what it offers.
It should have had a price cut not a price increase, but Apple gonna Apple. Those old Xeons were EXPENSIVE even to OEMs. Now they have literally the same SoC in a $4,000 and $7,000 machine. It's outrageous.
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Re-checking out the vision pro after the initial hype today and seeing how far they've come technologically, I now believe that Apple intentionally keeps the new Mac Pro as it is rather than having gpu and ram upgradability. I do not know the exact reason why they are doing that but I don't think that they are doing it because they couldn't find a way to let users add gpus and ram to that machine. They have a different kind of agenda and clearly they don't care about what the pros like us are thinking about the situation.
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It supports zero 16x GPU's, which is probably part of why it can get away with provisioning all those slots from the dribble of PCIe coming off an Ultra. The PLX switching is likely doing a lot of work, though that will get exposed in certain situations.
In which case it makes sense to skip this excuse of a Mac Pro, released because Apple needed a tick mark, to signal migration completed.
The real version will be if/when they crack the mxtreme variety and (hopefully) add AS GPUs.
P.S. I sense a departure in the near future, now that the legacy has been solidified.
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Indeed, what a ridiculous, vastly overpriced POS with a seven slot 'workstation' that doesn't support any GPUs. Game over for the pro NLE sector.
You picked the wrong things to scorn, for refining an LLM locally for folks who work on that this is actually a solid machine, the access to the full 192GB of RAM from the GPU/ML components is a big deal. The machine is absolutely niche, but there are target markets beyond audio pros.
All those PCI-e lanes for the slots? They 'found' them on the PCI-e switch all the slots ( doubtful there are any exceptions) are connected to. The reason substantive question is what is the backhaul off the switch. The MP 2019 had a two x16 PCI-e v3 input for the backhaul. The switch covered 6+ slots. That PCI-e v3 on slot sever would be real easy if the switch (like last one) as QoS/Bandwidth setting features. Just set the bandwidth to v3 worth and x4 PCI-e v4 effectively becomes PCI-e v3. ( apple doing a separate v3 provision when they have v4 technology would be odd. )
How the are getting that out of an Ultra package? Very highly likely it is a chiplet. ( can go round and round as to which chiplet has the two x16 PCI-e v4 controllers on it and how it egresses out of the package ). If can stuff two Max dies in there , how hard is it really going to be to stuff another, relatively very small one , in there?
Pretty decent chance they are stuff that 'extra' die into the Ultras that go into the Mac Studio's also and just no hooking it to anything. ( exactly what they do to the MBP 14"/16" systems to have the subsidize paying for UltraFusion connectors).
The actual bandwidth. In some 'back of the envelope' calculations, I think Apple extremely obtusely hinted at that. In the keynote they said that six 4K RAW capture cards could do 24 streams and concurrently convert them all in real time to ProRes. A single x16 PCI-e v4 connection won't cut it. Two x16 PCI-e v4 would cover that. And it also gets you back to the aggregate bandwidth of the MP 2019 ( four x16 PCI-e v3 == two x16 PCI-e v4 ). So didn't backslide.
[ And the way MP 2019 PCI-e lanes are organized may not be even able to do 6 4K capture cards concurrently and still have a running GPU left in the system. ]
Minimally, it very likely is not a backslide on aggregate bandwidth. And it lots like they just 'copied' what they did with the previous model to provision most of the slots. (just a 'better'/'faster' switch).
if the bandwidth was three x16 PCI-e v4 (or higher) I suspect they would have come up with a better example to brag about.
x8 PCI-e v3 cards are exactly what a Mac Studio + external PCI-e enclosure would choke on.
A x4 PCI-e v5 SSD could work at native speed if plugged into a adapter that could turn that back into x8 PCI-e v4 and put it in the new Mac Pro. Where the Mac Studio + external PCI-e enclosure is still stuck.
What can it do that the Studio can't is my question - I agree the architecture lends itself well to LLMs ran locally but Thunderbolt 4 speed is more than enough throughput for SSDs to feed it, especially if you spread it across multiple busses. My thing with audio is HDX cards are one of the very few use cases for all those slots that a prosumer might use. You can also spec an 8TB internal SSD for the Studio that can hold multiple enormous models, for the price difference between the Studio and the Mac Pro.
Their Video example probably covers less than a thousand users in the US, maybe some broadcast studios could use that level of capture etc. but no home or even normal pro user will need that much capture at once.
Maybe the reviews will expose some significant difference we (or at least I) currently don't understand.
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I guess I haven't seem any ASi ML benchmarks to know that even though you can train a 100+ GB LLM on a M2 Ultra.. its it gonna take 4 yrs to train.. in theory you have 800 gb/s comparable to a 3090.. but know idea how good Apple's neural cores are vs. Nvidia's gen 3 tensor cores.
This is a good point and I want to be very clear that I was talking about running a model locally with maybe some minimal refinements, not training an enormous one from scratch. Currently that pretty much has to be done in the cloud.
I've personally worked with teams that have burned through 10s of thousands of dollars in cloud compute to train models in a weekend vs. what would take a year locally. I think a lot of people are talking about running the LLaMA large model locally etc. not training from scratch. Or, at least I hope so because you're right the performance to do it isn't there. But again, this can be done on the Studio just as well as the Pro, so what is the purpose of the Pro in the lineup as it exists currently – that is what I want an answer to, because I can't come up with one and strongly think they did this to complete the transition and stop selling new Intel machines entirely.
I hope the M3/M4 revision, if we get one, expands on the benefits of the form factor a lot – and that is my argument for why this M2 Mac Pro is even more pointless, because at it stands it doesn't justify itself IMO, and I'd be surprised if they sell more than 10s of thousands of these which to Apple is a failure.
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There really was not a price increase once get to an Apples-to-Apples comparison.
Entry Mac Pro 2019
8 Core CPU , 32 GB RAM , 580X ( or W5500X now ) , 512GB SSD , etc.
$5999.
Entry Mac Pro 2023
24 Core CPU ( 16 if just count P cores) , 64GB RAM , better than W57000x , 1TB SSD , etc.
$6999
There are some big gaps there is performance and capacities.
In the old system a MP 2019 :
16 Core CPU , 96GB RAM , W5700 , 1TB SSD , etc
probably was more than $6999. (BTO didn't have a path to 64GB RAM). Apple charges about $400/TB for a SSD ( so about $300 over entry). The jump from W5500X to W5700 was about $500 (or so). Apple charges $800 for 32GB ECC RAM in the Apple store. 300+500+800 ~ $1600 ... + entry price = $7599
So yeah, in terms of bang-for-the buck it is cut. The factor in play is that you have to be "this tall" to ride the amustment park ride. If budget didn't go to $7000 in first place then there should have been a "price cut".
Sonnet is selling the 3 slot xMac Studio for $1,649
https://www.sonnettech.com/product/xmac-studio/overview.html
That is 3 slots ( half of the Mac Pro's 6) with a x4 PCI-e v3 backhaul connection the Studio ( versus if have single x8 PCI-e v3/4 card in a Mac Pro get full bandwidth). A Sonnet Echo III Express D for another three slots would be $799 and same backhaul deficient. So combo is $2,448. so the $3000 - 2448 . So for $552 more than double the backhaul bandwidth to your PCI-e slots. That isn't worth the money?
Yes the rack mount Mac Pro is another $1000 on top. But the backhaul bandwidth difference if using it... Probably still worth it. Easy to claw that back also. To go from 1TB to 8TB with Apple SSD capacity is $2,200. If actually need performant 8-12 TB SSD internally then 3rd party solution probably around $1K cheaper than that for a Mac Studio.
IMHO, the big problem with the way the Mac Pro sales pages and the pitch they made at the keynote is that they have massively buried the huge PCI-e backhaul gap between the Studio and Mac Pro. Also think it was slightly goofy to compare it to the W5500X on the marketing pages also. Grounding off of the W5700X would have been a much better baseline. Folks who had a 580X/W5500X/W6600X could all figure how far under they were from the W5700X all by themselves. Even Apple said at the first Studio introduction, the vast majority of folks do not by W5500X. The most common Mac Pro MPX module was W5700X.
On the whole Apple, moved better performance to a lower price. Not at the upper 10% range , but over the range that most folks bought from them.
Right, but I have an eGPU box that I can put a 4-8 slot M.2 RAID card into and my personal Audio use case never needs to access more than 2500mb/sec - random times are the limiting factor because they load into RAM and they are more than fast enough with even Thunderbolt 3, for sample storage and retrieval. If I want to get crazy I can get multiple u.2 carriers and spread it across 3 thunderbolt busses and achieve internal PCIE 4 speeds or better. I also have Optane SSDs that blow away even modern Mac random access times and they are 4 years old+.
The eGPU box with pci-e card solution is performant enough and thousands of dollars cheaper. Taking the GPUs out of the equation and not offering a unique SoC narrows this product's user base even further than it already was. Protools HDX cards yes, this thing makes sense. Anyone else? Dubious.
The old machine was also expandable, you could add RAM, change out the CPU, add an afterburner, etc. The ONLY thing you can do with this one is add storage or Audio/Video Capture cards. It's a niche within a niche at that point, and just strikes me as more of a disposable computer I guess, which is why I'm so hard-over on why the Studio is such a better value because you'll get more out of replacing it vs. spending the extra money now, unless you really need 12+ TB extra PCIE4 throughput which I'm arguing almost no one actually does in practice.
You can edit multiple streams of 8k ProRes on a Macbook Pro for God's sake, they have solved the video encoding problem across most of their pro line at this point which IS great but this Halo Product doesn't seem so special to me. Even the motherboard looks barren.
I take your point about the entry level machine being faster, but you could wait and upgrade it to be WAY faster in the past, and now you can't touch those core parts at all. That makes this much less of a "5-10 year" kind of investment IMO.