MP All Models 40 core ASI with PCI-E slot is around the corner!!

[macsplusmacs]

The real risk is if Apple stops updating the AMD drivers for new cards. Then the 7,1's life is going to be capped. If the 6900 XT drivers are the last ones we get - thats a problem.

That one of the big question IMO right now.

Deep inside of Apple HQ, is there a special team called "UPDATE AMD DRIVERS" or not.

If the answer is not, then,....

I think they will pull off newer better faster AMD drivers though. I have no evidence other than I don't think they would do PCI-E Mac Pro MAX - whatever without a video card solution.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

the disappearance of eGPU support

By 'your speculation', I take it as my explanation of dGPUs over PCIe in conflict of Apple's 'unified memory' GPU programming paradigm. You may call it speculation or whatever you like. I see it as a justification of the lack of 3rd party dGPUs support as of now, and possibly why Apple won't do it.

I know some of you hoping 3rd party dGPUs support. The burden of proof is on you to find some sort of evidence in MacOS to make your dream sound more plausible. Hypothetical assertion such as Apple iGPUs won't be as good as X number of Y brand dGPUs are not reasonable nor considered evidence.



I feel like typing out is penalising myself. Why should I? In a nutshell, I think one M2 Max die will support one PCIe 4.0 slot. Hence, four in total. Now do your own imagination. Or just label mine as speculation. I'm fine with it. lol.

Your "explanation" is your speculation. I've seen nothing that shows GPU over PCI is inherently not doable. Sure unified memory means there is added complexity. But you know what, rosetta is also a lot of added complexity and work, and apple bothered to do it. There is not inherent impossibility with unified memory.

Also, the disappearance of eGPU support is easily explainable if they are working on a new system. Apple pulls support from beta features REGULARLY only to put them back in when they get fixed up enough to be serviceable.

Again, these are your speculations. Perhaps they plausible and probable speculations. I would add I personally think they are also reasonable speculations. But youve done nothing more than present speculations. It doesnt matter if you're 'fine' with it or not, that is exactly what it is.

 

[kvic]

Out of curiosity, how did you come to this conclusion?

There aren't many PCIe lanes on M1 Max die. It's limited resource.

Your "explanation" is your speculation. I've seen nothing that shows GPU over PCI is inherently not doable. Sure unified memory means there is added complexity. But you know what, rosetta is also a lot of added complexity and work, and apple bothered to do it. There is not inherent impossibility with unified memory.

You didn't follow the discussion in this thread closely. Or more likely you don't possess the necessary technical background to quickly catch some of the points.

It's not about possibility. Nvidia/AMD has done 'unified memory' with their dGPUs. Apple won't want their way. Apple wants Apple way.

 

[edanuff]

Your "explanation" is your speculation. I've seen nothing that shows GPU over PCI is inherently not doable. Sure unified memory means there is added complexity. But you know what, rosetta is also a lot of added complexity and work, and apple bothered to do it. There is not inherent impossibility with unified memory.

Also, the disappearance of eGPU support is easily explainable if they are working on a new system. Apple pulls support from beta features REGULARLY only to put them back in when they get fixed up enough to be serviceable.

Again, these are your speculations. Perhaps they plausible and probable speculations. I would add I personally think they are also reasonable speculations. But youve done nothing more than present speculations. It doesnt matter if you're 'fine' with it or not, that is exactly what it is.

You are correct that this is speculation. All of this is just trying to read the tea leaves. As has been pointed out, you can get PCIe slots on AS Macs now. That’s not speculation, you can order a Sonnet enclosure today and connect it to your M1 Mac. A lot of cards will work, a lot will not, Sonnet even has a nice table showing ones that will. GPUs don’t currently work. The speculation part has been that we’d see GPU drivers appear by this past WWDC that worked with these if we were going to see GPU support in the Pro. If Apple were going to reintroduce GPU support, it’s reasonable to see these ahead of time in OS releases and enabling eGPU support is an easy way to get developers testing against GPUs via external PCIe enclosures rather than shipping mystery hardware that gets leaked by Amethyst. But I agree, this is just speculation but its not unreasonable. To recap, we know slots are possible - Apple could literally just move the equivalent of a Sonnet enclosure back into the case and we know that about half of the non-GPU PCIe cards that work in the 7,1 have AS Mac drivers. We don’t know how many of these slots are likely. We don’t know exactly how fast these slots will be (Deconstruct will likely tell us). We don’t know what the power envelope will be. We see no evidence of GPU drivers in the latest OS releases given what we’d expect for a machine that was supposed to ship this year. That’s about all we know.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

There aren't many PCIe lanes on M1 Max die. It's limited resource.


You didn't follow the discussion in this thread closely. Or more likely you don't possess the necessary technical background to quickly catch some of the points.

It's not about possibility. Nvidia/AMD has done 'unified memory' with their dGPUs. Apple won't want their way. Apple wants Apple way.

Somehow you are of the mind that apple cannot change their processor for the pro. For example, adding parity. Adding more lanes. Adding more GPU cores. Your SPECULATION is they must use the very same chip with no modifications. You may be right. You may be wrong. Again, that's your speculation.

 

[kvic]

Somehow you are of the mind that apple cannot change their processor for the pro. For example, adding parity. Adding more lanes. Adding more GPU cores. Your SPECULATION is they must use the very same chip with no modifications. You may be right. You may be wrong. Again, that's your speculation.

Don't shift your goalpost. You were talking possibility of doing 'unified memory' of 3rd party dGPUs over PCIe. I answered you already. I would just stop there.

Peace.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

Don't shift your goalpost. You were talking possibility of doing 'unified memory' of 3rd party dGPUs over PCIe. I answered you already. I would just stop there.

Peace.

You should take your own advice. The goal post was it's your speculation. Furthermore, I'm not bound to use your speculation that apple's chip is somehow immutable. You say it's somehow impossible to put a GPU in a PCI card just because apple has an SOC. I say that's false. It's a matter of drivers and apple altering the design of it's SOC for the pro, which I further posit, they NEED to do, if only to add parity.

 

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

There aren't many PCIe lanes on M1 Max die. It's limited resource.

Okay, but is this a fact or are you just speculating?

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

Okay, but is this a fact or are you just speculating?

It's a speculation that the M1max is somehow the bounding limit for a completely new and different computer and that apple is somehow not capable of changing it. But nice try at being pithy. Next time, try harder.

 

[kvic]

You should take your own advice. The goal post was it's your speculation. Furthermore, I'm not bound to use your speculation that apple's chip is somehow immutable. You say it's somehow impossible to put a GPU in a PCI card just because apple has an SOC. I say that's false. It's a matter of drivers and apple altering the design of it's SOC for the pro, which I further posit, they NEED to do, if only to add parity.

When you mentioned 'parity' in the previous post, I thought you were done with dGPU and shifted to talk about ECC for system memory, number of GPU cores.. You didn't make it clear.

I never said it is impossible to put Apple dGPU on a PCIe card. All the way some of us are saying is that Apple won't do dGPU over PCIe. For that I provide a justification that it's in conflict with their 'uniform memory' programming paradigm.

Peace.

 

[macsplusmacs]

When you mentioned 'parity' in the previous post, I thought you were done with dGPU and shifted to talk about ECC for system memory, number of GPU cores.. You didn't make it clear.

I never said it is impossible to put Apple dGPU on a PCIe card. All the way some of us are saying is that Apple won't do dGPU over PCIe. For that I provide a justification that it's in conflict with their 'uniform memory' programming paradigm.

Peace.

I've added him to my ignore list.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

When you mentioned 'parity' in the previous post, I thought you were done with dGPU and shifted to talk about ECC for system memory, number of GPU cores.. You didn't make it clear.

I never said it is impossible to put Apple dGPU on a PCIe card. All the way some of us are saying is that Apple won't do dGPU over PCIe. For that I provide a justification that it's in conflict with their 'uniform memory' programming paradigm.

Peace.

Correct, it's not impossible. I've noted several times that your speculation is reasonable and perhaps even probable. But it is what it is. The tale will be told, hopefully, this year. Let's see who is the better guesser.

 

[goMac]

Your "explanation" is your speculation. I've seen nothing that shows GPU over PCI is inherently not doable. Sure unified memory means there is added complexity. But you know what, rosetta is also a lot of added complexity and work, and apple bothered to do it. There is not inherent impossibility with unified memory.

It's not that simple. There is the unified memory bit - but there are also other Apple Silicon features like tiled memory.

The danger is that application developers ship application that require features like tiled memory. And if that happens - dGPU support will probably never happen. Developers will be relying on a GPU capability that simply isn't present on AMD and Nvidia GPUs. Just like how apps that ship CUDA acceleration only run on Nvidia GPUs. Apps will be locked in.

The warning sign to me is Apple has done absolutely nothing to stop people from shipping apps that lock in to Apple GPU features like tiled memory. There has been no technical advisory from Apple to keep non-tiled code paths in applications on Apple Silicon. Nothing to developers to even hint that non-Apple GPUs are even a possibility on Apple Silicon systems.

I think it's too late now to add AMD and Nvidia GPUs back into the mix on Apple Silicon. Apple is already having too many developers assume the existence of proprietary Apple features beyond unified memory.

 

[macsplusmacs]

It's not that simple. There is the unified memory bit - but there are also other Apple Silicon features like tiled memory.

The danger is that application developers ship application that require features like tiled memory. And if that happens - dGPU support will probably never happen. Developers will be relying on a GPU capability that simply isn't present on AMD and Nvidia GPUs. Just like how apps that ship CUDA acceleration only run on Nvidia GPUs. Apps will be locked in.

The warning sign to me is Apple has done absolutely nothing to stop people from shipping apps that lock in to Apple GPU features like tiled memory. There has been no technical advisory from Apple to keep non-tiled code paths in applications on Apple Silicon. Nothing to developers to even hint that non-Apple GPUs are even a possibility on Apple Silicon systems.

I think it's too late now to add AMD and Nvidia GPUs back into the mix on Apple Silicon. Apple is already having too many developers assume the existence of proprietary Apple features beyond unified memory.

Does Metal 3 provide any hints? Like their new upscaling mode perhaps?

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

It's not that simple. There is the unified memory bit - but there are also other Apple Silicon features like tiled memory.

The danger is that application developers ship application that require features like tiled memory. And if that happens - dGPU support will probably never happen. Developers will be relying on a GPU capability that simply isn't present on AMD and Nvidia GPUs. Just like how apps that ship CUDA acceleration only run on Nvidia GPUs. Apps will be locked in.

The warning sign to me is Apple has done absolutely nothing to stop people from shipping apps that lock in to Apple GPU features like tiled memory. There has been no technical advisory from Apple to keep non-tiled code paths in applications on Apple Silicon. Nothing to developers to even hint that non-Apple GPUs are even a possibility on Apple Silicon systems.

I think it's too late now to add AMD and Nvidia GPUs back into the mix on Apple Silicon. Apple is already having too many developers assume the existence of proprietary Apple features beyond unified memory.

I think that is a reasonable supposition. But it may be as simple as, when they release it, people will have to adapt. Won't be the first time apple has yo-yo'd developers.

 

[goMac]

I think that is a reasonable supposition. But it may be as simple as, when they release it, people will have to adapt. Won't be the first time apple has yo-yo'd developers.

Another problem is iPhone and iPad apps on Apple Silicon Macs. Those things definitely assume that the current GPU is an Apple GPU. Catalyst never fixed that either - the answer for Catalyst was "update your Metal code to work on non-Apple GPUs."

That could be worked around by having a small Apple GPU always present. But I can't see Apple wanting to disadvantage iPhone and iPad apps by locking them to a different, worse GPU. And I know most people here aren't using them - but in Apple's thinking iPad apps on Mac are a perfectly fine way to run iPad Pro apps like Luma Fusion and games.

 

[goMac]

Does Metal 3 provide any hints? Like their new upscaling mode perhaps?

No. The Metal 3 features like upscaling do still work on AMD GPUs. So they haven't stopped adding new features on AMD Macs.

And technically ZombiePhysicist is right. Developers on Apple Silicon can still check for non Apple GPUs. They can still deploy and run GPU programs that are optimized for Radeons on Apple Silicon. In theory if Apple shipped eGPU support for Radeons or even Nvidia cards that could work. Even all the eGPU API still exists on Apple Silicon.

The problem is no one at Apple is telling anyone to keep their Radeon code paths working on Apple Silicon. So developers might not write GPU code that even runs on Radeons. Stuff like the No Mans Sky and Resident Evil Mac versions announced at WWDC didn't even have an Intel version mentioned. It's possible those developers aren't even writing Metal code that would run on Radeons at all and it will be an Apple GPU only release.

Even if developers wanted to keep their Radeon Metal code running on Apple Silicon - no one has a test configuration to make sure it works! Even if I ship code that should run on a Radeon connected to an AS Mac, I have no way of knowing that it doesn't actually crash immediately due to a bug in my app I was never able to test for. Especially if the code is now full of branches that are supposed to execute depending on if the GPU is an Apple one or an AMD/Intel one.

The problem is even if Apple does bring back Radeons - they've now littered the entire ecosystem with apps that were never tested on a Radeon/Apple Silicon combination and could immediately crash, or just might not support Radeon hardware at all because they were written and optimized against Apple GPU proprietary features.

At least Nvidia and AMD GPUs ran the same Metal code so you pretty much could swap those out blindly. But Apple GPUs run a slightly different proprietary version of Metal.

 

[Romain_H]

In the light of all of this (thank you all, there‘s a bunch of pretty knowledgeable people around here) I am even more curious what Apple cooks up.

I hope they do not abandon the Mac Pro using crowd. I also hope (and, being quite the optimist, believe) we see some new surprising stuff.
That said, I am also prepared for some disappointments, one way or the other

 

[Mike Richardson]

The old Mac 2 desktops from the 80's 90's had six nuBus slots, I remember seeing some article that said apple did a survey and it turns out on 1.2 slots were ever used by customers on average

... types this from a MacPro5,1 with literally every slot filled

 

[Colstan]

As someone who isn't in the market for a Mac Pro, of any stripe, I'll be glad when the Apple Silicon version finally ships. Then the speculation can finally be over with. I don't think it is controversial to say that the Mac Pro has a small market share, so its importance is blown up on a forum catering to those users. I'm just not sure if Apple is going to go to extra lengths to support exotic solutions beyond what we have already seen. I have sympathy for the folks who invested a lot of time and funds into the Intel Mac Pro. However, at this point, it's a zombie product, Apple killed it, it just doesn't realize it's dead yet.

The most boring answer, in my opinion, is the most likely one. The Mac Pro will feature a scaled up version of the M(x) Ultra, doubled CPU and GPU cores, with a few PCIe slots tossed in for non-GPU additions.

When I asked him, that's exactly what Cliff Maier, former Opteron architect, who knows the Apple engineers from his days at AMD and Exponential, and talks with them regularly. You can see his breakdown chart here and ask him about it if you'd like. When questioned, he believed that there was a 1% chance of external DIMMs on the Apple Silicon Mac Pro, and a 33% chance of a dGPU, specifically designed by Apple, but that would only make economic sense if it can also be used inside other products, such as a hypothetical future iMac Pro and other high-performance devices.

I realize that, in five years, folks will still be asking for eGPU support, AMD and Nvidia graphics cards, the return of Boot Camp, and all manner of things from the x86 era. Intel Macs were a bit of an oddball, they go against Apple's traditional vertical integration strategy, and now we're returning to the pre-Intel days, for good or for bad.

I just don't want people to get caught up on wish casting for a future that isn't likely to exist, and be disappointed when the genie doesn't appear.

 

[mattspace]

Intel Macs were a bit of an oddball, they go against Apple's traditional vertical integration strategy

Correction, Apple's traditional strategy, was "juice short-term profitability to pay executive bonuses while becoming irrelevant and losing market share doing vertical integration on a proprietary platform that runs out of steam as soon as all the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and eventually gets buried by Intel".

They followed that strategy to the letter on 68k, then again with PPC. They didn't even get out of the first generation of Apple Silicon before Intel was doing mobile processors with comparable performance & battery life.

 

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

They didn't even get out of the first generation of Apple Silicon before Intel was doing mobile processors with comparable performance & battery life.

*When plugged in to power

 

[mattspace]

*When plugged in to power

As Mac Pros often are.

Granted, the best use of a 2013 is as a (boring and obvious) sculptural object, doing nothing on a plinth, but you know, good Mac Pros are usually plugged in to power.

 

[Colstan]

Correction, Apple's traditional strategy, was "juice short-term profitability to pay executive bonuses while becoming irrelevant and losing market share doing vertical integration on a proprietary platform that runs out of steam as soon as all the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and eventually gets buried by Intel".

Correction? I don't think anything I said precludes your assertion. My point was that, by using Apple Silicon, the Mac is more vertically integrated, with proprietary parts across the entire stack, hardware and software, beyond which Steve Jobs could have only dreamed of. As I said, whether that is a good or bad thing is a matter of perspective.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

As someone who isn't in the market for a Mac Pro, of any stripe, I'll be glad when the Apple Silicon version finally ships. Then the speculation can finally be over with. I don't think it is controversial to say that the Mac Pro has a small market share, so its importance is blown up on a forum catering to those users. I'm just not sure if Apple is going to go to extra lengths to support exotic solutions beyond what we have already seen. I have sympathy for the folks who invested a lot of time and funds into the Intel Mac Pro. However, at this point, it's a zombie product, Apple killed it, it just doesn't realize it's dead yet.

The most boring answer, in my opinion, is the most likely one. The Mac Pro will feature a scaled up version of the M(x) Ultra, doubled CPU and GPU cores, with a few PCIe slots tossed in for non-GPU additions.

When I asked him, that's exactly what Cliff Maier, former Opteron architect, who knows the Apple engineers from his days at AMD and Exponential, and talks with them regularly. You can see his breakdown chart here and ask him about it if you'd like. When questioned, he believed that there was a 1% chance of external DIMMs on the Apple Silicon Mac Pro, and a 33% chance of a dGPU, specifically designed by Apple, but that would only make economic sense if it can also be used inside other products, such as a hypothetical future iMac Pro and other high-performance devices.

I realize that, in five years, folks will still be asking for eGPU support, AMD and Nvidia graphics cards, the return of Boot Camp, and all manner of things from the x86 era. Intel Macs were a bit of an oddball, they go against Apple's traditional vertical integration strategy, and now we're returning to the pre-Intel days, for good or for bad.

I just don't want people to get caught up on wish casting for a future that isn't likely to exist, and be disappointed when the genie doesn't appear.

There was 3rd party gpu support in the pre intel days as well.