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Could we see M3 before A17?
- Thread starter senttoschool
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its just your guessing that M3/N3 will come with Mac Pro at WWDC
Still the better chances are that A17 is coming to the market before N3 macs
I suspect WWDC will be all about ios/ipados/watchos/macos, M2 Macbook air (maybe the 13" Mbp) and the headset
Well, a likely middle way is that the M3 based Mac Pro is announced at WWDC but available in December in limited quantities so in practice the A17 will be on sale before the M3 based chips. That would allow Apple to give some info about for instance ray tracing and total compute capability of Mac Pro for a wider audience. Developers likely know already.
i hope your guessing is right..but no words/rumours lately about a mac pro for WWDC until now...so almost 0 chances in my opinion
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I suggest we need to read the tea leaves. For instance, the recent mumbo jumbo about 36GB RAM from Mark Gurman. As I considered the possibility of what I initially considered an outlandish statement, I came to realize there is a reason this statement may be true. If Apple is testing a AS Mac Pro, which is very highly likely independent of when the Mac Pro may be announced, the new AS Mac Pro will use ECC RAM. The MP 6,1 and 7.1 use ECC RAM so it is a near certainty the next AS MP will also use ECC RAM. 4GB is exactly the amount of RAM required to implement ECC for a 32GB memory. Thus, the additional 4 GB of RAM likely the storage required for the error correction. The useable RAM is 32 GB, add 4 GB for the ECC and the total amount of RAM is 36GB which is the number being bandied about.
So, another "tea leave" suggesting the Mac Pro announcement is imminent.
Indeed these are my opinions and it appears to me it is even more likely now the MP will be announced at WWDC.
you are still talking about Mac Pro under TSMC N3 to be an WWDC thing right?
Again, i hope you are right...but hard to believe it
Maybe an Mac Pro is around the corner...but a Mac Pro under A17(cores)/N3 to be presented at WWDC? would be fantastic but just in my dreams
It would be nice that the most powerful Apple device to be promoted with the most advanced SoC...but Apple ..
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Apple could preview a M3 Ultra/Extreme 3nm/A17 Mac Pro at WWDC & ship by the end of the year, just like the last two Mac Pro models...
I feel like they'd also want to introduce the actual building block for an 4x variant (the M3 Max) before even talking about the Extreme itself, so it gets even weirder. I could see something like preview at WWDC and "next year" launch where they release in March/April. They could then release the Pro/Max variants somewhere within that space (or even at the same event).
And before they introduce the Max, they'd have to introduce the base M3 first.
Well yeah, you wrote about introducing M3 first already. I was just adding to that.
Launching the Max ipso facto also launches the base M3.
They certainly don’t have to. It’s all about marketing and what you say:
“The new Mac Pro comes with # CPU cores and # of GPU cores”
“The new Mac Pro can handle # of 12K video streams all at once”
Etc. etc. they don’t have to specify the name of the chip or that it’s part of M3. We also don’t even know if it’ll be part of the M3 family or if they will use a totally different marketing name for their Mac Pro chip.
There’s no reason why they have to announce M3 first. Apple could market this chip as something that is totally separated from the “consumer” chips just how intel uses the Xeon branding instead of their i7 i9 branding.
Apple is not going to simply market a new SoC based solely on core counts and not name it - that's not in their DNA.
There are also significant differences between Apple Silicon and Intel in terms of how different tiers are produced. For example, Xeons have a different physical architecture and die size than i3/5/7/9. They don't even use the same socket as the i Series of CPUs (FCLGA4677 for the Xeons and LGA1700 for 13th gen i(x) CPUs). On the Apple Side of things, the base, Pro, Max, and Ultra (for M1 at least) share common architectures, but the building blocks of the respective SOCs are arranged differently.
People get very locked into this Apple "patterns". If they've done anything once, they must do it exactly that way every other time after. Never works out that way.
They can easily do that all at once. Doesn't matter if there are no other products using it. They an describe the M3 and all it can do....and then say we've multiplied by 4 to make the Mac Pro. Absolutely nothing stops them from doing this. Especially not the fact that they didn't do this with the previous generation of chips. If the Mac Pro is ready now, and other products are not, then they can do what they want.
Never said they wouldn’t name it. I just said they don’t have to name the chip in their “preview” depending on how much info they give us. The chip will of course have a name.
Doesn’t matter. The name is all marketing. They could call the Mac Pro chip something unrelated to M3. Which negates any sort of need to announce M3 chips beforehand. It could be its own class of chip from a marketing standpoint.
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My theory is that the Mac Pro is not ready now - but will be ready this winter.
However Apple could easily announce the Mac Pro as a teaser at WWDC. The reason they would do this is so developers and professionals are aware of the basic specs of the machine, maybe they also release API’s that are special to the Mac Pro, and of course it eases some uncertainty circling around this Tier of Mac (many Pro’s are starting to wonder if apple will even do a Mac a pro).
Apple has a history of announcing their highest-end pro machines (iMac Pro, Mac Pro, Pro Dispoay XDR) at WWDC and then shipping months later in the winter. But of course as we both agreed - they never have to do something the same way!
They already did the teaser when they said the Mac Pro was coming on another day.
That was at least as much , if not more, about the Mac Studio. "Mac Pro later" should have clearly outlined that the Mac Studio is not the Mac Pro. Yes, that says that the Mac Pro 'exists' ( or at least an attempt). But it doesn't 'tease' nothing. There is not a single adjective attached to "Mac Pro later" that applies to the characteristics of the Mac Pro. So how do you 'tease' something and say absolutely nothing descriptive about it at all. Nothing!!! 'later' is a descriptive of time ; not the system. And frankly 12+ later , rings more than somewhat hollow ( and trending toward non truthful) .
That 'later' comment has far more so been a tool for NON-APPLE folks to injects all sorts of details about the next Mac Pro into discussions.
You are pulling the comment completely out of context. Apple had just done benchmarks comparisons between both the iMac 27" and the Mac Pro at the Mac Studio introduction. Mac Studio did better than the average configuration that Apple shipped. If Apple didn't try to dissuade people from inferring the Mac Studio was a replacement for the Mac Pro , that would have gone rampant.
Apple explicitly said the Mac Studio was a replacement for the iMac 27". Lots of folks were going to ignore that because those two don't have the same form factor. The Studio's form factor is closest to the Mini , but to some folks the Mac Pro would be a closer 'match' than the iMac 27" ( both headless ... so 'closer').
Can see this as recently in articles from Gurman and other 'echo chamber' stuff off of his that promote the notion that the next Studio is 'blocked' because the 'Mac Pro' is in the way somehow. People are trying really , really , really hard to draw them into the same equivalence class. Apple has to promote the notion that they are separate. Hence , "Mac Pro later".
Of course they can easily do that, I just don't think they'd want to. I do think @Jorbanead is onto something with the completely different marketing for the MP. Hope they call it an X1 or something.
Yeah I agree with this too. The Mac Pro chip will be different enough from the rest of the M3 line that it can be its own class of chip with its own designation. I think that's fine.
I'm pretty sure they did so that the media and users wouldn't speculate that the Studio is a replacement for the Mac Pro. They wanted to make it clear that the Mac Pro is still coming despite the Studio.