The question ain't if the AS-team can make a proper MacPro, the question is if the money guys (aka Tim Apple) see a point in spending that kind of money on a small niche product.
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MP All Models Intel may be the only way to save the Mac Pro
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The question ain't if the AS-team can make a proper MacPro, the question is if the money guys (aka Tim Apple) see a point in spending that kind of money on a small niche product.
The most interesting products coming out of Apple these days is Apple Silicon. Apple is lucky to have people like Johny Srouji working to ensure Apple's chips are the industry's best.
Agreed. I was as surprised as everyone else when I found out Christopher Walken was heading up Apple Silicon.
I am not an engineer, so I wonder how feasible this could be, but what if they created a hybrid system? Use Apple Silicon and Intel to offer the best of both worlds. Use Intel as the base, but add Apple Silicon to offload some critical workloads that are more efficient or faster on ARM (even when translating from X86 to ARM) and offer full upgradability.
You mean like this ?
Was a stupid idea 37 years ago is still one today, even before going into the cost and performance issues anything like this or with tighter integration would cause.
RAM density is getting harder than 'compute logic' density. But a bigger issue is that there is a trade off between more aggregated bandwidth with capacity. If want to get to a TB of memory then probably not going as fsster and vice versa.
What Apple is building is some semi-custom RAM that gets somewhere in the middle. It is somewhat a "poor man's" HBM memory. It is less bandwidth than HBM but higher capacity. And it is higher bandwidth than DIMMs , but lower capacity.
The density issues are going to get bypass a bit by just stacking the RAM dies higher. (like HBM does. ) This cranks up costs. So another trade off between "as cheap and commodity as possible" and better performance.
Apple goes 'extra wide' The M1 Max has twice as many memory controllers as the MP 2019's W-3200 does. Apple goes very wide like HBM. And semi-custom stacks RAM dies as HBM does. But there are limits to the trade off.
Does Apple even want to go there? The > 1TB capacity was mainly a side-effect of repurposing an Intel sever chip architecture as a workstation chip. It was a design decision pretty much unilaterally made by intel. Apple piggybacked on top of it more so for the extra 'tax' they would get to throw on top more so than deep need to cover that capacity.
Without, ECC abilities > 1TB is best dubious, if not a huge folly. No ECC in the 256GB - 1TB range is a bigger gap than some capacity above 1TB.
As unified , uniform access memory > 1TB is likely out of reach for Apple using the "poor man's " HBM technique.
Apple isn't making only a CPU. the bandwidth drop to get to > 1TB would negate the iGPU they have. Extremely unlikely apple is going to give up there lead in that area just for capacity.
Apple probably has some pretty accurate demographics of just how many folks are actually using > 300 GB , > 500 GB , and > 1TB amounts of data. if the number of folks in any of those groups is really very , very small then it really is not worth going through triple backflips trying trying to undo all the trade offs to fit in that group. Or even delivery systems in that subgroup. It just 'happens to be almost free' before (as an Intel 'hand me down' from server CPU packages) , but now would not be. In short, if there is no humongous group of sever people to pay for server features ... then may not get server 'paid for' features.
Hahaha, I’m afraid but despite what this site and Apple want people to believe, the majority of Mac Pro owners are not professionals, just a cohort of passionate hobbyists/fetishists with enough disposable income to purchase the thing outright but not enough of it to renew it over a typical 3 to 5 years amortisation cycle.
Serious businesses are not risking their revenues, staff, facilities and licensing investments over a totally unpredictable hardware release cycle and a non existent product roadmap.
The Mac pro is no more than a “concept” wet dream pc wrapped in glitter (ie a PC sporting a machined aluminium case, exorbitantly expensive monitor stands and optional wheel sets) that Apple likes to flash around to increase their “jewellery techno cult“ that drive sales of the portable and wearable product lines among rich students, hobbyists and receptionists.
Real pros moved long ago to disaggregated hardware and distributed, collaborative workflows mostly running on Linux and Cuda supported GPUs. Something on a galaxy far far away from this one populated by Sunday afternoon YouTube editors, bloggers and bragging influencers just interested in generating web traffic.
Disney, Pixar, Lucasfilm ... not serious business?
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Man, I so see Srouji doing the fat boy slim weapon of choice when the Mac Pro releases.
Apple gave up on Intel primarily because of Intel's response to issues like this:
www.techradar.com
they can cause performance issues and might even be ineffective without disabling Intel Hyper-Threading
There will never be another Intel Mac.
Microsoft is fixing a load of serious Intel CPU security flaws
Fixes should be applied with caution, Microsoft warns
they can cause performance issues and might even be ineffective without disabling Intel Hyper-Threading
There will never be another Intel Mac.
There was a time when Apple was reporting more bugs against Skylake than Intel’s internal testers. Apple, unlike the rest of the computing industry, no longer has to deal with Intel’s inability to focus on anything other than trying to force voltage through their systems so they appear “better” than a CPU that 0% of the market can use! (outside of Apple)Apple gave up on Intel primarily because of Intel's response to issues like this:
Microsoft is fixing a load of serious Intel CPU security flaws
Fixes should be applied with caution, Microsoft warns
they can cause performance issues and might even be ineffective without disabling Intel Hyper-Threading
There will never be another Intel Mac.
If we want to be really pedantic about it too -- it's not even Lucasfilm buy Skywalker Sound, a division of Lucasfilm (i'm twistin ya arm here)
.There is also Adobe, Autodesk, Avid, Unity and a few other lesser known studios
I think there is probably some credibility basis for the Mac Pro’s existence (like car manufacturers that make rally cars). If people started equating serious power with only PCs, it would probably have some sort of an effect on the Apple brand (even if the common consumer would never need that power).
That said, Apple doesn’t seem to put high importance on having the most powerful computers—probably just a presence in the high end professional space.
I work in an industry that uses a lot of Mac Pros.
I would agree that the majority of my fellow freelance 3D animators switched to PC a long time ago, and I was using them in-house, when the pandemic hit and I needed to supply my own computer I got a Mac Pro, just in time for Octane and then Redshift to start supporting macOS. It's been great, and I think if Apple keep at it, they'll pick up more and more pro users in my field as they come to upgrade.
that is more the fanboy rumors version of the story after playing a long session of the telephone game. .
‘ .. “… Basically our buddies at Apple became the number one filer of problems in the architecture. And that went really, really bad…. When your customer starts finding almost as much bugs as you found yourself, you're not leading into the right place." …’
Former Intel Engineer Claims Buggy Skylake Chips Hastened Apple's Switch to Custom Silicon
At this week's WWDC, Apple confirmed its plan to switch from Intel to custom processors for its Macs over a two-year transition period. Apple...
www.macrumors.com
Reporting more than other Intel customers ( biggest outside filer) ; probably . However, you can’t stop reading at ‘ number one filer’ . The very early versions of the chips don’t even make it out to customers. Only Intel is going to see those and that will build up a lead in bug repeating that will be hard to beat. The internal dev group is not going to file reports into same system that Apple and outsiders do. There may be an Intel QA group that is in same class as outsiders ( because working on same engineering samples and making a variety of reference boards and ) .
The other likely issue here is vast majority of Intel customer and Intel itself was not eyeball deep in ‘cloning’ x86-64 on ARM either. I doubt Rosetta 2 was done before the follow on to Skylake came, but pretty good chance a some very small group at apple was very closely scrutinizing how the CPU worked at a low level .
AMD is rapidly building share in servers( in very high 20’s % and may close to 35% by early 2024 ) , it isn’t like rest of industry is standing there not trying Intel alternatives . Dell and Lenovo have AMD workstations ( and do not urgently need a W-2400/3400 update. Unlike HP )
Intel is slowly loosing share in the more mainstream , but it is not zero . If Intel screws up Gen14 ( meteor lake ) laptop SoCs they will be in deep trouble ( probably going to punt mucking around on some showboat desktop to keep core business afloat ). Laptop Hasn’t been AMD’s main focus but they are evolving there with steady .
Right, but the largest portion of the market is, and will likely always be from this point forward, portable systems. Until AMD’s able to match Intel’s output across the board, they’re going to be relegated to servers. And, even with those servers, there are likely vendors that stick with Intel just because they know Intel can fill large orders easier than AMD can.
If Intel screws up with Gen14, they’ll still do a lot of business with them because there’s no one else that can provide a product in the quantities that Intel can that’s as compatible as Intel is. There is not a single vendor on the planet that will look at a power hungry, hot, Intel laptop solution and NOT bite the bullet and build a product around it anyway.
This whole thing is very interesting.
On one hand, there's the possibility that Apple backed themselves into a corner--meaning, they didn't anticipate the extent to which Apple Silicon doesn't work with the Mac Pro's modular/upgradeable philosophy and now they don't know what to do. I find that hard to believe that they couldn't have seen this coming.
At the same time, rumors indicating the Apple Silicon Mac Pro will be minimally upgradeable and will have the same chip as the Mac Studio lends some credence to this theory. Right now it seems like the Mac Pro is going to be a Mac Studio in a different form factor will possible upgradeable storage. Is that enough to differentiate it from the Studio? Why keep the Mac Pro around if it doesn't offer much over the Studio? (Or is the theory that the Studio is a "stop gap" that will be quickly discontinued once the new Mac Pro is released true?) Have we already seen the limits of Apple Silicon with the Studio?
At this point I just want to see where this goes.
On one hand, there's the possibility that Apple backed themselves into a corner--meaning, they didn't anticipate the extent to which Apple Silicon doesn't work with the Mac Pro's modular/upgradeable philosophy and now they don't know what to do. I find that hard to believe that they couldn't have seen this coming.
At the same time, rumors indicating the Apple Silicon Mac Pro will be minimally upgradeable and will have the same chip as the Mac Studio lends some credence to this theory. Right now it seems like the Mac Pro is going to be a Mac Studio in a different form factor will possible upgradeable storage. Is that enough to differentiate it from the Studio? Why keep the Mac Pro around if it doesn't offer much over the Studio? (Or is the theory that the Studio is a "stop gap" that will be quickly discontinued once the new Mac Pro is released true?) Have we already seen the limits of Apple Silicon with the Studio?
At this point I just want to see where this goes.
Well, wasn't Timmy the one who said something along the lines of "all people really need is an iPad"...?... That should give an indication of how he thinks, and the direction to which he is currently driving the mothership...
The other interesting thing to think about is this:
1. The Mac Pro was developed during the Steve Jobs era, and look at how amazing it is as a piece of engineering...
2. The Mac Studio was developed during the Timmy boy era, and look at how limited and constrained it is...
I am of the mindset that the Studio is indeed a "stop gap", one of which they quickly scrambled to put together, and didn't give much thought to, and I strongly believe it will be discontinued once the AS Mac Pro, and newer AS chips are released.
In terms of GPU power, the Studio already gets easily smoked by an RX-6800XT (in a 5,1 at that)
So take from that, what you will...
I am with you 100% on this.
I am even more excited to see the direction apple will take once Timmy boy finally resigns. Hopefully we get another Steve Jobs type character, that actually pushes the envelope, because with the amount of cash that they are sitting on, it really is quite a waste to not use any of that to innovate.