As the industry moves towards disaggregation and DPUs good ol' Apple seems to be going the opposite direction with its own SoC ?♂️
Well, this unless Apple will smell the coffee and come up with a DPU based ARM MacPro to resurrect the not so stupid concept of modularity. Could the idea of a MacPro in a smaller form factor be the hint at moving towards that direction?
Whether you are are real pro or just a nerd today it make sense to have separate modules for CPU, RAM, Storage and Graphics talking to each other via 100Gbit links and that can be configured and upgraded independently withouth throwing everything away. Look at what NVIDIA is doing with BlueField-2 or Fungible with DPU based storage.
Now that technology is here to allow it, this type of modularity is not just needed in the datacentre, it does make at lot of sense also in the AI and video editing department where scalability is needed vertically (more resources to users) and horizontally (increased number of users). DPU based modularity would deliver just that without having to open desktop chassis or moving them around via a ludicrously expensive set of wheels...
So maybe yes, I hope for 7,1 to go to history as the peak and outdated "monolithic" MacPro. With such an ubiquous and home grown ARM based architecture Apple today has all the cards to enable a modular design to help its customers for real.
Well, this unless Apple will smell the coffee and come up with a DPU based ARM MacPro to resurrect the not so stupid concept of modularity. Could the idea of a MacPro in a smaller form factor be the hint at moving towards that direction?
Whether you are are real pro or just a nerd today it make sense to have separate modules for CPU, RAM, Storage and Graphics talking to each other via 100Gbit links and that can be configured and upgraded independently withouth throwing everything away. Look at what NVIDIA is doing with BlueField-2 or Fungible with DPU based storage.
Now that technology is here to allow it, this type of modularity is not just needed in the datacentre, it does make at lot of sense also in the AI and video editing department where scalability is needed vertically (more resources to users) and horizontally (increased number of users). DPU based modularity would deliver just that without having to open desktop chassis or moving them around via a ludicrously expensive set of wheels...
So maybe yes, I hope for 7,1 to go to history as the peak and outdated "monolithic" MacPro. With such an ubiquous and home grown ARM based architecture Apple today has all the cards to enable a modular design to help its customers for real.
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