According to this article from Mac World, the M1 version of the Mac Pro that we thought was coming in some extreme flavor, seems cancelled for now. Apparently Apple is focusing on M2 for now, together is supply issues that are ongoing.
How it can be 'cancelled' if they are working on the M2 generation version? Delayed? Yes. Cancelled is an inaccurate connotation. Reportedly there were multiple 'large' screen iMacs prototypes worked on. If it never made to to production validation testing or even engineering validation then never really made it out final 'green light' stage of approval.
The AirPower was "all done and ready to go" too (Apple had even started to print up boxes to ship it) and it never got over the deep scrutiny of engineering and production validation.
The problem if go to the video where Gurman makes this "all done" characterization is that when asked when Apple will ship this M2 version it is "No not January .... Spring maybe ... maybe even early Summer ... maybe not even announce at end of 2022 " . That doesn't 'smell' like a 100% fully baked , problem free infrastructure simply waiting on a speed bump SoC upgrade.
if apple has composed a SoC packaging design that is way, way , way to hard to make in decent numbers then it was never really "all ready to go". Like AirPower had a concept but not a solid product. Would not be surprising if Apple made 100's of prototypes but production wise it doesn't work. So it is "not done in the first place" more so than "cancelled".
This actually makes sense, considering we haven't even seen a small teaser yet like we thought may have happened at WWDC.
If they can't make them inside of a 6 month window then it probably won't get announced.
I wonder if this opens the gate for one more GPU upgrade as AMD releases their next generation this or next year before it's completely done.
Probably not one way or another. If Apple's plan 1-2 years ago was to do 7000 series then it is probably still on track. If Apple had no plans for a 7000 series MPX module then I highly doubt the next Mac Pro sliding has any impact there. [ a sudden desire to throw money at the Intel Mac Pro probably won't not get greelit. ] If Apple had settled on limping along with unchanged hardware then limping along for 6 more months isn't a big deal. Apple squatted on the MP 2013 for 6 years. Squatting on the MP 2019 for 4-5 years would be easy.
The crux would be whether Apple had previously planned to sell both the 'going stale' MP 2019 and the new Apple Silicon version side by side for 1-2 years. If so, then perhaps already had a plan to use 7000 series GPUs to make that less painful for the intel model.
Drivers for macOS lag on AMDGPU releases 1 or 2 quarters anyway. If Apple was shooting for a 7700 and that lags a weeks , months behind the 7900/7800 then that would have been late Spring - early Summer 2023 anyway. Apple is not likely at all to pay extra to jump to the front of the AMD GPU release line. Those cards wouldn't have helped the intel Mac Pro in 2022 whether Apple ships a AS Mac Pro in 2022 or not.
Extremely unlikely that a 7000 series card could play any significant role as a 3-6 month "gap filler". So plus/minus 6-9 months on new Mac Pro won't make any significant difference .
if the 7900 is consuming up in the 400-500W range I'm not sure Apple is going to want to touch that. Similarly if there are no Infinity Fabric links on the 7800 GPU SoC ... again may not want to touch it. ( many of these out of spec, too large cards to handle the heat aren't going to fit. )
AMD also has lots of other irons in the fire than to sink effort in 2022 or very early 2023 into a dead end platform.
The cheapest path for both Apple and AMD is to add some general 6000 series optimizations and a few tweaks for the 6*50 cards and just let folks who need "single" , non fabric connected GPUS just use those. If the crypto GPU card crash continues Apple's cards priced into falling prices on 6800/6900 isn't going to work well.
www.macworld.com
