MP 7,1 Mac Pro 8.1 - WHAT IF...

[maikerukun]

So…who’s going to pick up the new Mac Pro? Is anybody seeing value in it?

I know there were multiple people here who don’t care about graphical horsepower enough for a lack of GPU support to be a dealbreaker, so now that we know what it actually is, who’s on board?

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

I’m passing on this Mac ‘Doh!

 

[AlphaCentauri]

So…who’s going to pick up the new Mac Pro? Is anybody seeing value in it?

I know there were multiple people here who don’t care about graphical horsepower enough for a lack of GPU support to be a dealbreaker, so now that we know what it actually is, who’s on board?

I would have bought it, if not for the price difference of approx. £3000 just for PCI slots and tower case, in comparison to similarly specced Mac Studio.

I’m going with M2 Studio Ultra, 192GB RAM and 4TB SSD.

 

[innerproduct]

Probably going for m2ultra for fall. See no point in the macpro except for internal storage and it isn’t worth 3000 extra. Will await reviews as well. It is 10% as powerful as the same money gets you in pc space for what i need.(3d and ai). I also need to reevaluate why i l even need a studio right now. For adobe stuff I am fine with my maxed out m1max 16” and for 3d I have far more poweful pc. Hmmmm

 

[deconstruct60]

There is a decent sized chip on the new motherboard about in the same exact place the PLX PCI-e switch was on the MP 2019 motherboard. Decent chance it is doing the same thing . 6+ slots of MP 2019 were only fed by two x16 PCI-e v3 feeds. If Apple feeds 7 slots with two x16 PCI-e v4 then really haven't 'lost' anything. ( 4 x16 PCI-e v3 == 2 x16 PCI-e v4 in aggregate bandwidth).


If it is just one x16 PCI-e v4 backhaul feeding all of that, then yeah. It is backslide.

Back of envelope sanity check... ( although a tech spec white paper for the new Mac Pro sure would be nice. Good grief ... watch that will show up 2-4 months months the system ships. ) Anyway.

Apple mentioned that the new Mac Pro could capture via 6 video cards can ingest 24 4K camera feeds and convert to ProRes in realtime. So presuming that is 4K HDR RAW that would put it in the range where there probably would be two x16 PCI-e v4 backhaul controllers like MP 2019. If that was six x8 PCI-e v3 cards, then we are looking at 48 lanes of PCI-e v3 bandwidth. Flip to v4 and that is 24 lanes of backhaul demand from a PCI-e switch ( which x32 would 'cover' , but x16 would not. ).

The DeckLink 8K is a x8 PCI-e v3 card

DeckLink – Tech Specs | Blackmagic Design

DeckLink are high performance capture cards for Mac, Windows and Linux with support for 12G-SDI and 8K.

www.blackmagicdesign.com

It is hobbled by Thunderbolt enclosures, but fully enabled by this Mac Pro. And I'm not sure you can juggle the MP 2019 to fit six x8 PCI-e v3 cards fully uncapped without tossing all the GPUs cards. ( only four are going on the two x16 PCI-e v3 switch. Can use slot 3 to get to 5 cards ... but the 6th???? But yes how many folks need 6. ) . If the cards only used 5-6 of the x8 bandwidth there is enough slack to squeeze another on the PCI-e switch, but likely other stuff active on that switch also. Perhaps that "better than previous one" contributed to why Apple selected it as an example to highlight at the introduction.

However, six x8 PCI-e v4 cards could swamp the backhaul. So could two x16 v4 cards plus a x4 SSD v4 . The latter would require a bigger and more expensive chiplet augment to the two M2 Max dies and I suspect Apple didn't want to go there. ( and the Extreme , if existed, probably would share the same 'fan out' to the PCI-e switch. Doubtful, Apple wanted to do major main board , long distance layout changes for relatively low run rate Mac Pro.) Apple didn't build some ThreadRipper Pro 5000/7000 'killer' SoC here.

Minimally, that 6 x8 PCi-e card example Apple gave means the backhaul isn't a horrible backslide.

 

[MacPoulet]

So…who’s going to pick up the new Mac Pro? Is anybody seeing value in it?

I know there were multiple people here who don’t care about graphical horsepower enough for a lack of GPU support to be a dealbreaker, so now that we know what it actually is, who’s on board?

If this was three months ago, we would have bought the rack-mount instead of an M1 Ultra Studio and PCI expansion chassis for our post-production suite at work.

 

[maikerukun]

I would have bought it, if not for the price difference of approx. £3000 just for PCI slots and tower case, in comparison to similarly specced Mac Studio.

I’m going with M2 Studio Ultra, 192GB RAM and 4TB SSD.

And I suspect this will be the majority of people. I'm still not 100% this won't take video cards and until the first ones ship and arrive we won't know for sure because while they didn't say they take them, they also haven't explicitly said they don't...

 

[maikerukun]

Probably going for m2ultra for fall. See no point in the macpro except for internal storage and it isn’t worth 3000 extra. Will await reviews as well. It is 10% as powerful as the same money gets you in pc space for what i need.(3d and ai). I also need to reevaluate why i l even need a studio right now. For adobe stuff I am fine with my maxed out m1max 16” and for 3d I have far more poweful pc. Hmmmm

Again, 2/2 have now said the Mac Pro simply has no relevance in this particular configuration. It's the exact same as the Mac Studio maxed out, and quite frankly, all the PCI they mentioned for workflows, have already been solved via other solutions using thunderbolt. Will be interesting to see if Apple releases a "one more thing" about the Mac Pros in the coming weeks...

 

[maikerukun]

If this was three months ago, we would have bought the rack-mount instead of an M1 Ultra Studio and PCI expansion chassis for our post-production suite at work.

And how have you guys felt about your M1 Ultra Studio and PCI expansion chassis? Has it been performing about as expected? Above expectations? Does anything about the M2 Ultra Mac Studio tempt you?

 

[Rob__Mac]

I'm a VFX guy and been exclusively a Mac user since 2003. I really should've bought a PC a long time ago for the sort of work I do. I was learning Redshift on my 15" MacBook Pro using an Nvidia RTX 2070S in an eGPU on Windows with Boot Camp. I was pretty set on building a PC around that RTX card, when I was awarded some EU Covid business funding specifically for purchasing equipment, and I got a 2019 Mac Pro.

Apple Silicon had already been announced so I knew it wasn't going to be my 10 year computer, but given it cost me nothing, I thought why the heck not.

A couple of years later and I'm really used to using Redshift with Cinema 4D on my Mac (hallelujah). I must say I'm pretty cheesed off that Apple:

1. aren't (yet?) supporting 3rd party GPU's with Apple Silicon.
2. have completely killed off MPX modules

I would be a natural purchaser of this Mac Pro - or whatever Mac Pro is around in a couple of years, because I would take my GPU's and boost whatever AS SoC is in there.

But now I can't. If nothing changes with GPU support, every single bit of kit in my Mac Pro will be redundant.

I don't need SDI cards, I just need render performance. Perhaps the GPU renderers will get better at supporting CPU as well, but at the moment that feels like several years off.

Disappointed, but still happy with my setup for now.

 

[maikerukun]

I'm a VFX guy and been exclusively a Mac user since 2003. I really should've bought a PC a long time ago for the sort of work I do. I was learning Redshift on my 15" MacBook Pro using an Nvidia RTX 2070S in an eGPU on Windows with Boot Camp. I was pretty set on building a PC around that RTX card, when I was awarded some EU Covid business funding specifically for purchasing equipment, and I got a 2019 Mac Pro.

Apple Silicon had already been announced so I knew it wasn't going to be my 10 year computer, but given it cost me nothing, I thought why the heck not.

A couple of years later and I'm really used to using Redshift with Cinema 4D on my Mac (hallelujah). I must say I'm pretty cheesed off that Apple:

1. aren't (yet?) supporting 3rd party GPU's with Apple Silicon.
2. have completely killed off MPX modules

I would be a natural purchaser of this Mac Pro - or whatever Mac Pro is around in a couple of years, because I would take my GPU's and boost whatever AS SoC is in there.

But now I can't. If nothing changes with GPU support, every single bit of kit in my Mac Pro will be redundant.

I don't need SDI cards, I just need render performance. Perhaps the GPU renderers will get better at supporting CPU as well, but at the moment that feels like several years off.

Disappointed, but still happy with my setup for now.

LOL. Trust me, I know exactly how you feel. I don't know how much of this thread you've read, but you and I as well as a few others are in an extremely similar boat...so much so that we may all be sailing to the same exact destination lol. And I'm STILL FINE with My 2019 Mac Pro. It's still a 3D powerhouse, but obviously cannot compete with a PC. I just purchased a new Puget system with 2 TRX 4090's and a 64 core threadripper. It's still sitting in the box as I'm currently VFX Supervisor on a film and already started the work on my Mac and don't have time yet to set up the Puget "and shoot an unboxing video of it".

And while I will still likely buy the new Mac Pro, I want to wait and see if Apple is gonna announce anything crazy "GPU cards, GPU support, etc"...

 

[prefuse07]

LOL. Trust me, I know exactly how you feel. I don't know how much of this thread you've read, but you and I as well as a few others are in an extremely similar boat...so much so that we may all be sailing to the same exact destination lol. And I'm STILL FINE with My 2019 Mac Pro. It's still a 3D powerhouse, but obviously cannot compete with a PC. I just purchased a new Puget system with 2 TRX 4090's and a 64 core threadripper. It's still sitting in the box as I'm currently VFX Supervisor on a film and already started the work on my Mac and don't have time yet to set up the Puget "and shoot an unboxing video of it".

And while I will still likely buy the new Mac Pro, I want to wait and see if Apple is gonna announce anything crazy "GPU cards, GPU support, etc"...

I honestly don't think you should waste your time or money on it. With that slap on the face, frankly, they don't deserve your money right now...

Plus, since you just purchased that beastly Puget system, just wait until the M3 version, or at least hold off to see if they do decide to announce support for GPUs later this year (which is highly highly highly unlikely)

 

[maikerukun]

I honestly don't think you should waste your time or money on it. With that slap on the face, frankly, they don't deserve your money right now...

Plus, since you just purchased that beastly Puget system, just wait until the M3 version, or at least hold off to see if they do decide to announce support for GPUs later this year (which is highly highly highly unlikely)

Hmmm, I agree with you actually. For the time being I will just run. the 2019 Mac Pro and the Puget System. My. curiosity always gets the best of me but I'm sure someone else on the thread will get one and we can monitor it and it's progress over the coming months to see if anything cool happens with it. So then it's settled. No more Apple purchases for me until the Vision Pro "and possibly the M2 Ultra Mac Studio lolol"

 

[maikerukun]

That said, I did just order some new toys today though You knew I wasn't just gonna let RED drop new cameras and not get a few. I'm pissed cuz I wasn't around the day they opened orders for the first 10,000 so I didn't get the white stormtrooper editions Still, something to pair up with the Puget.

 

[deconstruct60]

And I suspect this will be the majority of people. I'm still not 100% this won't take video cards and until the first ones ship and arrive we won't know for sure because while they didn't say they take them, they also haven't explicitly said they don't...

Somewhat already know. Look at the AUX power specs:

[ snapshot of specs page at the moment.]
"...
300W auxiliary power available:

• Two 6-pin connectors delivering 75W of power each
• One 8-pin connector delivering 150W of power

..."

Mac Pro - Technical Specifications

See all the technical specifications for Mac Pro with the M2 Ultra chip.

www.apple.com

Contrast with the MP 2019

" ...

• Alternatively, each MPX bay can support:
  • One full-length, double-wide x16 gen 3 slot and one full-length, double-wide x8 gen 3 slot (MPX bay 1)
  • Or two full-length, double-wide x16 gen 3 slots (MPX bay 2)
  • Up to 300W auxiliary power via two 8-pin connectors
• Three full-length PCI Express gen 3 slots
  • One x16 slot; two x8 slots
  • 75W auxiliary power available

..."

Mac Pro (2019) - Technical Specifications - Apple Support

support.apple.com

They have gone from four 8 pin AUX power connectors in the box down to just one (two per MPX bay). But they doubled the number of 6 pin ( 75W) AUX power connectors.

Does that sound they they are chasing the top end of the modern 300-500W dragon fire power burning GPUs product lines? Nope.

7900 XT

"... The card is longer than the Radeon 6900 design, but features the same power connector configuration as the RDNA2 GPU, which is a dual 8-pin connector design. ..."

AMD Radeon RX 7900 graphics card has been pictured, two 8-pin power connectors confirmed - VideoCardz.com

AMD Radeon 7900 pictured The pictures were posted by @9550pro who claims to have them from a closed QQ chat group. The card is clearly a prototype, with a red board design and voltage contact points in some places. What is clear though is that this design matches what AMD has been teasing in...

videocardz.com

"...
Rhe power connectors remain the same. Both the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT require dual 8-pin power for the reference design. Some third-party designs may go up to three 8-pin power connectors, so make sure your PC is equipped with one of the best PC power supplies to have all the connectors you need. ..."

AMD ramps up RX 7900 XT power requirements | Digital Trends

AMD's upcoming RX 7900 XT is getting a change in power consumption ahead of launch, which is important to know before it hits store shelves.

www.digitaltrends.com

Can you 'hack' a second 8-pin out of two 6's. Yeah. Is that some 'normal' , formally supported mode Apple is looking for? Probably not. The 'door' isn't completely shut though.

It looks like Apple 'bet the farm' on another option that needed to pull more power into the 'CPU' zone of the Mac Pro that either wasn't targeted this generation (or failed due to other problems like 'too expensive') and they sizably chopped down the aggregate system AUX power budget. Now the M2 Ultra only model is just more 'eco-friendly'; not going to run that power supply at 90+ % load.

If Apple was playing it safe that might have been two 8's and one 6. A backslide but still easier cable matching to higher end GPU cards. Where Apple is covering is something much more in the midrange zone ( AMD 7700XT zone).



P.S. I know there is a subset group in these forums that would just plop a 16 Pin power supply on the desk next to the Mac Pro and run the cords in though an empty PCI-e slot cover hole and "get 'er done' with whatever monster they wanted to throw in there. The relavant factor is whether Apple was looking to formally support that or not. They don't.

 

[prefuse07]

Hmmm, I agree with you actually. For the time being I will just run. the 2019 Mac Pro and the Puget System. My. curiosity always gets the best of me but I'm sure someone else on the thread will get one and we can monitor it and it's progress over the coming months to see if anything cool happens with it. So then it's settled. No more Apple purchases for me until the Vision Pro "and possibly the M2 Ultra Mac Studio lolol"

I mean, giving them money right now, and especially the amount of money you will give (cause I know you will spec the $h!t out of that M2 Ultra, lol) especially after the kneecapping that they just delivered globally to all Pros (yourself included) would just be totally masochistic.

I say, you've held out this long, plus your incoming Puget system will literally blow everything else away, that there is no reason to even look at the M2 Mac Pro. Wait and see what they Cook (lol pun intended) up in the M3 variant, and if those rumored compute modules we've been hearing so much about do end up turning into Apple dGPUs, etc...

 

[maikerukun]

Somewhat already know. Look at the AUX power specs:

[ snapshot of specs page at the moment.]
"...
300W auxiliary power available:

• Two 6-pin connectors delivering 75W of power each
• One 8-pin connector delivering 150W of power

..."

Mac Pro - Technical Specifications

See all the technical specifications for Mac Pro with the M2 Ultra chip.

www.apple.com

Contrast with the MP 2019

" ...

• Alternatively, each MPX bay can support:
  • One full-length, double-wide x16 gen 3 slot and one full-length, double-wide x8 gen 3 slot (MPX bay 1)
  • Or two full-length, double-wide x16 gen 3 slots (MPX bay 2)
  • Up to 300W auxiliary power via two 8-pin connectors
• Three full-length PCI Express gen 3 slots
  • One x16 slot; two x8 slots
  • 75W auxiliary power available

..."

Mac Pro (2019) - Technical Specifications - Apple Support

support.apple.com

They have gone from four 8 pin AUX power connectors in the box down to just one (two per MPX bay). But they doubled the number of 6 pin ( 75W) AUX power connectors.

Does that sound they they are chasing the top end of the modern 300-500W dragon fire power burning GPUs product lines? Nope.

7900 XT

"... The card is longer than the Radeon 6900 design, but features the same power connector configuration as the RDNA2 GPU, which is a dual 8-pin connector design. ..."

AMD Radeon RX 7900 graphics card has been pictured, two 8-pin power connectors confirmed - VideoCardz.com

AMD Radeon 7900 pictured The pictures were posted by @9550pro who claims to have them from a closed QQ chat group. The card is clearly a prototype, with a red board design and voltage contact points in some places. What is clear though is that this design matches what AMD has been teasing in...

videocardz.com

"...
Rhe power connectors remain the same. Both the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT require dual 8-pin power for the reference design. Some third-party designs may go up to three 8-pin power connectors, so make sure your PC is equipped with one of the best PC power supplies to have all the connectors you need. ..."

AMD ramps up RX 7900 XT power requirements | Digital Trends

AMD's upcoming RX 7900 XT is getting a change in power consumption ahead of launch, which is important to know before it hits store shelves.

www.digitaltrends.com

Can you 'hack' a second 8-pin out of two 6's. Yeah. Is that some 'normal' , formally supported mode Apple is looking for? Probably not. The 'door' isn't completely shut though.

It looks like Apple 'bet the farm' on another option that needed to pull more power into the 'CPU' zone of the Mac Pro that either wasn't targeted this generation (or failed due to other problems like 'too expensive') and they sizably chopped down the aggregate system AUX power budget. Now the M2 Ultra only model is just more 'eco-friendly'; not going to run that power supply at 90+ % load.

If Apple was playing it safe that might have been two 8's and one 6. A backslide but still easier cable matching to higher end GPU cards. Where Apple is covering is something much more in the midrange zone ( AMD 7700XT zone).



P.S. I know there is a subset group in these forums that would just plop a 16 Pin power supply on the desk next to the Mac Pro and run the cords in though an empty PCI-e slot cover hole and "get 'er done' with whatever monster they wanted to throw in there. The relavant factor is whether Apple was looking to formally support that or not. They don't.

Here's my question to you...do you think they're working on their own solution, ie GPU cards?

 

[maikerukun]

I mean, giving them money right now, and especially the amount of money you will give (cause I know you will spec the $h!t out of that M2 Ultra, lol) especially after the kneecapping that they just delivered globally to all Pros (yourself included) would just be totally masochistic.

I say, you've held out this long, plus your incoming Puget system will literally blow everything else away, that there is no reason to even look at the M2 Mac Pro. Wait and see what they Cook (lol pun intended) up in the M3 variant, and if those rumored compute modules we've been hearing so much about do end up turning into Apple dGPUs, etc...

I 100% agree. It really all comes down to those GPU cards/modules that they end up releasing. If that turns out to be the secret sauce that brings down the boss, then I'll take the bait. Until then though, it's time to figure out some new income streams to bring in FROM APPLE instead of giving them money lol.

Which is something I encourage EVERYONE ON THIS THREAD TO DO BTW...we are alive in a once per decade type of situation guys. Apple just created a new hardware space that will require an entirely separate APP STORE. ALL OF US should be brushing up on our coding, or hiring folks who can do it for us, and putting together ideas for the launch of Vision Pro. Everyone on this board can be a millionaire by next summer if we all take advantage of this opportunity ❤️ It doesn't happen often...get paid, my friends

 

[novagamer]

Which is something I encourage EVERYONE ON THIS THREAD TO DO BTW...we are alive in a once per decade type of situation guys. Apple just created a new hardware space that will require an entirely separate APP STORE. ALL OF US should be brushing up on our coding, or hiring folks who can do it for us, and putting together ideas for the launch of Vision Pro. Everyone on this board can be a millionaire by next summer if we all take advantage of this opportunity ❤️ It doesn't happen often...get paid, my friends

How do you envision that App store not suffering a similar "race to the bottom" the others have?

IMO Apple needs to solve for that on the Vision Pro more than anything else. Imagine IAP and ads in your VR/AR world, ugh.

 

[maikerukun]

How do you envision that App store not suffering a similar "race to the bottom" the others have?

IMO Apple needs to solve for that on the Vision Pro more than anything else. Imagine IAP and ads in your VR/AR world, ugh.

LOL It will absolutely suffer that race to the bottom, but that wasn't the point of my post...my point was, it's going to happen, make money while it does...a LOT of money. Hopefully Apple will course correct it somehow and at some point...but that said, unit they do, no point in all of us not making a quick 6 to 7 figure payday lol.

I definitely agree with you though and don't look forward to all the random noise in the new shop...but will be contributing to it. Hopefully with some quality products...at .99 cents a pop

 

[deconstruct60]

Here's my question to you...do you think they're working on their own solution, ie GPU cards?

No (at least for 2-4 more iterations/generations). Because the "no 3rd party GPU" issues is pretty likely a "no dGPU issue". It just manifests as a "anti those other guys" because Apple themselves don't have an dGPU. But Apple probably doesn't want a dGPU. It is useless in the laptop line up. And Mini. And iMac ( "iPad on a stick"). And Mac Studio. ( worse than useless in iPad line up).

First, it has to do with making highly consistently portable code up and down the whole stack. From S2 on watch through Vision Pro through iPad up to Mac Pro. The GPU optimization strategy for programmer largely doesn't change. Programmer may have more resources to spread computations over , but Apple wants to hide the complexity and give them tools so things 'automagically' spread out when they can. It will require manual adjustments ( it isn't going to be completely magical) , but it does help control development costs for developers.

For example when HW Raytracing comes to Apple Silicon there is a very good chance will make exact same calls to the RT libraries that Apple is tell folks to use for the last 2-3 years. It will just go faster; not huge code rewrites.

Second, I think they are suffering a bit of "fighting the last war' syndrome. The MP 2013 they said "2 GPU is good for everybody". That didn't work out and now they have sung the pendulum in the opposite extreme direction into "1 really , really ,really big GPU is good for everybody" . The other similar war is "Open Graphics standards are good. OpenGL/OpenCL stacks " to "Our way or the highway, Metal is good for everything and the border stops at Apple-land". Metal is turning into an "embrace , extend , extinguish " mechanism.

Third, for some edge cases , they are betting on scale out on the cloud. "Cloud" isn't necessarily a 100 miles away. It could be a stack of 4 Mini Pro in the same room or a rack mount of 3 MP against the wall. But for some it will be 'out to Amazon' or wherever. The 'scale out' to a Mac cluster has the side effect of selling more Macs. The same Macs that are already being bought in volume. [ You can see some of this in demos that Apple does of a cluster of 2-3 Macs hooked together with local 10GbE over TB cables in a point to point fashion. Or XCode-Cloud/Macstadium/Amazone M1 instances/ etc. ]


So two paths, not necessarily separate, I can see Apple going down. One, taking another stab as a super duper big , single GPU. Maybe three dies instead of four ( but definitely more than two). With an actual deliberate chiplet design they should be able to do that. They have chip talent. It just hasn't been completely let loose on a the chiplet SoC problem yet. Over time they ride N3 , N2 , etc to covering more of the edge cases they don't cover now. ( low-to upper mid range GPUs of the competitors are covered. All Apple has to do is hold their ground where they are doing very well and grow the envelope every 1-2 years to something slightly bigger; like 'the Blob'. )

The other path I think they should try is something that will be hard to get past the Industrial Design politburo. That's to put a Mac on a PCI-e card. To get something more than a 'plain' Mn process that probably means accepting that AuX power cables are "OK". Oddly for OCD Apple, that is likely a huge hurdle. Also not completely encasing it 100% in AL-LU-mini-um But it basically avoids detaching from "Unified Memory" and single instance on single package focus they have. It is modular though.



In Mac Pro M2 Ultra introduction they highlighted how the this machine can do what SEVEN Afterburner cards would have been needed to do ( not that you could have ever gotten to seven fully functioning cards in a MP 2019).
dGPU on a card toss that out the window. Might get to 'another seven' after you copied over ALL of the data to the remote card ... but if doing all of that duplication, why not shuffle over to whole another Mac?

If they were not still getting really big wins out of the Unified approach then perhaps they will get off that path. But they are. If you have to write apps a different way to get more scaling then , that is enough for them to skip it for now.

 

[MacPoulet]

And how have you guys felt about your M1 Ultra Studio and PCI expansion chassis? Has it been performing about as expected? Above expectations? Does anything about the M2 Ultra Mac Studio tempt you?

We haven't got it all set up yet. This is part of the lab upgrades that we do in the summer. I'm really looking forward to testing it out though.

We have some labs that are PC Xeon workstations, and a few dedicated post-production edit suites that are Macs with the possibility of adding a full-blown Mac lab with Mac Studios. Funny enough, the Mac labs will be cheaper than the PC ones (though the PCs will stick to 3D).

 

[maikerukun]

No (at least for 2-4 more iterations/generations). Because the "no 3rd party GPU" issues is pretty likely a "no dGPU issue". It just manifests as a "anti those other guys" because Apple themselves don't have an dGPU. But Apple probably doesn't want a dGPU. It is useless in the laptop line up. And Mini. And iMac ( "iPad on a stick"). And Mac Studio. ( worse than useless in iPad line up).

First, it has to do with making highly consistently portable code up and down the whole stack. From S2 on watch through Vision Pro through iPad up to Mac Pro. The GPU optimization strategy for programmer largely doesn't change. Programmer may have more resources to spread computations over , but Apple wants to hide the complexity and give them tools so things 'automagically' spread out when they can. It will require manual adjustments ( it isn't going to be completely magical) , but it does help control development costs for developers.

For example when HW Raytracing comes to Apple Silicon there is a very good chance will make exact same calls to the RT libraries that Apple is tell folks to use for the last 2-3 years. It will just go faster; not huge code rewrites.

Second, I think they are suffering a bit of "fighting the last war' syndrome. The MP 2013 they said "2 GPU is good for everybody". That didn't work out and now they have sung the pendulum in the opposite extreme direction into "1 really , really ,really big GPU is good for everybody" . The other similar war is "Open Graphics standards are good. OpenGL/OpenCL stacks " to "Our way or the highway, Metal is good for everything and the border stops a Apple-land". Metal is turning into an "embrace , extend , extinguish " mechanism.

Third, for some edge cases , they are betting on scale out on the cloud. "Cloud" isn't necessarily a 100 miles away. It could be a stack of 4 Mini Pro in the same room or a rack mount of 3 MP against the wall. But for some it will be 'out to Amazon' or wherever. The 'scale out' to a Mac cluster has the side effect of selling more Macs. The same Macs that are already being bought in volume. [ You can see some of this in demos that Apple does of a cluster of 2-3 Macs hooked together with local 10GbE over TB cables in a point to point fashion. Or XCode-Cloud/Macstadium/Amazone M1 instances/ etc. ]


So two paths, not necessarily separate, I can see Apple going down. One, taking another stab as a super duper big , single GPU. Maybe three dies instead of four ( but definitely more than two). With an actual deliberate chiplet design they should be able to do that. They have chip talent. It just hasn't been completely let loose on a the chiplet SoC problem yet. Over time they ride N3 , N2 , etc to covering more of the edge cases they don't cover now. ( low-to upper mid range GPUs of the competitors are covered. All Apple has to do is hold their ground where they are doing very well and grow the envelope very 1-2 years to something slightly bigger; like the Blob. )

The other path I think they should try is something that will be hard to get past the Industrial Design politboro. That's to put a Mac on a PCI-e card. To get something more than a 'plain' Mn process that probably means accepting that AuX power cables are "OK". Oddly for OCD Apple, that is likely a huge hurdle. Also not completely encasing it 100% in AL-LU-mini-um But it basically avoids detaching from "Unified Memory" and single instance on single package focus they have. It is modular though.



In Mac Pro M2 Ultra introduction they highlighted how the this machine can do what SEVEN Afterburner cards would have been needed to do ( not that you could have ever gotten to seven fully functioning cards in a MP 2019).
dGPU on a card toss that out the window. Might get to 'another seven' after you copied over ALL of the data to the remote card ... but if doing all of that duplication, why not shuffle over to whole another Mac?

If they were not still getting really big wins out of the Unified approach then perhaps they will get off that path. But they are. If you have to write apps a different way to get more scaling then , that is enough for them to skip it for now.

Hmm interesting. Thanks for the in depth analysis on what is or isn't capable. Very informative indeed.

 

[maikerukun]

We haven't got it all set up yet. This is part of the lab upgrades that we do in the summer. I'm really looking forward to testing it out though.

We have some labs that are PC Xeon workstations, and a few dedicated post-production edit suites that are Macs with the possibility of adding a full-blown Mac lab with Mac Studios. Funny enough, the Mac labs will be cheaper than the PC ones (though the PCs will stick to 3D).

That's awesome. Please update with your thoughts once you have had the opportunity to play with it.

 

[mattspace]

How do you envision that App store not suffering a similar "race to the bottom" the others have?

IMO Apple needs to solve for that on the Vision Pro more than anything else. Imagine IAP and ads in your VR/AR world, ugh.

I'm seeing quite a few developers using the fact their common codebase lets them make Mac, iOS & iPad versions of apps as separate products doing bundle pricing - eg Mona for Mastodon, I think I paid $25 for all my devices, which is a fair bit more than a lot of the super cheap pricing the App stores have seen. I suspect sensible software pricing may be coming back for non-subscription priced products.