Dear Apple, please make a M4 Extreme Mac Pro Cube, thanks...
I wonder if that chip would require the thermal capabilities of the cheese grater.
If not the full tower, a mid sized tower with good ventilation.
Dear Apple, please make a M4 Extreme Mac Pro Cube, thanks...
It won't need a full tower. It was only needed for the graphic cards. Just look at the present Mac Pro. It has a huge empty space for PCIe cards. With not a single MPX module capabilty.I wonder if that chip would require the thermal capabilities of the cheese grater.
If not the full tower, a mid sized tower with good ventilation.
Dear Apple, please make a M4 Extreme Mac Pro Cube, thanks...
I wonder if that chip would require the thermal capabilities of the cheese grater.
If not the full tower, a mid sized tower with good ventilation.
It won't need a full tower. It was only needed for the graphic cards. Just look at the present Mac Pro. It has a huge empty space for PCIe cards. With not a single MPX module capabilty.
Can't even fit the RAID MPX storage
We must summon the most noble, most mighty, one and only @Amethyst, to give us some hints! 🙏🔮
The MPX slots supported extra power and Thunderbolt. Which isn't supported anymore with the new M-series in Mac Pro. But I have not tried to analyse the board layout, because I have not been curious enough.Even in the 2019 Intel Mac Pro only one fan was blowing on the CPU heat sink, the ASi Mac Pro has the same fan configuration, with one fan blowing on the SoC heat sink; the remaining two fans are blowing on the add-in card slots...
Seems like it still has the physical room, the only thing missing would be the MPX slot & software support...?
Wow so were motorolla cpus just not efficient at running typical compression algorithms at the time? or was just compression so important for next that they decided on a dedicated chip for it? from your post, they even had dedicated on board memory. sounds similar to ML accelerators these days.Yea real time compression was a 'thing' that bit NeXT at least a couple of times. At least the DSP mostly worked for the soundKit .snd native compression.
NeXT had a big problem with the NeXTdimension board (a crazy awesome 32bit color 'display card' for the cube that ran it's own postscript window server and had video input so you could watch a video feed). It was supposed to have a C-cubed JPEG compression chip to do realtime video compression when it was launched. The announcements went out with that feature spec'd. However, only a few prototypes were made and the compression would never work. It would try to compress a few frames and crash everything on the card. So it shipped without it.
It was still an absolutely bats*** impressive card for its time. You could get 64MB of ram on it (insane for its day), and it moved 32bit windows around real time back in 1991. Nothing really came close until you got to SGI level workstations. Plus, NeXT had realtime renderman running on it then, and it ran disturbingly well for machines that relatively primitive. More insane, realtime renderman was a system level supported file type and library. The Workspace (ie finder) inspector could show you .rib files (like the teapot) and let you render/rotate in real time anywhere. It was a standard library so all apps got realtime renderman 'for free'.
One of the many things that was lobotomized and dumbed down in transition for the apple audience. S*** we still do not have a full processes panel from Workspace.app in the finder with the ability to pause/kill individual workspace processes (eg copying processes, compression processes, moving processes, folder merge processes etc), among many other cool/better NeXTstep things. Sigh.
Anyway, it's one of the few computers I sold that I made a profit on selling (it and the Mac ][fx were the only 2 computers I sold for a profit), and one of the few computers I regret having sold.
i personally think apple is embracing a post-workstation era and (clearly) focusing everything on custom SoCs. for the datacenter they seem to be non-existentThreadripper Pro has 128 PCIe 5 and 4 lanes and up to 96 cores.
Apple is falling so far behind in the HEDT space that nothing short
of the fabled M Extreme chip will keep them even remotely competitive.
The Nvidia RTX5000 series arriving this fall might be the final nail in the coffin
of Apple’s middle performance, non-upgradable desktops.
I haven’t given up hope for one more insanely great thing,
but the reality of the situation doesn’t look good, imo.
Hopefully WWDC brings some good news in a couple of months.
Wow so were motorolla cpus just not efficient at running typical compression algorithms at the time? or was just compression so important for next that they decided on a dedicated chip for it? from your post, they even had dedicated on board memory. sounds similar to ML accelerators these days.
Can't even fit the RAID MPX storage
Seems like it still has the physical room, the only thing missing would be the MPX slot & software support...?
Source: PCIe slots
None of that (PCIe slot specifications) has anything to do with the fact that, MPX slot/software aside, the ASi Mac Pro still has the requisite room for the Promise Pegasus R4i RAID to physically fit within...
Ok. Let us have a closer look at the Logic board, shall we? And see if there is obvious changes in the layout, beside the physical MPX slots.None of that (PCIe slot specifications) has anything to do with the fact that, MPX slot/software aside, the ASi Mac Pro still has the requisite room for the Promise Pegasus R4i RAID to physically fit within...
Apple’s M4 chip reportedly ‘nearing production’ — and it could cause major headaches for Qualcomm and Intel
Apple's finally stepping up its AI gamewww.laptopmag.com
Apparently an M4 in early 2025 for the Mac Pro... Things are getting interesting.
But, can you please elaborate on what you meant?
Ok. Let us have a closer look at the Logic board, shall we? And see if there is obvious changes in the layout, beside the physical MPX slots.
View attachment 2368365
View attachment 2368366
I have added photos of the two Logic boards as well.
The MPX slots supported extra power and Thunderbolt. Which isn't supported anymore with the new M-series in Mac Pro. But I have not tried to analyse the board layout, because I have not been curious enough.
Remember that Thunderbolt connections also used PCIe bandwidth (4 lanes of PCIe 3.0 for Thunderbolt 3).
But not in the new Mac Pro, as that is inside the SoC.
Must be more than just the slots that has been removed, as it does not have the T2 chip,
and the extra PCIe lanes that was added to the Intel Xeon CPUs (64 lanes), for a total of 92 lanes.
The new M-serie does not support as many PCIe lanes (66 lanes), and are shared across the PCIe bus and other components.
I agree with everything you said, even if I only quote a few lines. To save spaceAnyone who wants to stuff 6-8 HDDs into MP 2023 on carrier cards is not going run into any bandwidth problem. There is more room for multiple storage cards because there are no dGPU cards.
It won't need a full tower. It was only needed for the graphic cards. Just look at the present Mac Pro....
I'm hoping for expansion cards (with their own memory) specifically for ML training. It does seem like it could be a direction they are going. I think the only question is if they will default to HBM onboard memory or will it just be a paired down SoC with many more ANE cores + unified memory.What we don't know is if they might some time later in the future develop some kind of additional GPU capability in addition to what is on the CPU itself.
Seeing what's on the horizon on the PC side it might become necessary.
What we don't know is if they might some time later in the future develop some kind of additional GPU capability in addition to what is on the CPU itself.
This is a very interesting chart. Guess not as gimped as I thought. Although I agree that the PCIe slots in the 2023 Mac Pro are mostly useless since no GPU support. Shame they did not at least include the extra power part of the MPX slots, so anything other than GPU cards using it could work still.The MPX slots supported extra power and Thunderbolt. Which isn't supported anymore with the new M-series in Mac Pro. But I have not tried to analyse the board layout, because I have not been curious enough.
Remember that Thunderbolt connections also used PCIe bandwidth (4 lanes of PCIe 3.0 for Thunderbolt 3).
But not in the new Mac Pro, as that is inside the SoC.
Must be more than just the slots that has been removed, as it does not have the T2 chip, and the extra PCIe lanes that was added to the Intel Xeon CPUs (64 lanes), for a total of 92 lanes.
The new M-serie does not support as many PCIe lanes (66 lanes), and are shared across the PCIe bus and other components.
View attachment 2367996
Source: PCIe slots