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MP All Models Mac Pro X,Y…WHAT IF…
- Thread starter ZombiePhysicist
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I would be Extreme-ly surprised (sorry) if Apple ever had any intention of making this chip. It has always sounded like wishful thinking, from fans who are simply extrapolating from the Ultra.
Even if they did, it would be an unbalanced chip for many people, with a powerful GPU but far too many CPU cores (given you would pay a fortune for the privilege). It wouldn’t be of much interest to people that just want a multi-GPU workstation. What many people really want is a Mac Pro that can take Nvidia GPUs. But for numerous reasons, that will never happen.
Even if they did, it would be an unbalanced chip for many people, with a powerful GPU but far too many CPU cores (given you would pay a fortune for the privilege). It wouldn’t be of much interest to people that just want a multi-GPU workstation. What many people really want is a Mac Pro that can take Nvidia GPUs. But for numerous reasons, that will never happen.
I thought the original rumor from Gurman was that the Ultra would be a monolithic SOC and the Extreme would be two Ultra's stitched together with Ultra Fusion. I wonder if it would be more feasible for the MacPro to have an SOC that's a combination of a chiplet and multi-chip module design. Maybe it would be way too expensive to implement. I don't know. It would be nice if the whole SOC package was on a daughter-card that could be replaced/upgraded. Alternatively, I wonder if it would make more sense for Apple to tweak the design of the Mac Pro to where you could easily swap in upgraded motherboards that work with the same heatsink and power supply that's already in the case. All you would have to do to upgrade is bring it in to an Apple Store (or authorized provider) and for the cost of the new board plus maybe a small charge for the installation you have upgraded RAM CPU and GPU.
This is basically how the Mac Pro 4.1 and 5.1 functions. But the trays are not interchangeable between the models, in typical Apple fashion. But you can swap the trays supporting either singular, or dual CPUs.
This idea was discussed when the AS Mac Pro was rumoured, shortly before it was released.
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Ah man. Why!!!Welp…
Apple Cancels Its Plans To Launch The Most Powerful M4 ‘Extreme’ Chip, Which Would Have Featured Up To A 64-Core CPU And A 160-Core GPU
Apple Cancels Its Plans To Launch The Most Powerful M4 'Extreme' Chip, Which Would Have Featured Up To A 64-Core CPU And A 160-Core GPU
Apple has likely cancels its plans to launch the M4 Extreme chip for the Mac Pro tower, as part of its plans to launch an AI server chip/wccftech.com
We got thunderbolt 5 with the M4max. Anyone think PCIe5 might come in the 2025 Mac Pro? Shame about the extreme.
I want to see an M5 (or M6) Extreme "chip" that is a multi-chip assembly, giving Apple a way to increase GPU horsepower without needing to make a reticle limit busting MegaChip...
Slap that on a daughtercard, give me two or three PCIe Gen5 x16 slots (for half-length cards), give me GPU/NPU/SSD cards to choose from to fill said slots, slap all that into an 8" Cube...!
Slap that on a daughtercard, give me two or three PCIe Gen5 x16 slots (for half-length cards), give me GPU/NPU/SSD cards to choose from to fill said slots, slap all that into an 8" Cube...!
More likely the Mac Pro will be cancelled, on the basis that "thunderbolt is good enough".
Given how few MPs they must sell, the idea of them developing an Extreme version for a small sub-section of those buyers seems laughable.
The AS MP is clearly a minimum-effort design, putting an M2 Studio chip in an Intel MP chassis, adding £1.5K to the price (to make it worth their while), and calling it a day. They’ll drop it in a heartbeat when the time is right. IMHO, the 2013 MP showed their intentions a decade ago. The Studio Ultra is basically their dream fulfilled.
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Because they don’t sell enough of them to make it worth their time or resources.
Why don’t they sell a lot of high performance desktops?
Abandonware syndrome.
2013: Trash can went 6 years without updates and abandoned.
2017: The iMac Pro. No Update and abandoned.
2019: Brilliant 7.1 Mac Pro. Minor GPU update and abandoned.
2023: Apple Silicon Mac Pro. Stuck on 2 generation old M2.
If you look closely you can see a pattern.
The post above me has an Intel 13600K CPU and an Nvidia RTX 3080 GPU in the sig.
Go to the Blender performance list and that system has the same performance as an M2 Ultra Mac Pro.
That’s right, a peecee that sells for $1,000 now has the same performance as a $7,000 Mac Pro.
Maybe that has an effect on Mac Pro sales and is the reason Apple has the Mac Pro and Studio on a dark side of the moon priority list.
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As primarily a desktop user - I'm much more productive with a desk, 3 screens, full-size keyboard / mouse etc. - Apple just don't offer me much (I work with 3D apps like Maya, Unreal and Blender). They primarily sell laptops, and a handful of laptop-derived sealed boxes.
My PC also has 4x M.2 slots, with 2x 2TB sticks currently fitted. The GPU sits in a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot. It has an 850W PSU. Only half my RAM slots are filled. And the case is roomy / well ventilated (Fractal North). It has plenty of room to grow - I could go considerably higher upmarket with the CPU, GPU and RAM as my needs change / component prices fall.
Well, they've obviously sold exactly 0 'of them', since they never made one (with the Extreme chip).
I'm not implying they WOULD sell a ton, but you can't make predictions on how much a reimagined Mac Pro would sell, based on older concepts with different architectures launched at different times with a different set of 'software rules'.
It's not a stretch to me to see the Mac Pro as an attractive computer for both Apple and customers if they strike the right balance between power, expansion possibilities, and 'price over' the smaller headless Macs.
It seems clear now that the Mac Pro will never be the macOS version of a Windows PC. It's not a computer Apple thinks the customer should buy once, and then upgrade forever with off-the-shelf pieces from other vendors. Just like all other Macs, you buy it to serve you well with "top performance" for 2-3 years, and "current" performance for up to 5.
The 'Pro' in Mac Pro is just much greater expansion possibilities compared to Studio.
In my 35 years of buying and "upgrading" computers, the dream of rejuvenating an old computer has largely been a brain fart. Dropping in a current GPU into an older PC might be the exception. For at least 10 years or so, a brand-new entry-level Mac has compared favorably to a 3-year-old Mac Pro. Give or take.
But for this 'upgrade often' to work, Apple needs to get their prices in order for things like SSD and RAM. No one wants to spec their computer at 4-6x prices if it only lasts for a few years.
The Mac Pro didn't see any upgrade between 2013-2019, so not really a fair comparison. Even there, its silly GPU configuration, chosen purely because two small cards fit better into a cylinder, meant it dated quickly. And the 2019 was launched just before a major architectural change, so comparisons there are awkward too.
Fair enough. Upgrading makes perfect sense when prices are reasonable. In the wider market, component prices fall over time (unlike Apple's BTO options).
Your 7,1 has appeared to have benefitted from upgrades. I don't know if it came with a 12 core CPU, but many on these forums have upgraded a base Xeon. I don't recall 240GB of RAM being an Apple config; if the 8,1 supported that much RAM, you'd pay a fortune from the factory. The 8,1 would obviously take your 6TB SSD card, though it's an option denied to every other Mac, including those with plenty of space for NVMe slots.
And many 7,1 users would have loved to upgrade to a 7900XTX if Apple had deigned to provide drivers. To say nothing of the RTX4090, if Apple weren't able to put their corporate interests ahead of their users'.
Mac Pro (Cube) X,Y...WHAT IF...
- Introduced WWDC 2025
- Shipping December 2025
- MacProCube17,3
- M5 Extreme SoC (two Hidra chips UltraFusioned together)
- 64-core CPU (48P/16E)
- 160-core GPU (hardware ray-tracing)
- 64-core Neural Engine
- 480GB ECC LPDDR5X RAM (inline ECC)
- 2.18TB/s UMA bandwidth
- 32TB SSD (four 8GB NAND blades)
- Thunderbolt 5
- WiFi 7
- Bluetooth 6
- Dual 100Gb Ethernet
- 420W PSU
- 8"x8"x8"
- $24,999
- ;^p
In my mind, people who love and champion the 'buy a workstation and upgrade it for many years to come' are, more often than not, in love with the IDEA of a perfect modular computer. And such a computer would really be a thing of beauty.
In your example above, if I squint, I see hints of "would have, should have, could have...", whereas I'm looking back at my personal experience of what actually happens. Rarely could you make a simple CPU upgrade. More often than not you have to swap the whole motherboard and memory too. All the things you can upgrade tend to be older generation stuff that the current generation often run circles around.
I've made some upgrades to my Mac Pro over time. 240GB RAM is exactly the same as 48GB, which was already enough (which I knew, but the cost was pretty low so I went for it). I got mine with 12 cores. Going to 28 cores would have about 0 impact on the stuff I do. If I had an option to get another 12-core with twice the single core performance, I'd take that in an instant over the currently available 28 core.
My MPX graphics upgrades have made a 'generational jump' in performance. They work great in Resolve and in Blender up to 4.2. But going forward, Blender has removed support for these cards since the drivers aren't maintained which leads to too many issues.
My Mac Pro isn't slow, but it also isn't fast, like my MacBook Pro M3 Max. I hope the Mac Pro stays strong for quite a while yet. It won't get faster, but I also think you can throw a lot at it before it starts to feel slow.
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My take is this: just as the Mac Mini and Mac Studio seem to be attractive Macs for Apple to make, the Mac Pro ought to slot in beautifully at the top end. As a customer, you'll pay a premium for the larger case and extension capability. And no, the price premium isn't the "cost of raw material" over a Mac Studio. That's not how it works. But that doesn't mean that an Apple SSD should cost 4x the $ compared to generic drives.
And now that Apple has moved to Apple Silicon on the Mac Pro, the internals need to be reworked. It should come with at least 4 empty PCIe 5 NVMe slots that accept any off-the-shelf drive. They should probably have 1-2 slots for HDDs too. I have ZERO interest in keeping the computer small... It's a beautiful machine. Should be a hero product in any room that you don't need to hide.
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Whatever.
It's hard to disagree with all the naysaying considering how terrible apple has treated pros and enthusiasts alike over time, particularly regarding the mac pro.
But here is one thing to consider the justification of an extreme chip.
Apple's own servers. Such a mega chip could be very useful to itself there with its AI needs. And putting them in Mac Pros as a by product could be of value. Also, not sure a studio could support an extreme. This would give more justification for a mac pro and extreme to exist.
Probably wishful thinking though.
Single thread performance is the key thing that's difficult to improve on whilst keeping the same motherboard. Though AMD are better than Intel in this regard, as they keep the same socket for multiple CPU generations. You could get quite an uplift there, depending on what you were starting with.
Obviously this would be less of an issue on Windows, where rather than being restricted to exotic MPX cards, you could buy much cheaper and better supported cards like the RTX4090.
The 7,1 is a great machine. It's just a shame Apple is so ambivalent about its high end desktop computers. Whereas x86 workstation chips are shared with the vast server market, Apple has zero involvement with servers. So it becomes a case of beefing up its consumer chips at vast expense, all for a tiny % of their customers (and only their customers).
I think this is one of the reasons Apple aren't particularly keen on expandable computers. Even where their machines use replaceable SSD modules, as in the mini and Studio, they deliberately use proprietary standards, and generally refuse to sell the modules separately. The perks of being the sole supplier to a platform.
With no GPU support and copious on-board NVMe slots, there'd be even less need for all those PCIe slots. They'd pretty much only be for AV capture cards, which realistically you could just use Thunderbolt for.
Agreed.
And that RTX3080 is not the current generation either. Things have moved on so much since then.
If they would open up to the newer drivers for the AMD 7000 series GPUs we'd be good for quite a while longer. Unfortunately Apple behaves in a recalcitrant manner and refuses to even acknowledge any requests for support in this regard.
The Apple fans say it is AMD's problem, but AMD points the finger straight back at Apple. And that's where the blame needs to go.
Let's say that overnight, somehow all support for any newer GPUs in 5,1 Mac Pros (except the old Radeon 5870s) somehow evaporated - perhaps a new OS update removed it, no RX580s, etc. I wonder how those users would feel?
Yeh well there are faster and cheaper macs for blender.
And $1,000? A founders edition (the sort of GPU cards Mac owners would buy) 4090 with 24 GB video ram is $4000. A less one is still over 3.3k and then there's tax etc.
And that is not enough actually. You also need that power supply, motherboard, CPU RAM, case, CPU, fans, water cooling, radiators, and lots of cables ties. To mention just a couple of things.
My PC was about £1800 I believe, in mid 2023. I bought all the parts new from Amazon, except the GPU which I got second hand for £450. Aside from the stuff in the sig, it's on a Z690 motherboard, SN850x / SN770 (2TB each), decent Corsair 850W PSU, Fractal North case. The cooler is a Peerless Assassin 120 (no fancy water cooling).
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It's a bit different, as no one is removing existing GPU support from the 7,1. And 5,1 users should probably stop at Monterey anyway. But yeah, Apple should absolutely reach down the back of their sofa and send a few quid to AMD to produce drivers, out of respect for their loyal customers.
Of course, Apple doesn't really want AMD's latest GPUs (new ones out soon I believe) embarrassing the AS MP. And would prefer those users get on board the AS train too, so they can get on with ending x86 support.
The $1,000 figure is what a computer with a 13600K CPU and RTX3080 GPU is going for today.
The performance equivalent of a $7,000 M2 Ultra Mac Pro.
Blender - Open Data
Blender Open Data is a platform to collect, display and query the results of hardware and software performance tests - provided by the public.
opendata.blender.org
The $1,000 figure is what a computer with a 13600K CPU and RTX3080 GPU is going for today.
The performance equivalent of a $7,000 M2 Ultra Mac Pro.
Blender - Open Data
Blender Open Data is a platform to collect, display and query the results of hardware and software performance tests - provided by the public.
No, I meant where was @Melbourne Park getting the $4k figure for the RTX4090.