M2 users are not looking for any faster SSD speeds. They're more likely want larger storage sizes.
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MP All Models Mac Pro X,Y…WHAT IF…
- Thread starter ZombiePhysicist
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M1 Ultra's ship time likely also have COVID impacts on its ship date too. That was relatively late to replace the iMac large screen model. and the M2 Ultra using a relatively old fab process probably helped to speed it up.
I don't think that gap is a 'clean' reading at all.
And TSMC N3's 'technically not late , but expectations late" schedule is another hiccup that will echo into the next iteration.
The A16 is on N4/N4P , the M2 is on N5/N5P ... same general TSMC N5 family , but they aren't tightly coupled in production. Those are two different production lines.
There is no rational technical reason to tag the Mac chips with the same marketing 'butt hurt' of hitting some completely arbitrary fixed in time deadline that the iPhones have. It is a horrible boat anchor. It just 'happens to work' for the iPhone because kicks off 'crazy' profits. Macs aren't going to do that. Macs are healthy profits, but not 'crazy' ones. Nor are there 'annual contract' service providers flogging Mac users to upgrade on a regular basis.
But , but the Windows PC market... again vastly larger market with at least two orders of magnitude more individual products to release and triple the number of SoC SKUs to go in them.
Apple's SoC is mainly a GPU. If look at the GPU market they are no where near a 12 month iteration cycle. Same issues for Apple if doing things right.
Maybe Apple can pull off close to 12 for the plain Mn SoC but as the die sizes get bigger and the number of 'hand me down" products can shift the 'n-1' SoC off to for extended life ... the less and less the economics work. The iPad Pro has done just fine without rigid every 12 month upgrades. Macs are really not different.
Binned on faulty UltraFusion connectors? Because otherwise that doesn't make much sense at all.
The Ultra is time shifted from the "plain Max" laptops due to initial demand bubbles that lead to production(supply) versus demand mismatches. They are being tested and validated either way. And extremely likely don't need binning to fill the lessor categories at all. That is mainly to set up a pricing ladder to layer fatter profits on top. Not to get the proper number of working chips. ( yes they sell a relatively very small number of dies that couldn't make the upper cut. But the pricing here is that even those pay for themselves if sold 'cut down'. A sizable fraction of those sold 'binned' probably work. Just squeezing out even larger margins on aggregate sales. )
We'll see if Apple fixed the harmonic 'whine' issue with the Mac Studio that impacted some. If they haven't ( kind of a butterfly keyboard denial situation) then they'll need to fix it next iteration.
LOL. Many probalby are looking for something faster than the previous generation. This isn't about 'faster' . It is about not BACKSLIDING! the newer entry points were slower than the previous generation.
Apple gets to charge the the $400/TB rate to 'fix' the problem to get back to what would had at the entry point in the previous generation. The kneecaping was likely a COVID NAND supply issue. For a while there was no where near the glut there was now and Apple effectively shaved use by going smaller bandwidth to keep the price point the same. It was driven by what users were looking to pay; not the SSD speed they were looking for.
And Apple easily duping most folks walking into an Apple store off the street that didn't do their homework and expecting this years new MBA not to have gotten slower .... because who does that? Well Apple does in Scrooge McDuck mode. That's who.
Early benchmarks suggest Apple M2 Ultra could be slower than Core i9-13900KS, RTX 4080
Starting off with the CPU scores, the M2 Ultra notched up 2,809 points in the Geekbench 6 single-core benchmark and 21,531 points in the multi-core tests. This...
www.techspot.com
Why did Zombie get suspended again? 
I don't think the 8TB storage limit is anything more than Apple not seeing a target audience for it yet. The audience for people who want to spend $2.2K on a BTO upgrade is pretty miniscule, let alone $3K or more for what Apple would charge. Even the "money is no object" tech journos and YouTubers don't ever seem to get more than 2 or 4TB.
6C's review suggests it doesn't have the whine any more. https://sixcolors.com/post/2023/06/m2-ultra-mac-studio-review-top-of-the-line/
I don't think the 8TB storage limit is anything more than Apple not seeing a target audience for it yet. The audience for people who want to spend $2.2K on a BTO upgrade is pretty miniscule, let alone $3K or more for what Apple would charge. Even the "money is no object" tech journos and YouTubers don't ever seem to get more than 2 or 4TB.
6C's review suggests it doesn't have the whine any more. https://sixcolors.com/post/2023/06/m2-ultra-mac-studio-review-top-of-the-line/
Why did Zombie get suspended again?
m1maverick is in timeout as well IIRC, TBH it feels like there's a lot of AS fans coming in to this forum for the first time, to poke our community with a stick while we're experiencing some pretty raw grief, and then getting all indignant at the strength of emotion they receive in return.
If it's just to stop them from bludgeoning discussions it's arguably for the best. If you can say it in one post, going across multiple threads to keep hammering the point is unlikely to be beneficial for actual discussion. Can always blog your frustrations rather than hammering people with them piecemeal.
I feel like these threads have long suffered from people making the same arguments ad nauseam.
Your community? So you mean a wider discussion including AS and Apples current strategy is not accepted? When replies to “poking” includes pure arrogance and sometimes personal insults, perhaps a time out is needed to cool down the discussion climate.
when the form of the discussion basically comes down to "haha Intel's dead, move on, you shouldn't have spent money on it in the first place" etc, then no, why should that "discussion" be accepted.
The feigned ignorance "oh but why would you want more than 192GB of memory?", or "oh, but what do YOU need a better GPU for?" it's the same abusive "I'm just asking questions" crap straight out of the bully's handbook, and when people who've been screwed over by this situation lash out, all the tone police come in to take sides with passive-aggressors.
Sod that - there should be a separate specific AS Mac Pro forum, and anyone from here who wants to participate in discussion about AS issues, can participate there. In this forum, AS is just noise. There's no reason for an AS fan to want to post within an x86 Mac Pro forum, aside from a need to troll & rub folks' noses in being the "obsolete" platform.
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Maybe this thread should be called Mac Pro (2024)? There’s no Mac Pro 8,1, so there won’t be a 9,1. I wonder if it’s possible to predict what the model identifier will be. It looks like the new naming convention began with the M1 Studios (Mac13,1 & Mac13,2). M2 versions are Mac14,13 & Mac14,14. Since the 2023 Mac Pro is Mac14,8 presumably the M3 version(s) will be Mac15,x.
I think I'll buy the mac pro 9.1 "m3 ultra" with 384gb of ram, hoping Apple lowers the price a bit.
$3000 just for the case, pci-e lanes and an oversized power supply seems a bit much to me.
My use: ML, AI, large format images on Adobe, 3D, Drawing and Painting softwares
Softwares: Adobe, Topaz, Blender, Unreal, Zbrush, etc.
My interest in the Mac Pro rather than the Mac Studio: not having wires everywhere and storages that disconnect: being able to put a lot of SSDs inside is essential to me.
$3000 just for the case, pci-e lanes and an oversized power supply seems a bit much to me.
My use: ML, AI, large format images on Adobe, 3D, Drawing and Painting softwares
Softwares: Adobe, Topaz, Blender, Unreal, Zbrush, etc.
My interest in the Mac Pro rather than the Mac Studio: not having wires everywhere and storages that disconnect: being able to put a lot of SSDs inside is essential to me.
The thing about that is that 7,1 users aren't ready to upgrade yet and Apple knows that, so I'm not completely sure what buyers they are targeting with this one. Presumably 6,1 users who haven't upgraded to a 7,1 yet, but the price is so high and such a poor value compared to the Studio that it reduces the buyer pool to almost zilch. It's not realistic that Apple intended to convert PC workstation users over, since it's both slower and more constricted in modularity.
If Apple doesn't want to lose Intel Mac Pro users then they will have to make the next one much more appealing.
Mac Pro M2 review - Buy the Mac Studio instead
Apple has finally introduced its Apple Silicon Mac Pro. It is still a performance powerhouse, but most "Pro" users should get a Mac Studio instead.
appleinsider.com
Another coward review. No mention that an AMd 6900xt beats the machine in Metal gpu scores. That a an i9 beats it in cpu. That the pci lanes are gimped and basically slots run out of lanes after you put in just one 16lane card.
Disgusting. An absolute disservice hiding that from the community.
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In the mean time here is a Xeon system using blade cards:
www.servethehome.com
Argonne Aurora Supercomputer Intel Max Blade Installation is Complete
Today Intel and Argonne National Labs announced that the Intel Xeon Max and GPU Max Aurora supercomputer blade installation is complete
We're in a very odd place when the Max Tech review is the most informative.Mac Pro M2 review - Buy the Mac Studio instead
Apple has finally introduced its Apple Silicon Mac Pro. It is still a performance powerhouse, but most "Pro" users should get a Mac Studio instead.
Another coward review. No mention that an AMd 6900xt beats the machine in Metal gpu scores. That a an i9 beats it in cpu. That the pci lanes are gimped and basically slots run out of lanes after you put in just one 16lane card.
Disgusting. An absolute disservice hiding that from the community.
The AMD Instict accelerators are exceptionally powerful “GPU’s”. I put it in quotes, because they don’t have video out and devoted almost solely to massively-parallelized matrix multiplication operations. For some workflows, this is the way to go to get practical results. Yes, AS is very power efficient, but it is not powerful for some workloads. Hence, it would be nice to add that functionality/capability via pcie cards
1) This is so out of the realm of possibility that even "playing make believe" is difficult. They've changed the rules when it comes to Mac system architecture (well beyond just the processor architecture); the 7,1 days are gone with Intel
2) A socket-able SoC is how that will happen. That's honestly the only realistic way it will be able to happen.
3) See 2)
Apple is not going away from their unified memory architecture. At best, they'll get to a point where there's always an Apple Silicon Mac Pro configuration for any possible Mac Pro use case. But, they won't change the system architecture from how it is now. They're confident in it and committed, with the sales numbers to back it up.
Have you not seen the Xeon blades I just posted above? Also, a while back, we posted a Xeon system using SoC with regular memory and the SoC memory could be used in conjunction with the regular memory or as a cache for it. I'll try to find that and repost it. So apple does not have to go away form it, they just have to copycat what's already been done on the intel side of things.
Apple is not interested in making blades. Nor are they really interested in doing anything to combat Xeon workstations other than to be faster at the specific workloads that they're optimizing for (clearly only a subset of what one could do with a fully maxed out 2019 Mac Pro).
Were privy to high level talks where they told you what they are interested in? Did you get some report where they shared what they are interested in? Or did you somehow mind read apple to know what they are interested in? Or it's just your speculation. Because I recall speculation exactly like this that proved wrong during the all apology days of the trashcan that were proven completely false.
Go watch keynotes where Apple talks about the Xserve. Then note the time period in which the Xserve was discontinued (right around the same time that datacenters were moving from a one OS instance per physical machine model to a several virtualized OS instances per physical machine model). Then note how both the 2019 and 2023 Mac Pro come in a rack-mount configuration that is not optimized for datacenter use whatsoever. Then tell me that Apple has an actual interest in competing in this space. You won't because it's obvious that they do not care about this market segment.
Not sure what difference it makes. You do not need to work at Apple to understand what is painfully obvious from outside.