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MP All Models Mac Pro X,Y…WHAT IF…
- Thread starter ZombiePhysicist
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imagine boasting your computer has "standard i/o" and then trying to use it and it doesn't work because the company that makes it threw a tantrum when another company they collaborated with over a decade ago didnt make a press release they wanted. and then imagine this computer costing more than previous versions
Linus didn’t seem to test any of several fast ssd cards, which is probably one of the best use cases for the slots. Some of which reach between 12-24GB/s throughout.
We did learn that if you put a gpu in, the system sees it but doesn’t have a driver for it. Which is really weird and I’m not sure how to feel about it…somewhere between bizarre and pettty.
We did learn that if you put a gpu in, the system sees it but doesn’t have a driver for it. Which is really weird and I’m not sure how to feel about it…somewhere between bizarre and pettty.
honestly really only sucks if you 1) have to use macOS 2) really really like the look of the mac pro (which it is gorgeous imo).
but tbh i use a linux distro mainly and while i do like looking at my 7,1 its really not that big of a deal anymore i guess. i really do appreciate the cooling system in it since its very quiet other than when my GPU is at 100% but as previously mentioned and elsewhere, ill just move on from it and make my own linux boxes once the 7,1 becomes too slow for what i want
It's just a standard PCIe feature. The card can advertise itself as a video output, and the Mac Pro following the PCIe standard will report it's a video output.
It's much like USB where there are different USB class devices, and a system knows what they are regardless of if there are drivers installed.
Windows will do the exact same thing when a GPU is installed it has no driver for. It knows it's a GPU, and will report it as a GPU, but it can't spin it up.
Well the other thing he missed the mark on is whether or not performance suffers from say having a fast SSD card installed in one of the 16x slots and something like a 8k AJA capture card installed in the 2nd 16x slot. My guess is there is going to be some sort of hit since it appears Apple silicon does not have a ton of PCIe channels. In a worse case scenario that could mean dropping frames during capture.
What if you could run osx on this
www.ipi.wiki
Ampere Altra Dev Kit
COM-HPC-ALT Server Type Size E Module with Ampere® Altra® SoC (Arm Neoverse N1-based architecture),32/64/96/128 Arm v8.2 64-bit cores up to 1.7/2.2/2.8/2.6 GHz, with support for up to 768GB DDR4 memory. COM-HPC Server base supporting up to 3 x16,2x4 PCIe slots, 2x M.2 storage connector, VGA, 1x...
I’m not sure what the card is that he used not interested in watching video), but what would happen with a RX6800 or 6900, or even the PC version W6800 32GB Radeon…
I think it’s mostly a hypothetical - but…What if you could run osx on this
Ampere Altra Dev Kit
COM-HPC-ALT Server Type Size E Module with Ampere® Altra® SoC (Arm Neoverse N1-based architecture),32/64/96/128 Arm v8.2 64-bit cores up to 1.7/2.2/2.8/2.6 GHz, with support for up to 768GB DDR4 memory. COM-HPC Server base supporting up to 3 x16,2x4 PCIe slots, 2x M.2 storage connector, VGA, 1x...
Apple Silicon can run ARM apps, but macOS on Apple Silicon is not compatible with the ARM standard.
Apple adds a bunch of proprietary instructions on Apple Silicon that macOS is built on. It wouldn’t actually be possible to boot macOS on any generic or non-Apple ARM hardware, even if you can bypass the licensing checks and boot loader. Apple Silicon uses a proprietary architecture that can also run generic ARM apps.
In my eyes Apple are missing a trick here though. An Apple dev kit I’m sure there would be quite a few takers. Of course it would come with a number of caveats. Mainly “You build it you support it” not that you would be totally on your own, just not expect the regular hand holding
What if you could run osx on this
Ampere Altra Dev Kit
COM-HPC-ALT Server Type Size E Module with Ampere® Altra® SoC (Arm Neoverse N1-based architecture),32/64/96/128 Arm v8.2 64-bit cores up to 1.7/2.2/2.8/2.6 GHz, with support for up to 768GB DDR4 memory. COM-HPC Server base supporting up to 3 x16,2x4 PCIe slots, 2x M.2 storage connector, VGA, 1x...
There are multiple layers of problems here.
1. as noted Apple has added their own instructions (and co-processors ) to their Arm implementation. AMX calls to do matrix work won't work. ( Arm is no adding some Matrix instructions. Is Apple going to pick the up? I wouldn't bet on it. The longer the gap in implementing the less likely it gets. ). Rosetta won't really work correctly. Apple has added their own security features for addressing/memory management.
2. highly related to that, Apple boots their own firmware on their own security infrastructure. Ampere's boot context is a more regular UEFI . Several drivers are different. So have a mismatch at both the hardware and firmware level.
There is a substantial amount of denial floating around about just how significant Apple dumping any kind of open/standard firmware has on this 'hackintosh clone and bypass Apple' vector. Similarly the impact of the security changes Apple is making at a very low level in the stack. Back when Apple used OpenFirmware , EFI ( and pragmatically UEFI at the end because the Intel CPUs needed it) , they were on a substantially different track.
The T-series (T2 ) was a transition off of open boot firmware. T2 basically dead no in terms of new systems. (It likely will be desupported in 7 years , or less, ). And if Apple doesn't have a discrete secure element in the future then not going to get MacOS in that context.
Could you get the basic Mach Kernel up and running? probably, but decent chance will be stripping out substantive "Mac" features to get a generic Unix like thing running.
macOS on Apple Silicion will run in a virtual machine. Theroreticaly virtual firmware . 'fake/virtual' instructions, virtual secure element would hack their way around problems , but at what cost ( both in development time and performance hits )?
3. MacOS is a GUI focused software platform. If not running a GUI then "MacOS" doesn't really bring much to the table.(**) Technically it can be run headless , but to what end. There is only one GPU qualified to run the MacOS on Apple Silicon GUI and it is only present on the same die as Apple's Arm cores.
Even in the fantasy land where Apple made a dGPU, it still would be coupled to #2 above ( no UEFI boot drivers or any kind of portable support ) .
the NPU is also another significant value add processor that is now gone, so have also 'nuked' several high performance MacOS libraries' code.
Apple is largely making systems not components here. Finding a subcomponent isn't a holistic system replacement.
** there are some corner cases where doing graphics unit testing in 'off/no screen' mode .
Is Apple going to buy some Ampere Computing power boards for a substantive chunk of their backend, headless , cloud data compute needs? Probably. given they have tight 'green , carbon neutral' energy consumption goals to hit. However, that work is mainly Linux based.
yeah.... Apple sells 10's of millions of Macs per year. Apple developers by lots of them. (and iPhones and iPads to do development testing on also).
'dev kit ' for building Mac Clones.? Apple deliberately sold none of that for multiple decades and have built a substantively profitable business with that model avoiding clones. They are missing what? Profits? err no. The 'Clone wars' ended decades ago. They aren't going back. ( going to x86 was NOT a retreat on the "Clone wars" by Apple. It was an untidy necessistity at the time for other reasons than enabling 'clones'. )
Apple tolerated hackintoshes in the x86 era because it really wasn't worth the effort to chase all of that down (too small to bother with). But that really was a unintential side-effect. Apple didn't choose that side-effect as a highly desired 'feature'. Bootcamp was more making 'lemonade out of lemons' than something that Apple had a deep seated burning desire to do.
By 2017 Apple was cutting off folks doing major hacks to the EFI firmware with the T2.
macOS is not licensed to run on generic hardware (raw iron or in a virtual machine). MacOS and the underlying Mac hardware are not treated by Apple as two separate tracks at all. Apple isn't Microsoft (Apple as a mainly 'software only' company and/or services company) . Nor are they Dell/Lenovo/HP ( apple as a hardware company) .
Apple does systems ( whether a phone , tablet, classic PC form factor ... doesn't really change the focus).
P.S. the future of the "you built it , you support it" path is via the limited open doors Apple is leaving behind to do Linux booting on the Macs ( which is progressing slowing , but somewhat steadily) and on virtual machines. Apple doesn't generic hardware decoupled from macOS is basically gone.
Where Apple is probably missing out is the limitations they have on their virtual machine 'escape hatch'. If Apple is going to ignore certain classes of hardware at least open the option to direct 'attach' that hardware to a guest OS that isn't going to ignore it.
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These are all very good points and unfortunately true. I was thinking with a “what if mindset” not being realistic. Apple has chosen a path and it will be interesting to see how it works out over the next few years. There are very good reasons to couple hardware and software closely together if you’re customers expect a certain product. But we can still dream
If the general Arm core solutions market started to steadily crank out SoCs that were better than Apple's then perhaps Apple might change course , but it doesn't look like that is going to happen. Arm's Neoverse is mainly focused on servers , not individual workstations. That kit that Ampere Computing put out there is mainly so that developers can prototype server destine code on a individual server/workstation. Code that is primarily heading toward some 'cloud'/server room. Not a GUI.
Ampere One is an even bigger shift toward more huge CPU core counts ( which is another huge mismatch with macOS).
Qualcomm and Arm are battling over how to apply Arm to the general PC space. Sever space has higher margins and Arm needs 'fat profits'. ( Softbank needs a 'bigger fool' to pay more for Arm than they did. ) Arm doesn't seem to be in a hurry to get somewhere there versus making better progress in the phone/tablet market to hold there position there while they try to shift to more "make money fast" options. In the embedded space Arm is likely going to loose share to RISC-V. Arm has lots of their own drama to deal with. It isn't giong to be the stable monothic that Intel was in the 1990's - 2010 in terms of platform dominance.
Nvidia, Amazon , (and other hyperscalers working on somewhat customized mods ) are all aimed at different 'target space' than Apple is. There is a decent chance the Arm ecosystem is going to get more balkanized over time. That just lends itself to Apple increasingly just charting their own path and getting somewhat getting more detached instruction set wise over time. ( generic Unix utils still compile and run , but more macOS library code doing non-Arm stuff. )
Even the x86-64 market there is likely going to grow a detachment between the single user , GUI interface SoC and primarily targeted at the server SoC over the next 4-6 years. Intel's P and E cores and AMD's 4 and 4c. Just going to get more pronounced over time as SRAM and I/O diverge in density and progress from 'compute' logic in the fab processes. More dies will come that are targeting not quite as broad workloads.
The 'what if mindset' in several of these Mac Pro forum threads are more so "think inside the box" ones. 'What if things did not change' as opposed to what if followed some alternative universe path where things were different. It is mostly what did computers look like 20-30 years ago.... it should look have that form factor. That's ' more of the same' as opposed to 'what if'.
I doubt Apple would do custom builds of macOS with a ton of stuff disabled just for generic hardware. Like you were saying - Rosetta, Metal, machine learning workloads/matrix math, media acceleration, etc are all becoming full or partially bound to their custom architecture.
Apple treats ARM like a handy starting point to building their own proprietary CPU architecture. (Which they have a custom license for.) They aren't really participating in the ARM standard, or supporting the ARM standard.
You can put those in there too. They made the case to be opened. You and your coworkers can take bets on hurling them in there from across the room and seeing whose GPU sorta wedges in there & doesn't bounce back out.
Well, I’m off to swap out the aging nvme stick in my buttery smooth 2019 iMac for a larger capacity one & double my ram so I can run any OS from Mojave to Somoma & WinXp-Win11 in style. & then add 16 TB of ssd storage to my 2010 17” Macbook Pro with a single screwdriver once its done charging, which i‘ll know bc the little led will turn green on the magsafe & the invisible indicator lights lasered into the enclosure will light up, then i’ll unplug my fiber optic audio connections and add an eGPU connection into its expansion slot & enjoy a nice big 2nd display in addition to its high-res antiglare built-in. Yeah Apple sure does pack a lot of user-friendly features into their hahahehehahhehehahaha
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Meanwhile this is the kind of monster machine used for real AI work…something you can’t do on apples’s failed Mac Pro with its total crap m2 ultra processors…
www.storagereview.com
“two 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, 56 cores each, and 2TB of DDR5 ram provide the CPU backbone for the AI accelerators. Then adding in the eight NVIDIA HGX H100 or A100 GPUs, connected on SXM and together through NVLink, the server is equipped to handle the largest of models and data workloads.
The PowerEdge XE9680’s capacity for large RAM volumes (up to 4TB) provides a significant competitive edge in handling AI workloads. Such large memory footprints allow for the training of more complex models, leading to higher performance and more accurate results.
Our configurations include 8x U.2 NVMe SSD bays in the front. But just as we saw with the R660, Dell intends to offer an E3.S backplane as well, with 16x E3.S SSDs. The server also supports the NVMe BOSS-N1 boot drive rig on the rear of the server.”
When apple touts the largest memory space for a video card, it forgets you can just add more 80gb video cards on a real pro machine…
Dell PowerEdge XE9680 Review: My Favorite Server Ever Tested
Thanks to the partnership with Intel and NVIDIA on the Dell PowerEdge XE9680, the server is not only powerful but highly efficient.
www.storagereview.com
“two 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, 56 cores each, and 2TB of DDR5 ram provide the CPU backbone for the AI accelerators. Then adding in the eight NVIDIA HGX H100 or A100 GPUs, connected on SXM and together through NVLink, the server is equipped to handle the largest of models and data workloads.
The PowerEdge XE9680’s capacity for large RAM volumes (up to 4TB) provides a significant competitive edge in handling AI workloads. Such large memory footprints allow for the training of more complex models, leading to higher performance and more accurate results.
Our configurations include 8x U.2 NVMe SSD bays in the front. But just as we saw with the R660, Dell intends to offer an E3.S backplane as well, with 16x E3.S SSDs. The server also supports the NVMe BOSS-N1 boot drive rig on the rear of the server.”
When apple touts the largest memory space for a video card, it forgets you can just add more 80gb video cards on a real pro machine…
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just bumping this petition….
Nvidia tops estimates and says sales will jump 170% this quarter, driven by demand for AI chips
Revenue in the second quarter doubled from $6.7 billion a year earlier and increased 88% from the prior period.
In the mean time, apple is MIA and provides nothing even remotely competitive for “think different” AI pros. Apple is lazy and inept and should be scorned. This is worse than when they almost missed out on the rip mix burn wave of tech, but at least they had Steve nobs to course correct.
When apple needed a true modular Mac Pro the most, now for AI work, they were maximally incompetent and wrong.
Worse still, they had craven coward sycophant Pravda press and apologist loser users cheering them off the cliff.
Pathetic and disgusting.
In a historic about-face, Apple publicly supports right-to-repair bill
The iPhone maker now says repair access "is good for consumers’ budgets and good for the environment."
grist.org
Another instance where when apple gets enough flak and shame they will course correct/do a 180.
In a historic about-face, Apple publicly supports right-to-repair bill
The iPhone maker now says repair access "is good for consumers’ budgets and good for the environment."
Another instance where when apple gets enough flak and shame they will course correct/do a 180.
The '180' is more media hype characterization. Not really what Apple is doing.
From the article.
"... In its letter, Apple lists a few bill provisions that were crucial for the company’s support, including language that clearly states manufacturers only have to offer the public the same parts, tools, and manuals available to authorized repair partners, and the bill’s exclusive focus on newer devices. ... "
There is no "new" repair scope here other than providing the same , very expensive, repair vectors that the Authorized providers get access to. It isn't a move to "maximum" and "cheapest" repairiblity. The CA law also has clauses mandating that non Apple parts used have to explicitly laid out to customers. Nor is there any real forcing Apple to make parts they weren't arleady committed to doing ( parts window stops after 7 years. Pretty much exactly aligned with Apple's Vintage/Obsolete program. It is still there .)
It doesn't have to be any more modular than Apple wants to it be. In that sense, it isn't 180 at all.
Pretty good chance, this have bigger blow to Authorized Partner repair shows flow than it does to Apple's repair income stream. And that is about it.
I’m not one to deny a cynical view. You make fair points that Apple rewrote parts of the bill that worked for it, but they were also forced to go to the negotiating table kicking and screaming. They wanted that bill dead and didn’t get what they wanted. But the bill wasn’t fully what they wanted either.
Not everyone got what they wanted but you can waive your hands all you like, it’s a turn about. They settled for something they could live with and didn’t get the dead bill they wanted.
Honestly I’m not sure what the better outcome is in the long run.
My point still stands. If you pressure and humiliate them enough, they will respond to some extent. Some times a free bumper. Sometimes an about face in rip mix and burn.
Problem may well be that no one’s really left to raise enough of a ruckus. And those left just don’t care or are content as is.
Another really bad sign of how apple is not even in any pro game anymore. Go to any pro gear like a pro scanner. All of the devices have windows, and somewhat incredibly, linux drivers. And absolutely nothing for apple.
www.scantastik.com
Like none of the workgroup, high speed, or production scanners here have any Mac support, but almost all if not all have linux support. Let that sink in.
So apple doesnt support basic standards like U.3 drives and professional level scanners. Just more and more reasons why pros have left this platform.
Compare Document Scanners
Compare document scanners from all the major brands like Epson, Fujitsu, Canon, Kodak and more.
Like none of the workgroup, high speed, or production scanners here have any Mac support, but almost all if not all have linux support. Let that sink in.
So apple doesnt support basic standards like U.3 drives and professional level scanners. Just more and more reasons why pros have left this platform.
Those manufacturers probably got tired of Apple re-hashing the OS every other year forcing complete re-writes of drivers. I'm actually surprised Adobe hasn't dropped Apple support. I'll be sad when it happens, but I also would not be surprised.Another really bad sign of how apple is not even in any pro game anymore. Go to any pro gear like a pro scanner. All of the devices have windows, and somewhat incredibly, linux drivers. And absolutely nothing for apple.
Compare Document Scanners
Compare document scanners from all the major brands like Epson, Fujitsu, Canon, Kodak and more.
Like none of the workgroup, high speed, or production scanners here have any Mac support, but almost all if not all have linux support. Let that sink in.
So apple doesnt support basic standards like U.3 drives and professional level scanners. Just more and more reasons why pros have left this platform.