I think that compelling reason to buy a Mac Pro over a Mac Studio might come from a different area other than the chip…
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What to Expect From Apple's M4 Ultra Chip Next Year
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M2 Max MBP here and the app has loaded before the icon bounced a single time... what are you doing there?And the Pages icon will still bounce in the dock for ten seconds before the app loads.
This would be infinitely dumber than just discontinuing the Mac Pro.
If they don't give the Mac Pro multiple M4 chips this time... it should be discontinued. if the same hardware can fit inside a Mac Studio case, then that is where it belongs.
Safari won’t just be snappier. Safari will be high on angel dust wearing no pants while smoking crank out of a light bulb and driving a stolen car full of hookers on the Highway to the Danger Zone!
Even if it was a yearly schedule, the Studio and Pro would still get updates right before the next gen chip come out.
It'll be interesting to see how these machines compete. None of them will compete with a 4090, but maybe an M* Quadra (aka Extreme) could come close.
Really, the error bars are so large depending on thermals, drivers, optimizations, etc...
But I would expect something like these half-donkey'd guesses:
Hopefully the Ultras can actually hit higher RAM densities.
I'll be shocked if Apple ever releases another dual-socket machine.
They're now designing their own chips; so if they need bigger, they'll just go with chiplets.
But you dream, dream big!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't professional grade(Xeon) Intel chips always based on the previous generation architecture due to reliability?
Apple last week debuted its latest M4 Pro and M4 Max chips in the Mac mini and MacBook Pro, and the highest-end M4 Ultra chip should follow next year.
In his Power On newsletter today, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said the M4 Ultra chip in the next Mac Pro will "probably" have up to a 32-core CPU and up to an 80-core GPU, which would be double the M4 Max's up to 16-core CPU and up to 40-core GPU. That would be unsurprising, as the M1 Ultra and M2 Ultra chips both have up to double the number of CPU and GPU cores compared to the M1 Max and M2 Max chips, respectively.
Not all patterns at Apple carry on forever, so it is still noteworthy that the M4 Ultra chip will likely follow the same doubling scheme as usual.
When will the M4 Ultra chip be available? In a report last month, Gurman said the next Mac Studio will likely "debut between March and June" next year, and higher-end configurations of that computer should be available with the M4 Ultra chip. He expects a new Mac Pro desktop tower with the M4 Ultra chip to follow in the second half of next year.
Given the Mac Studio and Mac Pro were never updated with M3 series chips, the M4 Ultra chip would give these computers an improved Neural Engine for Apple Intelligence and ray tracing for improved graphics rendering for the first time.
A few years ago, Gurman said that Apple had tested a so-called "M2 Extreme" chip that would have offered even greater performance than the M2 Ultra chip, but he later said that the chip's release was canceled. Apple could choose to revisit an "Extreme" chip for the Mac Pro in the future, but there are no "M4 Extreme" chip rumors as of now.
Article Link: What to Expect From Apple's M4 Ultra Chip Next Year
There was a comment inside Apple's open source "openELM". It said "Training on Linux because Slurm does not yet run on MacOS." (The key word was "yet".)
So it seems there is an internal effort at Apple to get Slurm running on Apple hardware.
I think this is the the best solution for high-end computing. Let's say you have a maxed-out Mac Pro and you find you need something 20 times faster. You could just wait 10 year and hope for a better Mac Pro. But a better solution is to buy 19 more computers and have a way to distribute your job over all 20 computers. Then rather then waiting, you can have it tomorrow. Or if you need 10,000 times faster computer. You put 10,000 computers on a ig building.
This seems to be what Apple is doing, building out data centers with thousands of computers inside. Only it seems they used Linux PCs not macs.
In the future they might work it out so setting up a server farm is possible. Waiting for these incremental improvements is just too slow.
This type of thing can be used for jobs like Video rendering or training AI models or many kinds of scientific computation.
Slurm Workload Manager - Wikipedia
I had the same question. What machine are you coming from? For me the difference was GPU performance. I’m coming from a 16” M1 Max MacBook Pro with 10 CPU and 32 GPU cores. The M4 CPU performance significantly exceeds the M1 Max; but the 10 core GPU falls significantly below the M1 Max. The M4 Pro GPU performance on the other hand significantly exceeds that of the M1 Max. So for me GPU requirements dictate the M4 Pro. I suspect the M5 might materially narrow the GPU gap.
I would expect the M5 in 2025, but I wouldn't expect the M5 Pro/Max/Ultra in 2025?
Time will tell.
I also will strongly suspect that not every M4 Mac will even get an M5 update.
Nah there's no point in doing that, they'd make less money.
The Mac Pro is a niche device, its compelling reason to purchase is if you need PCIe expansion slots. They didnt make it to make lots of profit from, they made it cater for a small market.
This is the right question to ask.
The 4090 has something like 2TB of memory bandwidth. The Max is less than half of that.
I really think they need a Max*4 chip (Extreme, or whatever they call it) to be cutting edge in machine learning and ultra high end graphics work.
I sold my 2017 iMac last year and used the money to buy a studio display… I’ve been waiting on a new Mac Studio ever since lol
The 10 core GPU on the M4 is inferior to the M1 Max, but the 16 core GPU on the M4 Pro significantly exceeds the M1 Max? Interesting
