The upcoming Apple Silicon Mac Pro, powered by the “M2 Ultra” chip is due to be announced as early as this spring and it will feature insane graphics performance with up to 76 GPU cores.
Previously, rumors indicated the Apple silicon Mac pro would have a high-end configuration with 48 CPU and 152 graphics cores with the M2 Extreme processor, but, unfortunately, this chip has been canceled.
In addition, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, in his Power On newsletter, said, “It will also lack one key feature from the Intel version: user-upgradeable RAM. That’s because the memory is tied directly to the M2 Ultra’s motherboard. Still, there are two SSD storage slots and for graphics, media and networking cards.”
Since Mac Pro’s most important feature is being upgradeable, Gurman says it will be possible to add more storage as it will have the same design as the previous Intel model. Last but not least, he adds that the “big difference between a Mac Pro and Mac Studio, in addition to M1 Ultra to M2 Ultra, should be a performance from more cooling.”
MacDailyNews Note: Gurman on Wednesday reported via Twitter, “The next Mac Pro may lack user upgradeable GPUs in addition to non-upgradeable RAM. Right now Apple Silicon Macs don’t support external GPUs and you have to use whatever configuration you buy on Apple’s website. But the Mac Pro GPU will be powerful with up to 76 cores… That will leave storage as the main user-upgradeable component in the new Mac Pro, which will have the same design as the current, Intel model. The big difference between a Mac Pro and a Mac Studio — in addition to M1 Ultra to M2 Ultra — should be performance from more cooling.”
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Please be gloriously modular.
We have more than we could ever want from our mobile Macs, Mac Mini, and Mac Studio. The only reason to even have a Mac Pro is to have something you can load with cards and drives. Please make it rack-able, stackable, wheel-able, quiet, and over-engineered.
Aim for the old “cheese grater” G4 (not the cartoonish current model) or Xserve.
YES! YES! YES!
Pro should mean (should always have meant): rugged and user-customisable / upgradeable. Internal expansion with rock solid connections is strongly preferred over external cables with friction-based connectors or, yuck, wireless claptrap. All hard drives should be internal.
Apple, please cut it out with the insanely overpriced castors, bent chrome handles, CNC machined alyooooooominyum faceplate, and such non-value added nonsense. A workstation needs to be a value-creating powerhouse, not a fashion icon. A bare bones workstation should also start at a very modest price. We have a 2012 Mac Pro that still serves up media for the household. There is no sealed box Mac for sale today that would do what it does (6 internal disks for different media and backups). The trashcan was a non-starter. The 2019 Mac Pro is insanely overpriced for the relatively low performance we need for local media management, archiving home videos, etc. It’s like Apple chose in 2013 to intentionally force users to buy stacks of external NAS or raid enclosures because they’re too lazy to offer an affordable workstation.
Remember when Apple made a point of how the Mac Pro (old massive tower) was cheaper than comparable PCs and was actually affordable? I had one for ages. Loved being able to swap out drives and cards as I needed.
The Mac Studio fills my needs fine now but I’d love to see, as you say, a reasonably priced starting config.
Full agree. Had a G-5 tricked out with 8 gig of RAM (huge at the time) and 4 HDD. It was a joy to use as well as a low-end lab heater. Tim, just go back to a design that worked great. Please.
The 152 GPU core configuration is with TWO CPUs – that’s two times 76 GPU cores. The author doesn’t seem to know much about Mac Pros …
And you don’t seem to know much about Apple M-series UltraFusion Architecture. Just like M-series Ultra is built by connecting 2 x Max, the architecture is designed to connect 2 x Ultra to form even more powerful, single Extreme CPU (that would be the limit with the current UltraFusion, 2 x Extreme would require two CPUs). That said, of course it’s possible to create a two CPU config using 2 x Ultras, but a single CPU is a lot better (especially with the unified memory architecture), so that has never been the plan.
And 16GB RAM and 256GB storage.
Need modularity…it’s plug-n-play – all day! The days of tinkering inside the case should be over already.
256GB storage. Thanks…
I keep seeing writers and analysts state that it won’t be possible to add more RAM to Apple’s chips. Whether or not Apple wants to allow that is one thing. But I don’t see a technical reason why they can’t. Remember that the RAM packages are not on the die of the chip, they are on the substrate, which is a small special circuit board the chip itself is soldered to. So there are either two, or four special RAM packages on the substrate, depending which SoC version it is. That alone shows that Apple can indeed, add more packages. It’s a matter of deciding to bring more memory lines out to the substrate for extra packages. So, no reason why Apple couldn’t make a slightly larger substrate with more sockets for their, I think, proprietary RAM packages.
With the GPU, it’s different, because those are on die. Of course, it’s possible there too, but the Apple might have to accept slower transfer times (lag) if they put the GPU on the subtracted, or even on the mobo. But it could be done. Possibly a GPU with 256 cores might be worth it.
I think you answered your own question there, it’s the tight integration that gives the M chips their speed. Moving the ram to a removable package likely would slow things down too much.
Heck, throw four of those CPUs into a Mac Pro and get some serious power.
MDN is way wrong on this. A lovely 6800XT clobbers the maxed out studio and will continue to clobber this crippled non-mac-pro in real world use and real benchmarks like metal scores. Apple cherry picked bogus export benchmarks for its GPUs that completely lie about real performance.
Bottom line, if you cannot add a 3rd party GPU this is DOA to pro/enthusiast users and it’s game over. They will leave for good. This is trashcan 2.
76 GPU cores very good!
Apple M series silicon is a mobile processor design with power and thermal limitation of mobile computing. Apple needs to design a silicon specifically for desktop and workstation performance. Compared to AMD thread rippers and RTX 4900 gpus Apple’s real world performance & benchmarks are years behind. Will Apple every design a workstation CPU and dedicated GPU for pro use ?