The new Apple Silicon Mac Pro offers customers six available PCI Express expansion slots for storage, audio, video capture, networking, and more, but it’s no longer compatible with graphics cards as the system’s graphics processing is handled entirely by Apple’s M2 chip, with up to a 76-core GPU that can access up to 192GB of unified memory.
Apple’s hardware engineering chief John Ternus briefly touched on the matter in an interview with Daring Fireball‘s John Gruber last week, explaining that expandable GPU support for Apple silicon is not something that the company has pursued.
“Fundamentally, we’ve built our architecture around this shared memory model and that optimization, and so it’s not entirely clear to me how you’d bring in another GPU and do so in a way that is optimized for our systems,” Ternus told Gruber. “It hasn’t been a direction that we wanted to pursue.”
MacDailyNews Take: Every Mac Pro now has the performance of not just one but seven Afterburner cards built in and features the industry-leading media engine with M2 Ultra. The new Mac Pro can play an unprecedented 22 streams of 8K ProRes video.
When compared to the Intel-based Mac Pro, Mac Pro with M2 Ultra:
• Empowers demanding real-world pro workflows like video transcoding and 3D simulations to run up to 3x faster.
• Enables video engineers to ingest 24 4K camera feeds and encode them to ProRes in real time, all on a single machine, when using six video I/O cards.
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Mdn is carrying water for a Mac Pro that is doa. Its gpu is worse than a weak mad 7900, forget Nvidia. It has only 16lanes of pci available so one storage card saturates is bandwidth. It has no ecc memory. No expandable memory. Its cpu single core and multi core speed are worse than a middling Intel machine for $2500. This is not a Mac Pro. It’s a Mac ‘doh! It’s a Mac Studio plus not a Mac Pro.
This Mac Pro is a DOA insult not keeping up with mid level Intel chips while costing $1k more than apples excellent but already expensive 2019 Mac Pro.
This makes the trashcan seem like an uncompromised machine.
Total disaster.
You missing some facts in your statement.
The Mac Pro with Apple silicon is 1k more at the base level…BUT you forgot to mention the maxed out version is approximately $12,000, while the Intel version was just over $50,000. That’s not something you forget.
The base Apple silicon version blows the doors off of the Intel equivalent base model, so the 1k increase in price is to be expected. Why don’t you talk about the 38k savings you get right out of the box on the top end? I’ll take the 38k and you can get a pc so you can tinker with the memory sticks.
How moronic are you. It was 50k because you can add gpus that smoke the pathetic m2 ultra and like over 1.25tb more of ram. Which you cannot on the loser 8,1 Mac Pro.
And the base level of a 4 year newer machine being faster is a Moron level comment. It’s 4 years newer. Now compare it to a middling level pc that is faster for $2500. But you ignore that entry is now $1000 more. Thanks apple apologist.
https://wccftech.com/apple-m2-ultra-soc-isnt-faster-than-amd-intel-last-year-desktop-cpus-50-slower-than-nvidia-rtx-4080/
Everyone should be pissed at apple for this deceptive disaster pile of garbage machine. It makes the trashcan look like a triumph on comparison.
While I agree with your sentiments that the new Mac Pro is an unmitigated disappointment. You’re incorrect that its “single core and multi core speed are worse than a middling Intel machine for $2500.” Go look at the most recent report on Ars Technica about the Mac Studio, which for CPU performance should be effectively identical to the Mac Pro. Except for a certain subset of cases the top end M2 Ultra holds its own and sometimes excels against the top end AMD and Intel CPUs.
Now, the PCIe lane drought and the inability to use the top end GPUs from AMD (or Nvidia, which have been a pain to utilize in any Mac Pro for many years) is a HUGE setback for the newest Mac Pro. There are imagery and data analyses techniques that are popular in many industries that can utilize all the capabilities the highest end GPUs can muster — and then some. This latest version of the Mac Pro 100% eliminates this machine from those industries.
Additionally, it’s a negative sleight of hand for Apple to claim that the new Mac Pro has six 16 lane slots. It can’t even have two cards running full speed and full 16 lanes let alone six!
The reality is that the new Mac Pro is effectively a Mac Studio with six semi-useful PCIe slots, nothing more.
Sadly you’re wrong, it is taken out by a middling system. Read it and weep.
https://wccftech.com/apple-m2-ultra-soc-isnt-faster-than-amd-intel-last-year-desktop-cpus-50-slower-than-nvidia-rtx-4080/
Why does MDN’s take simply regurgitate Apple’s position? The Mac Pro has always been a niche product for the most demanding users with price not really a consideration. To tell us all the good stuff the new M2 Ultra can do compared to a base Intel Mac Pro isn’t really useful. It’s pretty obvious that this years old Intel Mac Pro can be tricked out with way more GPU power and RAM than this new Mac Pro! Sure, it might cost $100k – but at least for those willing to spend the money, the capability was there. And now it no longer is – at any price.
https://www.techspot.com/news/99026-early-benchmarks-suggest-apple-m2-ultra-could-slower.html
So, a 13900KS with a 4060ti beats the $6,999 Mac Pro in every way…
That’s ridiculous to think
“Enables video engineers to ingest 24 4K camera feeds and encode them to ProRes in real time, all on a single machine, when using six video I/O cards.” I thought the whole point of the article was that the Pro doesn’t/can’t use video I/O cards. Makes no sense.
In the mean time: