From Ben Lovejoy at 9to5Mac, the Ryzen 7840 can beat Apple’s M2 chip, says AMD, but provides no proof. Of course no benchmarks nor battery charts, and it is energy efficiency that Apple Silicon is so good with. And also which M2? The lowest?
Filipe Esposito at 9 to 5 first reported on this, from a test by Andy Somerfield at Affinity Photohttps://9to5mac.com/2021/10/25/apple-m1-max-gpu-beats-6000-amd-radeon-pro-w6900x-in-affinity-benchmark/
This is pretty amazing, beating a $6000 GPU from the 2019 MacPro! Wow. So the Apple Silicon iMac Pro and Mac Pro will certainly be impressive machines.
Malcolm Own at Apple Insider has an article on M1 Pro and M1 Max GPU performance versus Nvidia and AMD.
Now it uses teraflops to compare it to what the equivalent processor is, meaning the top of the line is equivalent to a Radeon RX Vega 56 or GeForce RTX 2080.
Which also means my Radeon Pro Vega 64x, which can do a bout 13.5 teraflops (12.5 teraflows for the 64) is still better, but still slower than a RTX 3060 Ti or above processor.
In a fairly surprising move, Apple has changed out 3 video cards for the Mac Pro and added 3 new models. You can see them at the Mac Pro Specs Page. They are an AMD RADEON PRO W6900X with 32 GB of RAM for $2400, an AMD RADEON PRO W65900X with 32GB of RAM for $5600, and a AMD Radeon Pro W6800x DUO with 64 GB of RAM for $4600. These are all very pro level current generation cards and should give a noticeable improvement to the graphics for those with a Mac Pro, and they all add 4 Thunderbolt 3 slots and can be linked together for more graphics power (and expense)
I am glad to see that Apple is still doing some things to update the MacPro, now lets hope the rumors are true and they update the CPU one time before moving on completely to Apple Silicon.
Wesley Hillard at AppleInsider is reporting that MacOS 11.4 adds support for AMD Big Navi graphics cards 6800, 6800XT and 6900XT.
This is great news, Big Navi are what are in the new Xbox Series X and Playstation 5, are more powerful than anything in the current MacPro. It would be awesome if these cards were to be released for the MacPro and even better if they were to be added to an Pro variant of the M1 with PCI card and hopefully thunderbolt eGPU support.
There is the possibility that the M1 cards will never support PCI based graphics cards, and that would really be a shame, but this keeps the possibility alive.
Big Navi should be great for both Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve. I would still prefer the addition of NVIDIA, but that is unlikely to ever happen.
So a YouTube Channel called Tailosive Tech has released a video on an inside source from apple on the new 2019 macpro.
And AppleInsider has also covered it (easier to read, especially since the edit is very trimmed, but not very covered and hurts my brain a bit as an editor).
Not only does this cover the new rumored 6K 31 inch monitor, but the new macpro, claiming the modular mac works like stackable legos, with a brain module with a soldered in cpu, and 8 slots of upgradeable RAM. Then you can add GPU modules, and storage modules, possibly modules with the unanounced thunderbolt 4, and eventually possibly third party modules eventually. Each module with it’s own power supply and cooling. And possibly not available until 2020.
This would seem to cover “modular” and why it has taken so long. Giving people an upgraded cheesgrater would not have taken this long, but Apple wouldn’t have made money off every upgrade in that scenario, while with this stackable design they would, including third party modules from licensing their propriety connector. And upgrades likely won’t be cheap. Instead of just a gpu, you are also getting a case, the custom connector a power supply and cooling system (and likely a reason for dropping NVIDIA support, as NVIDIA doesn’t like customized boxes and shapes, but AMD is all in with that).
And depending on the modules, this could be a very cool machine, though also very very expensive. Lets hope they have sone SATA modules as large ammounts of SSD storage are still prohibitively expensive. And let’s hope third party support comes quickly as a blackmagicdesign module for video i/o would be essential. And a sledless 4 drive sata raid module wouldn’t be a bad thing either.
I know this is all rumor, but it makes total sense. This lets Apple give expandability, but lets them control it completely and make money off of every bit of it. And Apple will have delivered what they said, and can charge what they want for it. It will not make everyone happy, especially since it will not be easily user upgradeable, and will be significantly more expensive than a machine that is user upgradeable, but it will ge a true pro machine.
I just hope they show it off at WWDC on June 3rd, but if they aren’t releasing until at least December 31st 2019, that may be way too early.