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.
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.
Not only would this give a nice boost to the Intel Mac Pro line, it would make up for the fact that they made a modular machine that could be easily upgraded and never bothered releasing a single upgrade for it. And as the article says they are also working on the Apple Silicon version of the MacPro, which will likely be a smaller version of the MacPro, more like a Cube, and it will likely not be upgrade-able, so it would be smart for Apple to release one more upgrade-able machine before they dump the idea of upgrade ability all together.
It seems likely that the Apple Silicon based MacPro will be like every other Apple Silicon with soldered Memory, and fixed gpu on the motherboard, and without the ability to run an external GPU. Now hopefully that also ends up being shown in the price which should be allot less than a fully loaded Intel MacPro, but I doubt it will still be considered inexpensive.
Change Miller at 9TO5 Mac is reporting that the Xcode 13 Beta has a reference to scalable Intel Ice Lake Xeon processors, which would be a big upgrade from what is in the current Intel MacPro.
It would be nice to see new video cards offered by Apple too since they are supporting more current video cards in the latest versions of Big Sur.
The Mac Pro is supposed to be this upgrade-able machine, so it would be great to see Apple actually make some upgrades available before the completely EOL it. Otherwise all the upgrade ability talk was just bullshit, because they knew that Apple Silicon was coming.
This would be a good boon to editors though to have one last MacPro with the best processor available.
So news reports have been popping up that 2013 MacPro’s running AVID Media Composer have been not restarting just going black. And the only fix was to re-install the Mac OS to get the system running again. Reports seemed to mostly focus on 2013 MacPro’s but from many rental houses, but also sone other macs were affected. It seemed to be that the user folder was having it’s permissions changed from admin to a normal user.
Well it seems that issue was not caused by Media Composer per se. In fact, according to ProVideoCoalition and Engadget it is a Chrome update that is screwing up the user folder. And it is only on macs that have System Integrity Protection (SIP) disabled. This means that in fact AVID is partially responsible, since AVID requires SIP to be turned off so it can get direct access to a Mac’s Graphic Systems. Of course neither Final Cut or Premiere or DaVinci require this, but AVID does.
AVID needs to fix this or work with Apple, because such an expensive and important software shouldn’t require you to lower your Macs defenses. And of course a Company as big as Google should know better as well, but why would they test with SIP disabled? I mean now they need to, but it is not something you would normally test for.
So Y.M. Cinema Magazine has a supposed leak of an internal slide showing info on the new modular MacPro 7,1. And not only is it powerful, but it has 3 pci slots, thunderbolt 4, and NVIDIA support! If this is true, holy shit!
I will be sad no matter what since my 4,1 passed and I now have an iMac Pro, but this bodes very well if it is true.
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.
William Gallagher and Mike Wuerthele at AppleInsider hacve an article on how someone at Apple Management doesn’t want NVIDIA support in MacOS.
I have been talking about this for years. Apple doesn’t care about the pros. They care about what they want. And they want the companies that kowtow to them.
And the new “modular” macpro is obviously not going to be what Pros want if you can’t use the components that you want. It seems any new MacPro will only work with AMD video cards. And many video pros want NVIDIA and CUDA, as well as for science people who need proprietary CUDA support! Honestly it means that likely there will be no accessible pci slots in the new MacPro, and not even thunderbolt support for NVIDIA.
There were all these rumors that the exclusivity with AMD ended as of 2019, but it seems Apple is done with NVIDIA. Hell there were even rumors that 2xxx series work with startup unlike all non-supported apple cards, and if that is true Apple is actively supressing NVIDIA!
Now I hear from friends that the new iMac Pro is awesome, but I hate no PCI slots or extra internal storage! Hell you can get PC’s with built in Raids that don’t even require sleds for spinning hard drives. I mean a macpro with an external raid would blow people’s minds! Even if it was a “module” you could add on!
I don’t want to move to Windows. I love my surface, because I can run real photoshop, but would rather have it be a mac, and I want my computer to ge a mac, but am more and more scared that a mac will not be great for a pro.
Intel is launching a new series of scalable Xeon processors. They have a new mesh architecture which will make them more optimized. They all can run dual processor from Bronze with 8 cores at 1.7 GHz, silver with 12 cores at 2.2 GHz, gold can run up to 4 processors with 14 cores at 3.6 GHz or 22 cores at 3.4 GHz and Platinum with 28 cores at 3.6 GHz and support for 8 CPU’s.
I bet the 1.7 is too slow, but we could see the 2.2 GHz and up in a new MacPro though I doubt they have more than dual CPU options. These are certainly not the processors in the iMac Pro though.
These Skylake Xeons should have a 1.65 times performance boost over the current Broadwell Xeon’s which likely will be in the iMac Pro.
Let’s hope the new Mac Pro really is a great machine. We all just want the cheese grater though and not some design wonder.
So Apple showed off their next OS High Sierra today at WWDC, with Metal 2 for more graphics acceleration.
Well if they want to prove that they are supporting Pro users as they make a new Mac Pro and work on their iMac Pro, they should re-open the os to 4,1 MacPro’s and continue to support 5,1’s until the new models come out. They killed 4,1 support with Sierra (though users can hack their 4,1’s to becone 5,1’s but it is not officially supported!
The new iMac Pro looks amazing, but I still don’t want an all in one, get that new Mac Pro out soon!
EDIT: So they will continue to support the 5,1 but they should expand their support back as a sign of goodwill to Pro Users!