From Wayne G at OWC Rocketyard.
The $3000 over the MacStudio to be able to use some PCI cards (but not video cards) just doesn’t seem worth it to me. If I had the money, sure, but I would have to be pretty loaded.
Harlety Charlton at MacRumors has an article, “Apple Silicon Mac Pro Configurations: Everything We Know.”
Of course we don’t really know anything, other then it is coming, so it is literally all speculation. We think it will be based on the M2, and it might be 5nm or even 3nm, and we don’t know ports and it is rumored to have 40 cores, or double the M1 Ultra.
I wish this machine was a known quantity as it really should be my next machine if it isn’t too expensive.
This is because PCIe 6.0 has officially been released, though there is no hardware that supports it yet, while the 2019 MacPro is on PCI 3 which was released in 2010. It is pretty bad since PCIe 4 was released a 2 years before the MacPro, and PCIe 5.0 has been out since 2019.
I am still excited for the next MacPro, though I doubt it will have any user available PCIe slots anyway, though hopefully it’s hard drive attaches faster than PCI 3. Likely it’s only expansion will be Thunderbolt 4 (which it will hopefully have more than 2 buses and 4 ports).
And this seems like a pretty big duh, of course.
The Apple Silicon MacPro will have to set itself apart with impressive CPU and GPU power as you are not going to be able to add either of these and I am even doubtful of PCI support. And I doubt there will ever be external GPU support through Thunderbolt on M1 Macs either, unless apple ever figures this out for their own hardware, but likely they would just like you to buy a new machine.
I am tending to doubt their will even be additional bays for RAM or Hard drives, though with a likely dual or quad M1 MAX, it will certainly be larger than a Mac Mini and need more cooling, but I doubt it will need to be too much bigger.
I would like to see more Thunderbolt ports though. The 4 Thunderbolt Ports on my iMac Pro are kind of a joke, and the MacPro has more and the video cards also add 4 additional ports, so 8 or more thunderbolt ports would be awesome (and 12 would be better, or at least 8 thunderbolt and 4 USB.
And maybe the ability to have 2 raided hard drives for video, but with the prices Apple charge for SSD hard drives, that would cost a fortune, but it would be great for video editing.
Any which way it will be the raw processing power of the chips and the included ProRES accelerators that really makes this machine rock and roll for video editors.
So both 9to5 mac and AppleInsider are reporting that Mark Gurman at Bloomberg believes Apple will hit it’s 2 year deadline on Apple SIlicon in it’s whole lineup including a new MacPro.
With the whole microprocessor issues hitting the world right now this will be impressive if true, but I assume they don’t need too many MacPros compared to their other machines, though that depends if the price is right.
The rumors point to a very powerful machine for the new MacPro. Who knows if it will be expandable or have any PCI slots, but if it has Thunderbolt 5, that might not be an issue. If they don’t have PCI slots, will they still offer an Apple Afterburner, or if they have a version of the MacPro with it built in?
If the Mac Pro is like current M1 macs it will likely not be expandable after the fact, so might need a larger initial expense, maxing out RAM and everything else you need because of lack of expansion ability after the initial purchase. And you will really need to maximize the RAM since it will likely share the video ram with the normal ram like all the M1 Macs do.
So pretty exciting, especially since it keeps the USB C form factor and doubles it’s speed from 40Gbps to 80Gbps.
Already I love being able to use Thunderbolt 4 hubs on my Mac, and hopefully the new Mac Pro will use Thunderbolt 5 for impressive speeds from it’s ports.
Bloomberg is reporting on rumors of the new versions of Apple Silicon. There will be a redesigned MacBook Pro, then MacBook Air, new lower end MacBook Pro and finally the Apple Silicon Mac Pro.
The next M1’s will support 64 gigs if RAM with 8 high energy cores and 2 energy efficient cores and either 16 or 32 graphics cores. The M1 currently 4 high performance and 4 efficiency with 8 graphics cores.
The chips for the Apple Silicon MacPro will have 20 and 40 core with either 16 or 32 high performance cores and either 64 or 128 core graphics.
Let’s hope the MacPro doesn’t top out at 64 gigs of combined RAM, but the rest of the specs sound impressive.
If performance scales with the cores, the performance will be impressive.
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.
And the results are not surprising, the M1 currently gets stomped in 4K Noise Reduction by more than 2x, almost 3x for the slowest Mac (the 2017 iMac Pro Pro Vega 64).
And at least currently it seems to show the power of GPU adds to Macs, over what the M1 can do. Now surely the M1 will scale, but we will have to see just how far it goes.
AppleInsider has an article on the possibility that Apple Silicon will only support their own GPU’s and not 3rd Party GPU’s. This graphics shows that Apple Silicon Mac doesn’t support NVIDIA or the currently supported AMD GPU.
This is really scary. The Apple Silicon GPU will certainly be OK for laptops or low end machines, but for high end computers this would literally be a death knell.
Let’s hope this just means for the current development system, because otherwise it means the new MacPro was a huge bait and switch. Oh look at this we can make the highest and most powerful machine, but you know at the same time they were already working on End of Life-ing that machine with Apple Silicon.
I don’t want to move to Wintel, but if their is no 3rd party GPU support, WINTEL will be the only solution.