I'm not thrilled about it, but I think you're probably right. I wonder if the development of the MPX module and the Afterburner card were partially motivated by Apple wanting to dip their toe in and test their prowess in the high end PCIe video and graphics hardware space.
I'm not thrilled about it as I really like my current setup of notebook for mobility, and eGPU for home working/playing on the same machine. Though they may well be very capable I can't imagine the GPUs in Apple's mobile Macs aren't going to be able to match what can be done with a full size graphics card in an enclosure. Plus, upgradeability is nice too. Hopefully I'll be proved wrong.
Yeah, the "Pro" solution certainly has a lot of questions to be answered. There is a lot you can do with an SoC, but there are also limits to that as well. I don't think their Mac Pro replacement will just have a bigger SoC. They are going to need some level of modularity if they're going to address that market. Even from a memory perspective, you're not going to get 1.5 TB on a SoC either. At some point, they're going to have to show us an architecture that allows for modular GPU and RAM. As for the afterburner, they could probably just bake in some form of ProRES hardware encoder/decoder into their Pro level SoCs. That's effectively all they are used for anyway.
The bottom line is that the Mac Pro already has an existing bar that is set. If Apple is going to address this market at all, it's going to have to rise above that bar. Likewise, I'm optimistic about what they will bring to market, if a bit curious as to how they are going to do it.
I always saw the new Mac Pro as a ‘grudge’ product for Apple - they had to adopt current workstation architecture because customers ‘needed’ it (some do by the way). I thought Apple saw the iMac Pro as their real Pro product as it addressed the majority of use cases and they’ll use ASi and macOS memory streaming to limit the need for modularity.
The M1 already has both HEVC & ProRes acceleration but most reviewers ignore these in favour of a ?RAW -> h.264 pissing contest. Do most videographers turn proxies off?
Theres still a lot of thermal & transistor budget available for the Pro SoC options with an M1X + dGPU + better audio/video HW codecs matching a 14-core iMac Pro to take the majority of the iMac/Mac Pro market.
I always saw the new Mac Pro as a ‘grudge’ product for Apple - they had to adopt current workstation architecture because customers ‘needed’ it (some do by the way). I thought Apple saw the iMac Pro as their real Pro product as it addressed the majority of use cases and they’ll use ASi and macOS memory streaming to limit the need for modularity.
The M1 already has both HEVC & ProRes acceleration but most reviewers ignore these in favour of a ?RAW -> h.264 pissing contest. Do most videographers turn proxies off?
Theres still a lot of thermal & transistor budget available for the Pro SoC options with an M1X + dGPU + better audio/video HW codecs matching a 14-core iMac Pro to take the majority of the iMac/Mac Pro market.
Yeah, I agree on the "grudge" comment for the Mac Pro. To your point, it was clear that they were hoping the iMac Pro would be sufficient to address that market. To be honest, it probably was for 80% of the "pro" users. However, as a platform, I think they realized that they needed to address the true "pro" market with the Mac Pro. I'm sure they don't make any money with that product, despite the ridiculously high prices because the volume is so low... but they DID need to address the that market and it certainly sounded like they were committed to maintaining it.
In terms of transistor budget, I'd say yes and no. Yes, they can certainly make larger SoCs and I'm sure they will. I have no doubt we'll see 12 core (cpu and GPU) SoCs and possibly even 16 core variants. However, with the current Mac Pro, you can have a 28 core Xeon system. No doubt Apple will put out a 32 core solution of some kind with possibly even more GPU cores. However, I don't think they're going to get that beast on an SoC.
I always saw the new Mac Pro as a ‘grudge’ product for Apple - they had to adopt current workstation architecture because customers ‘needed’ it (some do by the way). I thought Apple saw the iMac Pro as their real Pro product as it addressed the majority of use cases and they’ll use ASi and macOS memory streaming to limit the need for modularity.
The M1 already has both HEVC & ProRes acceleration but most reviewers ignore these in favour of a ?RAW -> h.264 pissing contest. Do most videographers turn proxies off?
Theres still a lot of thermal & transistor budget available for the Pro SoC options with an M1X + dGPU + better audio/video HW codecs matching a 14-core iMac Pro to take the majority of the iMac/Mac Pro market.
In terms of transistor budget, I'd say yes and no. Yes, they can certainly make larger SoCs and I'm sure they will. I have no doubt we'll see 12 core (cpu and GPU) SoCs and possibly even 16 core variants. However, with the current Mac Pro, you can have a 28 core Xeon system. No doubt Apple will put out a 32 core solution of some kind with possibly even more GPU cores. However, I don't think they're going to get that beast on an SoC.
I reckon they’ll look at the use cases for >14 Xeon cores and create dedicated silicon to address them i.e. audio silicon so every pro-level/X SoC can manage a certain track-count irrespective of CPU cores.
Comments
The M1 already has both HEVC & ProRes acceleration but most reviewers ignore these in favour of a ?RAW -> h.264 pissing contest. Do most videographers turn proxies off?
Theres still a lot of thermal & transistor budget available for the Pro SoC options with an M1X + dGPU + better audio/video HW codecs matching a 14-core iMac Pro to take the majority of the iMac/Mac Pro market.
In terms of transistor budget, I'd say yes and no. Yes, they can certainly make larger SoCs and I'm sure they will. I have no doubt we'll see 12 core (cpu and GPU) SoCs and possibly even 16 core variants. However, with the current Mac Pro, you can have a 28 core Xeon system. No doubt Apple will put out a 32 core solution of some kind with possibly even more GPU cores. However, I don't think they're going to get that beast on an SoC.