Geekbench reveals M2 Ultra chip's massive performance leap in 2023 Mac Pro
Geekbench has revealed performance statistics for the M2 Ultra chip inside the 2023 Mac Pro and it has over double the performance of the older Intel-based machine.
Geekbench shares stats for the M2 Ultra
During the WWDC event on June 5, Apple introduced the New Mac Pro along with the M2 Max and M2 Ultra chips, as well as an enhanced version of the Mac Studio. While there are currently no benchmarks available for the new Mac Studio, Geekbench has recently published specifications for the 2023 Mac Pro with an M2 Ultra.
The benchmark reveals a single-core score of 2,794 and a multi-core score of 21,453 for the 2023 Mac Pro, in contrast to the highest-end Intel-based Mac Pro equipped with a 28-core Xeon W processor, which scored 1,378 in single-core and 10,390 in multi-core performance. As a result, the new Mac Pro offers more than double the speed of the fastest Intel-based model and at a significantly lower price.
As well as performance increases, the most recent Mac Pro also brings PCIe expansion to Apple Silicon. The new Mac Pro has seven PCIe expansion slots, and six support gen 4 -- meaning this two sees a doubling of speed compared to previous models.
Apple highlights this expandability of the new Mac Pro, featuring dual 10Gb Ethernet ports, two HDMI ports, and the capacity to support up to six Pro Display XDR monitors. In this case, the new Mac Pro boasts up to twice the speed of the fastest Intel-based Mac Pro and up to seven times the speed of the base configuration of the Intel-based Mac Pro.
However, the latest Mac Pro no longer offers support for graphics cards. Consequently, the PCIe slots are limited to options such as extra storage, rather than giving the ability to install and use high-performance graphics cards for gaming, rendering software, or other demanding tasks.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
In general, I think I agree with analysts/posters who think Apple lost sight of who the prime users for their Mac Pro are: video/CGI folks who use the Mac to make movies, ads, etc. Those folks, I imagine, don't care too much about the base price of the Mac Pros they buy - they care they can get ever more photorealistic CGI done quickly. I'm pretty sure they bought plenty of external graphics cards to go into their Pros. But now they can't. They either make do with what's in the new Pro - or find an alternative.
Even if real world is not twice as good, the new Mac Pro must certainly be quite a bit better.
Regardless, this machine is an expensive, crippled embarrassment, not able to do anything a Mac Studio can do at much lower cost.
3D scenes similarly need a lot of memory for textures and heavy geometry. A 4K texture is 4096 x 4096 x 4 bytes = 67MB. 1000 textures = 67GB.
There are scenarios that people can pick that would exceed any machine. A 1 trillion particle simulation here uses 30TB of data per frame (30 bytes x 1 trillion):
https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/c72a2564-5656-343a-a098-5c592ce91433/
The solution for this is to use very fast PCIe SSD storage in RAID instead of RAM like 32TB boards x 4 at 6GB/s = 128TB of storage at 24GB/s. It's slower to use but a 1TB per frame simulation (30b particles) would take 80 seconds per frame to read/write. It's still doable, just slower and it has to write to disk anyway. Not to mention that even with 10:1 compression, that data would still need hundreds of TBs of storage.
Some types of computing tasks are better suited for server scale. For workstation visual effects, 192GB is fine and the big thing is that it's GPU memory too. Nobody else is making unified GPUs like this. The Apple execs said, there are real world scenarios where you can't even open projects on competing hardware because they run out of video memory.
Is it possible that the M2-based architecture allows the system to handle massive workloads without the extra RAM and graphics cards previously required? Yes, the possibility exists. But people are addicted to what they know. I'm pretty confident that Apple has done their homework on this.
I'm sure there are many problems that have much larger data sets, but those are the reason supercomputers exist - and even then, that data is spread across a network of nodes. You can't expect a single desktop system to chew through that much data. The main benefit of having such a huge amount of RAM on desktop systems in the past was so you could keep all your applications and data in memory without needing to load and offload to a much slower hard disk. With SSD's that latency has dropped dramatically and isn't the bottleneck it used to be.
You're not Apple's target here. They're trying to get users of Intel Mac Pros to upgrade. Hence, the comparison to the previous Mac Pro. Anyone interested in spending this type of money on a system would do some research - I'd hope - and know there are Intel and AMD systems that are more powerful. But that's completely useless to someone who's workflow is based around the Mac and Apple.
I mean, really, the idea that a company like Apple "loses sight" of what users want in its highest performance product is ridiculous. What does "losing sight" even look like? How would that happen?
What's far more likely is that the price/performance ratio of the new Mac Pro is so much more compelling that it will open up the Mac Pro to a much larger user base than when it topped out at $54,000--which, accounting for inflation since 2019, would be $63,000 in 2023 dollars, as opposed to the $12,400 max for the new machine that's benchmarking at doublle the speed. That's double the speed at an EIGHTY percent discount. I'll be curious to see what the graphics performance is like in real world testiing of actual tasks, not just benchmarking.
No that's not the case. The larger user base is covered by the Mac Studio; the Mac Pro serves a niche crowd still.
It's pretty clear what's happened. Mac Pro users are traditionally more from the creative industries, where Apple has historically a strong foothold. There are a few different categories of use cases that benefitted from the Mac Pro including (but not limited to):- 3D/VFX
- 2D/compositing
- Video post-production
- Sound/music professionals
Those in (1) Apple lost a while ago, when they switched from Nvidia, since much of the software was CUDA driven. They've been trying to build support for Metal but it's super limited even now, although following M1 they had a little success.Those in (2)-(4) generally don't need massive compute performance, and instead benefit significantly from the Apple silicon's SoC approach. Some in (3) and many in (4) need PCI-E expansion slots for hardware input/output of industry niche ports (e.g. SDI for some video post users like colourists). The Mac Pro is really for them... it doesn't really offer any benefit over the Mac Studio except for these sorts of users.
For those users in (1) and for some in (2) who do need massive computer performance... Apple has just decided that it's easier to drop those markets, at least for the time being. Besides, as mentioned, Apple lost those markets a while ago; and regaining them takes time. Even if they came out with SoCs that had GPUs on par with the best GPUs that Nvidia has to offer, the simple fact that all this software is optimised for CUDA and either not compatible or still very new on Metal means that they would still struggle to get a foothold.
3D/VFX people have been keeping an eye out on Apple since Apple Silicon came about, so it's a bit of a shame that Apple didn't have a standout product suitable for them; because if they wanted to regain those users, the launch of a powerful Mac Pro would have been that moment in time. As it is, M2 Ultra – even if it's powerful – is a far cry from their needs, falling massively short in GPU compute and in available RAM capacity.
is it a massive leap over the Mac Studio?