Mac Pro M2 review - Maybe a true modular Mac will come in a few more years

Posted:
in macOS edited July 2023

Apple has finally introduced its Apple Silicon Mac Pro. It is still a performance powerhouse, but most "Pro" users should get a Mac Studio instead.

Mac Pro review - top handle
Mac Pro review - top handle



Approximately two and a half years into a two-year transition period, Apple has rolled out the last of its Mac catalog to be moved over to Apple Silicon. The Mac Pro, the final desktop to be sold by Apple sporting an Intel processor, has finally moved over to Apple's own chip designs.

However, a bit of that Mac Pro magic has been diluted over the years.

Mac Pro review - Design



When Apple makes a major change to its Mac Pro, it has been accompanied in the past by a massive change in appearance. The 2023 update is the polar opposite.

Mac Pro with 16-inch MacBook Pro for scale
Mac Pro with 16-inch MacBook Pro for scale



From the outside, the desktop version of the M2 Mac Pro looks just like the 2019 Intel Mac Pro. There's a good reason for that: Apple didn't make any real external changes to the Mac Pro at all.

It's still got the signature "cheese grater" front and back to the aluminum housing, formed from a series of hemispherical gaps in a lattice. To the front, the lattice covers the entire front, while the back has a carved out section for ports and connectivity.

On the bottom of the case, standard, four feet -- although you can buy wheels at a $499 premium if you need to move the Mac Pro around frequently. Buy them at purchase though, if you want to avoid a $200 premium on top of the $499.

If you don't get them at purchase, consider OWC's Mac Pro wheels for $299. They do the same thing, but attach to existing Mac Pro feet instead of replacing them and work just as well.

As it has always been except for one model, there are two handles as part of its main frame. Apple decided that the sharpened aluminum needed to go also two generations ago, so that's nice.

Also on the top is the unit's power button and indicator, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and a lever that you can twist to pull the outer enclosure off.

Mac Pro review - handle and power
Mac Pro review - handle and power



With the enclosure off, you gain access to the internals of the Mac Pro, including all upgradable sections. You'll also get a good look at the three fans at the front, used to draw air in and through the Mac Pro enclosure.

Since Apple is using the same case, it's also the same size as before, at 20.8 inches tall, 17.7 inches long, and 8.58 inches wide. It has managed to lose some weight since its first iteration, with it now still tipping the scales at a lighter but still significant 37.2 pounds.

Of course, just like last time, you can get a rack-mountable version, designed to slot into 5U of space but retaining the same styling as the tower version. That model is 20.8-inches long, 8.58 inches wide, and 17.7 inches deep, and also lost a tiny amount of weight to hit 37.9 pounds.

For a Mac intended for the workplace, Apple's not going to go out of its way to disrupt something that obviously works for their intended market. It's just that Apple narrowed down who the target market is with this release.

Mac Pro review - M2 Ultra and specification changes



The main reason for the new model is the shift to Apple Silicon and away from Intel. Gone is the selection of Intel Xeon chips, and instead you have Apple's most powerful chip, the M2 Ultra.

What's also disappeared is the breadth of choice, as you have only one real chip decision to make.

The M2 Ultra is effectively two M2 Max chips stuck together, giving it a 24-core CPU with 16 performance and 8 efficiency cores, a 32-core Neural Engine, and 800GB/s of memory bandwidth.

There's also the Media Engine which can handle hardware video encoding and decoding duties. Here, there are two video decode engines, four encode engines, and four ProRes encode and decode engines.

In the Intel Mac Pro, you would've wanted to pay the extra $1,000 for the Afterburner Card, which did the same sort of hardware acceleration for video. Now, Apple says that the equivalent of seven of them are standard as part of M2.

Where the decision lies is in the included GPU within the M2 Ultra SoC. The standard edition is a 60-core GPU, while you can pay to upgrade to a 76-core GPU instead.

This relative lack of choice is then compounded by the memory options. Starting with 64GB, you could go for a 128GB or 192GB upgrade of Unified Memory, which can be used by all parts of the chip, including the GPU.




Under the Intel predecessor, you could configure beyond a terabyte of memory. That's simply not an option under Apple Silicon.

Storage is largely unchanged, with it starting at a 1TB SSD with configurations to 2TB, 4TB, or 8TB.

On the ports side, you have eight Thunderbolt 4 ports in total, three USB-A ports, two HDMI connections, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and dual 10Gbps Ethernet. Wireless connectivity has been improved slightly, with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 support included.

Mac Pro review - Upgradable, sort of



Part of the appeal of the Mac Pro has always been the ability to upgrade it after sale.

First, the bad news: for the first time in the Mac Pro's history, you cannot upgrade the memory any more. While under Intel, you could pull the memory and replace it with your own, saving you from paying Apple's fairly high configuration costs, there's no chance here since it's soldered to the M2 Ultra chip.

Though that is a loss, there are still other things that can be changed.

One of those three USB-A ports is inside the casing, which is helpful for some security or licensing applications.

There are also two Serial ATA ports connecting at up to 6Gbps, which can be a handy and cost-effective way of upgrading the storage internally with the right brackets.

The main feature of the Mac Pro is that Apple has retained PCI Express expansion. If you have a PCIe expansion card that supports macOS, you can install it in the Mac Pro.

Apple includes six full-length PCI Express Gen 4 slots, including two x16 and four x8 slots. There's also a half-length x4 PCI Express Gen 3 slot, which is preinstalled with the Apple I/O card.

If you need to power your expansion cards, there's up to 300W of auxiliary power on hand, including two 6-pin connectors delivering 75W each, and one 8-pin delivering 150W.

But there is a catch to the new model. As we've said before, Nvidia video cards haven't been supported in years, and Radeon GPUs have never been supported in Apple Silicon.

So, no video cards. And, given the architecture of Apple Silicon to date, we're not expecting them to be added later, unless Apple pulls a rabbit out of a hat and makes its own PCI-E Apple Silicon video card somehow, defying what we know about how the chip works today.

This remains the largest sticking point for most of the target market for this machine that we've spoken to. More on that in a bit.

Apple has also killed off its MPX module, which makes sense, since PCI-E 4.0 in the new Mac Pro delivers the same speed that the MPX module could. Other than Apple-made video cards, there weren't a lot of accessories that used it.

If you're one of the few that had a non-Apple MPX module, there's no migration path here. And, obviously, any MPX video card you had can't be fitted to the new Mac Pro.

Mac Pro review - Performance



The M2 Mac Pro is the same speed as the Mac Studio with M2 Ultra processor. We've spoken at some length already about that, and we won't do it again.

However, there's a better comparison. I keep speaking about the Pros that I have exposure to, and some of the calculations that I do. Those are all faster.

Our test beds here are a Mac Pro 16-core 3.2 Ghz Intel Xeon W, with 1TB RAM, 4TB SSD, and an Afterburner card. We're pitching it against a new Mac Pro with M2 Ultra with 60-core GPU, 192GB of RAM, and 4TB of SSD space.

One of the tested workflows includes high-altitude image processing, and identification of subjects of interest on the ground drawn from a 3TB database. In all of these tests, the database was loaded on the internal SSD. The code is Apple Silicon-native, and leverages the Afterburner card and Apple's Video Toolkit.

In 2013, this test took about a full day to complete.




Another workflow that I'm exposed to is simulating fluid flow over a moving body, such as over a boat hull. This is a calculation-heavy job, and doesn't have a lot of GPU involvement. It is also Intel-native code, and run on the Mac Pro with Rosetta.




The third workflow still includes water, but it is a simulation of water and steam flowing through a complex engineered system. It includes heat transfer and fluid flow, and is also calculation heavy. It is also Apple Silicon-native code.




The fourth workflow is stoichiometry, in this case, a very complex chemical equilibrium reaction calculation and simulation involving the interaction of organic compounds with inorganic ones. It is also Apple Silicon native code.




A final workflow here is an Xcode compilation of the application used in the third benchmarking run.




All of these tests were also done on a M2 Ultra Mac Studio. All tests were completed within less than five seconds of the Mac Pro M2 results.

As always, thanks to my partners across several industries for letting me use their computers for testing and evaluation.

Mac Pro review - 17 years later, growing pains



The change over to Apple Silicon was always going to be a difficult one for the Mac Pro. For the few people who wanted a Mac with an ungodly amount of memory, 192GB is a lot, but not quite the terabyte level some applications may really want.

If you've gotten this far, you already know if you need a machine this powerful for work, or if the time-savings you will glean from it are worth it to you or your organization versus what it costs. Every single AppleInsider reader has a unique workflow, and everybody has specific needs.

We've said it before, you don't need the Mac Pro to be a pro, and having a Mac Pro doesn't by default make you a pro. We aren't fans of Apple's wide-brush use of the term, but what you can always assume is that the products that have the name applied, are higher-end than the ones that don't.

What we know so far is that the Mac Pro is an incredibly powerful machine. If you take nothing else from this review, take this: the biggest problem for the Mac Pro is that the Mac Studio is just as powerful.

The real question for the Pro when thinking about a Mac Pro is no longer simply performance, because that's gettable in the much smaller Mac Studio. It's also no longer about adding more RAM later as needs increase, or slotting in an additional video card as time progresses to keep performance up.




It's now solely about PCI-E, plus internal storage capacity. And, both of those questions are muddled.

Nearly every PCI-E card can be used in an external enclosure at PCI-E 3.0 x4 speeds across Thunderbolt, and external storage can hit about 3.2 gigabytes per second in a similar enclosure.

So, it really comes down to if you need PCI-E 4 x16 speeds for your card, or your storage. In theory, this PCI-E 4.0 x16 slot can deliver up to 32 gigabytes per second, when properly outfitted. But, in the real world, it's a bit less than that.

Once upon a time, we said that the Mac Pro hit the target it was aiming for. If this was archery, in 2019, it hit the bullseye of a specific set of users it wanted to target.

This time, it split that arrow it shot in 2019 because it just didn't want to make a machine for anybody else in that bullseye, other than the folks it hit precisely with that first arrow.

For the rest of us, the halcyon days of the expandable and actually modular 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 through 5,1 Mac Pro are long gone, and likely never to return.

Mac Pro M2 review -- Pros

  • Comes in a rackmount version

  • Incredible power, quietly

  • PCI-E expandable, but...

Mac Pro M2 review -- Cons

  • A $3000 premium for PCI-E is steep

  • The Mac Studio is a far better price to performance proposition



Apple's Mac Pro has been a flagship for the company for almost two decades at this point. The Mac Pro 1,1 drew a line in the sand as it pertained to cost, performance, and upgradeability. Later models survive to this day running modern operating system versions with hacks.

The Mac Pro is not useless. But, it also doesn't exist in a vacuum. There is an obviously better choice for most of the folks that needed the 2019 Mac Pro.

That market that Apple has targeted so very specifically is shrinking. It's shrinking not because of any lack of desire for powerful Macs, but because Apple has deemed it so with engineering choices it made for this computer.

Everybody else who wants the most powerful Mac money can buy should buy a Mac Studio, and maybe, maybe, a PCI-E breakout box for that one card that they've been holding on to that still works with Apple Silicon.

And that's really unfortunate. This Mac Pro could have been so much more, but Apple just didn't want it to be.

Mac Pro review score: 3 out of 5

Where to buy Apple's Mac Pro (2023)



Apple's Mac Pro is available now, with AppleInsider readers eligible for an exclusive discount that knocks $100 off AppleCare with promo code APINSIDER at Apple Authorized Reseller Adorama.

You can find the latest deals and up-to-date pricing across popular Apple resellers in our 2023 Mac Pro Price Guide.

For those interested in securing the lowest prices on Apple's 2023 Mac Studio, deals are in effect on those models as well with the APINSIDER coupon. You can easily compare prices on every configuration in our M2 Mac Studio Price Guide.

Read on AppleInsider

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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 59
    blastdoorblastdoor Posts: 3,580member
    Apple has repeatedly made a really big deal out of the benefits of integrating the GPU and CPU. While I could imagine a PCI card that acted as an accelerator of sorts, and a GPU could technically play such a role, it would have been surprising to see the Mac Pro support add-on GPUs aa that term is commonly understood. 

    As I’ve noted before, the path to having a “modular” Mac Pro — in the sense of cobbling together multiple cpus and GPUs — is to buy as many Mac minis as you want and network them. 

    It might be cool if apple took that to a higher level and made it possible to network multiple minis using something faster that 10 Gb Ethernet. But I think that’s the most one could reasonably hope for in terms of a future modular “Mac Pro”
    Alex1Nndornquast
  • Reply 2 of 59
    Mike WuertheleMike Wuerthele Posts: 6,928administrator
    blastdoor said:
    Apple has repeatedly made a really big deal out of the benefits of integrating the GPU and CPU. While I could imagine a PCI card that acted as an accelerator of sorts, and a GPU could technically play such a role, it would have been surprising to see the Mac Pro support add-on GPUs aa that term is commonly understood. 

    As I’ve noted before, the path to having a “modular” Mac Pro — in the sense of cobbling together multiple cpus and GPUs — is to buy as many Mac minis as you want and network them. 

    It might be cool if apple took that to a higher level and made it possible to network multiple minis using something faster that 10 Gb Ethernet. But I think that’s the most one could reasonably hope for in terms of a future modular “Mac Pro”
    Xgrid was cool and the concept remains so, but that's not quite the same and requires massively parallel jobs to get the fullest extent. Even theoretically including Thunderbolt for networking, that will still only allow 40 gigabit connections in between, and more realistically, 10gig ethernet is today's solutions. The folks I worked with for this review have all experimented with clustering, but the calculations don't lead themselves perfectly to it. 

    It's a good idea, don't get me wrong. It's just not for everything that a "modular" Mac Pro could do, or has done.
    williamlondonfastasleeproundaboutnow
  • Reply 3 of 59
    This is a very thoroughly written and engaging piece with significant data. It seems to me that it leaves the current back row to the real professional who needs additional input-output.

    For the vast majority the Mac Studio seems to be the way to go.

    Now, please buy me either and I will be happy and grateful. :)
  • Reply 4 of 59
    longpathlongpath Posts: 401member
    In my view, the lack of processor & RAM differentiation from the offerings of the Mac Studio is the Achilles heel of the Mac Pro. If there was an extra tier of processor & RAM options exclusive to the Pro, it would be a lot easier to justify the extra weight & volume. Studios in Sonnet rack mounts take up a lot less rack space. Free standing Studios take up a lot less desk, or under desk, real estate. The absence of MPX support is also problematic, as the only internal RAIDs I know of are MPX modules. For a 3D animator, the Studio paired with an external RAID makes more sense, whether they’re working in Unreal or C4D & then overlaying 2D effects in After Effects, a workflow that’s won multiple Emmy awards for multiple Olympic Games coverage.
    williamlondonroundaboutnow
  • Reply 5 of 59
    danoxdanox Posts: 3,414member
    Apple is on a different path than the rest of the computer industry, in terms of power usage, megahertz, GPU, and ram, when it comes to their CPU/SOC chips and when you see the combo of an M2 processor, combined with a new R1 co-processor in the Vision Pro, (along with everything else they have done hardware wise over the last few years).

    I don’t think they’re going to backtrack, back to what the rest of the industry is doing, it’s also becoming apparent that they have decided to bite the bullet and take the performance/ram hit, short term to build their SOC/GPU’s from the ground up over the long haul. (future devices projects.?)
    edited June 2023 Alex_V
  • Reply 6 of 59
    I guess one possible advantage over the Studio is you can upgrade the main storage after purchase.
  • Reply 7 of 59
    In short this is Apple’s laziest product upgrade. 
    techconcwilliamlondonlongpath
  • Reply 8 of 59
    charlesncharlesn Posts: 1,163member
    Let’s take a step back for an apples-to-apples comparison. In June 2023, Apple can now sell you two machines that are roughly twice as fast, give or take, as a maxed out 2019 Mac Pro that sold for $54,000–which is actually $64,000 in 2023 dollars, accounting for inflation. 

    Instead of $54K/$64K, you can get double the performance for $9K in a maxed out Studio or $12K for a maxed out Mac Pro if you need the PCI expansion. And this is disappointing because why? We know that memory is handled differently on Apple Silicon vs Intel, so why is it assumed that the 192GB max is “a problem?” I’d like to see the test where this problem is actually shown. Also:  on what video tasks is Apple’s on-board video proving to be an issue vs a separate video card? It would also be interesting to see if the larger enclosure and fan system on the Mac Pro would allow users to push it harder and longer without throttling than the Studio with its smaller enclosure and single fan. 

    Far from narrowing the user base for the Mac Pro, I think the unprecedented improvement in price/performance ratio will grow the user base substantially. How many people actually need more than what the 2023 Mac Pro offers, and is that pool large enough to justify design changes that would appeal only to them, resulting in higher prices for everyone else? Spoiler alert: No. And yes, even more people may opt for the Mac Studio because they don’t need the PCI expansion, but having 2 lines of pro desktops is not a bad thing. 
    edited June 2023 freeassociate2danoxroundaboutnowAlex_VibillAppleZulumacike
  • Reply 9 of 59
    cpsrocpsro Posts: 3,239member
    OWC's wheel kit is now $249, not $299.
    longpath
  • Reply 10 of 59
    chadbagchadbag Posts: 2,028member
    Were any comparison tests (with 2019 Mac Pro) conducted that were memory constrained?  Where the full 1 or 1.5TB of RAM made a difference on thenIntel side?
  • Reply 11 of 59
    r_marir_mari Posts: 12member
    GPU PCIe cards will work. But someone has to write the drivers for them.  Apple won't.
    The article stated the Mac Studio is what most pros should buy.
    This validates the 2013 Trash Can Mac.  The Mac Studio essentially is the Trash Can Make incarnate.
    The Trash Can Mac forced developers to use non-PCIe solutions via Thunderbolt.
    So today, these solutions makes PCIe expansion less useful though still welcome in some fields.
    So long as someone writes drivers, then slaves CPUs and GPUs can be used for number crunching on the Mac Pro,
    which cannot be done on the Mac Studio.
    longpath
  • Reply 12 of 59
    Mike WuertheleMike Wuerthele Posts: 6,928administrator
    r_mari said:
    GPU PCIe cards will work. But someone has to write the drivers for them.  Apple won't.
    The article stated the Mac Studio is what most pros should buy.
    This validates the 2013 Trash Can Mac.  The Mac Studio essentially is the Trash Can Make incarnate.
    The Trash Can Mac forced developers to use non-PCIe solutions via Thunderbolt.
    So today, these solutions makes PCIe expansion less useful though still welcome in some fields.
    So long as someone writes drivers, then slaves CPUs and GPUs can be used for number crunching on the Mac Pro,
    which cannot be done on the Mac Studio.
    It's not just drivers, it's a hardware limitation. Apple Silicon has no hardware hooks for direct writing video anything to an external video processor. At all.
    roundaboutnowlongpath
  • Reply 13 of 59
    muaddibmuaddib Posts: 82member
    I think the difference between the Mac Studio and Mac Pro will occur when the M3 chip becomes available and Apple can produce their Extreme version which is 4 M3 chips tied together.  It should at a minimum have 384 GBs of ram  48 Cores, 120 GPUs and 64 Neural Engines.  This would be the true Mac Pro. 
    edited June 2023 atonaldenimlongpath
  • Reply 14 of 59
    Great review Mike. I’d be curious to see where the top 28-core Xeon in the Mac Pro 7,1 would land on the benchmark charts. A lot of people are just showing benchmarks against other Apple Silicon Macs, but comparing the new Mac Pro against the previous Mac Pro is definitely the most relevant metric for someone thinking of upgrading!

    Also, you said they used the same cheese grater design, but I’d have to differ. The old tower design was the cheese grater, the new design is the shredder! :)

    longpath
  • Reply 15 of 59
    blastdoorblastdoor Posts: 3,580member
    blastdoor said:
    Apple has repeatedly made a really big deal out of the benefits of integrating the GPU and CPU. While I could imagine a PCI card that acted as an accelerator of sorts, and a GPU could technically play such a role, it would have been surprising to see the Mac Pro support add-on GPUs aa that term is commonly understood. 

    As I’ve noted before, the path to having a “modular” Mac Pro — in the sense of cobbling together multiple cpus and GPUs — is to buy as many Mac minis as you want and network them. 

    It might be cool if apple took that to a higher level and made it possible to network multiple minis using something faster that 10 Gb Ethernet. But I think that’s the most one could reasonably hope for in terms of a future modular “Mac Pro”
    Xgrid was cool and the concept remains so, but that's not quite the same and requires massively parallel jobs to get the fullest extent. Even theoretically including Thunderbolt for networking, that will still only allow 40 gigabit connections in between, and more realistically, 10gig ethernet is today's solutions. The folks I worked with for this review have all experimented with clustering, but the calculations don't lead themselves perfectly to it. 

    It's a good idea, don't get me wrong. It's just not for everything that a "modular" Mac Pro could do, or has done.
    agreed, it's definitely a niche that can effectively use multiple networked minis. Happens to be my niche, so I find it interesting. 

    Really, the high-end 'pro' market is a just a collection of niches. The 2008-2012 Mac Pro served several of these niches. Now, no single machine serves them all. The Mac Studio gets some, the Mac Pro gets some, a cluster of minis can get some. 

    I've long thought Apple should offer an AWS-like 'iCloud Pro' to address more pro niches. I mean 'AWS-like' in a very loose sense. Using AWS isn't terribly hard but it's not super easy, either. There's plenty of room for improvement in the UI/UX, especially for smaller (but still 'pro') users. I know AWS itself offers Mac mini instances, and other providers do too, but there's a lot of room to make it easier, more transparent. 

    roundaboutnow
  • Reply 16 of 59
    canukstormcanukstorm Posts: 2,741member
    muaddib said:
    I think the difference between the Mac Studio and Mac Pro will occur when the M3 chip becomes available and Apple can produce their Extreme version which is 4 M3 chips tied together.  It should at a minimum have 384 GBs of ram  48 Cores, 120 GPUs and 64 Neural Engines.  This would be the true Mac Pro. 
    That's assuming there will be another Mac Pro update or new version coming out in the future.  Maybe THIS Mac Pro is the end of the line.
  • Reply 17 of 59
    Mike WuertheleMike Wuerthele Posts: 6,928administrator
    chadbag said:
    Were any comparison tests (with 2019 Mac Pro) conducted that were memory constrained?  Where the full 1 or 1.5TB of RAM made a difference on thenIntel side?
    This is hard to tell quantitatively, but qualitatively, the folks whose software runs on these machines say that even though the jobs were faster, the systems were under memory constraints nearly the entire time. When I asked about how much speed they thought they lost, they didn't have a good answer but I think this is practically demonstrated with the first job -- the image processing one. That in no way demonstrates that there is the equivalent of seven Afterburners in the new Mac Pro.

    On the fluid flow jobs, the 1TB Intel machines are constrained. The other jobs are not on the Intel gear. There's a reason they got 1TB of RAM.
    edited June 2023 chadbagmacike
  • Reply 18 of 59
    chadbagchadbag Posts: 2,028member
    chadbag said:
    Were any comparison tests (with 2019 Mac Pro) conducted that were memory constrained?  Where the full 1 or 1.5TB of RAM made a difference on thenIntel side?
    This is hard to tell quantitatively, but qualitatively, the folks whose software runs on these machines say that even though the jobs were faster, the systems were under memory constraints nearly the entire time. When I asked about how much speed they thought they lost, they didn't have a good answer but I think this is practically demonstrated with the first job -- the image processing one. That in no way demonstrates that there is the equivalent of seven Afterburners in the new Mac Pro.

    On the fluid flow jobs, the 1TB Intel machines are constrained. The other jobs are not on the Intel gear. There's a reason they got 1TB of RAM.
    Thanks. 

    I wonder if the SW could be rewritten to partially work around the memory constraints of the AS.  Parallel threads reading in and prefilling memory and emptying finished results back out of memory more aggressively or something. I’m not in those domains so don’t know if it is possible. 

    Even with the constraints the AS was faster so if you’re in a macOS workflow (not easily moved to another platform) then these new machines are still a step up from where you were even if the difference is not as great as it would be if you had more RAM.  


  • Reply 19 of 59
    chadbagchadbag Posts: 2,028member
    Great review Mike. I’d be curious to see where the top 28-core Xeon in the Mac Pro 7,1 would land on the benchmark charts. A lot of people are just showing benchmarks against other Apple Silicon Macs, but comparing the new Mac Pro against the previous Mac Pro is definitely the most relevant metric for someone thinking of upgrading!

    Also, you said they used the same cheese grater design, but I’d have to differ. The old tower design was the cheese grater, the new design is the shredder! :)

    The previous Intel Mac Pro used the “shredder” design that the new AS Mac Pro does.  Not sure why you're bringing ancient devices into this. 
    edited June 2023 williamlondon
  • Reply 20 of 59
    chadbag said:
    Were any comparison tests (with 2019 Mac Pro) conducted that were memory constrained?  Where the full 1 or 1.5TB of RAM made a difference on thenIntel side?
    This is hard to tell quantitatively, but qualitatively, the folks whose software runs on these machines say that even though the jobs were faster, the systems were under memory constraints nearly the entire time. When I asked about how much speed they thought they lost, they didn't have a good answer but I think this is practically demonstrated with the first job -- the image processing one. That in no way demonstrates that there is the equivalent of seven Afterburners in the new Mac Pro.

    On the fluid flow jobs, the 1TB Intel machines are constrained. The other jobs are not on the Intel gear. There's a reason they got 1TB of RAM.
    A few years ago I tried to simulate a very long optical waveguide in a program called Lumerical. Since it had to fit on a small silicon photonic chip it basically had to be wrapped on itself in the form of a rectangular spiral. The Lumerical software estimated it would need about 1.6TB to complete which was much more than the system had so when I ran it would basically crash the system.
    atonaldenimwilliamlondon
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