It would be nice if you could have mentioned some of the PCIe cards that would work in the Mac Pro and others that won't. A technical reason why graphics cards won't work would also be nice. Just saying Apple doesn't support them is not a valid answer. There needs to be a technical answer why graphics cards won't work and if that limitation can, might or will be changed later.

The Studio has 6 Thunderbolt ports while the Pro has 8. How many Thunderbolt channels are there? Are any of the TB ports shared on the same channel? 

I'll give you a start.

1. OWC Accelsior 8M2 PCIe 4.0 storage, up to 64TB.

twolf2919 said:

mikethemartian said:

I would like to see a comparison where someone performs the same physics 3D simulation with a dataset larger than 192GB with a maxed out 2023 Mac Pro vs a maxed out 2019. Based on past experience I would expect the 2023 to crash once the memory usage gets close to the max.

Count me naive, but I'd love to know what single simulation requires an in-memory dataset that large.  Not saying they don't exist - I'm just interested in what they are.  And whether they're typically done on a desk-side machine vs. on a supercomputer (e.g. weather modeling).

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.

I’ll throw a curveball into all of this. Historically, RAM has always been faster than any king of storage. Changing to SSDs sped things up a lot but Apple’s unified memory architecture turned storage access up even further. As for weather modeling being done on a “supercomputer” it depends on what your understanding of a supercomputer is. The Mac Ultra SoC is a desktop supercomputer class computing system compared to some of the best from 10-15 years ago. Weather modeling companies can’t afford the top supercomputers of today. 

mikethemartian said:

I would like to see a comparison where someone performs the same physics 3D simulation with a dataset larger than 192GB with a maxed out 2023 Mac Pro vs a maxed out 2019. Based on past experience I would expect the 2023 to crash once the memory usage gets close to the max.

Maybe, maybe not. I suggest asking Apple directly to benchmark your physics 3D simulation. With Apple’s unified memory there’s the possibility of lots more memory-storage, which might be faster than the RAM in the Intel Mac Pro. If barefeats.com Rob hadn’t passed away last year I’m sure he would have been able to run the comparison. 

ihatescreennames said:

22july2013 said:

Someone should sell stickers that say "Apple Inside."

https://insidesticker.com/en-us

Close enough?

Dated (M1). I wouldn’t mind smaller, white Apple logos as well as the original multicolor logo. I don’t need it to say Apple Inside because every Apple product, once Intel Mac Pro goes away, has Apple components inside. PC vendors need to add a sticker so you actually know what’s inside. Maybe Apple could include logo stickers in matching colors or include a suite of colors. 

AniMill said:

The Mac Pro is a kludge. I’m betting they tried to punch a hole in the sky, but the sky punched back: no 3rd party video card support, and no extended RAM to 1.5TB (for serious math/design labs). An M3 Extreme isn’t likely because the niche audience will use PC’s with multiple AMD/nvidia cards or simply off-load to cloud render farms. The days of the Mac Pro are waning - very sad. But the rise of the Mac Studio is a happy compromise. And I agree - stacks of M2 Pro Mac Minis are a serious consideration for homegrown render farms.

Are you able to run or have run some test files that historically use RAM on both an Intel Mac Pro and a new Studio and Pro? It might be interesting to see if the unified memory architecture can actually keep up with an Intel RAM-intensive system. I've seen people keep complaining about this but Apple's Ultra SoC is extremely integrated with a very fast internal bus. It would be interesting to see the results.

I'd also like to see Apple spend a little bit of time working with the TOP500 supercomputer benchmarking software to see how the Ultra compares to GPU-based supercomputers. Apple actually held four spots in the TOP500 list back in 2005 with the cluster system (512 dual-processor G5 Xserves) from Virginia Tech in 14th place with theoretical peak performance estimated at 20240 gigaflops (20.24 Tflops). The M2 Ultra delivers 27.2 teraflops of graphics performance so one current Mac Studio/Pro is faster than the 2005 system.