mjtomlin

melgross said:

Ok, so the writer gets it wrong, as so many others have when it comes to the M series RAM packaging. One would think that’s this simple thing would be well understood by now. So let me make it very clear - the RAM is NOT on the chip. It is NOT “in the CPU itself”. As we should all know by now, it’s in two packages soldered to the substrate, which is the small board the the SoC is itself soldered to. The lines from Apple’s fabric, which everything on the chip is connected with, extend to that substrate, to the RAM chips. Therefore, the RAM chips are separate from the SoC, and certainly not in the CPU itself. As we also know, Apple offers several different levels of RAM for each M series they sell. That means that there is no limit to their ability to decide how much RAM they can offer, up to the number of memory lines that can be brought out. This is no different from any traditional computer. Every CPU and memory controller has a limit as to how much RAM can be used. So, it seems to me that Apple could, if it wanted to, have sockets for those RAM packages, which add no latency, and would allow exchangeable RAM packages. Apple would just have to extend the maximum number of memory lines out to the socket. How many would get used would depend on the amount of RAM in the package. That’s nothing new. That’s how it’s done. Yes, under that scheme you would have to remove a smaller RAM package when getting a larger one, but that's also normal. The iMac had limited RAM slots and we used to do that all the time. Apple could also add an extra two sockets, in addition to the RAM that comes with the machine. So possibly there would be two packages soldered to the substrate, and two more sockets for RAM expansion. Remember that Apple sometimes does something a specific way, not because that’s the way it has to be done, but because they decided that this was the way they were going to do it. We don’t know where Apple is going with this in the future. It’s possible that the M2, which is really just a bump from the M1, is something to fill in the time while we’re waiting for the M3, which with the 3nm process it’s being built on, is expected to be more than just another bump in performance. Perhaps an extended RAM capability is part of that.

lam92103 said:

So every single PC or computer manufacturer can use modular RAM. Including servers, workstations, data centers, super computers. 

But somehow the Apple chips cannot and are trying to convince us that it is not just plain & simple greed??

entropys said:

If buying this kind of workstation, why on earth would I be interested in a comparison with a four year old machine? I would be comparing it with what else is currently in the market to perform similar tasks.

Regardless, this machine is an expensive, crippled embarrassment, not able to do anything a Mac Studio can do at much lower cost. 

It is not the Mac Pro anyone should be looking for.

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.

JP234 said:

That's a way to look at it. But that's not the way Apple is currently marketing it. The WWDC promo was 95% focused on enduser entertainment. Of course, that will evolve, when millions of VP purchasers find ways to use it that Apple never even imagined.

Apple never even mentioned future possibilities in the healthcare, military, legal or financial sectors. They also never mentioned the integration possibilities with AI. That's where the real money is going to gush like a firehose.