mjtomlin

Serqetry said:

What I am getting from the quotes in the article is that Mark Gurman pulled his usual "rumors" out of his ass and that we should be expecting an M2 Ultra Mac Studio, not a Mac Pro.  And I'd be quite happy with that.

Maybe Apple will make an ASi Mac Pro down the road when they figure out a way to make something significantly more powerful than a Mac Studio Ultra, or maybe they won't.

Still on the fence about what the ASi Mac Pro will be. The rumors of Apple designing the Mx Max to be "stackable" turned out to be true, but so far, it's only shown up in the Ultra - no "Extreme" yet. However, I do believe there were rumors that the "Extreme" was scrapped. But we're only on the second generation of this process, so maybe there were some kinks in the M1 design that didn't allow for it, or the M1 was never meant to go "Extreme".

At the time I assumed the higher end SoCs would only be updated every other generation. So the next Ultra SoC, would be the M3 Ultra and maybe by then the "Extreme" variant will debut?

Although, as I said in another post... The Mac Pro is a completely different system from what Apple has released with their M-series SoCs so far. So I still maintain the Mac Pro will remain on that path and forgo the SoC centric design all the other systems have. Instead it'll have a completely different set of disparate chips: X-series CPU, G-series GPU, and a new T3 SoC.

samuraiartguy said:
I have my doubts, when an Apple Executive has clearly taken some pains to explicitly not mention the Mac Pro – I am inclined to take him at his word. Same with the wild-eyed projections about “ComputeModule.” There is dead zero evidence other than tech writers breathless wish fulfillment that this undefined technology has anything to do with a new Mac Pro - fer blip’s sake, they run iOS, not Mac OS. 
Don’t mind me, I’m not a tech pundit, just a workin’ class Creative Pro here…

ApplePoor said:

I wonder if my Mac Studio Ultra (128GB and 8TB SSD) is a one trick pony like my 2013 trash can Mac Pro was? I just checked and the BTO times are getting longer (nearly a month out)..

 I was able to upgrade the 2013 Mac Pro to 128GB of Ram and a 2TB SSD. For lots more money, the video and processor cards could also be upgraded by OWC.

The Sonnet xMac Studio/Echo III with a 3U rack mount enclosure has a Thunderbolt to PCIe expansion system with three PCIe slots (one x16 and two x8 slots) and these can be full height cards for about $1,649.99 plus shipping and taxes. Perhaps one of their desktop expansion would work?

https://www.sonnettech.com/product/thunderbolt/pcie-card-expansion-systems.html

So depending on the work being done, the current Mac Studio is not exactly a slouch machine and it is based upon the Apple silicone. It is currently capable of power that exceeds the base current Mac Pro by quite a margin.

So with a little research, one can find ways to expand the current Mac Studio capabilities with off the shelf products for much less money than a upgraded current Mac Pro.

It is not all bad in Apple land.

No. The Studio line is the headless Mac people have been asking for for years. It'll stick around as long as there is enough demand to support it. It is not at all meant to be an upgradable system. Where as, the 2013 Mac Pro was, and unfortunately it was a design looking for an issue, and they found it - thermal constraints while trying to "update" it. The Ultra Studio has a massive cooling system, that is overkill to keep it quiet. It will never have any thermal issues.

mfryd said:

I think the author of this article is reading too much into Bob Borchers' statement. While Apple may very well be working on an Apple Silicon based Mac Pro.  I don't think Bob Borchers' statement speaks to that issue.

"Taking the entire product line to Apple Silicon" might mean that any Mac model with an Intel processor will be discontinued.  This doesn't seem to be a statement that every Mac model will survive the transition.

Consider that taking the iMac to Apple Silicon involved dropping the 27" model.   

That system was replaced by the Mac Studio. Consider the following...

The Intel 27" iMac was dropped when the Mac Studio was released.
The Intel Mac mini was dropped when the M2 Pro mini was released.
The Intel Mac Pro has not been dropped, because they haven't released a replacement... The Mac Studio was not meant to replace it.

That's not to say we won't see another large iMac. I believe the M1 Pro/Max was not what they wanted to put in a larger iMac. Just as the M1 Pro never made it into the mini. I'd be willing to bet we will eventually see a larger iMac with Mx Pro, and possibly Mx Max.

We're supposedly getting a larger MacBook Air soon. Maybe they'll also finally release an M2 iMac and alongside it, a larger iMac with M2 Pro/Max?

r_mari said:

Apple's Mac Pro could run GPUs on PCIe slots.
But someone - and it won't be Apple - has to write drivers to allow the GPUs to work with MacOS.
Who is going to do this work???  AMD?  nVidia?

Since the GPU is not on the Apple Silicon System-on-a-chip die, it will be generally slower than Apple's on-chip GPU.
But, at least you can run a GPU.  And if the GPU is a beast powerful enough, perhaps it can make up the speed difference compared to the Apple on-chip GPU.

In regard to RAM.  Apple could add a memory controller to run external RAM like a huge cache.
Obviously the bandwidth is going to be slower than using Apple's on-chip RAM.  It can never be used as working RAM
since it will be too slow.
But at least it is expandable --- perhaps to 2 TB of external RAM.
The Apple Silicon On-Chip RAM is the working RAM. It will fetch data from the external RAM/cache when necessary.
Apps can be preloaded, or offloaded when not being used to the external RAM.
Of course, one problem with 2TB of RAM is that you have to store 2TB of data from the RAM every time you turn the Mac to sleep or turn it off
so that the Mac Pro can wake up instantly. 

Apple already writes their own AMD drivers for macOS. And macOS already supports discrete GPUs. And ASi Macs already support PCI. There's only one reason dGPUs aren't supported on ASi yet, Apple doesn't want to support them yet. I have a feeling the next major release of macOS will support* them again as the Mac Pro will need it, which means I wouldn't expect a new Mac Pro until Fall.

*Although it is possible they'll only add support for dGPUs in the Mac Pro.

What is next for Apple Silicon? Borchers says that instead of looking at the specific chipsets, the company tends to look at the product, the whole package.

This may allude to the Mac Pro having something completely different from the M-series SoCs. A more traditional system; discrete CPU, GPU, memory, PCI-E slots, a new T-series SoC that contains the other blocks; ISP, NPU, media engines, Secure Enclave, etc.