mjtomlin

viclauyyc said:

I still think Apple will skip M1 in new Max Pro. Pretty hard to market a brand new M1 MacPro along side with M2 MBP or Mini. 

Marvin said:

stuartf said:

Except…

John Turnes of Apple quite literally said that the M1 Ultra completes the M1 line up just days ago

It is more likely that the MacPro will be based on M2 silicon or even a completely different design

Maybe but they could also have designed the Ultra chip to be able to join to other Ultra chips in which case it doesn't need a new name. The diagram shows two M1 Ultras connected in the middle using a different connector:



The Mac Pro can be offered with M1 Ultra at the entry level and an M1 Ultra Duo. There is no higher name than Ultra. Pro = better, Max = maximum, Ultra = beyond maximum. They can only call it Ultra something like infinity + 1. I expect they will be able to offer 256GB RAM on the Ultra Duo. The amount of RAM they need to offer is just what people have been installing, they don't need to support 1TB+ just because other computers do.

stuartf said:

Except…

John Turnes of Apple quite literally said that the M1 Ultra completes the M1 line up just days ago

It is more likely that the MacPro will be based on M2 silicon or even a completely different design


Stuart

blastdoor said:

mjtomlin said:

blastdoor said:

viclauyyc said:

My guess is the new Mac Pro will skip M1 Ultra or M1 Ultra Deluxe altogether and use M2 Max or Ultra in the 22Q3. If Mac Mini use M2 before Apple release Mac Pro with M1 Ultra Deluxe, it will be hard to market and justify the extra cost, even M2 basic is only 30% faster than M1 basic. 

Mini being the cheapest Mac, I don’t think Apple will be rush to update it. The reason why Apple released M1 Mini before other Mac is they want people adopt M1 with the cheapest Mac and do the M transition asap. Now, apple will treat Mini like it treats  IPhone SE, there is not point to put the new shiny M2 in mini in a hurry. 

Apple clearly stated the Ultra is the last of the M1 chips to be introduced. 

So, one of these must be true (listed from least likely to most likely):

1. Apple uses the Ultra in the Mac Pro, either as-is or clocked a little higher, and the only advantage of the Mac Pro is some degree of user-upgradability. I'd say this is highly unlikely.
2. Apple uses two (or more) Ultras in the Mac Pro. I think this is also highly unlikely, given Apple's repeated and enthusiastic statements about unified memory, consistent programming model, etc. I just can't see Apple going NUMA after all of that. 
3. Apple creates a different line of chips for the Mac Pro that aren't part of the M family. Unlikely, but not totally crazy. The small volume of the Mac Pro might make it *seem* totally crazy, but keep in mind that there are other very small volume chips out there -- the key is, you have to be able to charge enough for them to make the economics work. Maybe Apple could do that. Or maybe the volume isn't as small as it seems -- maybe Apple has plans for a Mac Pro that would also show up in an HPC cloud context.
4. The Mac Pro will be based on a chip from the M2 family, probably connecting 4 M2 Max chips. Seems most likely *by far*. 

I'd be willing to bet Apple created a discrete CPU for the Mac Pro  (the mark up is there to justify the cost of development and production). I'm calling it the X1. It'll come in two versions 32 or 64 cores. (The 64 core version will actually consist of 2 32-core CPUs, combined together with UltraFusion.) It will still support 1.5 TB RAM, all the PCIe slots, 3rd party GPUs. The Afterburner card will be replaced with a "GPU" MPX module, that includes GPU cores, ISP cores, media codecs and neural engine.

They seem very committed to CPU+GPU in the same memory space, though. 

Another option for a custom Mac Pro SOC would be to use a different process: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17123/tsmc-unveils-n4x-node-high-voltages-for-high-clocks

so, maybe your X1 could be 4 m2 ultras fabbed on n4x