programmer

mpantone said:

If they attempt to ship new M2 Macs on Monterey, there would likely be little new functionality offered by the current macOS Monterey unless they heavily forked macOS which isn't Apple's modus operandii. It's worth pointing out that there are no developer betas of the next generation macOS right now. Zero, zippo, zilch.

Things were different when Apple was still relying on Intel CPUs, Intel integrated GPUs and Radeon GPUs for their Macs but that time is passed.

New Macs = new M-series SoCs = new macOS.

And unless the new macOS ships in June, there isn't going to be a new M2 Mac on store shelves.

I don't think this is correct.  First of all, an M2 won't necessarily be substantially different from the software's perspective -- same or at least compatible cores, same GPU architecture/revision, same other SoC devices, etc.  Apple has full control over the hardware development, so they can (and do) coordinate closely between the hardware design and software development teams.  Additional or updated drivers, where necessary, could be delivered in a minor OS update, if necessary.

Second, Apple's QA burden has actually decreased in the transition to Apple Silicon because they are now leveraging the iOS team's hardware support as well.  Some iPads now have M1s, for example.  So the macOS and iOS teams can now share their hardware support efforts.  This should result in improved macOS support compared to when they had to struggle with supporting new Intel and AMD CPUs/GPUs (plus other devices on the motherboard).

13485 said:

tht said:

I'm afraid their window for market entry is closing. It still sounds like they are 3 to 4 years away and that will be too late in 2025 imo. As a EV maker, one with ambitions to dent the market starting 2025, they would need to:

1. Develop a supply chain for solid state batteries, with enough mass production for a 300 mile range $50k base model. From component supply to assembled structural battery package.
2. Build out a supercharging station network along major highways every 100 miles.
3. Develop service stations and service ecosystem
4. Ensure carbon neutral processes and energy supply from components, materials, and recycling

Don't get this waiting at all, especially for computer driving. They need to get something on the market and iterate, and needed to do it in 2020 let alone now. The don't need to have self driving. There are many hard things to get built up to even have something on the market.

Why on earth would Apple's "window for market entry" be closing? It's just competition, not a race. Will people simply stop buying cars after buying an existing model now? After all, Apple was 100 years "too late" with their first phone, and decades late with their first computer, yet still managed to sell a few units.

1. Batteries will be available, there is no "sole source". 
2. Super charging stations will be vehicle generic, either due to market forces, or by government edict. Are gas stations specific to only a select vehicle? If a corporation was funding charging stations, you can bet they will want to charge every EV on the road.
3. Service stations are not a barrier, most issues will be electronically diagnosed and most components will be modular and easily replaced.
4. Apple has always been ahead of the curve on carbon neutral energy supply compared to other corporations. 

What he said ^^^... plus Apple is probably still trying to figure out what product to build.  Jumping into the existing market with a me-too product is not Apple's approach.  They need to have a differentiator, and it takes a long time to figure out what that is and how to build it.

It's amazing that people don't think this is possible. Before the M1 Ultra was announced these same people would've said that it was impossible, too.

The surprise about the Ultra wasn’t that it wasn’t physically possible, it was that Apple had planned it in from early in their design process, and made the economics and thermals work.  Impressive planning, execution and secrecy.

The stacked chips are physically MUCH harder in terms of design, thermals, assembly and packaging.  We haven’t seen anything like this with devices this size and power.  And even “just” a four way crossbar at this scale (in just two dimensions, without stacking) would be an impressive piece of work.  If the Ultra warrants being called a “new chip”, then a four way device of any sort sure as shit would deserve that status as well.  So unless they flat out lied about no more M1 chips coming, this isn’t going to happen.

It may happen someday (these technologies are being researched, and used in various places), I just don’t think we will see it with the M1 line nor this year.

commentzilla said:

One thing for sure,  they won't include any drive bays for 5.25" devices or conventional hard drives. There is no advantage to having those devices inside of the case from a power, cooling or speed perspective. I also suspect the use of some kind of proprietary RAM expansion.

That depends on what their big customers with lots of money want.  The advantage is that its all in one box, rather than having external enclosures which can be problematic in some situations.  I tend to agree that the age of 5.25" form factor drive bays is gone, but I'm also not the target audience for such a capability.

And an earlier reply to my comment:

zimmie said:
On the topic of RAM, there's nothing inherent in the M1's design which precludes off-package RAM. They have a RAM controller on the chips, and the RAM controller is shared between CPU and GPU cores, but there's no fundamental reason the RAM couldn't be in DIMMs. Apple just hasn't chosen to do that. They might do so with the Mac Pro, or they might not. I don't see them doing a tiered memory structure, though. They just went to significant lengths to do away with NUMA concerns on the M1 Ultra.
With the introduction of the Mac Studio, I wouldn't be surprised to see the Mac Pro go primarily rackmount. Very few people need more computing power than the Mac Studio offers at their desks. Almost everyone who does need more computing power is in an environment where they can rack the computer in a closet. For example, recording studios, film studios, scientific labs, and so on all have 19" rack space for other equipment, so putting specialist workstations in there isn't a stretch. That said, rackmount would mostly be relevant for a box with several full-height, full-length PCIe slots (e.g., to add hardwired audio and video inputs), and I'm not yet convinced Apple is interested in that at all. They might say the future is a rackmount interface which connects to the system via Thunderbolt. I'd be curious to know what they have seen the current rackmount Mac Pro doing.

The in-package memory has much tighter timing tolerances because the memory configuration is fixed, lower signal driver power levels, and at very short distances.  I would imagine that their memory controller takes full advantage of those facts, and cuts a lot of the complicated corners that dealing with DIMM slots creates.  So, I disagree:  I do not think their memory controller could support out-of-package memory without some serious work, and it would represent a large power increase and performance impact.

What I suggested isn't a software-visible tiered memory structure.  It is just an alternative fast backing-store for the existing virtual memory system that all software currently works with (currently backed by flash memory).  Implementing this would require no changes to the M1 architecture and very little OS change.  The Mac Pro has a very small market (especially with the Mac Studio now taking a chunk of it), so custom work to support it doesn't make a lot of sense for Apple.  That's a big reason why I think the M1 Ultra is what we will see in the Mac Pro.  And probably just one of them as going multi-chip is a lot of specialized added hardware design work that I don't think they want to do.

The M1 Ultra has a pretty amazing amount of compute, after all.  Bump the clock rate a little and you give it a small edge over the Mac Studio.

A rack mountable full-sized case (but still a desktop workstation) which can hold lots of extra drives, memory, and PCIe cards would differentiate it from the Mac Studio.  

I doubt they will do this, but one thing they could do fairly easily in such a form factor is put the M1 Ultra motherboard itself on a PCIe card so one case could hold multiple of them (the case becomes just a PCIe backplane then).  How such a machine would be used becomes more challenging though and would take them away from their preferred programming model of a single shared memory space for many CPU/GPU cores.  Without a lot of OS work such a machine would look like several Macs on a high speed network... has some uses, but gets pretty obscure and way out of the consumer space.  Then again, it is the "Mac Pro" so who knows?

My guess is that the Mac Pro will use the same M1 Ultra as the Mac Studio does.  The difference will be in the system around the SoC.  With a larger form factor, they have more cooling potential and could bump up the clock rates a little... but really, the M1 Ultra is a monster as it is (both in terms of size and performance).  I would just take what Turnes said at face value, this is already the last of the M1 series.  And I think we will see a Mac Pro that uses it.

So what could differentiate the Mac Pro?  In a word:  expandability.

1) PCIe slots.  The M1 Ultra seems to have plenty of I/O potential, and a fast PCIe bridge chip would easily enable a lot of expansion potential.

2) Drive bays.  The Mac Pro would have the same built-in super fast SSD, but in a large case a whole lot of additional storage can be accommodated.

3) RAM.  This is where it gets tricky.  The Apple Silicon approach is to use in-package memory, and there are real constraints on how much can be put into a single package.  Some Pros just need more than can be fit into a single package, or more than is worth building in the TSMC production run.  So conventional DIMMs are needed to supplement the super fast in-package memory.  The question is, how does OSX use it?  Apple seems to want to keep the programming model simple (i.e. CPU/GPU shared memory with a flat/uniform 64-bit virtual address space), so having some fast vs slow areas of memory doesn't seem like the direction they want to go in (although they could and just rely on the M1 Ultra's ENORMOUS caches).  They are already doing virtual memory paging to flash, however... so why not do virtual memory paging to the DIMMs instead?  Big DMA data transfers between in-package and on-DIMM memory across the very fast PCIe 5.0 lanes would ensure that the available bandwidth is used as efficiently as possible, and the latency is masked by the big (page-sized) transfers.  A 128GB working memory (the in-package RAM) is huge, so doing VMM to get to the expanded pool is not as bad as you might think.  Such a memory scheme may even just sit on PCIe cards so buyers only need to pay for the DIMM slots if they really need it.  Such "RAM disk" cards have been around for ages, but are usually hampered by lack of direct OS support... and issue Apple could fix easily in their kernel.