zimmie

I have a macpro4,1 with updated firmware making it a 5,1. Two six-core Xeons, 96 GB of RAM, terabytes of SSD space. It's a beast of a machine, and I like it a lot. I wouldn't call it the best Mac Apple has ever made, though. The Mac Studio is better, hands-down.

It's surprisingly hard to add Thunderbolt to a classic Mac Pro. It will work ... as long as you boot into Windows first, and don't hot-plug anything. Oh, and it doesn't do USB over the port, which is important for me. I use a 21.5" Ultrafine 4K which accepts DisplayPort over USB-C but needs the single USB 2 channel for brightness control, audio, and so on.

The firmware doesn't support booting from an NVMe drive. Sure, you can boot from a thumb drive or a small SATA SSD then chainload to an NVMe drive, but something non-NVMe must be in the boot path.

The power distribution is pretty weird. The power supply has plenty of headroom, but you only get two aux power connectors for GPUs, and they have a weird capacity (120W each, rather than the more common 75W or 150W each). Some GPUs (e.g, the Radeon RX Vega 64) draw exclusively from the aux power connectors, which can cause the system to brown out, even though it has plenty of power budget left (the 75W allocated to the slot isn't used). Wouldn't be safe to draw more over the two aux connectors, which is why there should have been more than two.

It's also huge. If you haven't seen one in person, it's almost certainly bigger than you expect. And heavy. And the "handles" have fairly sharp edges, which make it unpleasant to move around on a regular basis.

There are undeniably a lot of tradeoffs with the old Mac Pro. They're worth it for me, but they're not for everybody.

ApplePoor said:

If Apple concedes the Mac Pro business to others, then where is the need for perhaps the Mac Studio?

The current M1 Studio version totally lacks the ability to swap components. As initially configured it will always be.

Not quite true. While the Mac Studio's processor and RAM are soldered, it has slotted storage, just like the iMac Pro and 2019 Mac Pro. The slots aren't officially user-accessible, but neither were the slots on the iMac Pro.

This also tells us something interesting about the upcoming ARM Mac Pro: it will have slotted storage. The flash carts for the iMac Pro and 2019 Mac Pro are physically identical, but the Mac Studio has a different cart design. They wouldn't go to that trouble for one model.

Since the Mac Studio's slots aren't meant to be user-accessible, we don't yet have official word on the process for replacing them. On the iMac Pro and 2019 Mac Pro, it just takes copying data off the SSD, swapping the carts, running Apple Configurator 2 from another Mac to reset the SSD controller, then reinstalling the OS and copying data back. Once we have an ARM Mac with user-accessible storage slots, the process for it will work for the Mac Studio as well.

tht said:

I have half a thought that they should create a specialized RAM slot. Something with 400 GByte/s bandwidth, and can go up to 2 TB of RAM. It would be like the MPX slots where it is effectively 2 PCIe x16 slots in series, but architected only for main memory, with lower latency and higher bandwidth. It would have a heatsink on it like the Mac Pro Afterburner card. With the Mac Studio being an integrated, vertical product. If it was able to support the same expansion modules as the Mac Pro, it would have in driving down costs for both machines. SSDs are also heading down the path of needing active cooling, so an SSD card with a heatsink will be inevitable too. So, an SSD PCIe card that looks like an Afterburner card seems inevitable too.

It doesn’t need to be a specialized RAM slot. Normal DDR5 DIMMs would work. The “magic” leading to the extreme memory throughput is just parallelism, same as we’ve had since DDR2 (even earlier on exotic systems). Apple’s other processors simply run a bunch of memory controller chunks each with their own single RAM chip to increase the bit width of the memory interface. M1 Ultra’s memory interface is so fast because it’s 1024 bits wide. Each channel is “only” a bit over 50 GB/s.

Apple’s SSDs on the iMac Pro, 2019 Mac Pro, and the Mac Studio all already use replaceable flash carts. They don’t need heatsinking so much as electrical isolation.

tape said:

Appleish said:

I kinda want to get one just to plug up one of the ports Apple was pressured to put in on my 16-inch M1 Max MBP, that I will never, ever use.

If you're a photo or video professional, or even a hobbyist, you NEED the SD card slot. Yes Apple was pressured to put it back in the MacBook Pros, but only because removing it in the first place was incredibly stupid.

At this point if you would never use it, you're an edge case MBP buyer.

None of my cameras even have SD slots. They're all CF or CFexpress. I doubt anybody would call a Canon 1Ds or 1D X anything other than a professional camera.

I don't own one, but Leaf camera backs are so expensive retailers sometimes give away decked-out MacBook Pros with them like most retailers give you a printer when you buy a computer. They're CF-only. Same for Phase One backs.

JustSomeGuy1 said:

atonaldenim said:

Wow, this would have been a dream card for my Mac Pro 5,1s four years ago when I was still putting money into them. I currently have all 3 of those cards filling up all my PCIe slots - 10GbE, USB 3.2, NVMe. Although the Sonnet’s x8 PCIe connection would limit the bandwidth on the MP 5,1’s PCIe 2.0 bus.

It was definitely not designed for the old old Mac Pro but rather as a budget option for single-slot Thunderbolt enclosures to upgrade Mac Minis etc without taking up all their TB ports, and for PCs with few PCIe slots available. On the PC side this could give new life to a lot of older machines that don’t have Thunderbolt ports for a TB dock. Like the old HP mini tower I tinkered with turning into a TrueNAS 10GbE server. Really cool combination of useful upgrades in one card for a pretty reasonable price actually! I only wish they’d given it a x16 PCIe connection for maximum speed with older PCIe 2.0 machines.

Perhaps they were made for small PCs. The "budgetoption for single-slot Thunderbolt enclosures" makes zero sense, as I pointed out. Unless, maybe, you already have one for graphics and are giving up on that. Hm. Is that market big enough to matter?

This doesn't appear to use any custom chips or firmware. Looks like it's a standard PCIe switch, a standard dual-port USB 3.2 2x2 controller, a standard NBase-T Ethernet controller, and eight lanes routed to two NVMe slots. Custom board design, custom assembly workflow, but those are both really easy. I've personally made cards more complicated than this one.

There are board assembly houses which basically do for circuit boards what print-on-demand companies do for books. They're more expensive per-unit than a bulk order of a thousand units, but you don't have to deal with inventory. At that point, addressable market size doesn't matter all that much.