atonaldenim

Great review Mike. I’d be curious to see where the top 28-core Xeon in the Mac Pro 7,1 would land on the benchmark charts. A lot of people are just showing benchmarks against other Apple Silicon Macs, but comparing the new Mac Pro against the previous Mac Pro is definitely the most relevant metric for someone thinking of upgrading!

Also, you said they used the same cheese grater design, but I’d have to differ. The old tower design was the cheese grater, the new design is the shredder!

rob53 said:

Nothing new. I have external SSD drives (TB and USB-C) that disconnect then reconnect for no reason. 

Yes external USB drives disconnect on sleep, especially if connected to a PCIe USB card. It’s unfortunate, but known behavior.

But internal HDDs connected by a SATA cable to the motherboard’s SATA ports should NEVER inadvertently eject on sleep. That’s very bad. 

Good report Mike. I also don’t think 2023 Mac Pro will sell nearly as well as the 2019 Pro. I hope that dip in sales prompts them to double down on improving future Mac Pros, rather than abandoning it altogether.

I’d guess that they would have liked to do more with AS Mac Pro, but for whatever reason were not able to get it done this year. Hopefully they will keep pushing forward. From taking a year longer than their 2 year transition goal, to failing to deliver the planned Jade 4C “Extreme” SoC in both M1 and M2 generations, seems like they really hit some roadblocks from their original intent. I highly doubt they would have given 2019 Mac Pro such dramatically better expansion capabilities if they knew they wouldn’t be able to maintain that level of performance after Apple Silicon transition.

One has to suspect the ongoing brain drain on the Apple Silicon design team is part of these stumbles. Let’s hope Srouji gets the big Mac back on track, and their patented multi-GPU tech comes to light soon!

elliots11 said:

Would really like to know more on how they're stopping it as it doesn't seem there's any physical reason it shouldn't be possible, even if the performance is poor.

The software limitations currently are "no AMD GPU drivers exist for macOS on Apple Silicon", basically the same limitation that kept NVIDIA cards out of Macs since Mojave. On top of that, the second limitation is "no support for using any GPUs other than Apple Silicon, in macOS on AS."

For current 2019 Mac Pro owners, a further hardware limitation is "no MPX slots on 2023 Mac Pro" therefore no power connection to any existing MPX Mac Pro GPUs, nor integration into Thunderbolt ports' DisplayPort bus.

PC GPUs could in theory work in Asahi Linux, someday, only after Asahi Linux gets even native Apple Silicon GPU support straightened out, maybe someday they'll be able to port other Linux GPU drivers to Apple Silicon Linux. For Linux apps. Don't hold your breath!

kendog52404 said:

I actually could see, in the future, there being an option for additional "Apple GPUs" Cards, to increase video memory capability.  

I was hoping this would come this year! I'm fairly surprised that it didn't, but I think you're right that it could still be possible in the future. Just like the Jade-4C "M3 Extreme" dual-Ultra chip could still be possible, someday. Let's hope this year's "minimum viable Mac Pro" will be surpassed in future years with more than we got this year.

Grabbing some popcorn... curious to see how the VR wars play out once Apple steps into the arena...

Clarification on the code names:

Stinson Beach is a popular beach town in Marin County, Northern California, north of San Francisco and Facebook's HQ in Menlo Park, often shortened to just "Stinson" by locals. Marin County could be considered the northernmost part of the "tech region" of California. (Apologies to Santa Rosa and Sacramento.)

Ventura is a beach town in the Los Angeles area, several hours south of Stinson Beach.

La Jolla is also a coastal town, in the San Diego area a few hours south of Ventura, which is the southernmost part of the tech region and California itself.