I think the new Mac Pro will be modeled after a stack of Mac Minis. Imagine being able to add processors just by stacking them up. Need more storage? Add a SAN module! Need a better GPU? Grab an NVIDA module! Hook them up with USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 and you're good to go.
I think it would be enough for the Pro to just be the same as the highest spec of the next generation Mac Studio, in a form factor that has PCIe and RAM slots. (I wonder if they could do some kind of memory hierarchy where you have, say, 32GB of the on-board unified memory soldered on to the processor like they have now, and then another eight slots or something of regular DDR5 sticks).
I agree, they hinted at a "modular Mac pro coming in 2019" and what's more modular than a little macmini with an external GPU, external storage, and lots of USB-c ports.
The internal design is 2-die max, so that'll be a somewhat puny Pro by Mac Pro standards. Maybe a Mac Mini Pro?
I expect them to come up with something much crazier with a newer design, perhaps in the M2 generation. Doesn't mean much, but the IRQ controller architecture and driver in these machines claim to scale to 8 dies, even though the existing implementation in the M1 Max is sized for 2. That's no guarantee they're looking at a product like that, but they might be.
I always assumed that upgrading the Mac Pro was going to by daisy chaining them with Thunderbolt connections. Guess I was wrong, but I'd love 24 cores and 6 graphics cards on my desk even if the price was crazy.
I'd like to see a pro machine with daughterboard slots, allowing you to add extra CPUs. A bit like the Acorn RISC PC. I guess Apple have already done this to seom extent with the FPGA cards that you can buy for the current Mac Pro. I do wonder if that was a taste of things to come?
Well, I expect them to ship an ARM GPU with every Mac Pro, but in addition to that, also a beefy external GPU. The OS would switch between them based on the workload, live they've done before.
It‘s not a very professional device if you can‘t upgrade the storage and the memory.
The Mac Pro will feature modular SSDs (and they aren‘t even super fast). I wonder if Apple will use something proprietary or standard M.2 NVMe modules. They probably can‘t offer PCIe 4.0 slots since they‘re using Intel which is trailing behind.
I'm not in the market for a Mac Pro, but I keep thinking that something like this is the future for high-end computers—a capable base system with the ability expand virtually infinitely by attaching another Thunderbolt 3 component.
I’m entirely unclear if an ARM-based Mac Pro would look anything like the old Mac Pro.
Well. Actually. If it would look anything like the late lamented cheese grater Mac Pro. I worry it would be a lot more like the trashcan Mac Pro.
Because for a long time, the Mac Pro has meant expandability. Lots of RAM slots. PCIe slots. Drive bays. Big-ass GPUs. Something adaptable to pro work flows, namely audio and video capture and production.
Is anything like that possible with the Apple Silicon system? I think it’s extremely unlikely they’d support GPUs. And I really don’t think they will support old-fashioned RAM—they seem to be all-in on directly-on-die memory. And PCIe cards? Shrug? No idea, because we’ve not seen anything like that yet.
I wonder if the Mac Pro version of this will do a two-tiered thing, with 16GB on the chip, and then a bunch of slots for your slower, "external" memory modules— basically the Mac Fusion Drive of RAM, with an internal controller to manage moving stuff in and out of the low-latency area.
I could certainly also see them going all-in on the integrated architecture, but the possibilities are intriguing if they want a reasonable story for a workstation that goes up to 100s of GB (the current Mac Pro's top configuration is an eye-watering 1.5TB of RAM).
The next Mac Pro will just be really really thin, have no ports, and gets it's power wirelessly from a mat underneath it, but no batteries. It'll have 8 cores and max out at 13g of ram
The most elegant solution would be to have a motherboard with cartridges. You're buying as many CPU/GPU/AI/RAM/SSD modules as you like and getting anything you want. Wanna crazy build farm? Put plenty of CPUs and some RAM. Wanna GPU farm? You've got it. Want terabytes of RAM? No problem.
Not sure if it's possible to implement. But I'd love to see it done this way.
If there's a "reinvention of the trash can" it will likely come in the form of a new high end Mac Mini. My prediction is that the real Apple Silicon Mac Pro will be pretty much exactly the same as the current Intel Mac Pro. The big questions in my mind are:
1. Can they match the number of PCI-E lanes?
2. How will they scale up the CPU and GPU to satisfy extreme workloads? Will we see gargantuan Apple Silicon chips or will it be a multi-chip solution?
3. Will Apple compromise RAM performance in order to give us DIMM slots, or will there be some clever trick to combine ultra-fast soldered RAM with regular-fast slotted RAM?
4. Will AMD GPUs be available for acceleration? Will they be available for 3D rendering and driving a monitor?
5. What will become of the Afterburner card? Will it be abandoned, will it be the key to how Apple makes the Mac Pro a performance powerhouse?
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