The future of Pro machines is largely about VMs. Heck, the recent past of Pro machines is largely about VMs — that’s the reason I so often hear people complain about 16GB ram limits, for example.
In that world, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Mac Pro running a (few?) very high core-count cpus(s) underneath an Apple/ARM based software stack, even if the cpu comes from Intel or AMD. That would let a putative Mac Pro run the same software as the battery-friendly laptops.
Apple ported many Pro Apps to ARM , especially their Logic Pro, Photoshop and they were showcasing Maya on ARM. That is about as Pro as it gets for Mac.
That reads to me Apple isn't going to have Intel for some high end Pro machine. They intended to go all in with ARM. i.e There will be a Mac Pro with High TDP ARM Chip. I wonder what are the owner of Mac Pro feeling now having just spend a $5K+ Mac Pro with Intel.
Question is,
1. They are going to design their own CPU for the whole range of Mac? up to 10W for MacBook, up to 45W for MacBook Pro. ~150W for iMac, ~ 250W for Mac Pro ? How is that financially feasible considering the volume of Mac Pro sold. Or do they intend to use those high TDP chip in their server farm / iCloud?
2. What happens to GPU? Having their own GPU for iMac and Mac Pro as well? Dual GPU options where Apple GPU for power efficiency? This feels like additional complexity.
3. Would it be like the PowerPC era where you will get a new iMac once you finish with the development kit?
Finally while I am excited for ARM Mac, at the same time I am also feeling a little sad. Good bye x86.
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
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 don't see a reason the Mac Pro has to have a more powerful CPU than the Mac Studio. For example the Macbook Pro and Macbook Air also share the same CPU at certain levels.
The difference could be in expandability (PCIe slots) and RAM if they are able to either move the RAM off-die or have a NUMA architecture.
Interesting to speculate though. So far they also haven't launched a multi-socket product, maybe that's what the Mac Pro could launch with.
I think a mac pro level machine will be the interesting one.
Put a bunch of these cpus in a system. I don't know if we can hope for expandability anymore, apple just might not do that anymore.
I am not interested in a Mac Pro, but I hope it marks the beginning of widely available computers with Cell-like architectures where a moderately powerful, general purpose CPU acts as a frontend scheduler for other parallel or specialized chips with negligible context switching costs.
Apple has this weird history of using laptop CPUs to make their machines smaller or thinner. I'm hoping they update the Mac Pro soon, but I can see them letting it continue to languish (no updates since December 19, 2013) or coming up with a smaller form factor (thus using this CPU).
I do wonder how these CPUs would do as processors for blades?
I don't know this, but I suspect any pro users who want absolute performance may be left with an uninterested apple.
High-end desktops and cloud systems are getting really amazing performance, with 32 and 64-core threadrippers compiling the linux kernel befo[compile complete!]re you can finish your thought.
I think this is a by-product of amd and intel serving the cloud market, and it just happens to benefit the high-end desktops.
Would apple invest in a many many core pro machine just for the (whatever low number) of pro users they have?
Yeah, the Mac Pro supports up to 1.5TB of DRAM (vs. 16GB), it's got a bunch of slots and discrete GPUs, and it can run Windows and Windows VMs. I hope it doesn't end up as an orphan system like the 2013 "trash can" Mac Pro, which was an interesting system that got zero upgrades. Perhaps Apple will offer Apple Silicon upgrades to Mac Pro buyers.
Assuming they can build it (and they have implied that they can scale their silicon designs up in terms of cores, power, and clock rate), an Apple Silicon Mac Pro will be a pretty interesting machine.
If they wanted to, Apple could even bring back an Apple Silicon powered Xserve, or the legendary, mythical, modular desktop Mac (I know, now we're in the realm of pure fantasy, but one can dream.)
The Mac Pro serves such a tiny, tiny sliver of the pro market, I don't know if they got played. I mean, the big audio/editing/GFX studios that bought a Mac Pro will keep using them for years or swap to Windows if no powerful ARM Mac comes out.
All the important pro software supports Metal by now.
Anything that isn't a Hollywood studio will have to use an ARM iMac.
Enthousiasts and semi-pro's that want a powerful, affordable and extensible Mac with state of the art discrete GPU's can probably get lost, as is the case right now.
Then again, Apple is now only bound by their own operations, so who knows what they have planned.
Yea, I wonder what the Mac Pro is going to look like in a couple of years. Then again, they could stuff it with 100 A19z processors and have a 1024 thread machine (or something equally outrageous).
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 smiled at "Standard components ... exceptionally futureproof". The way Apple are going the next mac pro will probably run an ARM CPU and have the RAM soldered on
Well, I would expect that might be an option depending on what powers the Mac Pro going forward. I wonder if Apple is at the multi-CPU stage. I am expecting external RAM and I hope ECC for the next Mac Pro.
I still don't see what's preventing them from shipping Core i7 Ivy Bridge Mac Pros now.
I wonder if the near future of the Mac Pro might be headless, providing storage, CPU and maybe GPU horsepower and advanced legacy I/O for an iOS device, which serves as the principal UI.
In that world, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Mac Pro running a (few?) very high core-count cpus(s) underneath an Apple/ARM based software stack, even if the cpu comes from Intel or AMD. That would let a putative Mac Pro run the same software as the battery-friendly laptops.
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