Apple Announces Updated Mac Pro With M2 Ultra

[Fouquin]

Apple today at WWDC announced a slew of new products, but one major one that the industry has been waiting for is the Apple silicon update to the Mac Pro. The new Mac Pro features the similarly new M2 Ultra which combines two M2 Max SoCs together via their UltraFusion interconnect, similar to M1 Ultra. M2 Ultra remains on TSMC's 5 nm and features 24-cores as well as configuration options for up to a 76 FSTP GPU slice and 192 GB of unified RAM. Apple is making bold claims about M2 Ultra's performance in comparison to the outgoing Intel Mac Pro, claiming it to be 3x faster than the fastest Intel configuration. The new Mac Pro doesn't change the chassis or aesthetic of the 2019 Intel based Mac Pro, which means that it retains a much wider array of expansion options in both tower or rack mount configurations. Expansion options include eight Thunderbolt 4 ports, two USB 3.2 Type A, two HDMI, dual 10GbE ports, and a 3.5 mm audio jack on the rear. Inside the mostly empty chassis there are six open PCI-E Gen 4 x16 slots for expansion, however Apple will likely still not support third-party graphics options on Apple silicon machines so these slots are for predominantly for accelerator, capture, network, broadcast, and storage expansion boards. However, what appears to be a 12VHPWR sits alongside a pair of SATA expansion ports above the PCI-E on the motherboard. The 2023 M2 Mac Pro will start at $6999 USD and is available starting June 13th.



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[R0H1T]

Wonder when they'll actually start comparing with the market leader, still doing comparisons with years old Intel Mac huh

 

[MagnuTron]

however Apple will likely still not support third-party graphics options on Apple silicon machines

Smart

 

[Fouquin]

Wonder when they'll actually start comparing with the market leader, still doing comparisons with years old Intel Mac huh

Gotta compare to what people are using. Mac Pro users only want another Mac Pro, they don't consider other options. So if you're trying to sell a product to one group of people you advertise how much faster the new machine is compared to the one those people are still using.

That said, they tried comparing to PCs for a couple years and everyone moaned about that too. They have to know that it doesn't matter what they say, people are going to complain about their choice of comparison. So advertise directly to those that matter and ignore anyone else.

 

[Selaya]

crapple, nomen est omen.

 

[AnotherReader]

Wonder when they'll actually start comparing with the market leader, still doing comparisons with years old Intel Mac huh

Since Apple didn't ship anything newer than Skylake in its Intel based Macs, they can pretend that the x86 world stopped progressing and is still stuck in 2019.

 

[Avlin]

Should be 4x 16x PCIE Gen 5.0 expansion ports + 4 mini display ports + 256GB ram with 128 efficiency cores

 

[Fouquin]

4 mini display ports

Mini DP is so 2009. All 8 of those TB4 ports are display outputs, by the way. So it has 10 potential outputs you can use for displays, but the G14X GPU architecture still only supports 6 displays. PCI-E Gen 5 would have been nice for a SSD storage speed boost, but I'm not sure any of the professional accelerator cards are even on Gen 5 yet. Most are barely using Gen 3 x8.

 

[kondamin]

Oh I was wrong.
I was pretty certain apple was going to do a threadripper pro mac pro since apple silicon still sucks for a number of video workloads

 

[unwind-protect]

Should be 4x 16x PCIE Gen 5.0 expansion ports + 4 mini display ports + 256GB ram with 128 efficiency cores

Yes. And ECC memory.

 

[HairyLobsters]

How are they using thunderbolt without Intel?

 

[bonehead123]

THE CHEESE GRATER RISES ONCE AGAIN

 

[natr0n]

95% case and motherboard 5% hidden cpu/whatever its called

 

[claes]

Weird choice to stick with the Pro chassis rather than the studio one.

@Fouquin any reason to believe they won’t support AMD?

Also, why include 12VHPWR? That seems really odd unless they know partner AICs (ie not nvidia) are planning on implementing it.

 

[Daven]

How are they using thunderbolt without Intel?

Thunderbolt does not require an Intel CPU.

 

[dyonoctis]

Weird choice to stick with the Pro chassis rather than the studio one.

@Fouquin any reason to believe they won’t support AMD?

Also, why include 12VHPWR? That seems really odd unless they know partner AICs (ie not nvidia) are planning on implementing it.

That might not really be 12VHPWR, the 2019 Mac pro already had a plug at the same emplacement plug for the Hard drive add on:

 

[Chaitanya]

So soldered components make their way to workstation.

 

[Marcus L]

Starting at 7k for essentially the SOC and unified RAM (I wonder how much the base config will ship with 64GB?) motherboard and case...... probably 15k to max the CPU/GPU cores and RAM out

 

[AnotherReader]

So soldered components make their way to workstation.

Yeah this isn't a good thing for workstations, but if you need more than 128 GB of RAM, then the x86 world has you covered.

 

[Chaitanya]

Yeah this isn't a good thing for workstations, but if you need more than 128 GB of RAM, then the x86 world has you covered.

Their current top selection is just 192GB while older Macs offered upto 1.5TB of RAM also there is no clarity if there is an option to add extra RAM through DIMMS or if users are going to be stuck with RAM they had selected at the time of purchase.

 

[AnotherReader]

Their current top selection is just 192GB while older Macs offered upto 1.5TB of RAM also there is no clarity if there is an option to add extra RAM through DIMMS or if users are going to be stuck with RAM they had selected at the time of purchase.

Given that these are heavily based off the M2, I really doubt the possibility of DIMMS. It's soldered memory for workstations: if the memory goes bad, the workstation is a goner too.

 

[R0H1T]

if the memory goes bad, the workstation is a goner too.

Not sure that's a real concern, embedded systems for instance work similarly albeit with limited amount of memory, but that RAM limit should be pretty obvious for anyone who needs/would need ~200GB or more of it.

 

[AnotherReader]

Not sure that's a real concern, embedded systems for instance work similarly albeit with limited amount of memory, but that RAM limit should be pretty obvious for anyone who needs/would need ~200GB or more of it.

I was talking about the RAM failing as it's packaged with the SOC. This is a case where optimizing for power efficiency ends up causing more waste. In addition, there is no ECC which is probably a bigger concern. Workstations are a totally different use case from embedded systems. That being said, this will be suitable for many workloads as there are 16 high performance cores, a powerful iGPU, inference engine, and 192 GB of RAM.

 

[R0H1T]

Not really a problem when you know what you're buying, AMD/Nvidia & Intel have been selling massive GPU's with HBM for years now ~ this is basically similar.

And if you don't know the risks you probably should not spend 5~10k+ on any such machine to begin with.

 

[AnotherReader]

Not really a problem when you know what you're buying, AMD/Nvidia & Intel have been selling massive GPU's with HBM for years now ~ this is basically similar.

A GPU can be replaced if it goes bad, but in this case, a memory failure would mean replacing the entire machine. I think it's wasteful and unneeded. The tradeoff of power consumption vs replaceability works for space constrained systems like mobile phones and laptops, but it isn't a good fit for workstations. Still, Apple chose to build off what they had, and that necessitated this tradeoff. For my work, I've used systems with 256 GB of RAM or more, and there have been times when a machine with adequate CPU failed for the task because of insufficient RAM. The ability to add more RAM via DIMMS saves both time and money in that case.

TLDR: I get that you probably have a different use case and this works for you.