[HN Gopher] Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silico...
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Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
Author : 0xedb
Score : 335 points
Date : 2023-06-05 17:22 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.apple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.apple.com)
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| In this discussion: people who know little about Apple Silicon
| architecture ("no discreet GPU, not buying"), who are not the
| target audience for this ("$77k for a comoputer!?!?!"), who do
| have no idea what video creatives need (see: discreet GPU),
| raging.
|
| These systems (especially the Pro) are for people who spend all
| day working on 4k and up video.
|
| Also, guys: do you really think that any of you are smarter than
| Apple? That Apple doesn't spend a lot of time talking to top
| creative professionals?
|
| These systems aren't developed in a vacuum, especially at these
| price points.
| wmf wrote:
| $3,000 just for slots certainly sends the message that Apple
| views their customers as completely captive though.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| The press release mentions a bunch of use cases for the
| slots, but does anyone actually sell Apple Silicon-compatible
| cards yet? It's a brand new processor architecture after all.
| I checked the store page and it doesn't show any. (The old
| page would let you configure a Pro with more GPUs or
| afterburner cards)
| wmf wrote:
| People will need to get the new Mac Pro in their hands to
| develop and test drivers, although any card that works in a
| Thunderbolt enclosure should also work when plugged in
| directly.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| Two questions I'm interested in:
|
| 1) Are these machines still limited to running a maximum of two
| macOS VMs?
|
| 2) Can they drive more than a single 8k display?
| 1Y3 wrote:
| Yes to 2), the Max can run 3 8k60 displays and 6 6k60 displays.
| Which are pretty crazy specs considering my Air can only push a
| single display of any resolution.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Amazing how often they directly dogged Intel, PCs and Intel based
| Macs.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| How is 192GB of RAM impressive? Why not 32TB?
|
| Esp given the unified ram you cannot upgrade it later on either.
| (I think?)
| nojito wrote:
| Unified with the GPU
|
| You aren't getting that much vram in a single product.
| lalaithion wrote:
| Example of a desktop computer that comes with 32 TB ram?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Last gen threadripper pro can "only" do 2TB, so 10x as much
| memory.
|
| The upcoming models should allow 6TB, which you can also get
| today with a server chip.
|
| I can't find much using the newest workstation Xeons but they
| supposedly will do 4TB.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Will the 192 GiB of RAM be properly addressable by all GPU for AI
| stuff or are there some NUMA-style constraints?
| xwowsersx wrote:
| Would the Mac Pro help me at all for my computing needs? I write
| code all day and have several IDEs and DataGrip running, use
| Docker, etc. I currently use an MBP with the Apple Chip. Would a
| beefier machine actually do anything for me, in the form of
| faster compilation or anything...or nah?
| chillbill wrote:
| The best thing about this whole event is that they didn't mention
| AI even once, all they're saying is ML. Which is what it is. AI
| is a hype word.
| gumby wrote:
| Yes, and it's shameful when people descibe a wrong or bogus
| answer as "hallucination". They are just stimulating
| unknowledgeable people's fears and/or fanboiism.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| Hallucination is a far better word than the recent verbiage
| I've seen around LLM's lying to you.
| musicale wrote:
| BS and travesty generation are well attested.
| DonaldPShimoda wrote:
| I agree. I was really impressed that even with regard to the
| Autocorrect update, they used technical terms like "transformer
| model" without using hype words. They very clearly labeled it
| as a predictive text engine rather than some magical pseudo-
| sentient enigma or something.
| dheera wrote:
| Much better than their previous marketing 15 years ago
| measuring hard drive capacities in "songs".
| neilalexander wrote:
| How dare they speak in a language their users might
| understand!
| safog wrote:
| And yet somehow it's better to say transformer models and
| not AI?
| jkestner wrote:
| Sir, this is a developer conference.
| jedberg wrote:
| They also mentioned transformers a few times, without saying
| AI.
| zbowling wrote:
| ML is subset of AI. AI that is inclusive of other concepts and
| it's not a buzzword. It's valid to call anything ML as AI. Sure
| there is a lot of AI hype but it's not some made up marketing
| jargon.
| version_five wrote:
| Not anymore in common usage. ML is roughly "learning from
| data". AI has had some historical meanings, but in the last
| 10 years became first a marketing term for Deep Learning (a
| subset of ML) and now a term for LLMs and Diffusion Models
| (and the like). Which are subsets of deep learning.
|
| There still exist people who refer to AI as the general study
| of computerizing intelligence, just like somebody somewhere
| is still telling people that "begs the question" means
| dodging it. But the most applicable definition of AI as it's
| commonly used right now is the as the brand under which
| OpenAI and friends are releasing generative neutral neural
| network models.
| renonce wrote:
| So is AGI AI? Why use such a broad term that puts AGI, a term
| defined by science fiction, with Transformer, a practical
| next token predictor based on gradient descent and attention
| mechanism, in the same basket?
| colechristensen wrote:
| AI has been used in a lot of ways, from a philosophy
| standpoint I'd like to insist it be used only when a
| meaningful definition of intelligence is applicable and other
| usages be considered incorrect going forward.
| ghaff wrote:
| You're technically right that AI is a superset. But, at least
| in a computational context, "AI" is hardly ever being used to
| refer to cognitive science and other AI subsets that are not
| directly related to ML. So ML is usually the more precise
| terminology. But I've pretty much given up on that one.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Large language models are definitely AI.
| thewataccount wrote:
| The best example I've seen to contest that LLM's are "AI"
| is to make it print the total number of line's it's
| response will be, essentially add
|
| "First answer with the total number of lines your total
| message will be, including the line with this number"
|
| For example, GPT4 said "12" for this prompt: "First
| answer with the total number of lines your total message
| will be, including the line with this number
|
| Make a program in Cpp that sums all prime numbers from 1
| to 100"
|
| LLM's cannot "think", they can only make sequential
| predictions based on their previous answers - so they
| cannot formulate a response and then modify that response
| on-the-fly
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| GPT very much can, in a limited way. It responds to
| feedback.
|
| It's not exactly a huge leap of imagination to suggest
| that it won't be long before it can create an internal
| feedback loop by comparing its own abstractions with its
| memories and live experiences of external feedback.
| renonce wrote:
| That's more like an inherent limitation of autoregressive
| prediction than that of LLM. Maybe LLMs can be trained or
| finetuned in other ways that allows it to think before
| answering.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _large language models are definitely AI_
|
| The term "AI" is becoming over inclusive to the point of
| meaninglessness. Cupertino is smart enough to pick up on
| that. "Statistical linguistics" is the best general term
| for LLMs I've come across.
| airgapstopgap wrote:
| LLMs are the apex of NLP research to date, and NLP is
| obviously a branch of AI. You may have some sophisticated
| notion of AI, AGI, human-level or human-like AI or
| whatever, but NLP has been considered AI for generations
| now.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _NLP has been considered AI for generations now_
|
| I'm arguing the term AI has become "inclusive to the
| point of meaninglessness." That doesn't mean it was
| always meaningless.
| kimixa wrote:
| Expert systems used to be considered "AI". Certainly some
| optimization algorithms like genetic algorithms were
| "AI". Pretty much any system that makes a decision was
| considered "AI" at some point.
|
| The problem is the general use of the term changes in a
| way to often make the meaning unclear to the point of
| being near useless. Outside of marketing, of course.
| nightski wrote:
| AI is a pretty well defined field I feel like. It
| combines symbolists, connectionists, evolutionaries,
| bayesians, and analogizers. Just because those not in the
| field misuse the term does not make it less useful.
| TuringTest wrote:
| It is useful when you use it like those knowledgeable of
| the field. Marketing departments are not using it that
| way.
| joshspankit wrote:
| The general public assumes AGI when they hear AI and that's a
| problem worth fighting against.
| lukifer wrote:
| The goalpost keeps moving on what is sufficiently "general"
| to meet a hypothetical AGI definition. At one point the
| distinction was more meaningful: AIs were always highly
| domain-specific (eg, playing chess). Now the same
| transformer model can write a string-parsing JS function,
| concoct a recipe that uses six arbitrary ingredients, pass
| a biology exam, sort unstructured data, and give tax
| advice, but somehow that still isn't general enough to
| qualify.
| valine wrote:
| It's a chameleon of a term that can mean anything you want.
| That's not a good thing.
| reaperducer wrote:
| See also: "Best practices."
| dheera wrote:
| If it's written in Python, it's probably ML
|
| If it's written in PowerPoint, it's probably AI
| miohtama wrote:
| They need to leave some hype for the next year as well.
| wilg wrote:
| This is a very specific type of virtue signaling that I find
| very funny
| jeffybefffy519 wrote:
| Yet all of their other marketing is convoluted non sense. It
| just shows them being more tactical with marketing to knock
| some competition down a notch.
| Solvency wrote:
| Games have talked about "enemy AI" for 25+ years. Hell, Halo 1
| was considered revolutionary for its advanced enemy AI. Was
| that a hype word? Was that an incorrect misnomer?
| pantalaimon wrote:
| The enemies didn't learn though, so it definitely wasn't
| machine learning.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| The AI was pre-trained before the game shipped. Kinda like
| how you can have a conversation with ChatGPT and it will
| eventually forget what you've "taught" it
| halostatue wrote:
| Pre-programmed.
| munificent wrote:
| Different fields use the same term to mean unrelated things.
| "AI" in gaming just means "non-player-controlled entity
| behavior" and has meant that all the way back to the first
| chess computer games (when they _did_ think what they were
| doing was "AI").
|
| "Theory" in law, versus in science is another example.
| TuringTest wrote:
| Scripted enemies are "non-player-controlled entity
| behavior", yet they are not AI. For NPC behaviours to be
| considered game AI, there needs to be some calculation
| depending on the current state of the game and objectives
| of the character. What makes a game behaviour "AI" is its
| feedback with the player actions and/or events evolving in
| the game.
|
| Super Mario mushrooms and turtles are not AI controlled;
| Pac-Man ghosts are. (Possibly the earliest and simplest
| form of game AI, but quite effective for its purpose).
| chillbill wrote:
| Yes
| riceart wrote:
| No. In games AI is a jargon term for the behavior of an
| NPC. It has a long history in this use. When people talk
| about a game's AI it is often clear what is being discussed
| regardless of the specific technology used. It is therefore
| useful for communicating an idea and that's usually all
| that really matters.
|
| There's even a distinct Wikipedia article on this use: http
| s://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_in_vid...
| mciancia wrote:
| Kinda unimpressive since it seems that it's just mac studio with
| pci-e expansion
| BXlnt2EachOther wrote:
| Config/pricing pages are open now, and it looks like the Pro
| does match the higher-end Studio configuration. The upgrade
| choices and prices match too, so they top out at the same spec.
| Minus the tiny detail of PCIe expansion of course. Pro has a
| few more ports (extra HDMI and 10GbE, couple more TB4s) as
| well.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| More so given the drivers issue.. I expect OWC and a few
| companies like AVID will develop proper tools for their
| hardware but all in it's not going to be nearly as
| approachable. Also the limit of 192gb on Unified Memory might
| still be an issue too.
|
| We'll see what happens with release, but as someone with two
| Intel Mac Pros in use, not quite sure I see a reason to switch
| still (though my laptop is the M1 Air released 2 years ago).
| BXlnt2EachOther wrote:
| Since they've now completed the transition to Apple Silicon,
| I wonder if that starts the timer on deprecating MacOS Intel
| compatibility. Though plenty media industry users especially
| stay on older OSes for stability.
| digitallyfree wrote:
| It also doesn't have ECC as well which was a staple of the
| previous Mac Pro line.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I wonder if on-die RAM is less susceptible to memory errors?
|
| I suspect that it is. Feels like less can go wrong. You have
| physically shorter interconnects, and the RAM is perhaps more
| of a known quantity relative to
| $SOME_RANDOM_MANUFACTURERS_DIMMS. But that is only a guess.
|
| However, I don't know if that's true. I guess it's not
| necessarily more resistant to random cosmic rays or whatever.
| lemetr0l wrote:
| For the modest price of 77k dollars!!!
|
| I will use vectorization and multithreading instead, thanks!
| bee_rider wrote:
| Are you off by one order of magnitude? Or does this cost as
| much as a couple quite nice cars.
| rch wrote:
| I was looking at a six figure workstation last week,
| including GPUs. The goal is to replace 2-3 loud servers in my
| home lab with something more compact and quiet.
| umanwizard wrote:
| What do you do with your "home lab" that can't run on a
| consumer-level desktop? I'm genuinely curious.
| rch wrote:
| Currently I'm revisiting some proteomics work I did as
| part of a DARPA project a while ago, as well as
| experiments with cinema ready geo-located media
| workflows.
|
| It helps with my day job too, indirectly.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| I spend a whole bunch more time at my Mac than I do in a car,
| and gain much more value from it too, so that doesn't seem
| unreasonable...
| bee_rider wrote:
| I've connected to plenty of machines that are worth more
| than my car (although it isn't as if my car was $35000 in
| the first place, that's a bit excessive!). I was just using
| cars as a unit of measurement, to aid intuition. Maybe I
| was too circuitous in my original comment.
|
| I only see prices in the 7k range on the site.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Cars don't usually become obsolete and borderline worthless
| after 5 years.
| cdelsolar wrote:
| i still use my 2013 macbook pro and it still works great
| and fast
| mk_stjames wrote:
| 192GB of memory on the Mac Studio is enough to run Llama 65B in
| full FP16.
|
| And at 800GB/s bandwidth, it will do so pretty quickly. I think
| my M1 Pro memory bandwidth is 200GB/s and I was running quantized
| 13B Alpaca relatively quickly, I'd say useable for a personal
| chatbot, and I think it was swapping every now and then causing
| pauses.
|
| So having 4x the memory bandwidth should allow large models to
| run pretty damn fast. Maybe not H100 GPGPU speeds but enough for
| people to do some development on.
| jyu wrote:
| What do you think the odds are we can get H100s or equivalent
| in Mac Studio?
| kristianp wrote:
| Nvidia gpus haven't been supported by Macs for a long time.
| Apple and Nvidia relations are not good for some reason.
| elorant wrote:
| How many tokens per second are you getting from Alpaca?
| selectodude wrote:
| When llamaCPP came out, I was running 13B at 100ms/token on a
| base model MacBook Pro 14".
|
| Edit: apparently llama.cpp supports running on GPU, so I
| imagine it's gonna be a bit faster. Maybe a fun evening
| project for me to get going.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| I got ~45ms/token on the 7B model but the 13B model slows
| to ~200 ms/token I noticed, and I have to mess with the #
| of threads sometimes, and I have to run it with --no-mmap
| or else it wants to swap to disk.
|
| I have 16gb of ram.
|
| It's completely memory bandwidth limited. I think with even
| more work it will get faster, and so these new M2 machines
| with 800GB/s should really fly even with larger models.
|
| I have not tried the latest llama.cpp and have not ran
| anything on the m1 GPU
| duskwuff wrote:
| > I think it was swapping every now and then causing pauses.
|
| What you're seeing is probably "context swapping", not swapping
| memory to disk. The model can't keep the entire history of its
| output in context at all times, so LLaMA periodically resets
| the context and re-prompts it with a portion of its recent
| output.
|
| https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/blob/f4c55d3bd7e124b1...
| arek_nawo wrote:
| Mac Pro is honestly underwhelming. It's entirely for those you
| really need macOS + PCIe combo. Other than that, with no
| expandable RAM (beyond top 192 GB) and no external GPU support (I
| assume), there's no reason to pick it over Mac Studio (when
| choosing between the two).
| racl101 wrote:
| What the hell is that cheese grater looking thing? I can't make
| out what that is.
| detrites wrote:
| It's the front of a desktop tower, except it looks exactly like
| a cheese grater and triggers some peoples visual phobias. While
| it's claimed functional for quiet airflow, it's also possibly
| Apple's worst visual design, ever.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| That's the Mac Pro design introduced with the last Intel model.
| It's a similar design to the original Mac Pro (before the
| "trash can" tube thing), which was very close to the design of
| the PowerMac G5.
| inasio wrote:
| The Mac Pro link in this page shows the Intel Xeon-based system.
| I was very confused
| [deleted]
| jasoneckert wrote:
| I own an M1 Ultra Mac Studio that I primarily run Asahi Linux on.
| Prior to that, I ran a trashcan 2013 Mac Pro 6-core Xeon that I
| primarily ran Ubuntu Linux on. Thus, I buy Apple primarily for
| the hardware.
|
| After watching today's WWDC product announcements regarding the
| Mac Studio and Mac Pro updates, I really don't see myself ever
| buying a Mac Pro in the future. While I can understand how very
| large studios may value the additional expandability, a massive
| case with ability for expensive upgrades just isn't something I
| would need or pay extra money for.
|
| It looks like Apple has targeted the Mac Studio for the largest
| number of professionals, while reserving the Mac Pro for a niche
| high-end market - and in these regards, the Mac Pro is a
| continuation of the 2019 Mac Pro, whereas the Mac Studio is a
| continuation of the trashcan 2013 Mac Pro.
| tostr wrote:
| Would you mind expanding a bit on your experiences with running
| linux on mac hardware? Especially the M1, what is your daily
| experience like? Any pain points or gotchas?
|
| Reason for my question is that I used to run linux on the mac
| as well (10 years ago), and I love the hardware. I don't think
| there is anything that even comes close hardware-wise. But
| currently I am on mac os, well, because it works basically ;)
| But I would be curious to know if switching over again would
| make sense now, without too much hassle.
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| Was it hard to get Linux to run well on the trashcan? Mine is
| still my main machine, but there are no more MacOS upgrades for
| it.
| davidkuennen wrote:
| As a developer I'd be terrified if Apple was showing my app in
| one of these events.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| It's all pre-recorded now, so what would the worry be?
| teddyh wrote:
| If Apple likes your macOS app, that's the first step to being
| sherlocked.
| dymk wrote:
| Does that mean acquired? 'cause that's more likely
| teddyh wrote:
| No, it means that Apple rewrites your app and releases
| their version for free with macOS, destroying your
| business.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sherlock_(soft
| war...
| DonaldPShimoda wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they reach out to the developers in advance if
| it's actually used directly (and not just in the background,
| like on the Dock or something). But I'll bet it's a real
| opportunity to gain new users, so it's probably more exciting
| than terrifying!
| davidkuennen wrote:
| I'm thinking more in the lines of getting this kind of
| attention it a strong indicator to get sherlocked [1] by
| Apple in the future. For example the hydration app.
|
| [1] https://www.howtogeek.com/297651/what-does-it-mean-when-
| a-co...
| float4 wrote:
| Developer of Apollo was completely surprised that they
| mentioned his app today[0]
|
| [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/141kfmi/wwdc_2023
| _ev...
| DonaldPShimoda wrote:
| Oh wow, I didn't realize! Well never mind then, my mistake.
| Thanks for the correction -- and with a citation, even!
| SquareWheel wrote:
| He also says he was invited to the event, so he's likely
| saying that he had his mind blown by being offered the
| opportunity beforehand.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I've been draggggggiiinnngggg my feet on a new desktop
| workstation. Waiting for the store to come back to truly make a
| decision but I think that I'm gonna go for a Studio. The hacker
| in me wants to build a beefy Linux workstation but the pragmatist
| in me wants a machine that just works. I think the Apple tax is
| worth it here.
| speed_spread wrote:
| I'm pretty certain you can buy yourself a Linux workstation
| that just works. ThreadRipper, ECC, NVidia proprietary drivers.
| Put Fedora on it. The trouble is leaving it alone and not
| messing with it after you get it going.
| rnk wrote:
| I bought the prev generation for that kind of purpose, about 3
| months ago. To get 2tb disk/128gb ram cost over $5k. Curious
| about new prices. The perf seemed good running 65b models but
| not 16bit. You need the ram and disk space, but the cost was
| astronomical.
| goosedragons wrote:
| $5200 for an M2 Ultra Studio with 128GB RAM and 2TB SSD.
| Still costs $200 to upgrade a MBA with a 512GB SSD.
| eastbound wrote:
| Is this event entirely AI-generated? Backgrounds seem too
| perfect, speeches seem too tight.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Apple spends at minimum a month prior to an event rehearsing.
| During a live presentation they have people following along
| with alternate presentations that can be switched to
| immediately. These are full AV productions that would make
| producers of Super Bowl halftime shows jealous.
| jasonjamerson wrote:
| We've been discussing this as well, the Virtual Production
| production value is incredible, are they also standing on a
| stage outside, and this is all being composited live, with
| foreground passes, etc. without green screen?
| grouchomarx wrote:
| Tim may be live but everything else is prerecorded
| jasonjamerson wrote:
| Yep, you're right. Still they put a TON of work into this.
| Incredible.
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| Surely it's all pre-recorded and edited together
| jasonjamerson wrote:
| You're right. I thought this was a live event, but the
| people watching it live are just watching a video, just saw
| a live photo from twitter. Makes a lot more sense!
| delfinom wrote:
| Ever since COVID, many companies have basically switched
| to these "fake live" announcements.
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| All the Apple presentations like this are very polished
| rektide wrote:
| Anyone else look at the motherboard & think, wow, heck yeah? It
| was barren. Flat, hugely unpopulated, painted black.
|
| Seeing such a stark & severely empty slab of pcb is something
| I've been looking forward to. With more and more on chip, we
| don't need all this extra componentry all over our systems.
|
| PCB might well be cheaper than cables.. but I can perhaps
| envision MCIO (Mini Cool-Edge IO)/SFF-TA-1002 taking over some
| day, disaggregating peripheral cards off the motherboard.
| beezle wrote:
| For all the accolades about the Apple cpus, market share remains
| within historical ranges (5-10% per my recollection going back to
| the late 80s).
|
| For Q1 per IDC: The top five PC manufacturers by market share
| were Lenovo (23.9%), HP (21.5%), Dell (16.0%), Apple (7.5%), and
| Acer (6.4%).
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| With fairly good support for Apple Silicon, the $4K Mac Studio
| might be a reasonable choice for a home deep learning rig. 64G of
| shared memory for the GPUs/neural units, and CPUs sounds good.
| lvl102 wrote:
| Why didn't they release GPUs for those PCIe slots? I just don't
| get why they couldn't do a simple thing instead of AR/VR.
| runjake wrote:
| Because it's not that easy due to Apple Silicon architecture
| display controller limitations with the current chips. Note
| that none of the PCI-e cards in the demonstration were GPUs.
| They were all network/storage/accelerators/etc.
|
| In the short term, I could see shoving an Nvidia GPU in a slot
| for offloading CUDA and GPU compute, but it wouldn't be really
| suitable for video gaming and such.
| [deleted]
| colmmacc wrote:
| Congrats to Apple on completing another IA migration! It really
| is an incredible accomplishment to get such a massive base of
| customers, partners, and developers to run on a new architecture
| so quickly and relatively seamlessly. I remember the PPC to Intel
| move, which was also well done, and they'd improved even on that
| ... with what must be many many more users. Awesome!
|
| P.S. Hopefully this transition frees someone to make a Pro
| Display with a webcam!
| ridiculous_fish wrote:
| And before that was the 68k -> PPC transition, which was even
| smoother: 68k and PPC code could co-exist and call each other
| _in the same address space_.
|
| (Well there was no memory protection in those days, so
| everything was in one address space. Still, impressive!)
| kamel3d wrote:
| The M1 Mac Studio has just disappeared from the Apple website.
| Maybe this disappearance could indicate how great of a deal it
| would have been if it had remained on sale at a lower price.
| RegularOpossum wrote:
| I would keep an eye out at Costco, M1 Pro MBPs still pop up on
| sale there regularly, they might get some Studios.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| I'm surprised they kept the cheese grater case for the new Pro.
| It is one of my least favorite case designs of any high end mac.
| I'm really surprised they didn't go with something simpler and
| more like a tall, scaled up Mac Studio. It's strange that given
| it is such a big architecture change on the inside isn't mirrored
| with a physical change on the outside.
|
| Mostly I hate the juxtaposition of the chrome legs/handles with
| the aluminum case. It's very mixed-material. The chrome reminds
| me of the early iPhones with the chrome bezels.
|
| Meanwhile the Mac Studio design is clean and monolithic in
| comparison.
| Clamchop wrote:
| I love the cheese grater but I don't care for the chrome
| handles and feet either. They remind me of bed frames and
| office chairs.
|
| I think the G5 case was peak design for a tower that's hard to
| top but Apple's surprised me before.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Can one install a regular AMD gpu in this?
| 1Y3 wrote:
| I was asking myself the same, but I am assuming there is no
| way. The specs list only 300W of extra power budget (with only
| 150W on the single 8-pin PCI-E connector) and the x16 slots are
| shown as single height on the images. Also I don't think there
| are any drivers for Apple Silicon afaik and using AMD GPUs
| purely as accelerator cards seems pointless when you have M2
| Max.
| jeffbee wrote:
| $7k starting price. High but compared to? Just glancing at the
| new HP Z6 G5, which may be a fair comparison, with a 16-core CPU,
| 8x16GB of memory (the lowest configuration that populates all 8
| channels of that CPU), minimal storage, and a parts bin GPU that
| nobody wants, $6k. To get 8 thunderbolt ports like the mac pro
| you'd have to fill each and every one of its add-in card slots
| with a HP dual TB4 card.
|
| Edit: The HP 340L1AA TBT4 card is only compatible with one
| expansion slot in that machine, so what I suggested is not even
| possible. Perhaps the Mac Pro is the only workstation you can get
| with 8 Thunderbolt4 ports.
| mhh__ wrote:
| I think the lust for ML performance has made people a lot more
| likely to arbitrage these costs by building their own machines
| so the usual like for like comparison doesn't necessarily hold
| the same way it does for Apple Silicon laptops.
| moondev wrote:
| FWIW Ampere Altra dev kit is $4k for 128 cores and supports
| 768GB of RAM. Bring your own memory, storage, PSU, GPU
|
| https://www.ipi.wiki/products/com-hpc-ampere-altra?variant=4...
| gumby wrote:
| Curious if you can feed all those Ampere CPUs or if it is
| memory bandwidth constrained.
|
| Disclaimer: this is not a "zomg apple grate; others must
| suck" comment. Apple claims that their integrated design
| balances things out to get the best performance. It will be
| interesting once there are some real benchmarks to see how
| well that claim continues to stack up.
|
| The M transition has been amazing, but not every iteration
| can be a winner.
| selectodude wrote:
| High compared to the Mac Studio, I'd say. $3,000 extra for the
| exact same specs and an extra 6 PCI slots. I guess if you need
| them, that's the cost of entry, but $500/slot seems like a
| tough sell.
| twoWhlsGud wrote:
| The HP is usually at least 30% off and has ECC memory - so
| depending on your use case it may still make sense.
| zamadatix wrote:
| If you actually want 8 Thunderbolt 4 ports that probably puts
| you towards that price range anyways because nobody has really
| seen the demand to make a quad Thunderbolt 4 card yet (as far
| as I know) so you're eating up a lot of slots which were
| probably designed to have way more than PCIe 3.0 x8 plugged
| into them. Same with the memory bandwidth, if you actually need
| 800 GB/s of RAM bandwidth then there isn't really a traditional
| option to compete.
|
| If you compare with what most people actually need out of a
| workstation instead of what this can do as a workstation you
| run into a lot of opposites though, and just as easily. 192 GB
| as a maximum cap is honestly pretty low for a workstation these
| days, as is a max CPU configuration of 2x10+2.
|
| Overall I don't think it's horrendously priced as some of the
| previous Mac workstation components could get, but at the same
| time, unless you have a very specific use case or specifically
| need macOS, it's not exactly compelling. It is "good enough" to
| finally round out the lineup though.
| WWLink wrote:
| > Overall I don't think it's horrendously priced as some of
| the previous Mac workstation components could get, but at the
| same time, unless you have a very specific use case or
| specifically need macOS, it's not exactly compelling. It is
| "good enough" to finally round out the lineup though.
|
| It's such a specific use case that I'm not entirely sure what
| the use case even is. Capturing off an SDI camera? Great! Why
| do we need so many pcie cards and so little memory? These
| things aren't even setup to hold that much storage. It
| appears to not work with PCIE GPUs, so that's out. You
| probably don't need additional thunderbolt ports since it
| already has those. Maybe additional USB, but probably not
| that many cards worth? Most audio equipment is external?
|
| I get it. Apple is saying "This machine is for a very
| specific type of video editor" lol.
| USB5 wrote:
| I am probably the minimal target market for the mac pro m2
| ultra. I am an artist and I do a lot of 3D rendering. I
| think it's a great price and I would love to own one, but I
| wouldn't even consider it unless it had support for Nvidia
| GPUs. Good GPU-based 3D rendering engines need CUDA. Even
| with the ones that don't, GPU rendering on a 4090 is 4x-5x
| times more performant than on an M2 Max, and building my
| own PC allows me to have multiple of them. Also Octane, the
| rendering engine in their demo, is trash. Specifically,
| it's fine for fancy titles and cartoons but terrible for
| realistic renderings.
|
| Also, I still have a chip on my shoulder about Apple
| failing to update Mac Pros for about a decade and then
| rubbing salt in the wound with their pathetic trash can. It
| would take A LOT to get me back after that BS. Moving to
| Windows was a horrible experience and they gave me no
| choice.
|
| Lastly, VFX software is heartily embracing Linux these days
| and I'm loving it, but I did have to invest in a KVM switch
| system and 10Gbe network so I can comfortably run Photoshop
| and Substance on a separate Windows machine.
| derefr wrote:
| > It's such a specific use case that I'm not entirely sure
| what the use case even is.
|
| Live TV production, I think. Mostly in the rackmount form-
| factor. A plethora of "IO breakout boards" is what turns a
| regular computer into a "video production system" head-
| unit.
|
| Though also, at least three of the PCI-e cards shown on the
| slide were for fibre-optic networking. So, presumably, this
| would be the Mac to get if you're trying to Beowulf the
| M2-Ultras together for some kind of NUMA-friendly ML model
| training. Or just for a render farm. Insofar as Apple
| dogfoods things, I would guess this is what they use them
| for themselves.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I liked how one of the cards on the screen was a sound
| card, as if a PCIe slot wasn't 1000x overkill for that
| amount of I/O. We had USB ports that could handle that
| when Bill Clinton was still president of the United
| States.
| derefr wrote:
| There was also what I believe to be an SDR card (the one
| with all the antenna-inputs) -- which is pretty
| interesting in its implications, but perhaps not the
| brightest one in this context. Aren't RF antennas also
| lightning rods? :)
|
| There was also something there that had DB9 and DB25
| connectors, but both female. (I would think this was a
| weird SuperIO card, but the computer side of a serial
| port is usually male.) There was also a _lot_ of stuff on
| that card. Anyone know what that one was?
| acchow wrote:
| How many simultaneous 4K input video steams can that HP handle
| (input and encoding)?
| jeffbee wrote:
| I haven't the slightest idea. I assume people with such
| requirements know how to specify and buy machines. That said,
| these guys who specifically target the video production
| market sell machines with the latest Xeons and e.g. an RTX
| 4080 (which I suspect is the more relevant part).
| https://www.pugetsystems.com/workstations/xeon/w790-e/
| miklosz wrote:
| Interesting, only single CPU. I was thinking, that for Mac Pro
| they will go somehow with multiple processors and some magic with
| shared memory access solved in OS. Interesting though, how the
| external GPU support will look like if you have PCI and if it
| will be expanded to the TB4 as well.
| gumby wrote:
| > I was thinking, that for Mac Pro they will go somehow with
| multiple processors and some magic with shared memory access...
|
| That _is_ what they did. Read what they wrote about their
| interconnect. It 's just all inside a single package. Look up
| "chiplets".
| jeffybefffy519 wrote:
| Does anyone else find the specs of apple hardware really hard to
| understand?
| f6v wrote:
| Incoming: "Not going to upgrade, I'm fine with my 1996 toaster,
| thank you!"
|
| It'd be actually interesting to read from people who buy a top
| config and how they use it.
| __loam wrote:
| I'm using an M1 pro macbook for work and it's fast as fuck.
| Seriously considering getting a studio or a macbook pro for
| some home game programming and asset creation work.
| imdsm wrote:
| I have an M1 Air and an iMac Pro (3.2 GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon
| W) and quite often I feel as though the M1 is faster. Seems
| to be jumping ahead remarkably!
| bee_rider wrote:
| I do not understand why people make those comments. All we know
| about their systems is that they can load this website. You can
| be perfectly happy as a dev running vim on an ancient
| netbook...
| jmkni wrote:
| I'd really love to hear from somebody currently using a 1.5TB
| Intel Mac Pro
| smoldesu wrote:
| My ex-boyfriend had a 128gb Mac he would regularly max out
| with nothing more than Spotify and Firefox tabs. I still
| don't understand it.
| imagetic wrote:
| I guess I've never been blessed enough to work at a place that
| will spend $7k on a base model edit station.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| What do you do for a living?
|
| I'm just curious which kinds of workplaces/industries _are_
| splashing out for $7K workstations. Would love to hear from
| people whose workplaces do provide such things.
|
| I wouldn't expect many software engineers to be answering in
| the affirmative but I suspect it may be fairly common in other
| realms...
| pier25 wrote:
| I think this new Mac Pro is more geared for PCIe developers so
| they can start testing drivers etc and the big launch will be
| with the M3.
|
| It really doesn't offer any huge benefits over the Mac Studio.
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| Yes presumably a decent % of previous Mac Pro customers are ok
| with a Studio
| pier25 wrote:
| Yeah. I know a bunch of media composers that switched to the
| M1 Studio from a Mac Pro and are very happy.
| mhh__ wrote:
| I know (of/first hand) a bunch of musicians who buy the top
| of the line one every generation because they "need" it. For
| video work you do need as much raw power as possible but for
| just about anything else you can honestly get by with a
| Macbook air these days (especially given that a lot of the
| top of the line customers are probably using external inputs
| rather than software synths!)
| DevKoala wrote:
| I didn't see a reason to upgrade and I feel I am their audience
| here, I own the last one.
| squokko wrote:
| People with the immediately previous generation are not usually
| the audience. This was only the case for iPhone between about
| 2011-2019.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| I'm vaguely considering it because it does 8K video, and it'd
| be nice to replace three 4K monitors with an 8K screen.
|
| But that's quite the price bump. The M1 Ultra studio handles my
| workload pretty well, so I'll maybe save up my pennies for the
| Vision Pro.
| justinator wrote:
| TBF I had the Macbook from 2015 before I felt like upgrading to
| the M1 in 2021. You usually buy Macs every year?
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| Almost no-one do, however there is a bunch that buys new cars
| and flip them all the time!
| cpmsmith wrote:
| Well, the previous Pro came out in 2019 (and the model before
| that 2013). Every four years is not unreasonable.
|
| https://everymac.com/ultimate-mac-
| lookup/?search_keywords=A1...
| justinator wrote:
| First/last Mac Studio was released in 2022 which is I
| thought what we were talking about
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Studio
| ghaff wrote:
| I did get an Apple Silicon MacBook 18 months or so ago but my
| 2015 MacBook Pro is still fine for pretty much everything
| except ML and video/image processing.
| ttfkam wrote:
| Or anything that requires a quieter, fan-noise-less
| environment that doesn't burn your lap on direct skin
| contact. But yeah, the 2015 MBP was a truly great model
| that precedes soldered RAM and USB-C-only port selection.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, it predated the infamous butterfly keyboard and
| touch bar. Mine did have to have its screen replaced
| (which Apple extended the warranty on because of a
| manufacturing issue) and I've also had a new battery
| installed but it still works pretty well on my dining
| room table for day to day purposes (which are mostly web-
| based use of some sort).
|
| But it's got a lot of miles on it. No complaints.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Don't you think their audience might be people who do have a
| reason to upgrade?
| detourdog wrote:
| Their audience hasn't had a 6 slotted mac since the 9600.
| osti wrote:
| Mac Pro and Mac Studio, spec'd to the same max Ultra cpu, 192GB
| ram, 1tb ssd, Mac Pro is $9600, while the Mac Studio is $6600.
| How many people really need the Mac Pro's PCI-E expandability
| (which probably no third party GPU's can use) to justify the
| $3000 premium, in an arguably worse form factor?
| skunkworker wrote:
| It's a little interesting that that are going to the Video 1st/
| Training second model and abandoning the HPC market where they
| can't compete with high, multi TB workstations.
|
| But I guess it's playing to the strength that video decode/encode
| has right now with the M series chips.
|
| I wish that they would have a tiered memory expansion, eg 192gb
| fast tier, and expandable to 1.5TB slower but DDR5 expandable.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| I imagine they did the research and found that most people with
| HPC needs are just renting it, and those that aren't renting
| aren't filling a data center with fucking apples.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| They're just ridiculous with Mac Pro pricing. $3k for pretty
| chassis and $3.5k for chassis with wheels. It's a joke. They
| didn't even match specs for previous Intel Mac Pro, when it comes
| to RAM.
|
| IMO this announcement is just a funeral for this product.
|
| Mac Studio is fine, I guess... I hate small computers so I would
| prefer huge empty box with lots of air inside which is likely to
| be silent. But not with this overprice.
| freeqaz wrote:
| Does anybody have the specs on the M2 Ultra chip? Looks like it
| supports up to 192GB of unified RAM, which is twice the 96GB of
| the M2 Max, so is this just 4 silicon dies jammed up against each
| other? (Apple website hasn't been updated yet with this info, but
| I'm very curious!)
|
| Edit: Ah, looks like they made a separate press release with that
| info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36199637
| roughly wrote:
| I'd been wondering how they were going to handle expandable
| memory with the M chip, since the integrated memory seemed pretty
| central to the design - seems like the answer is, "they're not."
| Be interested to see if PCI expansion is sufficient to satisfy
| the Max Pro market.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| The integrated memory design doesn't prevent doing it over a
| dimm slot. It seems more they just didn't want to deal with a
| ddr5 or some bespoke connector.
| qwytw wrote:
| Also allowing users to upgrade RAM themselves would lower
| Apples margin and their computers would remain usable for
| much longer which would result in even less profits... Now
| Apple can release a 512 GB version in a year or two then a
| 1TB one etc.
|
| The technical issues are totally insignificant compared to
| this.
|
| Edit: having said this extra memory for Mac Pro seems cheap
| as f** by Apple standards. Just $800 for 64 -> 128GB. 8 ->
| 24GB for Mac mini/Air is $400 and you only get 48GB for $800
| in a MBP.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Everything seems slightly parallel-universe in Apple world,
| looking at it from over here in x86/linux land.
|
| I can see why they'd decide to go in-package with their memory,
| it is really very fast. And 192GB of memory is not a huge
| amount of memory in server/HPC land, but it is still a decent
| chunk of space. You could load up a Mac Pro with a bunch of
| PCIe nvme drives or something, I wonder if it would really be
| that hard to adapt to that.
|
| I certainly wouldn't turn down the chance to try, haha.
| AprilArcus wrote:
| NVMe wouldn't give you the best latency, but a 16x PCIe card
| loaded with DRAM and addressable as a scratch disk doesn't
| sound bananas. I wonder why Apple didn't market something
| like that as a first party solution.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Mac Pro = Mac Studio + Expansion Cards
|
| I have to imagine this will be a huge disappointment to some,
| because 192GB of shared memory is way less than the 1.5TB of
| RAM available on the "old" Mac Pro.
| peoplearepeople wrote:
| Perhaps someone will come out with a new PCIe card with a
| load of RAM slots on it, and then writes a kernel driver to
| map the pcie card pages to appear as regular pages
| PlutoIsAPlanet wrote:
| You could use them as some kind of swap or ram disk, but I
| don't believe as normal RAM would be possible due to how
| CPUs work.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| That's an interesting idea. But do you actually need to go
| all the way to making the extra memory appear as a
| contiguous part of the system memory? I am thinking about
| CUDA unified memory and perhaps some parallels to your
| idea.
|
| The number of applications that are likely to use the extra
| memory is probably pretty small. So if you have some sort
| of framework that those developers can integrate into their
| software, you've probably done everything you need to do.
| sliken wrote:
| 192GB ram does seem like enough for a large fraction of the
| potential market, especially @ 800GB/sec which makes it much
| more usable than similar amounts of ram on Intel/AMD desktops
| at 1/8th the bandwidth.
| StillBored wrote:
| Except that my fairly modest upper midrange desktop has
| ~1.2TB/sec of memory bandwidth...
|
| Cause, I just added the GPU and system RAM bandwidth numbers
| together. Which is what needs to be kept in mind with much of
| this. Yes that is a lot of memory bandwidth and its hella
| useful for some subset of users, but its shared, and largely
| pointless for a lot of CPU bound tasks. But OTOH, may not be
| enough for many GPU bound ones.
|
| It also assumes that pretty much every other CPU manufacture
| on the planet are idiots for optimizing for latency and
| putting in large caches to compensate (aka the desktop parts
| from AMD/intel have only _two_ channels, vs the 8+ in the
| server/workstation parts) and price discriminating for the
| parts that have more CPU bandwidth. AKA, you can get amd
| machines in the same ballpark (or possibly faster depending
| on how fast you can get 24 channels of DDR5 to run).
|
| So, I'm not saying which is better because its likely
| workload dependent, but to claim its a blanket insurmountable
| advantage is questionable. Particularly since the price
| ranges we are talking about a similar machine is probably a
| 64 core threadripper plus a fat nvidia GPU or four and the
| shear core count and raw GPU compute is probably a win in
| most workloads.
| USB5 wrote:
| I just built a workstation with a 32 core Threadripper Pro,
| 128 GB ECC RAM, Thunderbolt 4, and an RTX 4090 for $6,500.
| sliken wrote:
| Likely better on any workloads that are GPU heavy and fit
| in 24GB of vram.
|
| Two data points from Apple: a) M2 Ultra
| 24 cores, 128GB ram, 2TB storage = $5,200 b) M2
| ultra 24 cores, 192GB ram, 4GB storage = $6,600
|
| Likely 1/4th the size, 1/4th the power consumption, and
| 4x the ram bandwidth. Have you by chance played with any
| LLMs? Just saw a post that someone managed 5 tokens/sec
| with the llama 65B model.
| sliken wrote:
| Sure, but what if a normal C code needs more bandwidth?
|
| Or if a GPU code needs more than 12-16GB of memory (normal
| cards) or 24GB (if you get a 4090)?
|
| What I like about the apple approach is that low end
| laptops/desktops get 100GB/sec. Pay another $500 get
| 200GB/sec. Pay another $500 get 400GB/sec. Pay another
| $1000 get 800GB/sec and still fits in a small desktop. On
| the PC side with AMD/Intel you get the same memory
| bandwidth for the low, medium, and high end chips. Until
| you upgrade to a threadripper, which is a 280 watt chip, on
| an expensive motherboard, usually in a rather large PC case
| and makes the mac studio look cheap.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| This is competing with servers though, and Epyc 9004 series
| has 460 GB/sec (and up to 6TB of ram per socket). Apple still
| gives you faster connection, but I feel like servers below
| 256GB ram are pretty rare these days.
| 221qqwe wrote:
| > much more usable than similar amounts of ram
|
| People keep repeating this but how does higher bandwidth
| (probably not 8x higher though) compensate for a lower amount
| of RAM?
|
| It's not quite as silly as the people saying that 8GB in the
| base config 'feels' much faster than 8GB on a PC cause the
| drive/swap are "so fast" but still..
| lambdasquirrel wrote:
| Maybe it adds another step to the memory mountain? Folks
| who use these kinds of workstations might think of in-
| package RAM as just the next level of cache, if someone
| goes ahead and makes a card with comparatively slower
| memory card slots.
| pwthornton wrote:
| The approach they took is certainly enough to satisfy the video
| and related markets. It won't help those who need truly
| staggering amounts of ram for their workloads. It may not be a
| big use case for the Intel Mac Pro, but it a use case
| nonetheless.
|
| For video editing, color grading, audio editing, 3D animation,
| etc. this new machine seems really strong. I am not sure if
| there is anything beyond that, however.
| USB5 wrote:
| >3D animation
|
| Disagree. All the good GPU-based rendering engines need CUDA,
| and none of them are optimized for Apple silicon. Octane (the
| one in the demo) is trash, only good for fancy titles and
| that sort of thing.
| WWLink wrote:
| I think that was deliberate. I am kinda amused at how they
| keep on narrowing the scope of what the mac pro is intended
| to be used for lol.
| gumby wrote:
| They probably have very good data on how their machines are
| used, and are optimizing for the fat part of the market.
|
| This may not be a great machine for training models, which
| is what I happen care about (I couldn't care less about
| video). I wonder how big the model generation market
| actually is though.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Damm the annotated voice mail feature seems awesome feature.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Seems clear to me that Apple never wanted to launch the Intel Mac
| Pro (cheese grater), but they saw a timing gap between the trash-
| can Mac Pro and the Mac Studio that needed to be filled.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The return of the rack-mount Mac? Nice one, Apple.
|
| But do I get it right, a _professional_ machine with zero ways to
| upgrade the system? Come on.
| robertoandred wrote:
| They've sold rack-mount Mac Pros since 2019.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Did you miss the 6 expansion slots? The 8 TB ports?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| I was talking about RAM and the CPU.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| >Today, Apple is carbon neutral for global corporate operations
| and is focused on its Apple 2030 goal to make every product
| carbon neutral. This means every Mac Apple creates, from design
| to manufacturing to customer use, will have net-zero climate
| impact.
|
| I love my bullshit green washing of hunks of metal produced by
| the millions too. Buying carbon credits from I-Promise-I-Will-
| Plant-Trees Inc. is still lying, Apple.
| nojito wrote:
| Just 1/5 of their total carbon neutral claim is from purchasing
| credits. I am sure it is even lower in 2023.
| hollerith wrote:
| >This means every Mac Apple creates, from design to
| manufacturing to customer use, will have net-zero climate
| impact.
|
| My guess is that the largest contributor to carbon emissions
| comes from Apple's employees living their lives: Apple pays the
| employee a salary, then the employee uses that salary in a way
| that result in heavy carbon emissions unless that employee is
| one of the very few who seriously rearrange their lives to
| intentionally pessimize their climate impact.
|
| I doubt Apple is counting that.
| threeseed wrote:
| > I doubt Apple is counting that.
|
| Actually Apple hires private investigators to spy on the
| activities of their employees in order to determine how much
| carbon to offset.
|
| Common knowledge.
| modeless wrote:
| I wouldn't buy a $7000 computer without a discrete GPU.
| throw74775 wrote:
| What if you needed its other features?
| thx-2718 wrote:
| It's a computer. I'm sure the other features are available in
| other packages in one form or another.
|
| That said, for business-to-business I bet these are great
| machines.
| throw74775 wrote:
| [flagged]
| bee_rider wrote:
| If one of your requirements is running macOS, I guess it
| will be hard to get elsewhere.
| dralley wrote:
| Depends. The "integrated" GPU shares a memory address space
| with the CPU. Depending on the workload that can compensate
| quite a bit.
| dvwobuq wrote:
| Bad news everyone, modeless isn't buying one. On the other hand
| I look forward to the steep discounts to be had at Apple's
| going out of business sale...
| emmelaich wrote:
| With all those thunderbolt ports you could add eight eGPUs.
| wmf wrote:
| No you couldn't because eGPUs are not supported.
| freen wrote:
| Not yet.
| Grazester wrote:
| Yeah and when it is it would be for next generation
| hardware.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The PCIe slots look easy enough to get at.
| jsheard wrote:
| Apple showed a lineup of compatible PCIe cards, with a
| variety of accelerators and I/O hardware but conspicuously no
| GPUs.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/28J1KfN.jpg
|
| The Apple Silicon transition ended support for external GPUs,
| so I think it's safe to assume they won't support internal
| ones either.
| jmkni wrote:
| Man I'm so out of what's going on with desktop computing
| lol, feeling old
|
| Could somebody explain what these are?
| BXlnt2EachOther wrote:
| left to right, had to search a few of them. You're
| probably not out of it, it's just relatively niche
| professional stuff. Half of them are only relevant for
| media professionals for example.
|
| Sonnet card - adds storage via a couple SATA SSDs
|
| OWC 8M2 - adds storage via up to 8 NVME drives
|
| Avid HDX card, runs DSP for ProTools (audio)
|
| Kona 5, video capture and I/O
|
| Lynx E44, high-quality audio I/O
|
| Blackmagic decklink SDI 4k - SDI video capture
|
| ATTO high-speed ethernet card, maybe 50GbE
|
| ATTO Celerity Fibre Channel Adapter - Storage HBA
|
| edit to add linebreaks
| jmkni wrote:
| Nice thankyou!
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Expansion cards, they were supported by the original PC
| from the 80s and even before that.
| jmkni wrote:
| I'm not that old lol, was wondering specifically what
| they were
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| As you can see they're still a thing, so you could be any
| age from 0-60.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| The product page specifically touts the Radeon Pro W6800X
| Duo.
| jsheard wrote:
| The product page hasn't been updated yet, it's still
| describing the Intel model.
|
| If it were current then they'd have something newer than
| the years-old W6800X Duo.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| Sorry, you're right. I thought I saw a mention of an M2
| spec, but it must have been something else.
| musicale wrote:
| > conspicuously no GPUs
|
| That is interesting. I wonder how hard it would be to do
| PCI passthrough to enable GPUs to work with Windows 11 ARM
| running in a VM?
|
| I wonder if it is even possible to write a driver for an
| external GPU for macOS on Apple Silicon? It seems that
| Metal on macOS Sonoma intel still supports external GPUs.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I guess (although, I don't actually know, low level stuff
| is confusing) this is an OS thing, right? Rather than
| hardware. Of course since it is Apple, the concept is
| bundled together anyway. But I wonder if Asahi Linux could
| bring support?
| modeless wrote:
| Anything you install is a brick unless hardware vendors port
| their drivers.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Isn't that true of any PCIe device? Is Apple supposed to
| develop their drivers too?
| modeless wrote:
| Apple is supposed to maintain good relationships with
| hardware vendors and support them in porting their
| drivers. Apple has done a poor job of this. They are
| practically enemies with Nvidia due to legal disputes and
| as a result I don't expect to see an Nvidia driver for
| Apple Silicon in the foreseeable future. Maybe AMD or
| Intel will write one but at least one should have
| happened before launch.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Are they? I think you want a PC. Which is totally fine.
|
| Microsoft goes around playing nice with every Tom, Dick
| and Harry with a hardware device and a dream. Apple in
| recent memory has never been that company.
| alwillis wrote:
| You're not the target audience.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| I would consider that for many people in your position, the
| desire for a discrete GPU is a proxy for the real desire, which
| could be one of several things: - Performance, which apple's
| GPUs may compete sufficiently with - Upgradeability, which
| apple's GPUs may not compete sufficiently with
|
| If all you care about is the performance, does it really matter
| if that perf is achieved via a discrete or integrated GPU?
| modeless wrote:
| Apple's GPU does not compete sufficiently with the discrete
| GPUs one would put in a $7000 PC.
| imdsm wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what is your benchmark here? I have a
| $2000 RTX card that is great for games, but pretty poor for
| LLMs. For LLM development, I'd be much happier with a
| Studio and an M2 Ultra. How much would it cost me to get
| 192 GB in discreet cards I wonder?
| singhrac wrote:
| I think the statement "I'd be much happier with a Studio"
| is a little hypothetical? Sorry if that's not true, but
| everywhere I've looked, it seems like these are not ML
| training chips, and people are just hoping they will
| handle LLMs well.
|
| You can absolutely build (with real support from the
| PyTorch folks) a 4x3090 deep learning workstation that
| has 96 GB of VRAM for roughly $7k. Or, more likely,
| you'll rent a A100 from AWS for ~$0.15/hr.
| tolmasky wrote:
| The best part to me is that this looks like a "platform" that can
| be updated year over year. They can just keep putting the updated
| M-whatever chip in it (and hopefully eventually figure out how to
| quadruple it vs. just having the Ultra). Ideally they can bump it
| up to PCIe 5 and Thunderbolt 5 "easily" too. In other words, the
| fact that this is so similar to the Mac Studio means it hopefully
| won't suffer the same fate as the previous "one-hit wonder" Mac
| Pros. An M3 (3nm) Mac Pro with PCIe5 and Thunderbolt 5 would be a
| very good machine I think.
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