351–360 of 403 posts
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Seriously - they do not even talk about GPU in the PCIe slot - then again they do not expressly rule it out either.
I think it's ruled out by the fact that Nvidia would need to release macOS drivers, and there is no realistic chance of them doing so without Apple's support.
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I think Apple is afraid of the AI people switching to CUDA and neglecting Apple's own accelerators. Whatever the case is, it's entirely petty - Nvidia still ships FreeBSD drivers and would probably gladly pick up Apple support again (at least for CUDA drivers). If it was as simple as "Nvidia was an unreliable hardware partner", they wouldn't go out of their way to arbitrarily limit the drivers you can run.
Apple doesn't arbitrarily limit the drivers you can run. And up until now there hasn't been a Mac Nvidia could even sell graphics cards for. Even now Mac Pro users will be such a tiny segment it's probably not worth the effort.
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 overpri…
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> magical pseudo-sentient enigma or Since when does artificial intelligence imply sentience? They're interdependent and neither are reliant on the other.
Yes, but that’s not how “normal” people take it. People believe these are thinking machines and programs, capable of some amount of reasoning. It’s coming from somewhere between decades of terrifying sci-fi and a few months of impressive model results.
Basic/moderate reasoning tasks are absolutely in the capability of GPT-4.
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> not a GDDR based APU AFIK Apple currently doesn't have a foodhold on gaming outside of phone/tablet games (where they are strong, but the games are used to LPDDR perf.). And while many of the Graphic applications people do use would profit from it I'm not sure it's that big of benefit. In the end a lot of users just do daily tasks on Apple laptops and for that battery life absolutely trumps any speed benefits GDDR…
Apple already outclasses everyone in throughput & throughput/watt especially. In case it wasn't already crystal clear, I was talking about everyone else finding ways to get their throughput up to more competitive levels, such as by supporting GDDR.
AFIK it's not that e.g. AMD couldn't do that and use on-die LPDDR5, I mean that is a bit different but not sustainable harder then using their chiplet + X3D tech.
The problem is that for AMD it's not a good business decision. First they need to be price competitive (a problem Apple doesn't have). Most applications outside some areas scale much more with the speed/latency of RAM then with bandwidth increase (beyond some basic level). In turn for a lot of e.g. desktop Ryzen processor use cases which are not media processing there is not enough value into adding many more channels. Especially if you consider that for large parts of the prosumer/server space IT admins will be really unhappy with on-die RAM Apple can afford forcing it, AMD can not. The reason is that while for desktop systems RAM death is rarely an issue in the server/heavily used workstation spectrum RAM death is not uncommon. Even for media processing or multi VM servers going beyond a certain number of channels (less then 16) is unlikely to be a good financial decision. I would go as far as arguing if the M2 Ultra wouldn't be based on tightly gluing 2 processors together and that processors have 8 channels because they are sold with a focus for media processing it wouldn't have anywhere close to 16 channels (but for Apple the cost of having less then 16 channels with their design is higher then the cost of having them, partially because they also don't sell server they don't want to compete with accidentally and similar).
Where I'm going with this is that outside of some media processing targeted products they don't need to "get their throughput up to more competive level" and getting it to having a some additional 8 channel choices (e.g. for some high end laptops) would likely be good enough in practice. And in turn we are unlikely to see more. And in turn they have no reason to try tricks like using GDDR memory.
The way Apple can push hardware vendors here is less because of a need for many more channels, but because for a want.
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> magical pseudo-sentient enigma or Since when does artificial intelligence imply sentience? They're interdependent and neither are reliant on the other.
Yes, but that’s not how “normal” people take it. People believe these are thinking machines and programs, capable of some amount of reasoning. It’s coming from somewhere between decades of terrifying sci-fi and a few months of impressive model results.
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I think it's ruled out by the fact that Nvidia would need to release macOS drivers, and there is no realistic chance of them doing so without Apple's support.
at this point, for mac pros which have expansion slots, why would not apple do that. both for nvidia and amd cards?
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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.
Interesting that they added a rackmount option though. At a $500 premium too, I guess it’s mostly for iOS developer build servers.
Mac Pro and Mac Studio, spec'd to the same maximum possible 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?
The people buying the Mac Pro are probably all going to be high-end video and audio professionals for whom the price difference isn't as noticable
edit: one of the PCIe cards they showed was the Avid Pro Tools HDX card which costs $5000 alone. People who need that card are the target market for a $3000 PCIe chassis.
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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.
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