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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#71

Post by vlovich123 »

readitalready wrote: post #59

Apple really dropped the ball here. They had every ability to make something competitive with Nvidia for AI training as well as inference, by selling high end multi GPU Mac Pro workstations as well as servers, but for some reason chose not to. They had the infrastructure and custom SoCs and everything. What a waste. It really could have been a bigger market for them than even the iPhone.

Don’t mistake stock market performance for revenue. NVIDIA makes ~200B annually, same as what Apple makes from iPhones. It’s a big market but GPUs aren’t just AI.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#72

Post by Forgeties79 »

vlovich123 wrote: post #68
jltsiren wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High-end Macs have moved to PCIe 5.0 speeds in their internal drives. Thunderbolt 5 is not fast enough to get the same performance from external ones. Thunderbolt is also too slow for higher-end networks. A single port is already insufficient for 100-gigabit speeds.

When people talk about 100gigabit networks for Macs, im really curious what kind of network you run at home and how much money you spent on it. Even at work I’m generally seeing 10gigabit network ports with 100gigabit+ only in data centers where macs don’t have a presence

I work in media production and I have the same thought constantly. Hell I curse in church as far as my industry is concerned because I find 2.5 to be fine for most of us. 10 absolutely.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#73

Post by leohonexus »

jmgao wrote: post #53
spot wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

MCPRUE sells shameless ripoffs of the Mac Pro case, but with support for standard motherboard sizing, if you really want your PC to double as a cheese grater: https://www.mcprue.com/case

I own one and there's nothing shameful about it. It's basically CNCed to Apple's standards, just without the logo. The cool thing is since Studio Displays work on Windows too, with Thunderbolt motherboards you can have a setup that's visually the same as a Mac but is actually a PC.

P.S. Does anyone know how well Studio Displays now work on Linux? The best I could get it to work was on Ubuntu, where it basically worked out of the fresh install. X11 KDE on Fedora was a close second. Couldn't get it working on Wayland whatsoever.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#74

Post by dijit »

SpecialistK wrote: post #52
lapcat wrote: post #35

The 2013 trash can was the end of the Mac Pro. It was never the same after that. The 2012 and earlier Mac Pros were awesome. I had a 2010 model. Here's what I loved: • Multiple hard drive bays for easy swapping of disks, with a side panel that the user could open and close • Expandable RAM • Lots of ports, including audio • The tower took up no desktop space • It was relatively affordable, starting at $2500. Many sof…

When it was introduced, Apple said the trash can was a revolution in cooling design. Then they said they couldn't upgrade the components because of heat. Everyone knows that wasn't true. By the time Apple said they had issues with it in 2017, AMD were offering 14nm GCN4 and 5 graphics (Polaris and Vega) compared to the 28nm GCN1 graphics in the FirePro range. Intel had moved from Ivy Bridge to Skylake for Xeons. And…

The biggest issue was actually that the Mac Pro was designed specifically for dual GPUs- in the era of SLI this made some sense, but once that technology was abandoned it was a technological dead-end.

If you take one apart you'll see why, it's not the case that you could have ever swapped around the components to make it dual-CPU instead; it really was "dual GPU or bust".

Somewhat ironically, in todays ML ecosystem, that architecture would probably do great. Though I doubt it could possibly do better than what the M-series is doing by itself using unified memory.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#75

Post by BirAdam »

Reading comments, I don’t think people are being completely fair here. For Intel and AMD to approach what Apple has accomplished they’re making many of the same compromises with Panther Lake and Ryzen AI Max. Apple chose to put disk controllers on their SoP rather than having them on the storage module. This shaves a tiny bit of latency. Worth it? No idea. I’m shit at hardware design.

As for not having a Pro or otherwise expandable system? It’s shit. They make several variations of their chips, and I don’t think it would hurt them to make an SoP for a socket, put a giant cooling system in it, and give it 10 or 12 PCIe slots. As for what would go in those slots? Make this beast rack mountable and people would toss better network cards, sound/video output or capture, storage controllers, and all kinds of other things in there. A key here would be to not charge so much just because they can. Make the price reasonable.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#76

Post by Forgeties79 »

zer00eyz wrote: post #70
readitalready wrote: post #59

Apple really dropped the ball here. They had every ability to make something competitive with Nvidia for AI training as well as inference, by selling high end multi GPU Mac Pro workstations as well as servers, but for some reason chose not to. They had the infrastructure and custom SoCs and everything. What a waste. It really could have been a bigger market for them than even the iPhone.

> something competitive with Nvidia for AI training Apple is counting on something else: model shrink. Every one is now looking at "how do we make these smaller". At some point a beefy Mac Studio and the "right sized" model is going to be what people want. Apple dumped a 4 pack of them in the hands of a lot of tech influencers a few months back and they were fairly interesting (expensive tho).

Cheaper than what you’d expect though. You could get a nice setup for $20-40k 6mo ago. As far as enterprise investments go, that’s a rounding error.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#78

Post by readitalready »

vlovich123 wrote: post #71
readitalready wrote: post #59

Apple really dropped the ball here. They had every ability to make something competitive with Nvidia for AI training as well as inference, by selling high end multi GPU Mac Pro workstations as well as servers, but for some reason chose not to. They had the infrastructure and custom SoCs and everything. What a waste. It really could have been a bigger market for them than even the iPhone.

Don’t mistake stock market performance for revenue. NVIDIA makes ~200B annually, same as what Apple makes from iPhones. It’s a big market but GPUs aren’t just AI.

I'm purely talking in terms of revenue. There's a huge demand for AI systems from personal workstations to datacenter servers, and Apple was one of the few companies in the world in a position to build complete systems for it.

But for some reason Apple thought the sound recording engineer or the video editor market was more important... like, WTF dude? Have some vision at least!

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#79

Post by jltsiren »

vlovich123 wrote: post #68
jltsiren wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High-end Macs have moved to PCIe 5.0 speeds in their internal drives. Thunderbolt 5 is not fast enough to get the same performance from external ones. Thunderbolt is also too slow for higher-end networks. A single port is already insufficient for 100-gigabit speeds.

When people talk about 100gigabit networks for Macs, im really curious what kind of network you run at home and how much money you spent on it. Even at work I’m generally seeing 10gigabit network ports with 100gigabit+ only in data centers where macs don’t have a presence

Local AI is probably the most common application these days.

Apple recently added support for InfiniBand over Thunderbolt. And now almost all decent Mac Studio configurations have sold out. Those two may be connected.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#80

Post by jasomill »

SpecialistK wrote: post #52
lapcat wrote: post #35

The 2013 trash can was the end of the Mac Pro. It was never the same after that. The 2012 and earlier Mac Pros were awesome. I had a 2010 model. Here's what I loved: • Multiple hard drive bays for easy swapping of disks, with a side panel that the user could open and close • Expandable RAM • Lots of ports, including audio • The tower took up no desktop space • It was relatively affordable, starting at $2500. Many sof…

When it was introduced, Apple said the trash can was a revolution in cooling design. Then they said they couldn't upgrade the components because of heat. Everyone knows that wasn't true. By the time Apple said they had issues with it in 2017, AMD were offering 14nm GCN4 and 5 graphics (Polaris and Vega) compared to the 28nm GCN1 graphics in the FirePro range. Intel had moved from Ivy Bridge to Skylake for Xeons. And…

Aside from the GPU mess, the 2013 was a nice machine, basically a proto-Mac Studio. Aside from software, the only thing that pushed me off my D300/64GB/12-core as an everyday desktop + front-end machine is the fact that there's no economically sensible way to get 4K video at 120 Hz given that an eGPU enclosure + a decent AMD GPU would cost as much as a Mac mini, so I'm slumming it in Windows for a few months until the smoke clears from the next Mac Studio announcement.

At which point I'll decide whether to replace my Mac Pro with a Mac Studio or a Linux workstation; honestly, I'm about 60/40 leaning towards Linux at this point, in which case I'd also buy a lower-end Mac, probably a MacBook Air.

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