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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#91

Post by rayiner »

washadjeffmad wrote: post #65
rayiner wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The top Mac Studio has six thunderbolt 5 ports, each of which is a PCIe 4.0 x4 link. Each is a 8GB/sec link in each direction, which is a lot. Going from x16 down to x4 has less than a 10% hit on games: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/sbegpb/gpu_in_pci...

Gaming isn't what people are using Mac Studios for. Thunderbolt also isn't a substitute for OCuLink.

Sure, but it’s probably reflective of the fact that GPUs generally aren’t PCIe-bandwidth bound. Also, TB5 and Oculink2 both use PCI 4.0 x4 links.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#93

Post by shrinks99 »

dd8601fn wrote: post #62
jmgao wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

$1,000 just for the case... ouch! (neat though)

I own one of these, it is amazingly well manufactured. Not cheap, but (with the exception of the power button) well made.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#95

Post by bombcar »

ks2048 wrote: post #57

With the popularity of mac mini (and macbooks for that matter) for doing ML/AI work, I would have thought Apple could make a Mac Pro that could make for a good workstation for doing in-house ML/AI stuff. I bought a GPU maybe a decade ago for this, and it's not worth the hassle (for me at least), but a nice out-of-the box solution, I would pay for.

The problem is that the M1 chips foretold the doom of the Mac Pro unless they could figure out some way to do something that you couldn't do with a Mac Studio - thunderbolt is so good that it's hard to justify anything else.

If they had done more with NUMA in the M series maybe you could have a Mac Pro with M5 Ultras that can take a number of M5 "daughter cards" that do something useful.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#96

Post by jshier »

therealmarv wrote: post #58
giancarlostoro wrote: post #39

Honestly the Mac Studio is the new Mac Pro, this makes more sense to me.

but even that one looks kinda outdated when looking at latest M5 Max laptops.

Mac Studio waits for the Ultra chips to ship, which are always last in a generation. Perhaps the M5's chiplet architecture will help them move faster there.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#97

Post by bombcar »

BirAdam wrote: post #75

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 other…

They have tried variations of this since time immemorial (we can argue about "price reasonablé") but there's just not much you can do with it that you can't do much cheaper or simpler in other ways.

The Xserve has been dead for 15 years now, and it was never tremendously amazing (though it was nice kit).

Apple apparently has some sort of "in-house" xserve-like thing they don't sell; but turning that into a product would likely be more useful than a Mac Pro, unless they add NUMA or some other way of allowing an M5 to access racks and racks of DIMMs.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#98

Post by bombcar »

testing22321 wrote: post #13
al_borland wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their justification for the form factor, when it was released, was that pro users need various PCI cards to interface with some of their equipment, and this would allow them to do that. It seemed like the guts of the Mac Pro were essentially shoved inside of a box and stuck in the corner of the tower. It would seem like they could decouple it and sell a box that pro users could load cards into (like other companies d…

It was always strange the Apple Silicon kept the 1.3kw power supply which was massive overkill. I always hoped we’d get a consumer version of what they have internally - 10 or 20 or more Apple Silicon chips for 1000 cores or so.

A bunch of the Mac Pro decisions seem to have been more driven by "we have a warehouse of these parts" than "this is what the system needs".

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#99

Post by bombcar »

redwall_hp wrote: post #5
bigyabai wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The form-factor always felt like a weird fit for Apple Silicon. With the Intel boxes it was understandable; you want a few liters of free space for a couple AMD cards or some transcode hardware. The system was designed to be expandable, and the Mac Pro was the apex of Apple's commitment to that philosophy after bungling the trashcan Mac Pro. None of the Apple Silicon hardware can seemingly justify this form factor, t…

I suspect we'll start seeing higher-spec Mac Studio options. One of those with an M* Ultra, and some sort of Thunderbolt storage expansion would probably cover most of the Pro's use cases. And Apple probably doesn't want to deal with anything more exotic than those.

Can't you already stack 4 Studios? Building a $1,000 case to hold them makes some sort of Apple sense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4_RsUxRjKU or something

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#100

Post by throw0101c »

jltsiren wrote: post #79
vlovich123 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Apple recently added support for InfiniBand over Thunderbolt.

TIL:

* https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technotes/tn3205-l...

Or maybe I forgot:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46248644

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