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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#221

Post by zer0zzz »

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.

How is this dropping the ball? I think they dropped the ball a long time ago by waiting until M5 to do integrated tensor cores instead of the separate ANE only which was present before.

For multi-gpu you can network multiple Macs at high speed now. Their biggest disadvantage to Nvidia right now is that no one wants to do kernel authoring in Metal. AMD learned that the hard way when they gave up on OpenCL and built HIP.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#222

Post by rayiner »

mrheosuper wrote: post #163
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...

Your example uses GTX1080, which is a very old GPU. Current flagship consumer GPU will take a harder hit on low bandwidth PCIE.

Here’s more recent HW: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/impact-of-gpu-pci...

This is an RTX4080.

“In the more common situations of reducing PCI-e bandwidth to PCI-e 4.0 x8 from 4.0 x16, there was little change in content creation performance: There was only an average decrease in scores of 3% for Video Editing and motion graphics. In more extreme situations (such as running at 4.0 x4 / 3.0 x8), this changed to an average performance reduction of 10%.”

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#224

Post by gizajob »

aprilnya wrote: post #47
magic_hamster wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gone are the days of PCIe. My GPU, NVMe drives and motherboard might disagree.

- GPU is integrated into the SoC - Surprisingly, it is possible to plug a drive into a TB/USB port …so what do you actually need PCIe for?

Things that aren’t graphics cards, such very high bandwidth video capture cards and any other equipment that needs a lot of lanes of PCI data at low latency.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#225

Post by gizajob »

Arcanum-XIII wrote: post #172
sundvor wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup the 4090 and SoundBlaster ZXR in my AM5 7800X3D system would both like to upvote your reply.

Sound card works fine on USB2 (RME for example has cards on USB2 that can manage 30/30 io at 192khz without issue at low latency if you have the CPU to deal with the load) With USB3 you have 94 i/o… For years pci has not been mandatory for audio. UAD, Apogee, RME and other high end brands will push you to them. Or even only provide them as usb device… even Thunderbolt is not needed here. And that’s been the case for…

Compared to video data and the speed the CPU is running at, audio trickles in at a snails pace.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#226

Post by looopTools »

This honestly saddens me a little. From the PowerMac's to the MacPro I always loved them when having the opportunity to work with them. Plus I loved the expandability they offered.

I don't find the external GPU houses for Mac Studio as appealing to use.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#227

Post by gizajob »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #137
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just about everybody who isn't Nvidia dropped the ball, bigtime. Intel should have shipped their GPUs with much more VRAM from day one. If they had done this, they'd have carved out a massive niche and much more market share, and it would have been trivially simple to do. AMD should have improved their tools and software, etc. Apple should have done as you say. Google had nigh on a decade to boost TPU production, and…

> And thus Nvidia is, now quite durably, the most valuable company in the world. Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world right up until the AI bubble pops. Which, while it's hard to nail down when, is going to happen. I wouldn't call their position durable at all.

The crashing and burning of Nvidia stock has been predicted for a while now and keeps not really happening. It’s gone pretty flat and volatile up there around $180 but they keep delivering the results to back it up. I was thinking this week that Apple is really primed to make a killing from people who want to run their LLM on-device coupled with an agent in the next couple of years. We’re a long way off being able to train the models – this is going to need an Nvidia-powered datacentre for the foreseeable future, but the local inference seems absolutely like a market that Apple could capture, gutting all the most premium revenue from Anthropic and OpenAI by selling Macs with a large amount of integrated memory to anyone who wants to give them the money to run their native OpenClaw/agent instead of paying ever-growing monthly bills for tokens.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#228

Post by robotswantdata »

chatmasta wrote: post #165

I bet there’s gonna be a banger of a Mac Studio announced in June. Apple really stumbled into making the perfect hardware for home inference machines. Does any hardware company come close to Apple in terms of unified memory and single machines for high throughput inference workloads? Or even any DIY build? When it comes to the previous “pro workloads,” like video rendering or software compilation, you’ve always been…

DGX workstations, expensive but allow PCI cards as well.

https://marketplace.nvidia.com/en-us/enterprise/personal-ai-...

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#229

Post by gizajob »

root_axis wrote: post #133
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.

Nah, Apple made the right choice. Nobody except a niche market of hobbyists is interested in running tiny quantized models.

About the same niche market as the people who bought the Apple I, and we know where that went.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#230

Post by wtallis »

HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #54
aprilnya wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- GPU is integrated into the SoC - Surprisingly, it is possible to plug a drive into a TB/USB port …so what do you actually need PCIe for?

but what about second GPU?

Multiple GPUs was tried, by the whole industry including Apple (most notably with the trash can Mac Pro). Despite significant investment, it was ultimately a failure for consumer workloads like gaming, and was relegated to the datacenter and some very high-end workstations depending on the workload.

Multi-GPU has recently experienced a resurgence due to the discovery of new workloads with broader appeal (LLMs), but that's too new to have significantly influenced hardware architectures, and LLM inference isn't the most natural thing to scale across many GPUs. Everybody's still competing with more or less the architectures they had on hand when LLMs arrived, with new low-precision matrix math units squeezed in wherever room can be made. It's not at all clear yet what the long-term outcome will be in terms of the balance between local vs cloud compute for inference, whether there will be any local training/fine-tuning at all, and which use cases are ultimately profitable in the long run. All of that influences whether it would be worthwhile for Apple to abandon their current client-first architecture that standardizes on a single integrated GPU and omits/rejects the complexity of multi-GPU setups.

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