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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#301

Post by gehsty »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #61
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.

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…

Why should Apple have done this? It doesn’t fit their business in anyway shape or form. Where does data centre hardware sit relative to electronics / humanities cross roads that is foundational for Apple?

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#302

Post by rayiner »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #274
rayiner wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A 10% performance reduction seems like a lot to be leaving on the table.

Not really.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#303

Post by whywhywhywhy »

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…

> But inference is unique because its performance scales with high memory throughput, and you can’t assemble that by wiring together off the shelf parts in a consumer form factor.

Nvidia outperforms Mac significantly on diffusion inference and many other forms. It’s not as simple as the current Mac chips are entirely better for this.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#304

Post by _ph_ »

The latest Mac Pro really didn't make much use of its size, as there were too few useful things to put into. Especially as the GPU is now part of the package anyway. Also, the Mac Studio is the perfect workstation for the desk.

Still, there are a few things which could be improved relative to the current Studio. First, the ability to easily clean the internals from dust. You should be able to just lift the lid and clean the computer. Also, it would be great to have one Mac which you could just plug in a bunch of NVMe disks.

On the other side, they might replace the Mac Pro with a rack mountable machine as the demand for ARM servers in the cloud raises.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#306

Post by spacedcowboy »

wolfhumble wrote: post #279
spacedcowboy wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I’m planning on selling my 512GB M3 Ultra Studio in the next week or so (I just wrenched my back so I’m on bed-rest for the next few days) with an eye to funding the M5 Ultra Studio when it’s announced at WWDC. I can live without the RAM for a couple of months to get a good price for it, especially since Apple don’t sell that model (with the RAM) any more.

Just out of curiosity, where do you think is the best place to sell a machine like that with the lowest risk of being scammed, while still getting the best possible price? Wish you a speedy recovery for your back!

> Just out of curiosity, where do you think is the best place to sell a machine like that with the lowest risk of being scammed, while still getting the best possible price?

There are none currently on eBay.co.uk, so I'm going to try there. I'll also try some of the reddit UK-specific groups.

As far as not being scammed - it's a really high value one-off sale, so it'll either be local pickup (and cash / bank-transfer at the time, which happens in seconds in the UK) or escrow.com (for non-eBay) with the buyer paying all the fees etc.

I'd prefer local pickup because then I have the money, the buyer can see it working, verify everything to their satisfaction etc. etc.

> Wish you a speedy recovery for your back!

Thank you :) It is a little better today. Sitting down is now tolerable for short periods... :)

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#307

Post by 1W6MIC49CYX9GAP »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #61
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.

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…

Intel doesn't limit how much memory card makers can pair with their GPU. It's up to the card maker.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#308

Post by spacedcowboy »

asimovDev wrote: post #286
wolfhumble wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity, where do you think is the best place to sell a machine like that with the lowest risk of being scammed, while still getting the best possible price? Wish you a speedy recovery for your back!

lowest is probably an apple trade in if available, but i can't imagine how bad of a price hit it will be.

I checked, it's terrible. They don't take into account the size of the RAM in the machine, so you get the base-model trade-in value (£1280). Yeah, no.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#309

Post by actionfromafar »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #263
rubyn00bie wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Apple just stumbled into it, and while I totally agree that Apple is killing it with their unified memory, I think we're going to see a pivot from NVidia and AMD. The biggest reason, I think, is: OpenAI has committed to enormous amount capex it simply cannot afford. It does not have the lead it once did, and most end-users simply do not care. There are no network effects. Anthropic at this point has com…

> A huge reason for this is Apple needs unified memory to keep their money maker (laptops) profitable and performant None of the things people care about really get much out of "unified memory". GPUs need a lot of memory bandwidth, but CPUs generally don't and it's rare to find something which is memory bandwidth bound on a CPU that doesn't run better on a GPU to begin with. Not having to copy data between the CPU an…

> Not having to copy data between the CPU and GPU is nice on paper but again there isn't much in the way of workloads where that was a significant bottleneck.

Isn't that also because that's world we have optimized workloads for?

If the common hardware had unified memory, software would have exploited that I imagine. Hardware and software is in a co-evolutionary loop.

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