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Apple Mac Studio

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Re: Apple Mac Studio

#131

Post by codyb »

yewenjie wrote: post #107
areoform wrote: post #22

I would like to highlight just how much Apple is focusing on their customers and use cases right now. It seems that they're targeting products to what their professional customers actually want. And in this case, it's a 3.7" little thing that can process 18 streams of 8k video (fully specced out). That's kinda crazy, and they're doing it at a price point that's competitive compared to all of the companies out there.…

Wait, how and why did Apple suddenly become cost-effective?

Apple’s been fairly cost competitive for a while now. That’s an old trope, lots of their new stuff is similarly priced or in some cases cheaper than their competitors.

Given the longevity and resale value, they make great machines.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#133

Post by birdyrooster »

the_lucifer wrote: post #75
minimaxir wrote: post #7

The Mac Studio's HDMI doesn't support 120Hz out (so likely HDMI 2.0?) and it also doesn't come with a keyboard and mouse.

Seems like it shares the same shortcomings as the M1 Pro/Max family then.

At least the display port goes 120Hz beyond.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#134

Post by GeekyBear »

nerdjon wrote: post #15

More and more I see the M1 chips and I wish Mac worked seriously well for gaming. Would love too see something like Proton but for Mac (given up hopes for native support). I hate that I have my gaming PC and then my Mac for everything else. I have to wonder though what their plan is for the M2. Are they laying the groundwork for when the M2 comes out all of these variants will be ready at the same time? Or a gradual…

The good news is that optimized iPhone, iPad, and Mac games now share most of their code and run on the same CPU and GPU cores.

There aren't many Mac games that have been ported over to both Metal and ARM, but World of Warcraft is an example.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#135

Post by minimaxir »

jachee wrote: post #87
Tiktaalik wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. If Apple supported gaming more I'd be able to drop this PC. Could be the sort of thing that could cause an avalanche of switchers. You'd also pull over the entire games industry into the Apple space. Right now we code on PCs. As Apple silicon gets better, it's gonna be more and more painful to not be able to make use of that.

> If Apple supported gaming more You mean if gaming supported Apple more, right? The industry's reliance on DirectX and the frameworks that build on it are largely what keep gaming so PC-centric. If we saw AAA studios embrace macOS-compatible (or better yet Open Source) graphics architecture, the need to have separate gaming PCs (and the insanely expensive GPUs associated therewith) would evaporate.

Even games running on engines like Unity and UE4 that support macOS/Metal don't support macOS because the userbase size isn't worth the overhead.

It's a chicken and egg problem, although Apple Arcade is a good approach to try and bridge that gap.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#136

Post by nextos »

areoform wrote: post #22

I would like to highlight just how much Apple is focusing on their customers and use cases right now. It seems that they're targeting products to what their professional customers actually want. And in this case, it's a 3.7" little thing that can process 18 streams of 8k video (fully specced out). That's kinda crazy, and they're doing it at a price point that's competitive compared to all of the companies out there.…

This is very interesting because PC workstations have been stagnating for quite long! It'd be cool to be able to bring medium-sized tasks back from clouds to personal computers.

The CPU performance is impressive but I wonder how well it'd fare against say an AMD ThreadRipper or a dual socket system with an equivalent price? It'd be also interesting to see a deep learning benchmark against Nvidia. Branding and RAM limits suggest this is geared towards video processing, but might also be useful for some other domains.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#137

Post by yurishimo »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #3

I think from a design perspective, this is the most disappointing Apple release so far. It's just way too tall, imo. There's a lot of empty space on the front which just seems odd. I'm not exactly sure what they could've done to keep the Mac Mini footprint, but this ain't it.

I'm convinced the design is a tradeoff to make this work in the datacenter. With the exact same footprint, racks of Mac Mini servers can be converted to fit these with very little effort.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#138

Post by throwaway894345 »

nouveaux wrote: post #71
areoform wrote: post #22

I would like to highlight just how much Apple is focusing on their customers and use cases right now. It seems that they're targeting products to what their professional customers actually want. And in this case, it's a 3.7" little thing that can process 18 streams of 8k video (fully specced out). That's kinda crazy, and they're doing it at a price point that's competitive compared to all of the companies out there.…

> they're doing it at a price point that's competitive compared to all of the companies out there I think they're blowing all their competitors out of the water with the price point. It's not just a 10-20% difference in price anymore.

And you can tell because they were marketing their products in relation to older Apple products rather than other manufacturers.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#139

Post by mynameisvlad »

rovr138 wrote: post #57
mynameisvlad wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe extending the grill all the way around with some other design changes to make it feel fresh, and not just a taller Mac Mini?

You also have to consider thermals and how the air would flow over components. It's not just as simple as adding more holes

Fake grills have existed for years. More airflow is usually, but not always, better.

All I'm saying is the current design doesn't look good to me, and some more work could've been done to not just make it look like a weird, tall Mac Mini.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#140

Post by bredren »

unfocussed_mike wrote: post #23
cube2222 wrote: post #2

Looks like all the people saying "just start fusing those M1 CPU's into bigger ones" were right, that's basically what they did for the top of the line new M1 CPU (fused two M1 Max'es together). And since the presenter mentioned the Mac Pro would come on another day, I wonder if they'll just do 4x M1 Max for that.

I think the Mac Pro is almost like a phantom product at this point. Or a riff. Like they're going to say "the new Mac Pro is there is no more Mac Pro". What can they really do, in a single machine, that is more "Pro" than the Studio? How are they going to bring developers along when most aren't developing for twenty-core machines? I still think something else is coming. Maybe something unconventionally stackable. Som…

It has been a phantom product, because Apple has needed to fill major gaps in the desktop space first.

I suspect Apple is set to debut powerful revision to the Mac Pro focused on AI/ML at WWDC.

I wrote about this 10 months back[0], and it still applies following Studio:

> It may not be obvious, but Apple has repair work to do in the pro community. Four years ago this month, Apple unusually disclosed that it was "completely rethinking the Mac Pro." [1]

> The current Mac Pro design wasn't announced until June of 2019 and didn't hit the market until December 10th of 2019. That's just six months prior to the Apple Silicon announcement.

> It seems unlikely Apple spent 2017-2019 designing a Mac Pro that they would not carry forward with Apple Silicon hardware.

> The current, Gen 3 2019 Mac Pro design has the Mac Pro Expansion Module (MPX). This is intended to be a plug-and-play system for graphics and storage upgrades. [2]

> While the Apple Silicon SoC can run with some GPU tasks, it does seem it does not make sense for the type of work that big discrete cards have generally been deployed for.

> There is already a living example of a custom Apple-designed external graphics card. Apple designed and released Afterburner, a custom "accelerator" card targeted at video editing with the gen 3 Mac Pro in 2019.

> Afterburner has attributes of the new Apple Silicon design in that it is proprietary to Apple and fanless. [3]

> It seems implausible Apple created the Afterburner product for a single release without plans to continue to upgrade and extend the product concept using Apple Silicon.

Given "Ultrafusion" it seems plausible that M2 would be able connect multiple custom SoCs that are littered with GPU cores as stackable accelerator cards.

> So, I think the question isn't if discrete Apple Silicon GPUs will be supported but how many types and in and what configurations.

This prediction not come to pass:

> I think the Mac Mini will remain its shape and size, and that alongside internal discrete GPUs for the Pro, Apple may release something akin to the Blackmagic eGPU products they collaborated on for the RX580 and Vega 56.

But at least the mid market display now exists. > While possibly not big sellers, Apple Silicon eGPUs would serve generations of new AS notebooks and minis. This creates a whole additional use case. The biggest problem I see with this being a cohesive ecosystem is the lack of a mid-market Apple display. [4]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26956886

[1] https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives

[2] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/apple-unveils-powerfu...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33ywFqY5o1E

[4] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/wishful-thinking-wwdc-d...

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