They finally did it - you can use an Nvidia card I assume with the new Mac Pro?
edit:
Apparently not actually - they only list I/O cards and others as connectible. No mention of GPU.
Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
251–260 of 403 posts
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's bizarre that you'd pay $3000 more over the Mac Studio for zero extra performance, upgradability only for storage, and a bunch of useless PCI slots that don't support GPUs.
Yeah the Pro feels like a miss. I figured it would have same specs as the Studio for its SoC but would come with a bunch of options for co processor cards akin to the Afterburner card. So a studio you can kit out for additional specialized performance. Maybe those cards will trickle out over time, but not having them ready at launch makes the Pro feel like an afterthought right now.
It might have been a good idea to put the M2 itself on a replaceable board. Other than adding some professional video out or capture cards, which you could probably just do via Thunderbolt, I'm just baffled by this product.
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you think the odds are we can get H100s or equivalent in Mac Studio?
Nvidia gpus haven't been supported by Macs for a long time. Apple and Nvidia relations are not good for some reason.
https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/10/13/apple-vs-nvidia-w...
Nvidia had a knack for putting Apple into difficult situations.
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Overall I don't think it's horrendously priced as some of the previous Mac workstation components could get, but at the same time, unless you have a very specific use case or specifically need macOS, it's not exactly compelling. It is "good enough" to finally round out the lineup though. It's such a specific use case that I'm not entirely sure what the use case even is. Capturing off an SDI camera? Great! Why do we…
I am probably the minimal target market for the mac pro m2 ultra. I am an artist and I do a lot of 3D rendering. I think it's a great price and I would love to own one, but I wouldn't even consider it unless it had support for Nvidia GPUs. Good GPU-based 3D rendering engines need CUDA. Even with the ones that don't, GPU rendering on a 4090 is 4x-5x times more performant than on an M2 Max, and building my own PC allow…
Seriously - they do not even talk about GPU in the PCIe slot - then again they do not expressly rule it out either.
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#255Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#256The best thing about this whole event is that they didn't mention AI even once, all they're saying is ML. Which is what it is. AI is a hype word.
ML is subset of AI. AI that is inclusive of other concepts and it's not a buzzword. It's valid to call anything ML as AI. Sure there is a lot of AI hype but it's not some made up marketing jargon.
AI as a term is poorly-defined, and conjures associations that range from sorta-accurate to totally fictional. ML is a specific set of concrete technologies, so it's a better and more precise term in most contexts
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#257Well there was 3 interesting questions about the apple silicon mac pro going into the keynote: - how will they provide more RAM than the Mac Studio? - how will they provide more GPU than the Mac Studio? - how will they provide more CPU than the Mac Studio? And the answer is « let’s not! » I’m disappointed there was no surprise on that front. I’m sad they mentioned gaming and created a « gaming mode » and then the Mac…
The GPU situation is getting really dire, and showing the obvious limitations of putting everything on one die at-scale. The Blender benchmarks tell the entire story now that Metal is supported: https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query The M2 Max renders on-par with a 90 watt, 12nm RTX 2070 laptop card. From 2018.
Is there really no GPU passthrough? This seems insane.
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#258Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious if you can feed all those Ampere CPUs or if it is memory bandwidth constrained. Disclaimer: this is not a "zomg apple grate; others must suck" comment. Apple claims that their integrated design balances things out to get the best performance. It will be interesting once there are some real benchmarks to see how well that claim continues to stack up. The M transition has been amazing, but not every iteration c…
It has 8 x DDR4 3200, so about 204GB/s of memory bandwidth, 1/4th of the M2 Ultra.
Unless somethings dramatically changed with the M2, Apples chips can't leverage their full memory bandwidth in CPU-only workloads so comparing their numbers to those of a discrete CPU isn't especially meaningful. When Anandtech tested the "400GB/sec" M1 Max the most throughput they could coax out of it via the CPU was 224GB/sec.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
The huge bandwidth numbers on the M-series are mainly for the benefit of the GPU, less so the CPU.
Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
#260They finally did it - you can use an Nvidia card I assume with the new Mac Pro? edit: Apparently not actually - they only list I/O cards and others as connectible. No mention of GPU.
Apple doesn't sign Nvidia drivers anymore. It's unlikely they'll be compatible with Nvidia cards specifically until they reverse that particular policy.