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Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

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Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#361

Post by fit2rule »

makeitdouble wrote: post #337
jeffbee wrote: post #76

$7k starting price. High but compared to? Just glancing at the new HP Z6 G5, which may be a fair comparison, with a 16-core CPU, 8x16GB of memory (the lowest configuration that populates all 8 channels of that CPU), minimal storage, and a parts bin GPU that nobody wants, $6k. To get 8 thunderbolt ports like the mac pro you'd have to fill each and every one of its add-in card slots with a HP dual TB4 card. Edit: The H…

With the M2 transition, I feel we're back in the days of the PowerMac G5. It was a beast on its own, but the main issue for comparison was that you couldn't just do the same things. If you're working on video editing or Photoshop perhaps, but if you're developping games for instance you'll want an x86 computer, and however good the M2 specs are on benchmarks, you can't compare it on real world usage anymore. For ML i…

[dead]

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#362

Post by rektide »

dathinab wrote: post #355
rektide wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple already outclasses everyone in throughput & throughput/watt especially. In case it wasn't already crystal clear, I was talking about everyone else finding ways to get their throughput up to more competitive levels, such as by supporting GDDR.

But a huge part of their throughput numbers is them having the equivalent of 16 memory channels. AFIK it's not that e.g. AMD couldn't do that and use on-die LPDDR5, I mean that is a bit different but not sustainable harder then using their chiplet + X3D tech. The problem is that for AMD it's not a good business decision. First they need to be price competitive (a problem Apple doesn't have). Most applications outside…

I don't know but I could see the possibility that maybe AMD really can use more throughput for mobile chips.

To spitball some figures, the rx7600 is 13b transistors, 165watts, and runs off 128-bit 288GBps GDDR6 memory. Or take 2017's rx580, but which was 256-bit GDDR5 good for 224GBps, at similar power.

An APU is going to be considerably lower power than either of these discrete gpus. I think I somewhat overestimated AMD's ability to scale up their APUs to be throughput limited, in most cases. The 256GBps LPDDR5X memory they're planning should offer a nice bump over where we are be pretty good.

I'm a bit surprised to see the memory bandwidth not being as constraining a factor as I had first guessed. It's also seemingly bizarre how overbuilt it makes Apple's memory setup look.

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#363

Post by kalleboo »

sbierwagen wrote: post #143
wmf wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$3,000 just for slots certainly sends the message that Apple views their customers as completely captive though.

The press release mentions a bunch of use cases for the slots, but does anyone actually sell Apple Silicon-compatible cards yet? It's a brand new processor architecture after all. I checked the store page and it doesn't show any. (The old page would let you configure a Pro with more GPUs or afterburner cards)

Rosetta works for drivers as well (as long as they use the user-mode DriverKit interface rather than kernel extensions)

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#364

Post by pinkcan »

bfrog wrote: post #279

Only 24 cpu cores? Doesn't that seem skimpy when compared to say, a threadripper or sapphire rapids xeon?

what do you use the cpu cores for on a threadripper, is it work that any of the other computing units available on this chip can do?

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#365

Post by bfrog »

pinkcan wrote: post #364
bfrog wrote: post #279

Only 24 cpu cores? Doesn't that seem skimpy when compared to say, a threadripper or sapphire rapids xeon?

what do you use the cpu cores for on a threadripper, is it work that any of the other computing units available on this chip can do?

Compiling and running tests

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#366

Post by dathinab »

rektide wrote: post #362
dathinab wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a huge part of their throughput numbers is them having the equivalent of 16 memory channels. AFIK it's not that e.g. AMD couldn't do that and use on-die LPDDR5, I mean that is a bit different but not sustainable harder then using their chiplet + X3D tech. The problem is that for AMD it's not a good business decision. First they need to be price competitive (a problem Apple doesn't have). Most applications outside…

I don't know but I could see the possibility that maybe AMD really can use more throughput for mobile chips. To spitball some figures, the rx7600 is 13b transistors, 165watts, and runs off 128-bit 288GBps GDDR6 memory. Or take 2017's rx580, but which was 256-bit GDDR5 good for 224GBps, at similar power. An APU is going to be considerably lower power than either of these discrete gpus. I think I somewhat overestimated…

I mean it is a constraining factor for live on-the fly real time multi 8k-track video editing and similar ;=)

It's just that most people don't do that on a daily usage basis.

Maybe not a I need 800GiB/s constraining factor but definitely a I don't want just 200GiB/s constraining factor AFIK.

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#368

Post by jdboyd »

jeffbee wrote: post #218
derefr wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's such a specific use case that I'm not entirely sure what the use case even is. Live TV production, I think. Mostly in the rackmount form-factor. A plethora of "IO breakout boards" is what turns a regular computer into a "video production system" head-unit. Though also, at least three of the PCI-e cards shown on the slide were for fibre-optic networking. So, presumably, this would be the Mac to get if you're tr…

I liked how one of the cards on the screen was a sound card, as if a PCIe slot wasn't 1000x overkill for that amount of I/O. We had USB ports that could handle that when Bill Clinton was still president of the United States.

Plus for audio tasks that USB isn't good enough for, there is Thunderbolt (Avid will do 256 channels via TB3) and Ethernet (256+ channels via AVB possible).

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#369

Post by pjmlp »

chillbill wrote: post #41

The 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.

Indeed, BUILD 2023 was impossible, if we would be drinking shots by everytime AI was mentioned I wouldn't have survived the keynote.

Re: Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro

#370

Post by Toutouxc »

ttfkam wrote: post #80
ghaff wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did get an Apple Silicon MacBook 18 months or so ago but my 2015 MacBook Pro is still fine for pretty much everything except ML and video/image processing.

Or anything that requires a quieter, fan-noise-less environment that doesn't burn your lap on direct skin contact. But yeah, the 2015 MBP was a truly great model that precedes soldered RAM and USB-C-only port selection.

> 2015 MBP was a truly great model that precedes soldered RAM

The last MacBook with upgradeable RAM was the non-retina 2012 Pro.

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