Apple Announces M1 Ultra CPU, Mac Studio and Studio Display

[pastrychef]

Agreed! It certainly is a work of art - a technical tour de force. However when it comes to aesthetics it is a bit lacking. This is what it looks like under someone’s monitor.

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I think the silver color is getting a bit dated. I would've loved Space Grey...

At the end of the day, I'm most concerned with performance and reliability and aesthetics are secondary to me. I'll probably have it sitting behind my monitor anyway. I have my monitor too low for it to fit like your picture. I just need access to the USB ports and SD slot.

 

[CaseySJ]

Is Apple intentionally limiting GPU power draw of M1 Max and Ultra despite the huge headroom available for cooling? Or are these chips unable to clock any higher?

 

[pastrychef]

Is Apple intentionally limiting GPU power draw of M1 Max and Ultra despite the huge headroom available for cooling? Or are these chips unable to clock any higher?

Good video.

Hopefully, Apple can clock these systems higher with a firmware update. Temperature-wise, there's a heckuva lot of headroom. It doesn't make sense to clock these the same way they would laptops since much more robust cooling systems are in the Studios.

 

[trs96]

I would've loved Space Grey...

Story from inverse.com about the origins of Apple's Space Gray

Everyone involved in The Hunger Games to get the new iPhone X already knows the drill — it comes in only two colors, silver or space gray. While the two might not sound that different, a former NASA astronaut who flew aboard the space shuttle Atlantis tells Inverse there’s some actual history behind the popular “space gray.”

“There are panels that the switches [in the space shuttle] are mounted on that look like that color,” Leland Melvin, former NASA Astronaut and current Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math (STEAM) advocate, tells Inverse. “I like to get Space Gray but sometimes I just get what they have in the store.”

Melvin adds that space gray looks like aluminum, which was ubiquitous aboard the space shuttle Atlantis, which he flew on in 2008 and 2009 as mission specialist. “[Aluminum is used] for all the different systems, like electrical, hydraulic, robotics work station, etc,” Melvin says.

Apple first introduced Space Gray back in 2013, when it debuted the iPhone 5 collection. The dark gray definitely gives the phone a 2001: A Space Odyssey quality without being ostentatious. Perhaps the drawback of the iPhone X isn’t its limited color range, but its extreme fragility. At least that’s what people who know more about tech than I do are saying.

While most of us will never go to space, getting a phone that looks like it could come from space is definitely the next best thing. If it allows us to live vicariously through astronauts far more capable than us, then it’s worth every penny.

 

[scottkendall]

I think the silver color is getting a bit dated. I would've loved Space Grey...

Fear not with in a few months there will be skins for it...

 

[c-o-pr]

Is Apple intentionally limiting GPU power draw of M1 Max and Ultra despite the huge headroom available for cooling? Or are these chips unable to clock any higher?

Just waving hands: As the Ultra is two dies fused together, the long cross-section of that package is so vast maybe there's a propagation timing limit for the design?

This is also just one more step in a endless progression of products, where the future will offer more advances.

Apple's marketing is in flux, where it seems the idea of "pro" has finished a very long turn away from broadcast environs towards individual content creators. Just as pre-press gave way to desktop publishing 20 years ago, video is now an individual enterprise. The "Studio" by name and design signals big changes in expectations about the market. What looks a little messy is that due to mishandling the progress of Final Cut Pro and Aperture in previous turns, Apple appears to have glitched its greatest advantage which is control of the total stack from app to microcode for performance. Will they recover with a reunification? From Apple's perspective they can find cheer in vast profits from iOS and Store. The Mac Studio suggests they are looking backwards a little shoring up a desktop segment they let lapse. The M1 Ultra doesn't actually innovate anything; to me, the fusing of the Maxes has the feek of a skunk-works that Apple took a chance to shake up perceptions about cost / performance as a stop-gap to a better rounded new desktop architecture. The so-said "beauty" of the Studio is that it is totally engineered, but to me it's not lovely in and of itself. I think the 2013 cylinder with passive cooling is a more attractive design.

I say props to the design as they took a chance on a beefy device at a great price.

I see reviews about how the Ultra is not living up to claim of 3090 GPU in gfx performance and I get a headache: the 3090 has been $2500 on the street, if you can get one, and the only way they have to assess its performance is AAA game title frame-rates. You get the Ultra upgrade and 500$ compared to putting a 3090 in a PC and it's literally 2x everything compute, compared to Call of Duty at 4K 60+ FPS. I don't see the comparison.

The best reviews of the Studio say this device makes everything the user does smoother and more effective, and enables promise of some new tools. To me this sounds like a nice accomplishment.

 

[scottkendall]

Just waving hands: As the Ultra is two dies fused together, the long cross-section of that package is so vast maybe there's a propagation timing limit for the design?

This is also just one more step in a endless progression of products, where the future will offer more advances.

Apple's marketing is in flux, where it seems the idea of "pro" has finished a very long turn away from broadcast environs towards individual content creators. Just as pre-press gave way to desktop publishing 20 years ago, video is now an individual enterprise. The "Studio" by name and design signals big changes in expectations about the market. What looks a little messy is that due to mishandling the progress of Final Cut Pro and Aperture in previous turns, Apple appears to have glitched its greatest advantage which is control of the total stack from app to microcode for performance. Will they recover with a reunification? From Apple's perspective they can find cheer in vast profits from iOS and Store. The Mac Studio suggests they are looking backwards a little shoring up a desktop segment they let lapse. The M1 Ultra doesn't actually innovate anything; to me, the fusing of the Maxes has the feek of a skunk-works that Apple took a chance to shake up perceptions about cost / performance as a stop-gap to a better rounded new desktop architecture. The so-said "beauty" of the Studio is that it is totally engineered, but to me it's not lovely in and of itself. I think the 2013 cylinder with passive cooling is a more attractive design.

I say props to the design as they took a chance on a beefy device at a great price.

I see reviews about how the Ultra is not living up to claim of 3090 GPU in gfx performance and I get a headache: the 3090 has been $2500 on the street, if you can get one, and the only way they have to assess its performance is AAA game title frame-rates. You get the Ultra upgrade and 500$ compared to putting a 3090 in a PC and it's literally 2x everything compute, compared to Call of Duty at 4K 60+ FPS. I don't see the comparison.

The best reviews of the Studio say this device makes everything the user does smoother and more effective, and enables promise of some new tools. To me this sounds like a nice accomplishment.

Besides the beauty of the 2013 Trashcan was that you could put a 6" plumbing reducer to 4" and a 4" duct to the outside and dump all the heat to the outside. Why would they need passive cooling the Tarascan fan was so silent only after running a rendering for 3/hrs in the middle of the summer did I ever hear the fan. I had a 8 core D700 version.

Are people buying the ultra to play call of duty at 4k 60k FPS? I would guess not! I would also guessing when apple compares the ultra to the 3090 it is not from a gaming perspective but instead media editing perspective.

 

[Going Bald]

Is Apple intentionally limiting GPU power draw of M1 Max and Ultra despite the huge headroom available for cooling? Or are these chips unable to clock any higher?

What I want to see is not benchmarking but real time video processing of, say, special effects for a movie in an actual production. Benchmarking is OK, but is no substitute for the real world.

 

[D-One]

I think that is right. If those are 2230 SSDs there's no way 8TB would possibly fit on one of them. Even making a 4TB capacity on a drive that small is a major challenge. Hope that some reviewers that paid the big bucks for 4 or 8TB upgrades show us their drives. Interested to see how Apple does make it work.

Here's a Samsung 8TB drive where you can see the 8 nand flash chips. Think this is a 2280mm drive but it might be longer.

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Seems so. Apples' website marketing pics show 2 SSD's, perfectly mirrored part so it cant be anything else I think.

This guy has 2 Mac Studios and tried transplanting one SSD into one of the computers... I guess he assumed it could 'see' 2 drives but that didn't work, so some software config is necessary, Apple Configurator 2? I guess he will try that next:

 

[pastrychef]

Seems so, Apples website marketing pics show 2 SSD's, perfectly mirrored part so it cant be anything else I think.

This guy has 2 Mac Studios and tried transplanting one SSD into one of the computers... I guess he assumed it could 'see' 2 drives but that didn't work, so some software config is necessary, Apple Configurator 2? I guess he will try that next:

Why didn't this dumbass boot from USB to see if reformatting and reinstalling macOS would work? At the very least check how Disk Utility recognizes the SSDs.