Apple Announces M1 Ultra CPU, Mac Studio and Studio Display

[robomartion]

Apple still murders customers on storage prices...

But the Studio Ultra redefines price/performance by any measure. It's another breakthrough.

(The following thoughts are my opinions and I'm happy to hear I am completely wrong. But these opinions are something like informed, not just mouthing off...)

This is the best value Apple has ever offered and it knocks PCs upside the head. No hack can touch the Ultra on value. While you can hack something together sort of comparable based on price, any real advantage — if you can find any at all — will assume your time is worth nothing, or even has negative value.

The Studio Max (vs The Studio Ultra) is unlike previous Mac lower-end offerings in that it is not a cost/performance compromise at all.

Unless you do hi-res pro video, systems development or science, the Ultra is excessive.

IOW, the Ultra should only be pursued if you know exactly why you need it, and if you know this then there's no cost-performance tradeoff to be considered.

The Ultra slams the 2019 Mac Pro into the ground. There are still some very narrow reasons why the Xeon Mac Pro still means something to certain class of buyer, but no such buyer ever chimes in on these forums. I think the most significant of these narrow cases is ECC RAM — I believe the M1 is not ECC RAM, but I'm happy to find out I'm wrong 'cause if it is, it just increases its value over 2019 Mac Pro.

For the Studio Max, there's horsepower to spare for anyone doing DTP / photo and many other common workloads, with lots of room to grow into new styles of work. The Studio Max encourages wasteful approaches to work because there's so much power. The Ultra is just gilding the lily.

For 98.9% of buyers, get the Max and put the $2K towards something else, like Studio display, storage, etc.

(I'll say it again, these are opinions and I'm not intending to beat anyone over the head. Looking forward to hearing a contrary view)

For anyone considering the Mac Studio I wouldn't take Apple's benchmarks at face value. They said the M1 Ultra was 40% faster than a 12900K but if the Max benchmarks are anything to go by it will actually be about 10% slower. The same goes with the GPU. They said the Ultra is 80% faster than the W6900X but outside of the Affinity Photo Benchmark going by Geekbench the M1 Ultra is 40% slower. You will want to find out the true performance in the tasks you will be performing or the Mac Studio might disappoint. If you're ProRes video editing I would say the Studio is a good choice but even the base M1 Mac Mini will be fast enough for that just because of the dedicated ProRes cores.

 

[pastrychef]

For anyone considering the Mac Studio I wouldn't take Apple's benchmarks at face value. They said the M1 Ultra was 40% faster than a 12900K but if the Max benchmarks are anything to go by it will actually be about 10% slower. The same goes with the GPU. They said the Ultra is 80% faster than the W6900X but outside of the Affinity Photo Benchmark going by Geekbench the M1 Ultra is 40% slower. You will want to find out the true performance in the tasks you will be performing or the Mac Studio might disappoint. If you're ProRes video editing I would say the Studio is a good choice but even the base M1 Mac Mini will be fast enough for that just because of the dedicated ProRes cores.

The GPU is probably slower than W6900X but the CPU multi core scores beats anything I've seen from the 12900K on the Geekbench site. 12900K has a slight advantage in single core.

The other thing to consider is, what you will do with your 12900K and W6900X when Apple drops macOS support for the X86 platform?

 

[stevegut78]

Really trying to figure out the cost benefit here. I could replace my i7 8770k RX580 hack and pick up an M1 Max base CPU. I would upgrade to 64GB RAM. I have 32GB now but thinking future proof and support for video editing since the memory is shared with the GPU. The conundrum is storage. Right now I have 256GB OS m2 and several other SSDs which I used symlinks for Documents, Music, etc to keep the OS m2 free for the OS and programs. Then I have a couple spinning disks for time machine and video file archives. I'm trying to find a good NAS/DAS solution that could replace this mix of disks. When I factor that cost in, I can't justify the cost.

Anyone have any insight into a good external storage solution that would be able to provide high performance r/w and also be able to allocate some of the disk for time machine? Was looking at QNAP, Synology offerings with thunderbolt 3 or 10GBE. We're talking an additional $1300+ on top of the Mac Studio.

 

[HackinMax]

Holy frijole! That's way out of my price tolerance.

 

[Middleman]

Really trying to figure out the cost benefit here. I could replace my i7 8770k RX580 hack and pick up an M1 Max base CPU. I would upgrade to 64GB RAM. I have 32GB now but thinking future proof and support for video editing since the memory is shared with the GPU. The conundrum is storage. Right now I have 256GB OS m2 and several other SSDs which I used symlinks for Documents, Music, etc to keep the OS m2 free for the OS and programs. Then I have a couple spinning disks for time machine and video file archives. I'm trying to find a good NAS/DAS solution that could replace this mix of disks. When I factor that cost in, I can't justify the cost.

Anyone have any insight into a good external storage solution that would be able to provide high performance r/w and also be able to allocate some of the disk for time machine? Was looking at QNAP, Synology offerings with thunderbolt 3 or 10GBE. We're talking an additional $1300+ on top of the Mac Studio.

For storage there's quite a few new options out now. DAS is really needed if you work with photo/video or files a lot. I've been using a Drobo 5D & Areca RAID combo for years which went from 5TB first now to 40TB in size. The Areca is a backup of the Drobo. For reliability, convenience and price nothing touches it. It is a literal workhorse. The newer 5D3 and Turbo versions should work just as well and should be good also for Time Machine (as they have great Mac support).

For my office documents I also have a QNAP NAS on a 1GBe network. Attached to that is a large USB drive secondary backup (which is essential). Whilst the QNAP is great for accessing files quickly, online security is bit of a concern these days so I kind of advise against it. But if you like, on newer QNAPs there are ones such as TVS-1282TB3 that is fitted with both Thunderbolt 3 and also option to install 10GBe cards and/or additional enclosures to form storage pools, so these are ideal for large projects/archives/studios. And of course there is also the option of setting up IP-based remote backup repositories with using NAS, so you can create another backup location other than at your home (for best backup practice).

For drives I would recommend fitting either HGST, WD Reds or Toshiba branded into the NAS. Anything else don't bother as reliability is absolutely crucial for running these. Most HDDs can run about 3 years ideally before replacement (if run on a daily basis). Try to fit Enterprise versions if you can for best reliability.

 

[pastrychef]

Really trying to figure out the cost benefit here. I could replace my i7 8770k RX580 hack and pick up an M1 Max base CPU. I would upgrade to 64GB RAM. I have 32GB now but thinking future proof and support for video editing since the memory is shared with the GPU. The conundrum is storage. Right now I have 256GB OS m2 and several other SSDs which I used symlinks for Documents, Music, etc to keep the OS m2 free for the OS and programs. Then I have a couple spinning disks for time machine and video file archives. I'm trying to find a good NAS/DAS solution that could replace this mix of disks. When I factor that cost in, I can't justify the cost.

Anyone have any insight into a good external storage solution that would be able to provide high performance r/w and also be able to allocate some of the disk for time machine? Was looking at QNAP, Synology offerings with thunderbolt 3 or 10GBE. We're talking an additional $1300+ on top of the Mac Studio.

I don't know how fast you need your storage to be... I run a Synology clone with 10GBase-T. I have an eight drive SHR2 array. Here's what I get on Blackmagic Disk Speed Test:

 

[djlild7hina]

Already retired my hack but pulled the trigger on a Max Studio. We'll see if I cancel or not

 

[stevegut78]

For storage there's quite a few new options out now. DAS is really needed if you work with photo/video or files a lot. I've been using a Drobo 5D & Areca RAID combo for years which went from 5TB first now to 40TB in size. The Areca is a backup of the Drobo. For reliability, convenience and price nothing touches it. It is a literal workhorse. The newer 5D3 and Turbo versions should work just as well and should be good also for Time Machine (as they have great Mac support).

For my office documents I also have a QNAP NAS on a 1GBe network. Attached to that is a large USB drive secondary backup (which is essential). Whilst the QNAP is great for accessing files quickly, online security is bit of a concern these days so I kind of advise against it. But if you like, on newer QNAPs there are ones such as TVS-1282TB3 that is fitted with both Thunderbolt 3 and also option to install 10GBe cards and/or additional enclosures to form storage pools, so these are ideal for large projects/archives/studios. And of course there is also the option of setting up IP-based remote backup repositories with using NAS, so you can create another backup location other than at your home (for best backup practice).

For drives I would recommend fitting either HGST, WD Reds or Toshiba branded into the NAS. Anything else don't bother as reliability is absolutely crucial for running these. Most HDDs can run about 3 years ideally before replacement (if run on a daily basis). Try to fit Enterprise versions if you can for best reliability.

I don't know how fast you need your storage to be... I run a Synology clone with 10GBase-T. I have an eight drive SHR2 array. Here's what I get on Blackmagic Disk Speed Test:

View attachment 543524

Thank you both. I'm not interested in any cloud capability with the NAS. I would prefer to keep it simple if I could just have a DAS that has high throughput at and affordable cost. I basically would primarily only need access to it from the Mac. I would say my use would need high throughput initially to move the data but once the data is there, it would just be day to day type stuff like symlinking my downloads, Photos/video sync from iPhone (library is 400GB), iTunes library is about 500GB. I'm pretty sure having these libraries on either a DAS/NAS would not impact performance too bad?

My digital video archive from other devices (drones, action cameras) is around 3TB currently but continuously growing. That would be my heavy task. For this I think my workflow would be to copy the video files from the source media to the Mac Studio for editing. Then copy the original and edited version to the DAS/NAS for archival. Videos could be up to 20-30GB at times. So if it takes a little while here and there not a bad thing since once it's copied to the DAS/NAS it's mainly just going to sit there.

The final thing is I would want to use this for time machine destination as well. I remember doing time machine backups a long time ago over the network and it was bad. I'm sure it's better now but I feel having thunderbolt 3 would be best. Seems Qnap has some nice Thunderbolt 3 options but they are pricey. Drobo looks nice but sold out everywhere. How much does a Synology clone run?

 

[hboy89]

Thank you both. I'm not interested in any cloud capability with the NAS. I would prefer to keep it simple if I could just have a DAS that has high throughput at and affordable cost. I basically would primarily only need access to it from the Mac. I would say my use would need high throughput initially to move the data but once the data is there, it would just be day to day type stuff like symlinking my downloads, Photos/video sync from iPhone (library is 400GB), iTunes library is about 500GB. I'm pretty sure having these libraries on either a DAS/NAS would not impact performance too bad?

My digital video archive from other devices (drones, action cameras) is around 3TB currently but continuously growing. That would be my heavy task. For this I think my workflow would be to copy the video files from the source media to the Mac Studio for editing. Then copy the original and edited version to the DAS/NAS for archival. Videos could be up to 20-30GB at times. So if it takes a little while here and there not a bad thing since once it's copied to the DAS/NAS it's mainly just going to sit there.

The final thing is I would want to use this for time machine destination as well. I remember doing time machine backups a long time ago over the network and it was bad. I'm sure it's better now but I feel having thunderbolt 3 would be best. Seems Qnap has some nice Thunderbolt 3 options but they are pricey. Drobo looks nice but sold out everywhere. How much does a Synology clone run?

You don’t actually need a special dedicated NAS server. You can just install a flavor of Linux and set your old computer up (with all storage drive already in it) as NAS server.

All you need to make time machine work is to make the drives available over the network via SMB.

gigabit Ethernet would be more than fast enough for any of these task except that copying the 30gb files could take ~4-5 minutes.

My point is you don’t need to buy an expensive NAS server. Any old desktop will work. And if you don’t need transcoding or video related, you can even sell the GPU. The NAS server just has a nice form factor and raid/cloud stuff built in — but you’re a hackintosher — I’m sure you can figure out that stuff in Linux.

 

[hboy89]

As for my general thoughts on the studio:

Apple finally made a desktop for the above average user. The Mini was always constrained to bad integrated graphics, too few usable ports, and low upgradeability. The pro was always ridiculously pricey. I was hoping for a somewhat lower entry price but it’s finally a good machine at an ok price. And now we don’t have to buy/upgrade our displays at the same cadence, which always bothered me because they’d still be usable AND it’s a ton of unnecessary ewaste.

I am still upset about the lack of upgradeability but I get that it wouldn’t matter with a SOC design with shared memory. I guess Apple thinks thunderbolt 4 is a replacement for pcie. I wonder how their pro model will handle things and if they will allow for a few internal m2 slots and maybe a pcie slot or two.

Overall it’s a very nice machine and for creative workflows i expect it to perform VERY well.

Gamers probably still want the 12700k+6800xt for now. I don’t think Intel/Amd are resting on their laurels. We may see Intel catch up to Apple on Intel4 with Meteor Lake.