Apple Silicon Mac Pro Revealed at WWDC 2023

[trs96]

You won't be able to come close to matching the performance of the internal SSDs with an external SSD.

If using an SN850X and a good USB 4 enclosure you'd get a little less than half those speeds. Real world write speeds will be higher than 2752 MB/s. Acceptable performance. About what you'd get via M.2 slots on PCIe 3.0 motherboards.

This result is from an SN850x and an Acasis USB 4 enclosure that only costs around 110 USD. So not crazy expensive. A 1TB SN850X sells for 78 bucks on Amazon today.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BB74BQVN/?tag=tonymacx86com-20

This external NVMe boot drive would make the most sense on the base Model M2 Mac mini. The ram is way too low. The SSD is slow and only 256 GB. Spending $188 on the above combo would greatly improve it while offering a lot more NVMe storage at faster speeds. Apple charges $200 just to upgrade to 512GB of storage so it's a no brainer.

 

[LasaterJ]

Right after the M1 transition announcement I remember it too.

View attachment 567427

Apple still plans to support Intel-based Macs for years to come

New Macs with Intel chips are still "in the pipeline" and the company is planning to support Intel-based MacOS computers for "years," despite announcing Arm-based Apple silicon.

www.cnet.com

I read “in the pipeline” as “under development” or “under consideration.” Not “definitely to be released.” He was hedging. Supporting Intel Macs for “years” is sufficiently vague that it could mean almost anything. They already have supported Intel Macs for years and Sonoma is not out yet.

When Steve Jobs introduced FaceTime and announced it was going to be an open standard? Now THAT was lying.

 

[scottkendall]

This is a joke ? Now I have performance far beyond fastest new Mac Pro for a fraction of the cost. Most mac users can only dream about it because they would never spend so much money on such a machine . So I dont think that my hackintosh is not "at the same level".

Believe or not but 90% professional video production (or more) is done on PC/Windows . Also, it's not that macOS gives what more performance. For example if we use Adobe Premiere under Windows so this same Adobe Premiere will not run faster on a mac of comparable performance.

Therefore, price is an important element here. if you are doing business you don't like to spend more money to achieve the same thing. And this is the reason why we use hackintosh.

Of course I would like to have new Mac Pro and also maybe change my car on new Ferrari )

No I am not joking, Your CPU might be on par, your memory might be on par, even your hard drive might be on par.

However, that is where it ends; your hack simply does not have the extra hardware encoders the Mac Pro has. I promise you the 60 core GPU will beat up on your 6800 without even flexing. I can tell you this because my 6900 XT loses out to my M2 Max 38 core GPU processing video in Premiere. When Apple released iMac 19 without a T2 chip and the 2018 Mac Mini with a T2 chip, the Mac Mini was Womping the iMac. There is just something about having a dedicated hardware encoder that tips the scales.

As I stated earlier in this thread, if you save $10/hr on 10 projects or 100/hrs X $100/hr, you have effectively paid for the maxed out Mac Pro. When the primary purpose of your PC or Mac is to make money saving time is paramount exp when you have projects lined up. People need to factor their time into the equation.

 

[ckrueger99]

Neil Parfitt comments on the new Mac Pro in his latest video. Also, lots of comments by (semi?-) professional audio users...:

 

[pastrychef]

Neil Parfitt comments on the new Mac Pro in his latest video. Also, lots of comments by (semi?-) professional audeo users...:

Yeah. I agree with a lot of what he said.

This Mac Pro def seems like a rushed product, and I'm guessing that isn't what Apple intended to release when they first announced the transition to Apple Silicon. I'm sure that the COVID lock downs, supply chain issues, and TSMC 3nm delays forced Apple's hand because they were already so late at killing off the final Intel Mac. This probably allowed them to stay on schedule with ending Intel support on macOS.

I loved that he acknowledged the myth of "modularity". Despite having just about everything socketed and replaceable on his MacPro7,1, he has no real upgrade path.

I also agree with him on how "necessary" PCI-e slots are anymore. Without video card options, PCI-e slot usefulness falls off the table. Sure there are some things where Thunderbolt just can't compare: i.e., fast storage and high speed (40Gb+) NICs. But it's a very small subset of customers that will need that stuff. Honestly, how many users here have 40 or 100Gb networking? For things like AV I/O, Thunderbolt is sufficient in most cases.

As for RAM, I think that will mostly get resolved in time with newer generations of Apple Silicon. Going from M1 Ultra to M2 Ultra, we already saw a 50% increase in max RAM. If rumors are true and Apple can stitch together four "Ultra" chips for the next Mac Pro, I think RAM will become a non-issue.

 

[ramazarusx]

Yeah. I agree with a lot of what he said.

This Mac Pro def seems like a rushed product

Yup. Very rushed.

https://wccftech.com/apple-m2-ultra-soc-isnt-faster-than-amd-intel-last-year-desktop-cpus-50-slower-than-nvidia-rtx-4080/

 

[pastrychef]

Yup. Very rushed.

https://wccftech.com/apple-m2-ultra-soc-isnt-faster-than-amd-intel-last-year-desktop-cpus-50-slower-than-nvidia-rtx-4080/

As we move forward, these comparisons will be increasingly difficult. They will be trying to compare performance of different CPUs on different operating systems.

Even in your link, they are comparing OpenCL performance. Is that even relevant anymore on macOS or even Windows? And, honestly, I really don't care how those CPUs and GPUs run on Windows because I'll never use it. What matters to me is that the RTX 4080 scores ZERO in Metal.

I also don't care how Android phones benchmark against iPhones. Again, because I'll never use an Android phone. It's all meaningless to me.

 

[trs96]

If Apple was rushed it's only because TSMC was behind schedule with the 3nm M3 chips that they wanted to use for the new Mac Pro. An M3 extreme would be capable of having more GPU cores, more RAM, etc. Hopefully Apple will be able to update it relative quickly some time in 2024.

Apple is said to be one of the prime customers of TSMC's 3nm process node and while the cost is expected to be relatively higher than the existing 5nm process node, it won't affect Apple much as they will be utilizing it for their premium products launching next year. Meanwhile, the cost might be an issue for PC customers who are not only affected by the rising cost of top-tier nodes but also by a declining market where the demand has dropped massively. wccftech 2/23/23

This past June 5th WWDC was three years after they announced AppleSi, and they had promised a two year transition. These are the main reasons the new MP is seemingly so disappointing in terms of raw performance numbers. They couldn't hold off another year before releasing it.

​

 

[D-One]

Neil Parfitt comments on the new Mac Pro in his latest video. Also, lots of comments by (semi?-) professional audio users...:

Interesting, he pretty much has the same opinion that I shared here about the MP VS Studio. For the vast majority of Audio/Video Pros the Studio is more than enough now that there's no upgradability, those are a very small amount of people, now inside that target the ones that really absolutely need pcie is even smaller, 1% of 1%...

With MP sales dropping down significantly (assumption of course) it will become very hard to justify its existence and whatever expenses it costs Apple to maintain it as a product line. Maybe 500$ wheels or 1000$ stands help?

 

[ramazarusx]

As we move forward, these comparisons will be increasingly difficult. They will be trying to compare performance of different CPUs on different operating systems.

Even in your link, they are comparing OpenCL performance. Is that even relevant anymore on macOS or even Windows? And, honestly, I really don't care how those CPUs and GPUs run on Windows because I'll never use it. What matters to me is that the RTX 4080 scores ZERO in Metal.

I also don't care how Android phones benchmark against iPhones. Again, because I'll never use an Android phone. It's all meaningless to me.

As I said before in specialized software the MacPro and MacStudio are very competitive and in some cases even exceeding them, but at the end of the day I personally don’t care if it got ARM or x86, OpenCL or Metal as long as they do what I need them to do for a reasonable price.

For my day to day usage the i9-13xxx and dual 6900 is more than sufficient if not exceeding the MacStudio/MacPro for the tasks I need, for the rest I’ve got Farms and Linux workstations picking up when it fails.

I’m not an average Apple consumer that can be wowed and oozed by new shiny things, I’ve had their products from PowerBooks to latest M2 Max laptops. It’s business for me, how much time I can reasonably save on certain tasks and to be honest I never cared how they looked or how much power they’ve used.

Just my opinion, from being in tech for almost 30y.