Apple Silicon Mac Pro Revealed at WWDC 2023

[c-o-pr]

M1 Ultra chip reach max 50 C when full load. M2 Ultra chip reach max 85 C .
Future M3 Ultra chip probably ...100 C or more. Welcome to the world of high performance and high temperatures
Finally, after four or five years, Apple will realize that it has reached a barrier that Intel is already overcoming today.

You write suggesting these limits are not understood by the industry, when in fact this limits have guided the design of every electronic device since experimentation with lightening!

There's nothing the least unusual about 100+ C T junction in Intel parts. Older Intel is commonly rated at 105. A key reason for such a low limit is implications of integration of the device with the surrounding environment, where the temperature of boiling water might be seen as a commonsense (and therefore legal sense) application threshold to a range of dangerous temperatures.

Apple's portable designs since the inception of the Macbook have tolerated running right up to Tj to control fan noise: when the chip is run hotter, air moved across the spreader carries more energy away per unit of fan flow.

But this also leads to well-known secondary problems like laptop cases causing too-hot laps.

My guess about temp limits of ASi is they started conservatively with the fanless M1 portables. They left clock rates of Studios in reserve for a bragsheet bump at M2+. This can be seen as part of an obvious marketing trajectory given the of historical competition with Wintel.

These products are designed and scaled for their markets, with rich awareness of trends.

Cars were obscenely marketed in such ways during Detroit's heyday of the 1950s and 60s. It's not like GM, Ford and Chrysler couldn't figure out how to build a reliable economical car at the time of the space program. They just couldn't see any reason to sell the market short when they were making bank on phat gas guzzlers.

It's not like the tobacco cos didn't know that cig...!

Never mind.

 

[mantis2001]

I guess Too

I guess three

 

[ramazarusx]

Interesting.

 

[pastrychef]

Interesting.

The things he says is only applicable for those who are willing to use Windows.

For those who only want to use macOS, what good will hs RTX 4090 do?

Building a PC has always been cheaper than buying a Mac. He didn't stumble on to any new revelations here.

I happily paid $3000+ plus for my Mac. I won't pay $1000 for a system that can only run Windows, regardless of specs.

 

[scottkendall]

The things he says is only applicable for those who are willing to use Windows.

Honestly everything that comes out his mouth is hot air just like the 4090!

 

[c-o-pr]

I liked LinuxTechDude's review: it makes sense, and he's right to call out the marketing, which is typical Apple "cherry-picking."

And he calls out what good and bad about power mgmt and thermals: that for some reason the design prefers fan speed over compute.

Review helps me understand limits and tradeoffs.

As to $$, history says any sys you buy will look slow and expensive in a few years, and the price differential is not a show stopper for pros. Plus the integration is highly desirable for those who value dependability and the form factor and I/O is where it needs to be.

RAM capacity is interesting: First, the Studio exceeds typical gaming PC RAM limit. Second, the review didn't touch on how Apple unified memory means the GPU could have access to RAM far in excess of PC GPU which has its own dedicated RAM. Plus optimizations over Mac's shared RAM with very linear scaling might be key perf factor for certain apps and workloads?? I don't know, so I'm posing this as a question.

The review is very much a PC nerd hoping to be impressed by a Mac, but while he tries, he's locked into the hope of deposing his bias, rather than exploring Studio potentials within the products domain.

Apple doesn't consider itself to be in direct competition with PC any more, nor should Apple users. But there's still habits and tics of the old megahertz myth marketing from decades ago that we all hang on to. So viewers may regard LTT as suffering from a bit of Tourette's syndrome based on the first part of the review, but he comes around to acknowledging the new world of the Studio.

So his review comes down to fair warning on marketing, a red-flag on thermals and rev-limiting, an open question as to the value of a high-zoot nVidia to your workload: taken at face value, maybe the hammer of the 4090 is very important, maybe it's not—he doesn't help us understand. But there's no denying the Apple compute brag sheet can't keep up with latest gaming PC for a spread of PC benchmarks.

OK, so if you want a system that runs PC benchmarks the best: get the latest PC!

My takeaway is that the against all odds, Apple is tracking performance of best PC with a totally in-house design against an desktop industry 10x its size, and making decent design cuts at every turn. Do they blow away PC? No but that's very hard to do because of physics, not marketing. Just tracking the desktop industry front-runner and adding key value in the lineup is a strong position.

Yes the Mac Pro is floundering. But I think there are other trends on the near horizon of systems architecture, notably chiplets, that are going to shape the next 10 years, and although the Mac Pro is a marque stalwart, it's a backwards-looking design.

 

[pastrychef]

I liked LinuxTechDude's review: it makes sense, and he's right to call out the marketing, which is typical Apple "cherry-picking."

And he calls out what good and bad about power mgmt and thermals: that for some reason the design prefers fan speed over compute.

Review helps me understand limits and tradeoffs.

As to $$, history says any sys you buy will look slow and expensive in a few years, and the price differential is not a show stopper for pros. Plus the integration is highly desirable for those who value dependability and the form factor and I/O is where it needs to be.

RAM capacity is interesting: First, the Studio exceeds typical gaming PC RAM limit. Second, the review didn't touch on how Apple unified memory means the GPU could have access to RAM far in excess of PC GPU which has its own dedicated RAM. Plus optimizations over Mac's shared RAM with very linear scaling might be key perf factor for certain apps and workloads?? I don't know, so I'm posing this as a question.

The review is very much a PC nerd hoping to be impressed by a Mac, but while he tries, he's locked into the hope of deposing his bias, rather than exploring Studio potentials within the products domain.

Apple doesn't consider itself to be in direct competition with PC any more, nor should Apple users. But there's still habits and tics of the old megahertz myth marketing from decades ago that we all hang on to. So viewers may regard LTT as suffering from a bit of Tourette's syndrome based on the first part of the review, but he comes around to acknowledging the new world of the Studio.

So his review comes down to fair warning on marketing, a red-flag on thermals and rev-limiting, an open question as to the value of a high-zoot nVidia to your workload: taken at face value, maybe the hammer of the 4090 is very important, maybe it's not—he doesn't help us understand. But there's no denying the Apple compute brag sheet can't keep up with latest gaming PC for a spread of PC benchmarks.

OK, so if you want a system that runs PC benchmarks the best: get the latest PC!

My takeaway is that the against all odds, Apple is tracking performance of best PC with a totally in-house design against an desktop industry 10x its size, and making decent design cuts at every turn. Do they blow away PC? No but that's very hard to do because of physics, not marketing. Just tracking the desktop industry front-runner and adding key value in the lineup is a strong position.

Yes the Mac Pro is floundering. But I think there are other trends on the near horizon of systems architecture, notably chiplets, that are going to shape the next 10 years, and although the Mac Pro is a marque stalwart, it's a backwards-looking design.

He had to stick the thing in an oven to get it the temps up...

 

[c-o-pr]

I don't think that oven test is unfair. And I was surprised to learn that there's a seemingly very low fan speed limit. But this limit does solve the problem with fan noise!

My complaint about the review is that LTT dude doesn't go looking for evidence of what Apple does well with performance within its garden, nor does he look for the deeper explanations and implications of tradeoffs.

Here is an example from my thought patterns regarding the significance of the T2 chip, which was added to the last generations of Intel based Macs. I grok the conventional wisdom that T2 was just a platform security add-on, but it turned out that in some ways it was the transition to ApSi ahead of M1: the T2 is a full ARM SoC within the Intel Mac system. It handles peripheral I/O, media de/coding, and offloads cryptographic chores. The T2 media engine should not be overlooked regarding power: h26x video is a key workload that's a deal-maker on app responsiveness and battery life and T2 moved it away from 3rd party iGPU & dGPU dependency. While the Intel cache-core complex is naturally the workhorse for apps, in some ways it had become a compute adjunct as key parts of the system were run in the T2; sort of as if the heart of Mac became a iPhone to handle baseline UI+media work and the Intel CPU was the app accelerator.

I know I'm going too far, but it's just a thought experiment.

When T2 was announced it seemed incidental, but it takes on much more significance looking back since ApSi transition. Beyond working as an internal accelerator, what did T2 mean to the customer? It meant that when M1 shipped much of the Mac experience was already proven on previous product, making for a smoother shift. As the future of the product is now built on ARM, that was a key step to the future for all customers.

Getting back to the review above, LTT dude does not tend to look at such engineering from Apple's evolutionary perspective: he's judging the Mac as a funny sort of a PC which locks you into macOS.

This is where Apple truly faces an Apples and Oranges marketing problem which cannot be addressed in the typical patter of PC brag-sheets: Today a WinPC can mean almost anything from perspective of user expectations, because the performance bar is kept low for backwards compatibility, and because there's no single point of reference for any standard of service. Moreover, PC users are very accustomed to holding themselves accountable for new features that don't work. Trying to make Facetime a consistent experience on WinPC is impossible. You can see how Microsoft tried to impose some minimum kit requirements in Win11 and it just annoyed a lot of users. Notice that Microsoft has no brand stake in a feature like Facetime, and after they brought Skype, it got eaten by Zoom! But how can Apple brag about this? It can't!

Forgive me for rambling on in digression.

My point is that LTT dude looks at the Studio from a Linux POV which is 10-times worse herd of cats than Windows. So he has to focus on a short litany of his own cherrypicked app workloads, running on a class of HW that's no longer even relevant to Mac, to make a complaint about Apple's cherrypicked bragsheet, while he completely ignores the value of the holistic Apple scene. And he should ignore it! Because the holistic Apple scene means nothing to him. But it means something to Apple.

As a hackintosher, I'm more with LTT dude. I am fiddling around with my kit for a UI experience with specific apps, and don't care about the Apple cloud scene on the Mac. My iPhone gives me all the new Apple I can stand and I can't take much.

But I'm not a typical Apple customer. I'm a Unix greybeard who happens to prefer Apple ease-of-use as it has been traditionally understood compared to Windows and Linux.

I'm also feeling that everything about commuting seems dumb these days. Super smart, but dumb. I'm hoping for what we consider to be a personal computer to be completely re-invented.

iOS almost did it! Then it got so smart it's dumb too.

 

[pastrychef]

I don't think that oven test is unfair. And I was surprised to learn that there's a seemingly very low fan speed limit. But this limit does solve the problem with fan noise!

I'm going on the assumption that anyone buying a Mac Studio can probably afford to have the A/C running when it gets that hot.

 

[pastrychef]

I've seen quite a few reviews of the new Mac Studio and there has been nothing but praise for the thermals and cooling system. The only guy who criticized it was the fool who put it in an oven... To him, I say, "don't put it in the oven."