Possible January 2023 New Mac Pro Reveal

[etorix]

Apple is also moving the production to Vietnam instead of China.

I suspect that securing a supply chain out of China is even more important than cost savings.

I feel that the way Apple Silicon is currently designed there would be no way to add "extra" RAM to a new Mac Pro beyond that which Apple is willing to include. It's all a part of the CPU+RAM+SSD joined-at-the-hip construction.

Unified memory does NOT require the memory to be soldered on-board. This is a design decision, both with respect to soldering and to any maximum RAM which the controller may support.

 

[pastrychef]

I highly doubt Apple will make drivers available for 3rd party video cards. It opens up a whole bag of worms for Apple that they were able to eliminate when they migrated to Apple Silicon. Assuming the price will be similar to current Mac Pros, professionals will be the target audience, not gamers. Maybe they'll have some sort of Super Afterburner II cards available...

The only real uses for the PCI-e slots that I can think of are for:
40GB NICs?
1000GB NICs?
Storage.
A/V I/O.

Btw, there's no chance in hell it will be Intel based. Zero. Nada. Zilch.

 

[thedocbwarren]

I highly doubt Apple will make drivers available for 3rd party video cards. It opens up a whole bag of worms for Apple that they were able to eliminate when they migrated to Apple Silicon. Assuming the price will be similar to current Mac Pros, professionals will be the target audience, not gamers. Maybe they'll have some sort of Super Afterburner II cards available...

The only real uses for the PCI-e slots that I can think of are for:
40GB NICs?
1000GB NICs?
Storage.
A/V I/O.

Btw, there's no chance in hell it will be Intel based. Zero. Nada. Zilch.

Agreed and makes no sense to build something that is a support nightmare given it would be the only Intel Mac with all the PC baggage with GPUs. Even latest Intel chips are space heaters and are nasty power/performance. Add GPUs to that is doubly so (looking at Nvidia 4090 melty-cards.) As it stands anything off SoC would be a subsystem and have higher latency and a GPU would complicate this drastically.

 

[pastrychef]

Agreed and makes no sense to build something that is a support nightmare given it would be the only Intel Mac with all the PC baggage with GPUs. Even latest Intel chips are space heaters and are nasty power/performance. Add GPUs to that is doubly so (looking at Nvidia 4090 melty-cards.) As it stands anything off SoC would be a subsystem and have higher latency and a GPU would complicate this drastically.

If the rumors are right and they have beefy coolers, maybe Apple will clock the SoC much higher to achieve higher performance. Otherwise, it will be difficult to justify getting a gigantic box over a laptop if they have the same SoCs.

 

[trs96]

I highly doubt Apple will make drivers available for 3rd party video cards.

How about making their own dGPU instead of using AMD ? If they can build an iGPU into the SoC they could certainly make something with many more cores that slots into a PCIe slot and has access to more power. Remember this is the Mac Pro, it's not about conserving electricity. It's about handling the big jobs that Pros have to complete every day at work.

 

[pastrychef]

How about making their own dGPU instead of using AMD ? If they can build an iGPU into the SoC they could certainly make something with many more cores that slots into a PCIe slot and has access to more power. Remember this is the Mac Pro, it's not about conserving electricity. It's about handling the big jobs that Pros have to complete every day at work.

I'm sure Apple can make their own full fledged video cards, but I'm not sure if it would make much sense financially. Only a subset of Mac Pro buyers would choose the option and the Mac Pro itself is already a very niche product...

Also, I think that for video editors, the Media Engines in the Apple Silicon do most of the heavy lifting, not so much the actual GPU cores. That's why I think some sort of Super Afterburner II is more of a possibility.

 

[UtterDisbelief]

I also think the strong point of Apple Silicon as we've seen it so far, is that everything is on one SoC. When you start thinking about add-ons the speed advantages drop away because you need some kind of open bus to connect everything. So the engineering of any new AS Mac Pro will be interesting to see.

 

[craighazan]

The specifications are all very nice!, but what everyone really cares about is the cheese grater!. Will the new Mac Pro have a cheese grater design, will it be a cube?.

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Unified memory does NOT require the memory to be soldered on-board.

For the general theory of "Unified Memory" this is correct. But that's not the way Apple has implemented it so far. Yes, it's their design decision. That does not mean they are going to change it just to suit a hacker.

 

[UtterDisbelief]

The specifications are all very nice!, but what everyone really cares about is the cheese grater!. Will the new Mac Pro have a cheese grater design, will it be a cube?.

Well we've had a cheese-grater and an a trash-can ... how about a coffee-grinder? That way any fan noise can be put down to emulation of beans being ground!