the Mac Pro It is effectively defined as two things. First, the most powerful Mac in Apple’s lineup. Second, the more expandable hardware, but it’s increasingly looking like neither will apply to the 2023 Mac Pro.
And if you take away both of the Mac Pro’s unique selling points, isn’t it dead on arrival…?
background
Launched in 2006 (or 2005, if you count the Developer Transition Kit), the Mac Pro was supposed to be the ultimate Mac.
You can specify it at the point of purchase to be a more powerful machine than anything else in the lineup. You can also adapt it to your own needs. Your priority may be CPU power, graphics performance, RAM, or storage; Whatever your desired use, you can configure the device to suit.
Likewise, as technology advances, or your needs increase, you can continue to adapt the device—upgrading the CPU or GPU, adding RAM, and increasing storage.
Recently, however, there have been reports that both raw strength and scalability may be compromised.
threatening force
Mark Gurman noted last month that Apple had scrapped plans to make the Mac Pro more powerful than any other in the lineup, by Giving up on the M2 Extreme chip.
Apple seems to have scrapped its plans for a new Apple Silicon Mac Pro with a high-end “M2 Extreme” chip that has 48 CPU cores and 152 GPUs.
The “Extreme” chip was essentially a dual M2 Ultra chip. But concerns about complexity and cost appear to have stalled those plans.
Instead, he said, the machine will launch with just the M2 Ultra — the same chip expected for this year’s Mac Studio. So all of a sudden, the Mac Pro is no longer the most powerful Mac of the bunch, it’s just one of the… two High end desktop computers.
This does not necessarily mean that the performance of the high-end Mac Pro and Mac Studio will be identical. The larger chassis and vents in the Mac Pro form factor should allow for more effective cooling, allowing the machine to run flat for longer periods before thermal throttling begins.
However, it is far from a more powerful chip.
Penetrating expandability
Earlier this month, Gurman suggested that the 2023 Mac Pro’s expandability may also be compromised, With no upgradeable memory.
The product will not support expandable RAM, as Apple Silicon architecture means that all memory is bound to an M2 chip.
And today he says The same may be true for GPUs.
The next Mac Pro may lack user-upgradable GPUs as well as non-upgradable RAM. Apple Silicon Macs do not currently support external GPUs and you must use any configuration that you purchase on the Apple website.
So what’s left, in terms of scalability? we will, storage.
This will leave storage as the main user-upgradeable component of the new Mac Pro, which will have the same layout as the current Intel model.
that may be Faster than external storage options, but at this point, that seems far from a certainty. Due to the high speed and high capacity external solid state drives on the marketIt doesn’t seem like a great differentiation point.
So what’s the point of the 2023 Mac Pro?
If a machine isn’t more powerful than anything else in the lineup, and won’t be (mostly) upgradeable after purchase, the question must be asked: what is it for?
In regards to the Mac Pro, Apple has cornered itself with Apple Silicon design. A large part of the reason M series chips are so much better than Intel chips is due to their system on a chip (SoC) design. In particular, unified memory. This is what Apple had to say about it When it first revealed the M1 chip.
As a system on a chip (SoC), the M1 combines many powerful technologies into a single chip, and features a unified memory architecture to greatly improve performance and efficiency. […]
Macs and PCs traditionally use multiple chips for CPU, I/O, security and more. Now with the M1, these technologies are combined into a single SoC, providing a whole new level of integration for better performance and greater power efficiency. The M1 also features a unified memory architecture that combines high-bandwidth and low-latency memory into a single cluster in a custom package. This allows all technologies in the SoC to access the same data without copying it between multiple blocks of memory, further improving performance and efficiency.
Which is great – except when you want to make a machine upgradeable. If everything is on a single chip, you can’t upgrade the individual elements: CPU, GPU, and memory.
I’d hate to see the Mac Pro go away, but… wouldn’t Apple make it practically useless? It seems like the best we can hope for now is a better progression machine continuous Better performance than Mac Studio, thanks to better and more adequate cooling (f Maybe Faster) expandable storage.
Is that enough to justify the existence of the 2023 Mac Pro? I’m honestly not sure about that.
What’s your point? Please take our poll, and share your thoughts in the comments.
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