New Mac Studios AND an AS Mac Pro!

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by LDS

And not to mention the circa ~2006 memory pricing. Memory costs $0.0015 a megabyte today, yet Apple want almost 10 times that.

Unfair comparison. ARM takes more performance from less memory, compared to x86.

Memory bandwidth of 800GB/sec is something. Intel Mac Pro had half of that which means ARM Mac Pro can do twice the work with its memory. Add faster SSD and we are at 3X performance easily.

Just for comparison, I have 2TB SSD for nightly backups. The idea of ARM processor handling that two terabytes in two and a half seconds is mindblowing.

No need for terabyte memory for now.

EDIT:
... and by the way, the 2019 towers also maxed out at 192GB memory if you bought the normal priced sticks. You needed the more expensive LR-DIMMs for more than 192GB and if you maxxed at 1.5TB your bank manager was happy. For a cheap price of 53 thousand dollars you bought yourself bragging rights that are already obsolete. And that is without display and other peripherals. Must have been most overpriced Mac ever!

[Carl Lie]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Unfair comparison. ARM takes more performance from less memory, compared to x86.

Memory bandwidth of 800GB/sec is something. Intel Mac Pro had half of that which means ARM Mac Pro can do twice the work with its memory. Add faster SSD and we are at 3X performance easily.

Just for comparison, I have 2TB SSD for nightly backups. The idea of ARM processor handling that two terabytes in two and a half seconds is mindblowing.

No need for terabyte memory for now.

Well Janne- let us know when you pick your Mac Pro up since you seem to think it's a bargain.

C

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by Carl Lie

Well Janne- let us know when you pick your Mac Pro up since you seem to think it's a bargain.

I have no such money but if our fellow mod Chris updates his pair of 2019 towers next year there is a chance I am invited to set them up.

[LDS]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Unfair comparison. ARM takes more performance from less memory, compared to x86.

Memory bandwidth of 800GB/sec is something. Intel Mac Pro had half of that which means ARM Mac Pro can do twice the work with its memory. Add faster SSD and we are at 3X performance easily.

Just for comparison, I have 2TB SSD for nightly backups. The idea of ARM processor handling that two terabytes in two and a half seconds is mindblowing.

No need for terabyte memory for now.

EDIT:
... and by the way, the 2019 towers also maxed out at 192GB memory if you bought the normal priced sticks. You needed the more expensive LR-DIMMs for more than 192GB and if you maxxed at 1.5TB your bank manager was happy. For a cheap price of 53 thousand dollars you bought yourself bragging rights that are already obsolete. And that is without display and other peripherals. Must have been most overpriced Mac ever!

You've swallowed the cool aid, Janne.

Apple use exactly the same Samsung LPDDR memory in their SoCs as everyone else in the industry. That includes pretty well every smart phone design in existence. Their enterprise grade ECC memory was overpriced. The price they want for smartphone memory is... just absurd.

The 800gb/s figure you are quoting merely represents total memory bandwidth. The M2 Ultra has twice the bandwidth of the M2 Max because it is two M2 Max chips on a single die. It needs to be high bandwidth because it does twice as much. That is what unified memory is. It gets shared by all the CPU and GPU cores, and without adequate bandwidth it will bottleneck.

Intel systems don't require memory to be shared. It has discrete DDR for RAM and GDDR graphics processes. To put it into perspective, an Nvidia A5000 has 786gb/s of memory bandwidth just for graphics processes alone...

192GB of memory for a 2019 Mac Pro will only cost $661 for the full 192GB. Not $1600 for just the 64 to 192gig upgrade.

And not to burst your bubble, but the read and write speeds of SSDs included in Apple Silicon machines is no different to current PCs. Have a read here, then compare it to the same test using a $299 4TB WD SN850x that I ran...

Apple's SoC design simply does not flatten, outperform or annihilate the competition. The benefit of unified memory is reduced CPU & GPU overhead. Lower overhead = lower power consumption. Performance per watt is where Apple Silicon excels.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by JFreak

ARM takes more performance from less memory, compared to x86.

Oh bulltwinkles.

None the less the just announced Mac Pro is still an appealing machine for many users especially audio and avoiding stupid Thunderbolt expansion chassis. The sting might be when Apple and TSMC actually get production issues behind them and deliver M3 silicon with an expected significant performance kick. I've not had time to see if Apple committed or hinted any future CPU upgradeability/motherboard swaps with the new Mac Pro.

It's just not a high-end workstation in say Threadripper Pro workstation territory, way less cores, way less memory etc. No CUDA compatible GPUs (well no surprise there)..., and there is a Zen 4 Threadripper Pro maybe coming late this year. But thats all likely a side effect of TSMC delivery woes and problem with a very high-end processor packaging. What Apple has done for now is finally plugged an embarrassing hole in its product line up, good they have done that but I hope they do much better.

[Eric Lambert]

This new ilk of Mac Pros, whatever we're calling them these days, has felt foreign its entire life. It has the Apple logo but it's uncharacteristically Apple, and perhaps even more so today.

[uptheoctave]

Originally Posted by Carl Lie

It's a $3,000 PCI expansion chassis!

Expansion chassis come with a few downsides.

You get much slower data transfer over TB than you do over PCIE.
My Mac Studio with a Sonnet chassis tops out around 2700MB/s over TB.
The 2019 Mac Pro will do double that.

Plus noise.
The great thing about the 2019 Mac Pro is how silent it is.
A Mac Studio with an expansion chassis is louder.
Too loud for my control room, which is why it is in the machine room.

I have no immediate need for the 2023 Mac Pro, nor the new Studio.
But if I was upgrading right now I'd get the Pro.

There are going to be some customers for whom the 192GB RAM limit is going to be a deal breaker.
I'm not one of those, mind.

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

It's just not a high-end workstation in say Threadripper Pro workstation territory, way less cores, way less memory etc.

Well, yes. On my dayjob I have 5THz worth of CPU, 10TB memory and 100TB storage available. You guessed it, my bread and butter comes from selling my Oracle DBA skills. That new ARM tower is still impressive for what it is.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by uptheoctave

Expansion chassis come with a few downsides.

You get much slower data transfer over TB than you do over PCIE.
My Mac Studio with a Sonnet chassis tops out around 2700MB/s over TB.
The 2019 Mac Pro will do double that.

Double? It does boat loads more than double PCIe bandwidth. A Thunderbolt 3/4 expansion chassis has 4 x PCIe 3 land of bandwidth.

If early reports that the new Mac Pro has 6 open slots at 2 x 16 PCIe 4 lane slots and 4 x 8 PCIe 4 lanes are correct then that a M2 Mac Pro has 2 * (( 2 * 16) + (4 * 8)) / 4 = 32 times the internal PCIe IO bandwidth of a Thunderbolt 3/4 chasssus (irregardless of how many slots it has).

[RobertDorn]

Originally Posted by uptheoctave

Expansion chassis come with a few downsides.

You get much slower data transfer over TB than you do over PCIE.
My Mac Studio with a Sonnet chassis tops out around 2700MB/s over TB.
The 2019 Mac Pro will do double that.

Plus noise.
The great thing about the 2019 Mac Pro is how silent it is.
A Mac Studio with an expansion chassis is louder.
Too loud for my control room, which is why it is in the machine room.

I have no immediate need for the 2023 Mac Pro, nor the new Studio.
But if I was upgrading right now I'd get the Pro.

There are going to be some customers for whom the 192GB RAM limit is going to be a deal breaker.
I'm not one of those, mind.

The sonnet/avid branded chassis noise is very annoying indeed, I also have it put away from my control room because otherwise the noise of the chassis won’t let me record anything with a mic in the control room.

As for the bandwidth, sure it’ll be much greater when having it on a pci slot in the Mac Pro instead of over Thunderbolt3, but in real world practice I guess we never ever get to use the max bandwidth available with TB , left alone that we need a PCI 16x gen4 slot bandwidth .