The new Mac Pro chip could double or quadruple the power of the M2 Max | Hacker News Reader

The new Mac Pro chip could double or quadruple the power of the M2 Max

theverge.com

Max, Ultra, Extreme... at some point they're going to run out of adjectives with high enough magnitude to signal that it outclasses the previous one.

You underestimate Apple marketing.

If once you start down the marketed path, forever will it dominate your destiny.

Everyone markets. It's just whether they accept its importance or not.

Product marketing leads to gratuitous differentiation.

Gratuitous differentiation leads to indifference or hate.

Indifference and hate lead to suffering.

Apple almost died when it went down this Yodaean path. Windows laptops went down this path to the Dark Side.

Hopefully Apple will return to the light side.

Hope is like Sun Microsystems. If you only believe it when you see it you'll never make it through the night. It took over power at Sun. As the marketing was charged, Sun was drained until it disappeared.

When in doubt, they can turn to the simpsons who addressed this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9STeegpxSb0

It's also not clear what's better. Is Ultra better than Extreme? Or is Max the bestest one?

Absolute? Is there a marketing chart for "holistic taste profile" along seven dimensions?

From what I learned from USB committee, Super > High > Full > Low

M3 resets the modifers

The current Mac Pro supports up to 1.5TB of RAM and with DDR5 memory capacities about to increase, I wonder how Apple will compensate for the much lower RAM.

But don't you know? The ram is much faster because its close to the die? /s

Well, performance and resource use wise it did worked great thus far, so need for /s

I have a friend who a Apple Silicon iMac who bought the whole memory tale and it hasn't worked out well for him, so thats why I have an /s

Did he buy with 8GB? Because that being good for heavy users was never part of the tale.

I have a 16GB one, and have no problem with 4K video editing, audio works, VMs, Java, and other heavy uses...

He has a 16gb imac

They know how many people are ordering that much RAM, and probably have some guesses about how many actually need it. Apple won't mind losing 5% or whatever of their Mac Pro customers if it means not fundamentally redesigning their SoC architecture.

>The current Mac Pro supports up to 1.5TB of RAM and with DDR5 memory capacities about to increase, I wonder how Apple will compensate for the much lower RAM.

Probably by just not supporting that market. But maybe they could implement some kind of Optane/CXL type SSD-as-memory solution?

Or just support additional memory boards, full of DRAM DIMMs, plugged into PCIe slots, accessed over CXL protocol (no need to use Optane, Intel killed it off anyway).

They would have to give up on the “unified memory architecture” (their terms) and sacrifice some of the simplicity they get by being able to not care about anything important Being outside the one big pool of fast addressable memory. This would have major impact on their GPU firmware/drivers as it would now need to handle data in the CXL hardware… all if this is extremely normal in the PC / wider hardware world, but Apple are going down the hardware optimisation path like consoles used to, and this overhead can be cut quickly to get the kind of gains that have made the M1 generation seem so much better than the previous intel hardware.

In essence, if they aren’t going to enable high power GPU compute (external AMD/Nvidia cards) for things like machine learning and parallel physics simulations in many industries various analysis software suites… then there’s little to be gained from anything remotely like this, CXL or otherwise.

I'm hoping they'll make it available via a special board on an interconnect. Based on the M2 topping out at 24GB, the Extreme should top out at 384GB on chip. I'm sure that would address most needs, but the ones outside of that range are interesting and prestigious and provide a lot of useful feedback to the teams that study and interface with professionals, that benefit everyone.

I'd be willing to bet their data shows only some fraction of their Mac Pro buyers actually max out the RAM, so they're fine with discarding that group in favour of the majority.

Yep. The 1.5 TB max capability came “for free” with the Intel Xeon architecture (if you chose to populate the 12 DIMM slots with the expensive 128 GB ones).

Might be that very few people (if anyone at all!) actually did that or needed that.

Edit: However, 384 GB of RAM seems a too low maximum though for a maxed out 2023 professional workstation.

My understanding is the Mac Pro was targeted for the professional "film" industry for high end 8K video editing, processing and effects, though there were scientific applications as well. Apple claims that Final Cut Pro is "fully optimized for the M1 Max and M1 Ultra on the new Mac Studio," but I don't know if "optimized" means the code is native for Apple Silicon. I guess the point I'm getting to is Apple tends to delay hardware releases until there are a few killer applications, at least, that showcase the hardware's capabilities, and for the expected cost of the hardware, native pro applications better be available.

Isn't 256GB RAM kind of limiting for this type of workstation? Or is it possible to combine it with standard DIMMs?

256GB should only be limiting to certain audio applications afaik.

So I wonder: why do Threadripper motherboards support up to 2 TB of RAM, if nobody needs that?

Because they're intended for another market, where people do use that. You don't buy a Mac Pro to use as a server, for example...

Some would like to use it as a iOS / macOS CI server. So server hardware features designed for a data center & rack mount options would be appreciated. Yes you don't need the 2TB of ram in that case, but other parts would be helpful!

Its addressing range, not advertisement

Only ThreadRipper Pro mobos support that much as far as I know. ThreadRipper Pro CPUs are AMD EPYC server grade CPUs that are customized/rebranded for the workstation market segment. The regular “gaming CPUs” and motherboards support only 64-128 GB of RAM. Some have 4 DIMM slots, but the CPU still has only 2 channels, so with 4 DIMMs you won’t get any memory access throughput increases, just more space for caching stuff to avoid disk IOs. EPYC/TR Pro have 8 memory channels…

Every TR has at least 4 channels

Virtual machines?

Even for the pros, there aren't many sample-based orchestral templates that don't fit into 256GB.

And most are going to stream samples on demand from a fast SSD anyway. Fitting all your libraries in memory is mostly a forum bragging rights thing. It's silly to load it all up when you're only going to use a small portion of it in any given project.

This rumor states that Apple is testing a configuration with 256gb of RAM, not that it’s the highest build-to-order configuration of this to-be-announced machine.

Hopefully they go a hybrid approach. 256gb next to the package and expandable slots up to 2TB.

Well it would have to, otherwise it's not a compelling Mac Pro?

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