Hacker News Reader

Comment by rewgs | Hacker News Reader

My theory is that they're going to release a new Mac Pro that's about half the size of the current one. Enough space for some PCIe slots, but otherwise smaller given the enormous amount of wasted space in that thing since moving from Intel to Apple Silicon. Guessing the rack-mount model, should they continue selling it, will be 3 or 4u instead of 5u.

I know everyone thinks they're going to just kill it, but I don't see it. Apple's move under Tim Cook has been to exhaust supplies (see: filling the Intel Mac Pro chassis with air and not updating the CPU), letting people predict its death (see: 2013 -> 2019 Mac Pro silence), and then redesigning it into something people want while utilizing it as an opportunity to segment specs across their SKUs.

The Studio will remain the high-powered creator machine, whereas the Mac Pro will be retooled into an AI beast.

View on HN

Why people buy the Studio with the high ram config is actually the unified memory. This is unique to Apple. I'm not sure what Mac Pro would do with PCIe cards . It would be useless for AI because what you want is unified memory that can be used by the GPU/AI not just ram.

PCIe cards would indeed be useless for AI unless Apple supports third-party GPUs, but there are certainly some pro creators that would still prefer to have them. I myself work in large-template film/game scoring and while we all love our Mac Studios, they're usually housed in a Sonnet chassis so that we can continue to use PCIe cards. Had Apple kept them in parity with the Studio w/r/t CPU and RAM, the rack-mount version of the Pro would've been a no-brainer.

Its not entirely unique to Apple: the Ryzen AI Max platform (in the e.g. Framework Desktop) is a unified memory platform. The PlayStation 5 also has a unified memory architecture (which given the chiplet was made by AMD, not too surprising) (people sleep on PlayStation hardware engineering; they're far better at skating to where the puck is headed than most hardware tech companies. remember Cell?)

Thank you! I was not aware of Framework Desktop. Unfortunately it seems it’s even more limited to ram(to 128GB vs studio 512GB on Mac studio)

> I'm not sure what Mac Pro would do with PCIe cards .

Video and Audio Engineers [1] would like to have a word. Not to mention PCIe Network Card. And they do use all the slot in the Cheese Gater although I believe a modern version could have cut those in half.

[1] https://www.production-expert.com/production-expert-1/2020/7...

It is already a walking zombie, Apple clearly no longer cares about the workstation market, regardless of how many "I still believe" t-shirts get sold to wear at WWDC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com