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Comment by andrewl-hn | Hacker News Reader

This would probably push some high-end audio professionals away from Logic. One of the niches Mac Pro has been popular is audio production. And with cheesegrader the ability to slot in many-many different audio interfaces into a box instead of dangling out to various PCIe enclosures has been a big win.

Here's a good video how it looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIQINCWMd6I&list=PLi2i2YhL6o... (at 1:40 Neil Parfitt shows Mac audio setup his before and after).

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Feels like it'd just create a market for a big rack-mountable multi-bay PCIe enclosure, with its own internal power supply, that you could connect with one ore more thunderbolt cable. I don't see any reason why a solution built around a Mac Studio should have to be significantly more cluttered.

I don't know if such a solution exists right now, but I'm thinking there's a fair chance it will soon as the Mac Pro disappearing creates a demand for something like it.

The DAD AX32/AX64 is such a thing.

Thunderbolt is really an unsung hero here. It is surprisingly nice to be able to move various components around my desk that would have otherwise sat in a huge tower hogging all the PCIe slots they can find.

Agreed, I've been doing experiments and it's wild to me what "just works" in a secondhand eGPU case or music production PCIe boxes.

Dual 10G NIC cards, way cheaper than a comparable dongle 36 HDDs in JBOD, absolutely! 12 optical drives, sure!

The Thunderbolt offerings on the current Mac lineup offer dramatically less bandwidth in total if that matters for a given use case. Thunderbolt 5 is the equivalent of PCI-E Gen 4 x4. So if all 4 of the Thunderbolt 5 ports on a Mac Studio can run at full speed, that's still only the equivalent of a single gen 4 x16 slot. That's less than half the bandwidth of a basic consumer x86 CPU, to say nothing of the Xeon that was in the previous Intel Mac Pro or a modern Epyc/Threadripper (Pro).

This is a big reason why things like eGPUs kinda suck. Thunderbolt is fast for external I/O, but it's quite pathetic compared to internal PCI-E.

Reports as pointed out here have shown that x4 to x16 for most GPUs and common loads is a 1% to 10% loss of performance - hardly pathetic. In many (gaming) cases, it would be unnoticeable.

The video you linked is from 2019. A lot has changed with Thunderbolt capability and the Studios now have enough ports/bandwidth to handle audio processing needs to multiple boxes.

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