The Best Mac Nobody Needs

everybody seems to be confused by Apple's new seven thousand dollar Flagship computer but it's really not confusing here's a one-line summary of this machine are you ready the 2023 Mac Pro is an aspirational failure that may kill the Mac Pro namesake not save it but that might be okay let's start by talking about what this computer was supposed to be because it was not this and we have overwhelming evidence to support that since the unveiling of the original M1 supply chain leaks indicated that there would be two other chips in the product pipeline we now know those as M1 Pro and M1 Max the ladder chip M1 Max was rumored to be of a chiplet design that would allow for an interconnect bus that could in essence glue two or four chips together to make a mega chip twice or four times as powerful and the M1 Ultra well it became exactly that a chip twice as powerful as the M1 Max because it was literally two M1 Max's glued together Apple bragged about their Ultra Fusion interposer architecture extensively when the M1 Ultra was announced but cheesy marketing aside it was pretty remarkable for comparison CPU interconnects from AMD managed a tad over 200 gigabytes per second Intel Xeon lineup pre-sapphire Rapids could barely crack 40 gigabytes per second and even nvidia's top of the line server tensor core gpus could only sustain about 600 gigabytes per second over Envy Link 3. in essence Apple was claiming to be capable of greater than four times the internship performance of anybody this not only allowed memory to be pooled between the CPU and GPU but that even in software the glue dies would be recognized as a singular addressable chip with essentially no transport overhead no degradation in performance part of what enabled this at an affordable price was tsmc's integrated fan out plus local silicon interconnect packaging technology about that is a mouthful that Apple was the first and I think still the only one to really utilize at scale in short unlike other packaging methods namely the popular chip on wafer on substrate design info LSI can be done significantly cheaper like significantly cheaper and there's a bunch of other benefits like better power efficiency as well as integration flexibility when designing for extra logic and memory modules on heterogeneous socs like the m-series chips but here's the problem larger interconnect and substrate layers have lower yields the bigger that the soc gets and the rumored M2 extreme this 4X quad chip would have been massive Apple leaker Mark German essentially suggested last year that the Quest for an M2 extreme had been canned due to increasing costs that a Mac Pro was such a chip would retail near ten thousand dollars that may well be true but I think it's more likely that Apple just couldn't get Dependable yields and that it wasn't worth it to move to a more expensive and entirely different packaging method for this singular SKU I mean 10 grand for a computer since when has Apple cared about pricing on their Pro computers regardless of what happened though that left us with this the 2019 Mac Pro chassis with the same chip found in the cheaper smaller plain better Mac Studio a chip without the power draw and heat output that would require such a behemoth of a case one designed in the x86 days of your but while the M2 Ultra might not befit the pro case it sure does perform like a pro chip should in a number of areas our benchmarking found a number of sizable improvements over the M1 Ultra in essentially every test 20 to 30 percent improvements across the board and while performance of the M2 Ultra is not double that of the M2 Max in every test it is roughly 35 percent faster on average holding true to the prior Generations precedent even in cinebench a benchmark that heavily favors Intel the M2 ultra's multi-core score hung with all but the ryzen 7950x and latest generation Intel Core I9 processors not shabby at all in real world workloads especially those exclusive to Mac OS the M2 Ultra does an awesome job as should be expected but it does have one extraordinary weakness and that is the same weakness that every Apple silicon chip has had GPU hutzpah Apple now highlights the ability to drive three 8K displays and refresh rates up to 240 hertz nice but this is an improvement in IO by bringing two new 48 gigabits per second HDMI ports more than it is some revolutionary upgrade in video capability for traditional Graphics based GPU tasks the M2 Ultra gets clobbered by even mid-range gpus from gaming to 3D animation the M2 Ultra only looks good when contrasted against prior Max not when taking an objective view of the market and in compute tasks well stuff doesn't really much improve it barely manages to beat out a sub 2 000 MSI laptop in geekbench's opencl test not a great look now okay when accounting for optimized software utilizing metal compute instead of something like opencl things should improve right well the M2 Ultra is still handily outpaced even the 750 AMD RX 6950xt smashes it and that's a one-year-old GPU not just supported by every modern PC but even the 2019 Mac Pro that this computer is intending to replace and that's the headline the M2 Ultra graphically is less capable than a four-year-old Mac Pro and that brings us to the pcie slots which cannot support gpus subsequently gone are the eight-lane MPX slots for Apple's Fancy Pants graphics cards that supported Thunderbolt pass-through and gone is the plx pcie switch on the reverse side of the motherboard this was one of the coolest things about the 2019 Mac Pro because despite the Cascade Lake xeons only supporting 64 pcie lanes that PL LX chip in the prior Mac Pro allowed you to install eight full-size cards using up to 96 Lanes the lack of MPX this time around makes the new Mac Pro's motherboard look Barren but so do the lacking Lane traces because there are just two x-16 slots just four X8 slots and one X4 slot we've got ourselves much skimpier I O this time around but without support for gpus I mean does it really even matter what can you even put in here well we tested pcie-based storage devices and network interface cards that both worked pretty much without a hitch as long as the device is supported by Mac OS it is supported here but that didn't really seem to me like something that a pro would actually require so I talked to a few pros and while writing this video I really found out that there's only two real potential markets for this new Mac Pro and that's live production houses and musicians now multi-stream video video capture cards are crucial on set in studio and more however many of the latest offerings from brands are moving to Thunderbolt anyways not because such a Mac doesn't exist but because there are features that are not afforded by an add-in board that you can utilize with Thunderbolt like displays external cases and more and in the music world Pros I talked to well they told me that really only Pro Tools stonebank's use of pcie based HDX cards for processing every other major Daw has moved to primarily supporting Thunderbolt interfaces years ago one engineer told me that even within the Avid Pro Tools Community most musicians are now exclusively using Thunderbolt based hdx's dsps and fpgas from Brands like antelope and others anyways so if the Mac Pro isn't for the weirdos that it's alleged to be for is it for anyone why release it at all I think people are trying to solve some great mystery that's not actually a mystery at all the Mac Pro we have today was not originally the plan it became a machine marked with technical Follies and delays and was ultimately released with compromise and maybe that's going to make this machine the last Mac Pro but I think it's more than likely there's just a stop Gap in between figuring out a more ideal solution look throughout the entire 2010s Apple neglected its pro market a market that just wanted something but instead got nothing today we have two great Pro level options okay sure they're very similar and in the process of releasing a machine without class leading Graphics well they've basically destroyed any remaining hope of Refuge for 3D artists animators Architects and Weirdos that need a GPU but transparent disappointment is better than obfuscated neglect and if there's anything that Apple has proven over the last decade there's always the possibility that they will change course when it comes to the Mac thank you so much for watching and as always stay snazzy

Channel: Snazzy Labs

Views: 171,504

Keywords: snazzy labs, quinn nelson, snazzyq, mac pro, apple mac pro, mac, 2023 mac, apple m2, apple m3, m2 max, m2 ultra, m2 extreme, m3 ultra, apple, computer, arm, intel, gpu, apple silicon egpu, expandability, pc build, mac vs pc, 2023

Id: tucbrkWxmNA

Length: 9min 15sec (555 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 17 2023