Mac Pro with Apple Silicon Finally Here to Complete Transition Away From Intel

News
By Andrew E. Freedman
published

The Apple Silicon transition is complete.

Apple M2 Ultra Mac Pro
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Apple is finally finishing its move away from Intel with a new Mac Pro using M2 Ultra. It is configurable with up to 192GB of memory, will start at $6,299, and be available starting next week.

Every Mac Pro will use M2 Ultra, with 24 CPU cores and up to a 76-core GPU. The chassis shares its physical design with the last Intel Xeon Mac Pro, and vertical and rack-mounted options will be available.

Apple M2 Ultra Mac Pro Open

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Rather than using AfterBurner for ProRes video as an optional card, Apple says the new PC will have the power of seven AfterBurner cards. It can ingest 22 camera feeds direct to Pro Res.

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Mac Pro
(Image credit: Future)

There are 8 Thunderbolt ports, as well as dual Gigabit Ethernet. PCIe Gen 4 expansion cards are an option now, with five slots for video, networking, audio and video IO cards. However, there is no word yet on third-party graphics.

Apple M2 Ultra Mac Pro Ports

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Apple initially said that its transition away from Intel chips would take two years. That was in 2020. While the Mac Pro pushed that into three-year territory, it seems the transition is now complete. Apple has finally moved its entire product line away from Intel.

Andrew E. Freedman

Andrew E. Freedman is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on laptops, desktops and gaming. He also keeps up with the latest news. A lover of all things gaming and tech, his previous work has shown up in Tom's Guide, Laptop Mag, Kotaku, PCMag and Complex, among others. Follow him on Threads @FreedmanAE and Mastodon @FreedmanAE.mastodon.social.

22 Comments Comment from the forums
  • bit_user
    It will have up to 192GB of memory.
    For some workstation applications, that's not nearly enough.

    For PCIe, it must be using a PLX switch, because I think the M2 Max (i.e. the basis for the Ultra) doesn't have nearly enough lanes to support 5 slots.
    Reply
  • peachpuff
    Gigabit ethernet? 🤣🤣🤣
    Reply
  • palladin9479
    LMFAO... a SOC as a "workstation". Reminds me of this.

    9BnLbv6QYcA
    I’ll buy almost anything if it’s shiny and made by apple
    Reply
  • bit_user
    palladin9479 said:
    LMFAO... a SOC as a "workstation".
    Yeah, I can see the limited memory and core count pushing some users onto Xeon W or ThreadRipper Pro. The question of dGPU support might also be an issue for some.

    For those with less extreme needs, it'll be fine.

    palladin9479 said:
    I’ll buy almost anything if it’s shiny and made by apple"
    The real knee-slapper is usually how much the accessories cost.
    https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/04/15/apples-mac-pro-wheels-cost-699-and-the-feet-run-299
    On the plus side, this is a rare bit of good news:
    "With everything said and done, the (top spec) 2023 M2 Ultra Mac Pro comes in at $12,199 before tax and without a display."

    https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/06/05/maxed-out-apple-silicon-mac-pro-costs-14-what-a-maxed-intel-one-did
    For Apple, that's surprisingly reasonable.
    Reply
  • newtechldtech
    Atually I was expecting something like 128 cores chip at least and 2 TB of RAM.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    newtechldtech said:
    Atually I was expecting something like 128 cores chip at least and 2 TB of RAM.
    It would've been interesting, for sure. However, I think the writing has been on the wall, for a while, that it would simply follow the mold of the M1 Ultra.

    In the next gen, I'd guess they might scale up to 4x Max chips and offer CXL support as a way to scale up memory capacity well into the TB range.

    The problem I think they face is that the Mac Pro market just isn't big enough to justify a purpose-built CPU for it. So, if they don't buy one from somebody like Ampere, then it's going to be some form of scaling up of their laptop SoCs.

    Edit: I guess another possibility is that they actually decide to make a server CPU, which they could deploy in their own cloud infrastructure.
    Reply
  • palladin9479
    Apple is not some physics defying deity on high that can will thermodynamics to cease to function by sheer style. There is only so much thermal energy that can be transferred through a limit physical area and modern GPU's already push hundreds of watts worth of TDP. Not to mention unified memory architectures absolute suck for GPUs as they have a very different memory requirement then general purpose CPUs. CAD / CAM and other GPU heavy processing tasks are all done better with a dGPU.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    palladin9479 said:
    There is only so much thermal energy that can be transferred through a limit physical area and modern GPU's already push hundreds of watts worth of TDP.
    It's never going to rival something like a RTX 4090. You're right that thermal density is a limiting factor. Die size is another one, although Apple's M-series Ultras stand alone as the only true multi-die, mass market GPUs.

    palladin9479 said:
    Not to mention unified memory architectures absolute suck for GPUs as they have a very different memory requirement then general purpose CPUs.
    Consoles have shown how much potential the APU system architecture provides. The M1 Ultra provides 800 GB/s of memory bandwidth, which compares rather well to the 1 TB/s of top-end gaming GPUs. I'm still waiting to find out what speed memory the M2 Ultra uses.

    palladin9479 said:
    CAD / CAM and other GPU heavy processing tasks are all done better with a dGPU.
    Truth be told, I genuinely wonder how intensive CAD is on modern GPUs.
    https://www.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/ga3rxr/how_many_polygons_are_the_top_limit_for_realtime/
    I find it a little hard to believe that CAD really needs to display more than several million polys per model. Decent tessellation tech has been the norm for a while, now. And any half-decent scene graph should provide adequate hidden surface removal to avoid much depth complexity.

    I'd wager that 3D content creation and high-end video production are much heavier GPU users, these days.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    bit_user said:
    For PCIe, it must be using a PLX switch, because I think the M2 Max (i.e. the basis for the Ultra) doesn't have nearly enough lanes to support 5 slots.
    You've got to be right, because there's a slide missing here which specifies lanes which STH has. There are 4 slots running x8, 2 running x16, a PCIe 3.0 x4 I/O card, and they're saying 8 thunderbolt 4 ports. That's a lot more I/O than we've seen on any of the M chips to this point so that has to be coming from somewhere. y

    STH article: https://www.servethehome.com/apple-m2-ultra-powering-mac-pro-mac-studio-and-a-face-m2-experience-arm/
    Reply
  • skiwi44
    bit_user said:
    For some workstation applications, that's not nearly enough.

    For PCIe, it must be using a PLX switch, because I think the M2 Max (i.e. the basis for the Ultra) doesn't have nearly enough lanes to support 5 slots.
    Errr, yet it can. out of the box, support 22 simultaneous streams of uncompressed 8K video that would normally require rendering on separate machines. Out of the box, it can support 6x 6K@60Hz and 3x8K @60Hz displays.

    You would need to be pretty special for that not to be sufficient....
    Reply