Mac Studio, M1 Ultra, and the New Mac Pro

What can does Apple's Peek Performance Event releases (Mac Studio and M1 Ultra) tell us about the new Mac Pro?

In this video, I recap the new release and imagine what a new Apple Silicon Mac Pro could look like.

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CHAPTERS
==========
0:00 Intro
0:32 M1 Ultra - UltraFusion Interconnect
2:29 Mac Studio
5:04 New Mac Pro - When?
5:56 M2 Mac Pro?
7:59 4 x M1 Max?
8:34 What makes a Mac Pro?
9:58 Multiple SoCs?

#Apple #MacPro #M1Ultra

[ConstantGeekery]

I think it's worth saying I edited this video on my 14" M1 Max MBP, using battery power, from 6K Blackmagic RAW on a 4K timeline (without any optimisations) and the experience was completely seamless. The fans only got audible halfway through the render!

[FredericEpe]

Ohhh yeah, just what I needed before going to bed

[daisyintherain]

I am so impressed with your new studio. It really makes a huge difference. Everything seems brighter, clearer and more dynamic. Your CG mug matches your shirt and both look good. Great video, though out of my league. Thank you.

[t.s.]

The Asahi Linux project has been reverse engineering M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max for some time, and discovered several months ago that the interrupt controller in M1 Pro/Max was a new design quite different from the interrupt controller in the original M1. The key difference is that the Pro/Max interrupt controller supports exchanging interrupts with CPUs located on remote die, an essential part of stitching multiple SoCs together and making them behave as one.

Here's the thing: while this new interrupt controller is architected such that future M* generations can easily be extended to support more than two SoCs, what Apple put in M1 Pro/Max supports just two. A two-die config is the limit. What they told us in the presentation is literally true: M1 Ultra completes the M1 family.

There's another reason to think this. If Apple was satisfied merely replicating the Intel Mac Pro's performance, the Mac Studio is almost all the way there. But to truly replace it, they need a SoC designed to support massive expansion, both memory and PCIe. Stitching more than two M1 Max die into a single machine would not help enough on memory capacity, and would be completely inadequate on the PCIe side. They probably wouldn't be able to offer even a single x16 slot, let alone the plethora on a big backplane required for a giant Mac Pro.

There are really two M1 silicon designs: the plain M1, and M1 Max. M1 Max is just cleverly designed to scale down to M1 Pro by chopping a slice of the chip off (not literally, but in the design sense), and up to M1 Max by providing interconnect to glue two M1 Max together. My belief is that M2 will preserve these two designs and add a third, a new SoC designed to provide more interconnect to support bigger multi-die configs, and much more PCIe I/O.

[jdmbandarelos]

the most realistic analyse of how the next mac pro could look like!

[mortenthorpe]

Removing the need to specialize code to accommodate and utilize parallel processing, and letting the processor handle the scheduling and parallelism, is a huge complexity and time saver for programmers. There are few things as complex as parallelism in programming, especially if you have to enable/disable it selectively depending on the platform executing the application.

[pdv]

Interesting video. Thanks a lot. And nice lighting in the background. New studio looks very nice.

[nobodynemoq]

As usual, very comprehensive and reasonable summary. You always deliver as expected. Good job, thank you and have a nice day ☺

[berengamble]

Super high quality content, delivered professionally. Great channel :)

[Composercleo]

This is the video I was waiting for 😌😌

[sonica]

It was really frustrating having all her power with the 2013 trash can Mac, but not being able to use the dual gpu’s 😞😒

[AlanW]

I wonder if an off-die interconnect is going to impede performance in such a configuration.

Perhaps what really happens is they have clock cycle headroom in the Ultra, as long as the cooling solution is up to the task. So it could be the same chip, but spun up to some ridiculous speed.

[MaxPowers]

Yeah I think your right it makes no sense to start the M2 in the Mac Pro a computer that will be a very niche product. I don’t really understand how two M1s will work together but it makes the most sense that’s what they’ll do that and PCI slots etc. who knows I won’t be getting near one ..my boss will though he’s the only one I know who has the current one. I’ll be getting the M1 studio Max’s for our edit suites anything more I think is overkill for what we do.

[sharonb.]

Great video. Very interesting possibilities.

[sterlingroberts]

This guy gets it.

I could easily see Apple launching it with two M1 Ultra chips linked together in a manner similar to Intel’s Xeon. It’s not as big of a deal for that market to handle the need for dual processor programming, and the industry is clearly already used to this issue.

I really doubt the Mac Pro will come with something other than M1 generation silicon. iPads(especially the Pro models) we’re on an 18 month refresh cycle for quite a while, so it seems reasonable that as you go up the computing food chain, the length between updates gets longer. People upgrade desktops/notebooks less frequently than iPads, and way less than iPhones. It also allows for larger jumps between the previous model, which will look great on those apple graphs.

[JoeTourist]

Since we're speculating, perhaps Apple will implement the Ultrafusion die interconnect on a super fast bus, allowing up to (perhaps) 8 M1 Max SoCs to be plugged into sockets.

[Jenny_Digital]

If there is _one_ thing that the new Mac Pro really needs to have, it’s PCI-E slots.

[misterforest]

Since the new Studio Display is so thick and has speakers and cameras, is it possible that it will be the next iMac eventually?

[TheBasementChannel]

I reckon the Mac Pro is a Mac studio with pci slots. I guarantee they’ll ditch the weird hole pattern as well.

[melomaniakjm]

The Max Ultra with 20 cores is a great performer in multi-threaded apps, no doubt. IF the GPUs perform, then this could be a great machine for 3D pros also. Fingers crossed.