> Now that they've caught up with Intel and AMD...
I'm an enormous fan of the M series. But there is an interesting consequence of a couple of fundamental design decisions.
The M series has huge memory bandwidth but look at its focus on I/O. It reminds me of one of the design decisions of the Alto (memory bus was 3/2 the screen refresh rate, a mind-boggling decision for its time). The fact that the M1 can go in an ipad is insane, but is enabled by the way the M series was designed. Their design for long battery life while drawing onto directly connected displays is unmatched.
However I believe that same decision has hobbled the M1 in a way that may make a Mac Pro version "impossible" (i.e. too much change to be worth doing). M series are optimized to dash rapidly then quickly go to sleep.
I feel the Intel and AMD guys are still thinking of sustained performance, a holdover from the desktop world and its mainframe, or at least minicomputer roots. Psychologically their mobile chips look to me like scaled down desktop machines.
If my belief is right, AMD and Intel aren't really catching up on mobile, while Apple will probably never produce a Mac Pro worth buying (for me they never were, but I'm sure there are people for which they were a great deal).
Apple's CPUs do very well in sustained performance. They fit 8 high-performance CPUs and 2 efficiency cores into a 40w peak power envelope while hitting peak clockspeeds (that 40w includes all the IO, mostly idling GPU, idling NPU, SSD controller, etc). Based on M2, their new chip should be 3.4-3.5GHz with 4 efficiency cores that get 30-40% better IPC all within that same power envelope.
AMD puts 96 cores into a 360w TDP (not counting spikes that go higher than that) at 3.6GHz. Apple could most likely fit 72 high-performance cores and 36 more efficiency cores into that same 360w TDP.
Given that AMD's chips require much higher clockspeeds to hit the same total performance (nearly 5GHz for Zen 3 to match a 3.2GHz M1), the final product from AMD would likely be quite a bit slower overall.
I believe the real reason for the Mac Pro not hitting the market is their insistence on unified memory. At that size, unified memory and controlling latencies explodes in complexity.
Even worse, the Mac Studio already appeals to most of the higher-end market meaning this $20-50k system probably doesn't have very many buyers either. They could sell such a product in the server market, but they left that market years ago and the reinvestment costs would be massive and very high-risk.
Yes but people buying current gen Mac Pros probably value upgradability and want/need discrete GPUs. Just try to imagine how much would Apple charge for 256GB based on M1/M2 pricing.
I'm an enormous fan of the M series. But there is an interesting consequence of a couple of fundamental design decisions.
The M series has huge memory bandwidth but look at its focus on I/O. It reminds me of one of the design decisions of the Alto (memory bus was 3/2 the screen refresh rate, a mind-boggling decision for its time). The fact that the M1 can go in an ipad is insane, but is enabled by the way the M series was designed. Their design for long battery life while drawing onto directly connected displays is unmatched.
However I believe that same decision has hobbled the M1 in a way that may make a Mac Pro version "impossible" (i.e. too much change to be worth doing). M series are optimized to dash rapidly then quickly go to sleep.
I feel the Intel and AMD guys are still thinking of sustained performance, a holdover from the desktop world and its mainframe, or at least minicomputer roots. Psychologically their mobile chips look to me like scaled down desktop machines.
If my belief is right, AMD and Intel aren't really catching up on mobile, while Apple will probably never produce a Mac Pro worth buying (for me they never were, but I'm sure there are people for which they were a great deal).