M2 Pro and M2 Max

Cmaier said:
It wouldn’t be insane for Apple to release dedicated cards for things like ML training, video encoding, etc. They won’t do it, but it wouldn’t be insane.
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There's been some speculation that Apple may release AMD cards, minus the GPU drivers, for compute and other tasks. We keep speculating on third-party graphics cards for the Mac Pro, but as you and many have pointed out, who is going to write the drivers? My question is: who is going to test the drivers? Graphics drivers aren't easy, just ask Intel, and springing that on the market, while only exposing them within Apple's skunkworks seems like poor planning. I suppose they could have a limited NDA with close partners like Adobe and Blackmagic, but I think that is dubious, because the Mac Pro has always been the least restrictive in terms of "surprise and delight" with Apple's product announcements. The 2019 Mac Pro was announced a full six months before it shipped.

I had assumed that, if Apple were going to release full-on third-party graphics cards for Apple Silicon, then it would have been in the form of an eGPU dev kit at last year's WWDC. Then, developers would be ready for when the Apple Silicon Mac Pro launches, whether that is in March or June, depending on Apple's schedule. I suppose they could do that at this year's WWDC, then ship in December, yet again, but I seriously doubt Apple wants to miss their 2-year transition by a full 3-years. The longer they wait, the longer they'll be stuck shipping both x86 and Arm versions of macOS. I would imagine that their software engineers are itching to do away with that duplication.

Again, that's why the Mac Pro remains the most fascinating species of Apple Silicon, because there are many unanswered questions.
 
Colstan said:
There's been some speculation that Apple may release AMD cards, minus the GPU drivers, for compute and other tasks. We keep speculating on third-party graphics cards for the Mac Pro, but as you and many have pointed out, who is going to write the drivers? My question is: who is going to test the drivers? Graphics drivers aren't easy, just ask Intel, and springing that on the market, while only exposing them within Apple's skunkworks seems like poor planning. I suppose they could have a limited NDA with close partners like Adobe and Blackmagic, but I think that is dubious, because the Mac Pro has always been the least restrictive in terms of "surprise and delight" with Apple's product announcements. The 2019 Mac Pro was announced a full six months before it shipped.

I had assumed that, if Apple were going to release full-on third-party graphics cards for Apple Silicon, then it would have been in the form of an eGPU dev kit at last year's WWDC. Then, developers would be ready for when the Apple Silicon Mac Pro launches, whether that is in March or June, depending on Apple's schedule. I suppose they could do that at this year's WWDC, then ship in December, yet again, but I seriously doubt Apple wants to miss their 2-year transition by a full 3-years. The longer they wait, the longer they'll be stuck shipping both x86 and Arm versions of macOS. I would imagine that their software engineers are itching to do away with that duplication.

Again, that's why the Mac Pro remains the most fascinating species of Apple Silicon, because there are many unanswered questions.
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All of this does make me think that there will, indeed, be an M2 Ultra. If Mac Pro can’t be the best Mac Pro ever, at least it can be the most performant Mac ever. (It may essentially tie a M2 Ultra Mac Studio if such a thing comes to pass)
 
mr_roboto said:
Afterburner is just a FPGA on a PCIe card, not custom silicon. FPGAs are extraordinarily inefficient compared to normal chips. You pay a huge price in area and power and clock speed for being able to arbitrarily redefine what they are in the field.

To me, Afterburner feels like a one-and-done product. In the 2018-2019 time frame, Apple should have already had most or all of the work done on the video codec block that was going into Apple Silicon, and they wanted to make at least a limited version of it available on the 2019 Mac Pro. So they had one of their board designers whip up a simple FPGA card and one of their RTL designers port the codec to FPGA, and that was that.

The 7 gazillion streams isn't something they can really address with a similar Afterburner 2, not unless they want to use outrageously expensive FPGAs (unit price: tens of thousands of dollars). The only real scope for it is providing newer codecs to older computers, but Apple will probably just want to sell you a new computer.
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I never actually looked much into the Afterburner outside of seeing what it did performance wise in some tests. I remember thinking it was relatively little win for such a big card compared to what they could do in their SoCs. I never realised it was an FPGA based product. But that makes me wonder if it's possible to reprogram the Afterburner to do other tasks

But I mean Apple could in theory then take the hardware designs of the video encode/decode blocks of their SoCs and scale it up for an Afterburner 2
 
Aside from drivers for GPUs, there's also the consideration that TBDR and IMR can have different optimisation mechanisms, and even expose different bugs - some things are fine in IMR and buggy in TBDR and potentially vice versa. I think it's fine to have a PCIe based Apple GPU foregoing some of the unified memory locality advantages, but having both IMR and TBDR GPUs does make it a lot harder to imagine. You could see a fair bit of software that is buggy graphically on Mac Pro because developers of the software don't have one to test on and assume everything is TBDR unified memory. I don't know - It's intriguing for sure at least
 
Apple needs ASi GPGPUs, both in the ASi Mac Pro & for e(GP)GPU usage by all other ASi Macs...
 
Cmaier said:
All of this does make me think that there will, indeed, be an M2 Ultra. If Mac Pro can’t be the best Mac Pro ever, at least it can be the most performant Mac ever. (It may essentially tie a M2 Ultra Mac Studio if such a thing comes to pass)
Click to expand...
Gurman still says that an M2 Ultra is planned, despite the "Extreme" being axed. The leaker on MR claims that his buddy has been testing a Mac Pro with the features expected of an M2 Ultra since October. His latest update says that stability is getting much better, and runs 13.3 Ventura, as Gurman said, but the hardware features remain unchanged. He says his friend is remaining mum on third-party GPU drivers, which is a change from a firm "no" back in October. Regardless, assuming that 13.3 is the target version, and if it doesn't get pushed back, then the Mac Pro could ship as early as March. 12.3 Monterey shipped on March 14th of last year. If 13.3 gets released earlier than the Mac Pro, then I wonder if any skillful individual will uncover references about it buried deep within.

It's notable that this same leaker on MR has never claimed, at any point, that his pal had access to an M2 "Extreme". He does think that Apple needs to do something showy, but has no knowledge of one. Thus far, to those of us outside the Apple black box, the "Extreme" has only ever existed inside of Gurman's articles. For all we know, he botched this, and there never was an M2 "Extreme" in the works, and he's simply dialing back his error. He already walked back his "hallmark features" remark that lead us to spend three weeks speculating about DIMMs that he now says will never arrive.

My guess is that the Mac Studio won't be updated until after the Mac Pro ships, since Apple would want it to be the king of kings among all Macs. The Mac Studio may not get updated with a the M2 generation, or when it does receive an update, the M(x) Ultra will be missing, saved exclusively for the Mac Pro.

It's a bit of a conundrum, one which shall result in us endlessly chasing our own tails until the next Mac Pro is finally announced.
 
Colstan said:
Gurman still says that an M2 Ultra is planned, despite the "Extreme" being axed. The leaker on MR claims that his buddy has been testing a Mac Pro with the features expected of an M2 Ultra since October. His latest update says that stability is getting much better, and runs 13.3 Ventura, as Gurman said, but the hardware features remain unchanged. He says his friend is remaining mum on third-party GPU drivers, which is a change from a firm "no" back in October. Regardless, assuming that 13.3 is the target version, and if it doesn't get pushed back, then the Mac Pro could ship as early as March. 12.3 Monterey shipped on March 14th of last year. If 13.3 gets released earlier than the Mac Pro, then I wonder if any skillful individual will uncover references about it buried deep within.

It's notable that this same leaker on MR has never claimed, at any point, that his pal had access to an M2 "Extreme". He does think that Apple needs to do something showy, but has no knowledge of one. Thus far, to those of us outside the Apple black box, the "Extreme" has only ever existed inside of Gurman's articles. For all we know, he botched this, and there never was an M2 "Extreme" in the works, and he's simply dialing back his error. He already walked back his "hallmark features" remark that lead us to spend three weeks speculating about DIMMs that he now says will never arrive.

My guess is that the Mac Studio won't be updated until after the Mac Pro ships, since Apple would want it to be the king of kings among all Macs. The Mac Studio may not get updated with a the M2 generation, or when it does receive an update, the M(x) Ultra will be missing, saved exclusively for the Mac Pro.

It's a bit of a conundrum, one which shall result in us endlessly chasing our own tails until the next Mac Pro is finally announced.
Click to expand...
Plot twist, Mac Pro will come with a Qualcomm 8cx Gen 3 and a Graviton2 for high performance tasks
 
Jimmyjames said:
Some more geekbench scores
Single Core: 2030
Multi Core: 15333

Mac14,6 - Geekbench

Benchmark results for a Mac14,6 with an Apple M2 Max processor.
browser.geekbench.com

First gpu geekbench score I've seen
86805

Mac14,6 - Geekbench

Benchmark results for a Mac14,6 with an Apple M2 Max processor.
browser.geekbench.com
Click to expand...
Higher base clock frequency than the M2/M2 Pro?
 
Cmaier said:
Higher base clock frequency than the M2/M2 Pro?
Click to expand...
Could it be; Possibly, maybe - that High Power Mode on the 16" Max models actually increase clocks now. It barely influences anything on the M1 Max 16". You have to put both CPU and GPU to simultaneous heavy work and even then only see a small difference from the default setting
 
Cmaier said:
Higher base clock frequency than the M2/M2 Pro?
Click to expand...
I would say "yes"

1E01ECB3-9D60-4355-B0D3-2CCB09686573.jpeg
 
Colstan said:
This reflects a leaked Geekbench score from last month. It was questionable, at the time, but it looks like it was true. It does make me wonder if Apple will continue to apply the juice even higher with larger desktop models, namely the Mac Studio and Mac Pro.
Click to expand...

I seem to recall theorizing that the big change between M2 and M1 (aside from much beefier efficiency cores) was that the performance cores now can scale in frequency. Looks like that’s Apple’s plan.

Which makes me think that Mac Pro will really ramp up the clock and take advantage of the cooling solution, as a way to differentiate against Mac Studio.

I feel like the A-series is going to diverge from the M-series, and the M-series is going to start having bigger changes between desktop and laptop.
 
Cmaier said:
I seem to recall theorizing that the big change between M2 and M1 (aside from much beefier efficiency cores) was that the performance cores now can scale in frequency. Looks like that’s Apple’s plan.

Which makes me think that Mac Pro will really ramp up the clock and take advantage of the cooling solution, as a way to differentiate against Mac Studio.

I feel like the A-series is going to diverge from the M-series, and the M-series is going to start having bigger changes between desktop and laptop.
Click to expand...
I'd definitely appreciate that.
 
Does anyone know, does the single core score for an Intel processor run entirely at "Turbo" speed, being so short?
 
Here's another M2 Max result, but it's for the 14,5, and is 3.49 GHz--consistent with the 14,5 being the 14", and the 14,6 (at 3.68 GHz) being a 16" M2 Max on high power mode, as @casperes1996 suggested. [Among the 1st-gen MBP's, only the 16" M1 Max MBP has a high-power mode; it's not available on the 14" M1 Max; perhaps that's also what's happening here, with the additional distinction that, unlike with the M1 generation, high-power mode in the M2 generation actually offers an increase in clock speed.]

Mac14,5 - Geekbench

Benchmark results for a Mac14,5 with an Apple M2 Max processor.
browser.geekbench.com
 
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