How many cards do your clients usually need? If Apple were to produce a M2 or M3 based Mac Pro as a 2U rack mount with room for, say, 4 wing cards (horizontal), given the lack of need for a GPU or Afterburner, would that be enough for most?
From my perspective, it's not so much what cards clients need to home-grow develop their own solution, but rather what would I or someone else need to develop and sell a special purpose MacPro-based product a customer would find useful/interesting for, say, analyzing realtime (or stored) data (industrial, medical, research, defense). Or whatever specific need is required by a customer.
Just to toss out a number, between 1 and 4 (or could be just 1 or 2) cards, depending on how data comes in; ie digital or analog. And if analog, would there be room for a small shielded box for two to four A/D converters and a small linear power supply (if MacPro’s switching power supply could not be adequately filtered). Keeping noise out of A/D converters, via proximity or conducted through a switching supply, makes me nervous. A MacPro full of logic with super-fast rise times translates to wideband noise in the frequency domain, which could corrupt A/D dynamic range.
I'm spitballing here as I haven't done this sort of thing in a long time. It's more of a thought experiment: ie, What kind of useful *turnkey* product could one make out of a rack mount MacPro?
That could range from a well-shielded board with two to four channel 16 bit A/D converters clocked at various high-speed rates that pushes digital samples into the huge amounts of soc RAM in the MacPro, to special purpose custom digital pre-processing cards accepting data implementing an algorithm in hardware. Or both. And custom analysis software, perhaps aided by MATLAB.
As an aside, I am kind of curious how fast MacPro’s internal M2/M3 RAM can directly accept continuous digital sample data received over an internal bus, or, MacPro’s 10 Gbit/s ethernet port with its overhead - without ever dropping (or corrupting) a sample. Certainly audio is no problem. 100 MegaSamples/sec (16 bit samples) from an external source over 10 Gbit/s ethernet with overhead? Possibly, I don’t know - the numbers seem to fit. Or… sample data could be drawn from a customer’s bulk memory as blocks, and not real time.
2U is an interesting size (3.5"), and pretty common for instrumentation (the current MacPro rack mount version is 5U (8 3/4").
Laying cards flat in a 2U chassis is an interesting idea. Curious...do you think a 2U chassis with lay-flat user cards is a real possibility from Apple?
The current MacPro has a 1.4 kilowatt power supply. No doubt an AS MacPro version will be much less. For reference, a Mac Studio lists maximum continuous power at 370 watts. So maybe 500 watts max for an AS Mac Pro? And more if there are user card slots? 700 watts?
Sorry for the ramble. The above is nothing specific, but just a bunch of initial stuff to think about to see what possibilities are practical.
