Now that Apple has revealed and released their new MacBook Pros with the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips,
we can now finally get a better idea of what to expect from the future Apple Silicon Mac Pro!
So in this video, I’m gonna take the existing leaks and rumors
that we already have for this Mac Pro and combine them with what we now know about the
M1 Max chip to make some predictions in terms of the general size and design of the Mac Pro,
the price, the release date, the layout of the motherboard, the situation with the RAM,
the overall performance and much more, so without further ado, let’s jump right into the design!
First of all, Mark Gurman recently reminded us that the Mac Pro will
have a new larger SoC chip with up to 40 CPU cores and 128 GPU cores,
which is a perfectly scaled version of the current 10-core M1 Max chip with a 32-core GPU.
And in previous reports, Mark confirmed that the 40-core chip will consist of 32-high
performance cores, exactly 4x the amount that you get with the M1 Max chip.
And he also said that it would come with a less expensive option
with a 20-core CPU and 64-core GPU, which is 2x the amount of the M1 Max.
So just like I already showed you guys around 4 months ago, I believe that Apple will quite
literally take either two or four M1 Max dies and toss them into a single SoC package, using some
form of new infinity fabric to interconnect the dies to create a single extremely powerful chip!
Now before I get into what that means for the price and the performance,
I want to cover the design, but first, I want to mention that only 27%
of you guys are subscribed, so if you didn’t already,
click that subscribe button to help us reach our goal of 1 million subs before the end of the year!
Now getting into the design, a lot of people are expecting the new Mac Pro to look like
a cube, but that’s actually based on a pretty old rumor from Mark Gurman
from way back in January when he said it would resemble the old Apple Power Mac G4 Cube.
But if you look at a more recent report from Gurman in May, he changed his mind
and he now believes that it will look like a smaller version of the current Mac Pro design,
which to me makes more sense because the design of the current Mac Pro is now iconic, so here’s
an image of what I expect it to look like, being around 33% smaller than the current model.
Now you might be wondering how Apple is gonna have room for all of the components
if they’re making it that much smaller.
Well, if you think about it,
there are 4 things that take up the most space inside of the current Mac Pro.
#1 is the two massive MPX Modules for graphics.
#2 is the HUGE CPU Heatsink for that crazy power-demanding 28-core XEON.
#3 is the large and thick triple-fan system that covers the entire face of the Mac Pro.
And #4 is the pretty heft 1.4kilowatt power supply.
So to tackle #1 first, I fully believe that the new mac Pro WILL NOT support
the current MPX Modules because I can 100% guarantee you that third-party GPUs like the
ones from AMD will NOT be supported on the new Mac Pro or any Apple Silicon Mac EVER!
So with that said, the new Mac Pro will likely only have either four or six
PCI-express slots so that professionals can add in things like audio interface cards, I/o cards,
Blackmagic deck link cards, and potentially custom Apple GPU cards if Apple decides to make them.
But even if they do, they will not be double-wide like the current MPX slots,
they’ll probably only take up a single slot, just like the current afterburner card.
Now onto #2, that massive CPU heatsink may not need to be that large because as we all know,
Apple’s chips are extremely power efficient.
And that same reasoning applies to the huge triple fan
system which I believe can easily be slimmed down on the new Mac Pro.
And finally, for #4, we have the absolutely overkill 1.4kilowatt power supply which we
won’t need anymore, and I know this for a fact because the highest package power
reported on the new M1 Max MacBook Pro has been 92 watts, and keep in mind that’s with Andrei
putting as much load as possible on the chip, including the CPU and the GPU at the same time!
So if you multiply that by four, assuming the Mac Pro will have four of these dies,
that brings the power usage up to 368 watts, and that’s for the top-of-the-line chip!
Keep in mind that our 12-core XEON Mac Pro, which is slower than the 30W CPU in the M1 Pro chip,
was able to use up to 218 watts by itself, let me repeat that… that’s just the XEON CPU alone!
The 92W total package power in the M1 Max also includes the GPU, the neural engine,
the media encoders, the thunderbolt display engines, the AMX coprocessors,
the memory buses, the RAM, all of the caches, and literally everything else!
And now looking at the Intel Mac Pro, the highest-end W6900X GPU
uses around 300 to 350 watts alone, and the W6800X DUO likely uses up to 500W total,
that’s more than the theoretical maximum of 368 watts with four M1 Max dies, and that’s
including the CPU and everything else, so the point I’m making is that Apple no longer needs a
crazy large supply, especially since they won’t support AMD graphics cards anymore.
So with that design stuff out of the way, I want to get into how I can see Apple pulling off this
new 40-core M1 Max Quadro chip, which is a name that many other people on Twitter can agree on!
As we already know, Apple is using a binning process to improve yields for their chips,
as you can see in this analysis by Frederic orange on Twitter.
So for example, if there are too many defects on the bottom M1 Max portion of the die,
Apple literally slices off the bottom and uses it as an M1 Pro chip.
Or if there are up to 2 defective performance cores,
apple sells it as an 8-core base M1 Pro chip in the 14”.
And even better, Apple secretly printed a second neural engine on the bottom M1 Max portion just in
case the one on the top is defective to sell it as an M1 Max chip to improve yields, which is genius!
So my theory is that over the next year, Apple is gonna be collecting perfect M1 Max dies
with no flaws at all, so they can be used in the Mac Pro by creating that M1 Max Quadro chip
using an I/O die and some sort of infinity fabric to minimize efficiency loss.
And the cool thing about using perfect dies is that Apple could technically enable the second
16-core Neural Engine within each die, giving us up to an insane 128-core
Neural Engine across all of the four M1 Max dies, if they really wanted to.
But to make things even better, the new M1 Max Quadro chip will technically have
8 video encoders and decoders, as well as 8 ProRes encoders and decoders.
For example, Matthew Moniz made a video where he compared the M1 Max MacBook pro
to a custom-built Desktop PC with the brand new i9-12900K Alder Lake CPU
and an RTX 3080 GPU, and in his Davinci Resolve export test,
the MacBook Pro smoked the desktop PC by finishing in just a minute and 59 seconds.
But with 8 video encoders and decoders, the M1 Max Quadro in the future Mac Pro
will finish the export in only around 30 seconds, basically 6x faster than this RTX 3080 Desktop PC,
basically creating the world’s fastest computer in the world for video editing, by far.
But what REALLY blew my mind is a programming test that Matthew ran,
which was compiling Mozilla Firefox.
Apparently, the 10-core M1 Max chip only took one minute longer than the Alder Lake 12900K,
which is absolutely mind-blowing because that CPU is now the world’s fastest non-server consumer
CPU in terms of raw performance, being over 2x faster than the M1 Max, but in this compile test,
the M1 Max is barely slower because of the efficient unified memory architecture.
In fact, in our Xcode programming test, the 10-core M1 Max was only 4 seconds slower
than the insanely expensive 28-core XEON in the current Mac Pro,
so imagine how fast the 40-core M1 Max Quadro will be in the future Mac Pro!
And just using some quick math, the 40-core CPU could score up to 49,348 points in Cinebench R23
if it scaled linearly, but i’ll take off 10% for efficiency loss, giving us a score of 44,413
points, basically creating the world’s fastest non-server-grade CPU,
competing with some of the highest-end AMD threadripper CPUs out there.
But going even further, the crazy thing is that the new Quadro chip
will also have 8 AMX chips for matrix multiplication, it’ll have 128-channel memory
for overkill photo editing performance, and it should have 16 Thunderbolt 4 controllers
to support up to a theoretical total of 12 6K displays and 4 4K displays using HDMI.
And then of course, you’ll have up to 256GB of unified memory and 128
powerful GPU cores, so if you’re curious about how that crazy GPU would perform,
we can actually get a rough estimate if we take a look at how the M1 Max performs.
In the optimized 3DMark Wild Life Extreme benchmark,
the 32-core M1 Max scored almost exactly 4x higher than the 8-core GPU in the M1,
showing that Apple achieved perfect 4x scaling in optimized workflows.
So if we assume perfect 4x scaling going from a single 32-core M1 Max die up to 128-cores in an
M1 Max Quadro chip, that would bring the score up to over 80,000, which is absolutely insane!
But just to be realistic, let’s factor in 10% efficiency loss due to the fact that the
four dies will have to communicate over some form of infinity fabric.
That brings us down to around 73,000 points, which is actually higher than the best score
ever recorded in this benchmark, which is 61,973 using an i9-10900K and an RTX 3090 GPU.
However, that GPU was overclocked like CRAZY, with the clock speed sitting at 2.8GHz
compared to the base 1.4GHz frequency, as well as a slightly overclocked 1.4GHz memory clock speed.
But if we adjust the boost clock speeds down to a more realistic 1.8GHz
that most of these 3090’s ship with, we see scores of around 45,000 points
compared to an estimated 73,000 for the future Mac Pro.
So the point that I’m making is that even the integrated 128-core GPU
in this new M1 Max Quadro Mac Pro would be the fastest consumer GPU in the world,
and that’s not even looking into performance per watt metrics.
So based on that, I honestly don’t think that Apple needs to create
custom Apple GPU add-in cards, but if they for some reason do,
they can potentially reuse M1 Max dies that had too many flaws in other parts
of the die and simply use them to create custom GPU chips with disabled CPU cores.
But with all of that out of the way, the last point I want to make is that a fully-loaded
new Mac Pro will be less expensive than a current Intel Mac Pro!
Now the reason the current 28-core XEON CPU in the Mac Pro is so expensive is because it features a
MASSIVE monolithic die that has low yields because those huge dies take up a larger portion of the
silicon wafer, so you’re wasting more of the edges of the wafer and losing dies due to flaws.
But if you look at something like Apple’s M1 chip,
the price per die is MUCH cheaper because they’re much smaller, estimated by Locuza
on Twitter to be 120 square millimeters, so there’s a lot less wasted wafer space.
So Frederic_Orange made an estimate of the price per die and it comes out to $200 per M1 Max die
based on a 60% yield rate because this is a newly designed chip,
bringing the total up to $800 for four of these dies, which is likely MUCH lower than
one of those monolithic 28-core XEON dies which doesn’t even include all of the other components
like the crazy 128-core GPU and everything else.
So because Apple is gonna be combining multiple M1 Dies,
they’re saving a ton of cash compared to using monolithic dies,
which means that the price that we as consumers have to pay will drop by a lot!
But with that said, let’s finally get into what I expect Apple to pack into the base model,
as well as the pricing and the release date!
Mark Gurman believes that you’ll have two main chip options for the Mac Pro, the 20-core model
which I think will be called the M1 Max Duo, and the 40-core model, or the M1 Max Quadro.
So for the base model, I expect it to come with a 20-core CPU, a binned 48-core GPU that can be
upgraded to 64 cores, 64GB of unified memory that can be upgraded to 128GB,
and a 1TB SSD that can be upgraded to up to 16 Terabytes, and potentially optional
dedicated traditional RAM if they choose to add that in for specific workloads.
And as for my estimates for the base price, I think it’ll start anywhere from $4,000
to $6,000, and then upgrading from the base chip to the top-of-the-line
40-core with 128 GPU cores and 256GB of RAM will cost somewhere around $8,000,
which is significantly cheaper than the CPU and GPU upgrades on the current Mac Pro.
And then of course you’ve gotta add in storage upgrades and potentially traditional RAM
upgrades and maybe even add in custom GPU cards if Apple decides to do that as well.
But of course, this is all just speculation, but one thing I do know for sure
is that the new Mac Pro will likely go up for sale in either November
or December of next year, just in time for business write-off season.
So there you guys go, hopefully I put some things into perspective,
and I fully believe that this Mac Pro will be the fastest consumer-available computer
in the world, by far, for both professional work and gaming!
So hopefully you enjoyed this video, be sure to subscribe.