You know what's funnier? The CPU they put inside it has a measily 24 PCIe lanes... They have multiple x8 and x16 slots, but there are only two PCIe busses, one x16 and one x8 all split up through PCIe switches. For some context, I've got a 3rd gen Ryzen 7 PC and that thing has 24...

Ahhhhh! Why does apple tease us so? They have such brilliant mechanical design... to make it easy to do upgrades that you can't actually do! Ugh.

@@jjoonathan7178 they want other companies to produce better full tower ARM alternatives

I thought it had 7 PCI slots!?!?

@@shapelessedIn practice it probably won’t matter to much most of the time, they are Gen 4 lanes and mostly for audio add ins, the only thing it supports that could use a lot of PCI-E bandwidth would be NVME drives in a configuration you would not likely use a MacPro for and instead an external NAS anyway. It’s mostly for audio and network cards that can easily manage full speed with a tiny handful of Gen 4 lanes.

Underrated comment. Kinda cheesy though. Gouda done better.

iFixit is the only outlet to test a 7000$ cheese-grater that is Incidentally a computer 10/10

@@fwheels7776 I agree, he could’a done feta

iMac and iCheese

The board design is insane, they would be using a board with a bunch of copper layers to fan out that BGA, which is expensive, ludicrously so at this size, and they're wasting most of it! You can tell the profit margin on this machine is out of this world, otherwise they wouldn't do that! They would have two boards, one with enough layers for the BGA and another with just enough for the rest, like they did with G5s.

My first reaction to the whole video didn't really come until Sam took the board out. I startled my dog yelling, "WHAT IS EVEN ON THE BOARD??? Maybe it's on the back?????? Nope."

@@s8wc3 I don't see why they'd need a lot of layers. The reason the package is so big is that Apple used package-on-package DRAM; there's eight DRAM packages hiding under that heatspreader. (If you want to see this for yourself, wccftech recently posted an article with pictures of a delidded M2 Ultra.) Unlike similar Intel and AMD big packages, none of the DRAM signals (and there are a lot of them! 1024 bits wide, IIRC) have to leave the package. Only IO does, and I'd be surprised if there's more than 64 lanes total SERDES. That shouldn't be much of a problem to route out.

​​@@t.s.4494ram is 64bit for ddr4/5 (though ddr5 has this split up into 2x32bit streams). And what you are describing is not how dram works at all from CPU to dram. The literal only difference here is that there isn't expandability. Sure, have soldered dram close to the SoC provides slightly lower latency, but beyond that, there is no difference (and certainly not anything a user or program would notice). This is blatantly done for $$$

For people who have add in cards for specialist tasks / audio / video. Robot overlord interfaces.

You actually can upgrade the boot SSDs, Apple sells upgrade/replacement kits on their store. You can also obviously add storage on PCIe cards (M.2, SATA, etc.) or with the Pegasus HDD caddy.

They didn't make this for PC lovers. Give up on that paradigm! The advantages of integration (All CPU, GPU, Neural Engine, and specialty processors for video, audio, and graphics integrated WITH shared memory onto the processor die) outweigh modularity for those components.) The fast solid state storage is, sadly, locked to the system, BUT you can add SSD cards to the PCI slots! This is basically a Mac Studio Ultra with slots that allow you to connect all sorts of outboard video editing gear, robotic devices, and other exotic components. It does not need graphics expandability... LOOK AT THE SPECS. 60 or 76 graphics cores should be plenty for the expected life of this machine.

​​@@williamburkholder769 Wow. What an Apple 🐑. Just because Apple is screwing over consumers doesn't mean you should bend over to their anti-consumer practices!

@@williamburkholder769 The GPU isn't that fast when compared to what PCIe graphics cards are available today

Defrag the cheese.

Best you can do is recycle

Back when you could buy the base model, throw 2 Xeons and a Quadro in it, upgrade the RAM and add in a Raid 0 array of HDDs. 😉

Nah, they would integrate Optane onto the chip.

@@XenonG That is kinda not possible because of processes, but i agree, apple would not make it modular under any circumstances.

I'm a software engineer/architect and at my work we have actually used optane as memory in some very high memory workloads (mainly scientific computing) where it was just way too expensive to buy all memory. I agree it would have been cool if Apple had done that so we could have actually had swappable memory in addition to the soldered on RAM. I'm no expert but from my understanding when you add enough Optane and present it to the OS like RAM, the actual RAM becomes a sort of cache for it. Would have been really neat.

@@Watchandlearn91 you'd expect that at this price, techs with enough budget would just take the hit and pay for the memory modules as well...

It’s basically just for users who require pci-e expansion slots for specific hardware. Otherwise it’s the same as a Mac Studio.

@@ConnorGriffinMusicthe irony being that a lot of cards like ProTools HDX and SDI Capture cards work perfectly fine in external Thunderbolt enclosures, especially since the Studio already has a ton of TB4 ports

The main reason would be dust accumulation and easy access to internals. The Mac Studio will require a full disassembly every time you decide to clean the heat sink and psu from dust.

@z37d4 I've heard NVME expansion was feasible but limited in bandwidth. I'd encourage you to check that out before making a purchase. Even this use case may not be applicable

Because it's an aesthetic case with upgradability for very specific uses.

Well...MPX was kind of a weird hack Apple did to get around the limitations of PCIe 3.0, using an additional connector to add lanes and carry video output over the Thunderbolt bus. Given that you can't use MPX in any other computer, and the number of computers with it was a relatively tiny fraction of a minority to begin with, it's not like manufacturers were lining up to support it. If Intel had had support for 4.0 at the time, Apple might have made some very different design decisions. That said, yeah, it'd be cool to be able to have some sort of M2 blade server type machine, or a derivative GPU-only chip, that could run in concert with a host Mac the same way they used to with Xgrid.

In what world are we moving away from add-in GPUs?

@@nmotschidontwannagivemyrea8932 In the "Apple" world they are

Hehe very punny! Unfortunately it's unlikely given Apple and Nvidia's beef

It's a shame that unified memory, while very fast and efficient, can be a bit of a disadvantage if you have a small amount, or not enough for your workload. My M1 Mac Mini has 8 GB of unified memory, and engages in near-constant swap activity even with light-to-medium usage. My 2012 MacBook Pro has 16 GB of discrete RAM, my 2010 Mac Pro has 48 GB and my 2013 Mac Pro has a whopping 64 GB; while these computers use older, slower DDR3 memory, they have so much memory that the CPU and MacOS can take all they need with plenty to spare, and so almost never engage in swap activity.

It's s just a STOPGAP product. Initially they planned to have an M2 "Extreme" card there (basically 2 fused M2 Ultras) and a secondary interface/hardware layer for DDR5 memory (in addition to the soldered memory on the SOC. But it took significant R&D and resources for them to hit timelines. Heck, even people inside Apple don't even want to release this thing. Tim Cook only greenlit this thing to "spiritually" complete their transition from Intel.

It basically just exists because they want to completely retire the Intel Macs but some studios that use macs need PCIe slots for things like dedicated soundcards etc and so they need *something* that can fit that niche.

The storage is actually upgradable. Apple sells the internal storage upgrade kits on their website. Only thing is, since Apple Silicon is kinda peculiar, you can only use Apple’s SSD’s, and you need to have a second Mac to reprogram the SSDs and get the Mac Pro to use them. Security, Device Integrity, all that… At least it isn’t totally locked down though

​@@zoruaboyApple silicon is like any other ARM soc. Apple just likes making money and hating their costumers so they lock their ssd with proprietary firmware which is totally unnecessary.

Yes, there are power connectors available.

​@@xluumuprobably $99.95 extra...

Details are pretty sparse, unfortunately. They look to be 140mm fans based on the the product dimensions and some pixel peeping. An Apple interview from 2019 also seems to imply that they're optimized for airflow rather than static pressure, as one of the engineers called out the lack of dust filtration and wide heatsink fins as a way to reduce fan noise.

@@Noah-Lach Hey Thank you for this nice Information! I mostly like the Fan outer side of the Blades. That this is a wall which goes over the outside ob the Thing that sourrounds the whole Fan. Sorry iam lost for words kinda ;) Maybe the channel: Major Hardware gets sometimes such a fan to print with better Blades.

@@Fincher123 You mean the shroud attached the the fan blades? I think that's a really neat idea for reducing turbulence. I know Noctua's Sterox fans are so quiet in part because the tolerance between the fan blades and the outer casing is extremely small. I guess Apple took another approach by just eliminating that "tolerance" altogether. Like you, I'm curious to know more about this interesting rather unique design and why it isn't been copied by any other fan manufacturers.

🤓🤓🤓🤓

It’s integrated into the chip itself. The M2 Ultra is an SoC, so its all in one package vs RAM being separate from the CPU, GPU, etc.. It’s much less likely to fail.

@@zoruaboy I really appreciate that thank you. Just taught me something new for the day

@@zoruaboy "it's much less likely to fail" uhhh where did you get this from? It has the exact same chance of failure as every other RAM module. Just because it's integrated into an SoC and shared between CPU and GPU doesn't make it more robust somehow. Thermal cycling, electromagnetic interference and overvoltage/-current can kill RAM, especially over time. Yes it can die, but it's not really a novelty in the Apple world, since RAM has been soldered on for around 8 years in many Mac products now.

@@PvtAnonymous the likely hood of all that happening is a lot less when it’s integrated, literally by nature of being integrated, vs in separate pieces. Good example would be how the T2 chip could sometimes crap out or the touchbar would freeze on an Intel MBP, but since it’s now all integrated, all being handled by the same package, there’s less chance of failure because there’s just less parts to worry about.

@@zoruaboy ram chips is not "integrated", they simply soldered near the cpu. It is still 2 separate chips.

It's like HiFi gear that amstrad used to make in the 80s. Big box noting inside it but air.

Rather than Apple dumping all that engineering effort into an Extreme chip, I see them starting to sell "Compute Units" that are full Apple Silicon Macs on a PCI card you can add to the Mac Pro to boost performance. There's room to add at least 3 Compute Units for a total of 4 Ultra macs in one tower.

@@montex66 never going to happen. Selling "compute" units would make them less money than buying a new unit outright

Is this satire? PCs aren't modular?

@@littlebuch he never said modular, he said "module design" which is a completely different thing. And I totally get what he means, I don't know how one can misunderstand that.

@@PvtAnonymous The two words are synonyms. You "completely" get it. I'm sure...

@@littlebuch ok, so which modules do exist in the ATX standard smartpants? I only know of parts.

@@PvtAnonymous Gpus, ram, psus, ssd, hdd, drives of various types? Everything? Literally everything exists in an "ATX standard".

It is mandatory It's a HUGE part of what makes it so fast

Unified memory and onboard memory are two different, unrelated concepts. Unified memory means that all compute IP blocks (CPU, GPU, cryptographic accelerator, etc.) on the system share a single memory pool. Doing things this way makes it unnecessary to move data around between different memory pools. e.g. if you want to load a piece of texture onto a PCIe GPU, the CPU will have to first load it from disk to system memory, then send it from system memory to VRAM through the PCIe bus. In a unified setup, the CPU fetches the data from disk, loads it into system memory, and the data is now directly accessible to the GPU. It’s far from a novel concept, Intel’s iGPU has been doing it for years. In fact, they not only shares the system memory with the cores, but also the on-ring cache (L3 in CPU cache hierarchy). There are technical reasons why Apple went with soldered memory on ASi Macs, however none of these apply to the Mac Pro. 1. LPDDR (which doesn’t have a standardized connector and has to be soldered) consumes less power than the corresponding DDR standard (which does have a industry standard slot). This allows the system to draw less power at idle and improve battery life. I’m pretty sure the Mac Pro has a battery life of 0 minutes. 2. Comparing against the typical x86-64 PC system, the ASi system memory has a significantly more powerful GPU to feed. This poses a substantial memory bandwidth requirement. One DDR SO-DIMM is 64-bit wide, and takes up a substantial amount of space in a laptop. M1/M2 Max has a 512-bit memory bus, and Apple would’ve needed 8 SO-DIMMs if they were required to implement it using standard modular interfaces. As you can see, the ASi Mac Pro board has a lot of unused space.

@@DGao-zz5vq thanks mate! That clarified my doubt!

Unified memory doesn't necessarily have to be soldered on, but current M-series SoCs only support LPDDR5 which is always soldered on (the difference between it and regular DDR5 is that it uses less power to reach DDR5 performance at the cost of, well, being soldered on). There were rumors that Apple was experimenting with adding a hypothetical M2 Extreme to the lineup which would support additional DDR5 DIMMs in addition to the on-chip pool of LPDDR5 but that the project never materialized. Maybe when the M3 Mac Pro comes out, we'll see more user-expandability (although this is Apple so temper your expectations).

Unlike Mac Studio yes, you can. But only Apple proprietary SSDs. They made a mistake in the video, saying that the drives cannot be upgraded.

@@arround1 understandable

@@arround1 you also can in the Mac Studio in fact.