Is the new Mac Pro less versatile than the old one?

Question

Is the new Mac Pro basically an inferior in versatility as compared to the past intel model?

Answer 1

This new Mac Pro has its advantages and in some respects comes up short as compared to the older Intel-based version because it lacks the option of installing powerful GPU cores for some uses. It also doesn’t use, nor does it need, the old Afterburner cards, as the power provided by the M2 Ultra chip is sufficient by itself. The latest Mac Pro, however, is capable of handling specific professional workflows which require the use of PCI slots for expansion cards.

Comments

The problem with those PCIe slots is that it may well offer 8 PCIe slots, but the M2 doesn't have nearly enough PCIe lanes to drive all those slots directly. So instead those slots are behind PCIe switches and effectively share bandwidth with each other. (Like old  4-way SLI motherboards on the PC side used to do).

Which for Marques's use case isn't too bad because he's only going to use 1 16x card. (the bigger problem there is the slots only being PCIe4 when intel has been shipping PCIe5 for almost 2 years now)  
but if you're some broadcasting customer like many in the comments keep bringing up as the intended use case for this machine you are in for a rude awakeing.
Because those customers rely on their 4k capture cards not fighting for bandwidth with their 100gb network card and their fiber connection to the SAN.
Same goes for any audio engineers that want to put their PCIe based audio gear for their 2019 Mac pro rack version into this machine. Those PCIe switches basically need to turn off the PCIe lanes for one card for a tiny fraction of a second to give the other card access and vice versa. That introduces latency and any form of latency is an absolute killer for any professional audio workflow.

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I'm real worried Apple has engineered themselves into a corner here. The massive max RAM downgrade is a severe problem, and I have to wonder if they just could get their architecture to work with non-shared memory, or physically distant memory. If the next Mac Pro is more than a year from now, and still doesn't have expandable RAM, I think that'll be pretty good evidence for this.

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The last Mac Pro was certainly just as expensive and not a good fit for most people, but the fact that we lost the ability to upgrade GPUs and RAM is a massive disappointment. I bought my 2019 Mac Pro because I kinda had a feeling it would be the last industry standard, modular and upgradable Mac they'd make. I was holding out some hope but unfortunately I was proven right. Apple Silicon excels in mobile devices and small desktops like the Mac Studio, but a desktop as big as the Mac Pro that you can't put stuff into (aside from storage cards or specialized ones like Marques mentioned) doesn't make sense to me as an average computer user. Especially not for a $3K premium.

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It's a shame it maxes out at 192GB RAM. I certainly don't need 192GB, but there are Mac Pro users who'd certainly want more for certain applications.
Maybe the M3 will be able to use additional external memory by turning the on-chip stuff into a giant L3 cache. Could be interesting to see.

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It does have a lot less ram though. The old one could be configured with 2tb. Would have been nice if this had optional ram slots in Addition to the on chip memory

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I can’t understand how they’re not selling the Mac Pro chip as a standalone chip, or at least a standalone motherboard. The fact that you have to re-buy the cheese grater tower again is insane. Defeats the whole purpose of it being modular.

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I just wish they'd put the CPU on a card that could be upgraded in a couple of years. That one thing would have stopped it being obsolete in a couple of years. Like, you know, the Intel Mac Pro is now.

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Composer here—music, that is. I’ve honestly had mixed feelings about Apple silicon; the performance is great and for base-level Macs, and the capacity that M1 and M2 have delivered has been stunning compared to base-level Intel options. But as someone who relies solely on CPU and RAM for their workloads, I feel like I can’t really find a machine that fits my needs unless I end up paying for a lot of superfluous GPU performance. I would love to see a variant of the Max where they pile on the CPU capacity instead of adding more GPU muscle; I might’ve considered Pro but 32 GB of RAM just isn’t enough.

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Apple has successfully made expandability a $3000 option.

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The thing that u didnt cover is that the niche they claomed with the exoansion slots, they lost multiple times over in the order of magnitude reduction in max ram capacity. 1.5TB in 2019 to 192gb in 2023. For so many people in this level if cimputing ram is everything and theyve gone from enterprise level to literally the same as what u can get on a normal consumer intel and amd desktop.