With New Mac Pro, Apple Promises "Things Not Possible Before"
Combining the most powerful Apple chip yet with ultimate expandability, the new Mac Pro is the most powerful computer Apple has ever built.
Wayne Grayson • Jun 05, 2023
During a jam-packed WWDC 2023 keynote this morning, Apple unveiled what many professional Mac users have been hoping to see ever since the introduction of Apple's first system on a chip (SoC), the M1, nearly three years ago.
Those hopes were answered with the unveiling of the new Mac Pro. Though the also-upgraded Mac Studio has provided many professionals with a very capable M-Series-based workstation, this new Mac Pro is something else entirely. This is the most powerful and most capable computer Apple has ever built, combining the power of the new M2 Ultra chip with the capability that only PCI expansion can bring. The new Mac Pro will be available in both rack and tower enclosures and is aimed at the most demanding of professional workflows.
If you heard a strange sound shortly after 10 a.m. Pacific today, that was the collective squeal of excitement coming from post-production houses, recording studios, and software development firms all over this great nation at the site of a real Mac Pro with Apple silicon.
M2 Ultra
M2 Ultra "delivers twice the performance and capabilities of M2 Max," Apple says, "and is Apple's largest and most capable system on a chip (SoC) ever."
With more than 134 billion transistors, Apple creates the M2 Ultra by dieing together two M2 Max chips. That means it is a 24-core CPU with a massive 192GB of unified memory―a 50% increase over M1 Ultra. M2 Ultra memory has 800GB/s of unified memory bandwidth.
M2 Ultra can be configured with an internal GPU with up to 76 cores. Apple says GPU performance on M2 Ultra is 30% faster than M1 Ultra and during the keynote, Apple added that M2 Ultra is capable of training massive machine learning workflows discreet GPUs can't handle because they would run out of memory.
In terms of overall performance gains, the new M2 Ultra is 20% more powerful than the M1 Ultra and brings a 3x performance boost to the Mac Pro when compared to the most powerful Intel-equipped Mac Pro.
Things not possible before
With M2 Ultra at the heart of this new machine, Apple says creative professionals are going to find they are now capable of doing things that simply were not possible before on a single desktop workstation.
For instance, Apple mentioned during the keynote that a single M2 Ultra Mac Pro is capable of rendering an entire scene from the major Disney animated feature "Moana."
Another aspect of M2 Ultra that will boost your capability is its media engine. This integrated engine is designed to accelerate video processing, allowing for 50% faster video processing in DaVinci Resolve and 3x faster rendering in Octane when compared to a Mac with an M1 Ultra chip.
But Apple also compared the M2 Ultra Mac Pro's video acceleration to the Intel Mac Pro. Without the benefit of Apple silicon, the latest Intel Mac Pros use an Afterburner to be capable of playing back three streams of 8K Pro Res video.
Not only does the new Mac Pro not need an Afterburner card, the M2 Ultra packs the performance of seven Afterburner cards and is capable of playing back 22 simultaneous streams of 8K ProRes 422 video.
To drive home just how powerful this workstation is, Apple says that when using six video I/O cards, the new Mac Pro can ingest 24 4K camera feeds and encode them to ProRes in real time.
PCI expansion
The new Mac Pro features six Gen 4 PCIe slots. Two of these slots are x16, while the remaining four are x8.
Beyond allowing you to truly customize your Mac Pro with the I/O you need to get your work done, these Gen 4 PCIe slots support storage at speeds and capacities previously unheard of.
For instance, OWC's Accelsior 8M2―the fastest, highest-capacity PCIe SSD is Mac Pro-ready with support for Gen 4 PCIe.
Accelsior 8M2 SSD cards pack eight ultra-fast NVMe SSDs in one card. By equipping six of these cards into a new Mac Pro, you'd have up to 384 TB of on-board storage with speeds up to 26 GBps. And because the Accelsior 8M2 comes with SoftRAID, you can choose multiple RAID levels and RAID sets for maximum flexibility. Plus, SoftRAID will keep you on top of any issue that could compromise your data with custom notifications.
More Thunderbolt
But the expansion possibilities on the new Mac Pro don't stop with PCIe. Apple has also doubled the amount of available Thunderbolt ports on the Mac Pro to eight: two on top of the tower and six on back. Each Thunderbolt port is a bus port.
When you consider how much internal storage you can add, these additional Thunderbolt ports mean you could connect more than a petabyte of storage to the new Mac Pro:
6x OWC Accelsior 8M2 cards via PCIe for 384TB
and
8x OWC Thunderbay Flex 8 via Thunderbolt for 1.2 PB
...for a total of nearly 1.5 PB of storage. On one machine!
But let's say you want your storage to be all NVMe SSDs. Well you can equip your Mac Pro with:
6x OWC Accelsior 8M2 cards via PCIe for 384TB
and
8x OWC Thunderblades via Thunderbolt for 256TB
...for a total of 640TB of blazing-fast NVMe SSD storage.
Those additional Thunderbolt ports in addition to the added capability from M2 Ultra also allow the new Mac Pro to support connecting up to six Pro Display XDRs.
Additional on-board I/O comes in the form of three USB-A ports, two higher-bandwidth HDMI ports that support up to 8K resolution and up to 240Hz frame frates, a headphone jack, and two 10Gb Ethernet ports.
Availability
All Mac Pro configurations come with the new M2 Ultra and pricing starts at $6,999 for the tower enclosure, while the rack enclosure starts at $7,499.
Orders for Mac Pro are open now and the desktop will officially be available and start shipping June 13.
