# Next Mac Pro chip could be 4x more powerful than M2 Max



## gsilbers (Oct 24, 2022)

Next Mac Pro chip could be 4x more powerful than M2 Max




The M1 Ultra has 20 CPU cores. Gurman predicts that the next macOS workstation “will be offered with options for 24 and 48 CPU cores and 76 and 152 graphics cores — along with up to 256 gigabytes of memory.”

The next-generation Mac Pro with the most powerful M-series processors yet is rumored to launch in 2023. Its predecessor started at $5999, and the new model will likely be at least as expensive.


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## KerrySmith (Oct 24, 2022)

They need to announce it and allow pre-orders before the "need more deductions" season ends.


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## ridgero (Oct 24, 2022)

How many producer will need that kind of computer?

0,0 ?


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## proggermusic (Oct 24, 2022)

KerrySmith said:


> They need to announce it and allow pre-orders before the "need more deductions" season ends.


As someone who desperately needs to replace his ten-year-old machine... and could use more deductions... I heartily agree! (Probably just gonna get one of the current 10-core Mac Studios and max out RAM on it. I think that'll still be an upgrade I'll feel and enjoy for the next decade.)


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## re201spaceecho (Oct 24, 2022)

All I really need is something with a bit more single core speed… the M1 Max and Ultra are identical in that regard from my understanding. More complex virtual instruments (Slate and Ash) are coming out all the time, and Logic will never split the load across cores for 1 track it seems. I don’t mind extra multi core capabilities either but my focus is on single core!


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## colony nofi (Oct 24, 2022)

re201spaceecho said:


> All I really need is something with a bit more single core speed… the M1 Max and Ultra are identical in that regard from my understanding. More complex virtual instruments (Slate and Ash) are coming out all the time, and Logic will never split the load across cores for 1 track it seems. I don’t mind extra multi core capabilities either but my focus is on single core!


You are not wrong. For 99% of sessions, my ultra doesn't give me any advantage over my M1Max MBP aside from getting 128GB ram vs 64GB. The processor difference (aside from immersive workflows) doesn't do squat.
And don't get me started over how terrible it is in SELECT workflows (love teletone audio - but don't try using the plugin)
And how amazing it is in others (offline rendering in nuendo when running in native mode, or rendering to video - which is a massive time saver)

The real-time nature of audio and its effect on CPU usage is real. While I'm not quite in the camp of "its ALL about single core performance" (since there are plenty of workflows I personally use which scale significantly better than just single core perf) I appreciate that viewpoint, and think it is likely the best metric for most composers to look at when seeking out new systems. 
Apple at the moment doesn't have to participate in the current single core performance wars that we see occurring between intel and amd. In intel and AMD world, it seems the consumer voice of "moooor fps" is trumping other voices (workstations, productivity etc) and that is benefitting composers no end. Composers in apple world will be making do for quite a while. I see the performance delta between the eco-systems widening significantly in the next 2 or 3 years unless there are new directions taken by apple. It only takes someone there to suddenly decide to make a real push into gaming to turn that around.


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## Virtuoso (Oct 24, 2022)

I just hope it has plenty of internal storage capacity, ideally at full gen5 speeds. Can't get enough of that - my 2019 Mac Pro has 28TB in SSDs and another 24TB in HD (for backup) - and it's almost full!


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## gsilbers (Oct 25, 2022)

I was wondering about the form factor because with so many gpu cores having an external gpu seems a little redundant. I’m sure folks will rather pay for less gpu cores and use their own gpus, but I’m still wondering how 3rd party gpu can integrate with SOC / arm like processors. 

These new m chips are so small compared to bulky pc parts I don’t see why the form factor would remain as big. 

Then it’s the hard drive space which would be cool, but with mostly 2.5 ssd or m.2 type of drives I don’t think it needs a lot of space and if so, external enclosures might be more customizable. 

The 128gb ram limit on the Mac Studio seems to be good enough for most composers I think. 256gn of ram and tons of storage does seem enticing too. 

I’d go for the Mac Studio ultra w 128ram and have external ssd. 

But for now I’m holding to see the performance increase from m1 to m2 and cost and Mac Studio cycle time. 

Also on the software side because pro tools and some plugins have not been ported to native and trying to see how obsolete stuff will become in a sense. 

Every composer is still holding strong to that Mac Pro trash can and 5,1 until a clearer picture arises from the new Mac Pro.
Apples marketing just sucked with the Mac Studio. At first it seemed amazing and a couple of month later some random apple engineer dude say “Mac Pro also AS” in one of the mac video and everyone just said fuk the studio, I want to see that new Mac Pro. 
Logic hasn’t had any significant update (besides crappy atmos) and specially nothing about that one core issue.
Doesn’t seem there’s been any video that’s been sponsor or anything trying to promote the Mac Studio. And everything has been geared towards video where it’s been a hard sell on the video crowd if they love their gpus to be pcie and big.


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## HCMarkus (Oct 25, 2022)

I ordered the Mac Studio Ultra the day it was announced; couldn't wait to move on from my 5,1 12 core Mac Pro. I've been loving the Studio; everything just works way better and smoother and my workflow has not been hampered by the single-core performance as long as I raise the buffer when my mastering chain is brought into play. That said, if Apple releases a Mac with significantly greater single-core speed, it will be appreciated by many. As for me, I'm feeling quite certain I can "make do" with my Mac Studio for a number of years.


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## davidson (Oct 25, 2022)

colony nofi said:


> And don't get me started over how terrible it is in SELECT workflows (love teletone audio - but don't try using the plugin)


Which teletone title is causing you issues? I get around 2% cpu useage (in kontakt) with scarbo and ondine. Now slate and ash libraries on the other hand...


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## seclusion3 (Oct 25, 2022)

Yes hopeful that maybe Logic would have parts rewritten to take advantage of the AS chip and single core performance.
Maybe we'll see something change.


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## Nimrod7 (Oct 25, 2022)

seclusion3 said:


> Yes hopeful that maybe Logic would have parts rewritten to take advantage of the AS chip and single core performance.
> Maybe we'll see something change.


They do that before each major release, and I speculate they hold releases until hardware is out:

e.g. in 10.7.3 back in May:





There is a while we last seen a Logic Release, but I am guessing they are working in supporting those crazy processors. They enjoy presenting the thousands of channels in their keynotes.


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## Nimrod7 (Oct 25, 2022)

gsilbers said:


> Logic hasn’t had any significant update (besides crappy atmos) and specially nothing about that one core issue.


Genuine question, and feel free to ignore, or reply elsewhere since it's off-topic. 
Do you feel Logic's Atmos implementation is not good? I am planning to upgrade my studio early next year to Atmos and I was looking forward to test it. 

Anything I can read more about it?


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## colony nofi (Oct 25, 2022)

davidson said:


> Which teletone title is causing you issues? I get around 2% cpu useage (in kontakt) with scarbo and ondine. Now slate and ash libraries on the other hand...


Oh this is encouraging. I have the whole suite. I think it was scarbo but don't hold me to that... I'll open up the session I was working on last week and get the exact patch / settings / midi file. Perhaps you can test your end as well? I would kinda love to find out that its a setup problem my end...


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## colony nofi (Oct 25, 2022)

Nimrod7 said:


> Genuine question, and feel free to ignore, or reply elsewhere since it's off-topic.
> Do you feel Logic's Atmos implementation is not good? I am planning to upgrade my studio early next year to Atmos and I was looking forward to test it.
> 
> Anything I can read more about it?


Atmos for music or post?
Post wise it was cumbersome - but thats for other reasons than just atmos (general approach of logic doesn't allow for great post workflow). I only tested it to see what was possible though.
I can see that it could be great for folk just needing to do atmos music mixing.

Bare in mind - setting up a mix room to effectively hear a mix (and know its going to translate) is not as simple as many would suggest. Indeed, the acoustic environment needs to be MUCH drier than most music mixers are used to - and more and more folk are moving towards non-environment type rooms (and even dead front walls). This is not to say a diffuse field isn't a valid aim (and there's a couple of famous atmos rooms doing this) but that is INCREDIBLY hard to pull off.

Multi channel - even 5.1 monitoring - is hard if you want to do it well. And if you're mixing, you want to do it well. There are so many 5.1 mix suites i've been in which hinder the mix engineer. A lot of the time the engineer is doing things they know work, rather than hearing it well. Atmos is another level on this. (Even trying to place doors + a small client couch is tricky in the circle-style monitoring room.)
As a first port of call, grab the dolby docs on room design. Then try talk to some acousticians who have built rooms that engineers actually like working in...


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## biomuse (Oct 25, 2022)

What is the “one core issue” with Logic? Don’t tracks distribute across the cores? (DP user here, which AFAIK is multicore all the way down)


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## davidson (Oct 25, 2022)

colony nofi said:


> Oh this is encouraging. I have the whole suite. I think it was scarbo but don't hold me to that... I'll open up the session I was working on last week and get the exact patch / settings / midi file. Perhaps you can test your end as well? I would kinda love to find out that its a setup problem my end...


Yeah sure, just send me over the details and I'll test.


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## colony nofi (Oct 25, 2022)

biomuse said:


> What is the “one core issue” with Logic? Don’t tracks distribute across the cores? (DP user here, which AFAIK is multicore all the way down)


It’s not an issue with logic per se. 
It’s not even an “issue” in the true sense of the word. 
It’s how real time digital audio has to work. 
While there is room for parallelism in some tasks of a daw, everything is happening in real time. Which means that everything needs to be timed - and the results of previous calculations need to be completed before new ones start… and it all occurs in very small chunks of data. The smaller the chuncks, the “faster” the real time nature (less latency) but waaaay more pressure on core 0 (the first core of a chip which programmatically takes care or ordering all the other calculations and also takes care of serial calculations, of which by necessity there are many (often the majority). 

This is extremely simplistic and I can poke holes all thru my quick summary, but it’s better than no info. 

If I was more into you tube I might be inclined to do a little explainer, but I do not have the time or skills for that. I have the knowledge though to help out someone else if ever they wanted to do it. 

There are academic papers around about this as well…


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## HCMarkus (Oct 25, 2022)

I'm pretty sure DP (and all other DAWs as far as I can tell) doesn't parallelize VIs and Effects on a single track. In other words, only one core per track. This is the reason it is often better to use more instantiations of a multi-timbral VI instead of stacking 16 or more sounds in a single instantiation, especially if all are playing at the same time. 

OTOH, I didn't code any DAW, including DP, so I could be off base.


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## colony nofi (Oct 26, 2022)

HCMarkus said:


> I'm pretty sure DP (and all other DAWs as far as I can tell) doesn't parallelize VIs and Effects on a single track. In other words, only one core per track. This is the reason it is often better to use more instantiations of a multi-timbral VI instead of stacking 16 or more sounds in a single instantiation, especially if all are playing at the same time.
> 
> OTOH, I didn't code any DAW, including DP, so I could be off base.


Its WAAAAY more complicated than that, but you're kinda right. It is tricky. Some VI's do parallelise some of their workload within the plugin itself. Some meta-plugins (ie patchwork) do this extremely well. While others only work on a single core. 

But to follow your thoughts... 
A good thought experiment involving the serialisation of plugins on a single channel.
Each plugin has to wait for the result of the previous plugin in order to compute their changes to the signal. And this all has to happen within a short "packet" of time. So in this instance, there is no point placing one plugs computation on one core, and the next on another. You're wasting resources that way. (there are exceptions to this, but its a thought experiment rather than being precise)
Now for two tracks that have different inputs, it is possible to run their own serial plugins separately on their own cores. However, for each packet of audio they both need to wait for core zero to "do its thing" in regards to bringing ALL the tracks together (summing - though this is also not entirely true / isn't the process that is going on, but its good enough for the explanation) and putting out the audio stream without glitching (ie, processing taking longer than the allotted time).


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## Nimrod7 (Oct 26, 2022)

colony nofi said:


> Atmos for music or post?


Thank you for the additional context! It's really helpful.
For post I am using ProTools, however my preferred DAW for composing music including mixing in stereo is Logic!
I was hopping that Logics workflow to be enough for music Atmos mixing.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Oct 26, 2022)

Oh no. This means I've wasted money on my Max Mac Studio.

Three seconds - literally - to launch Logic is nowhere near fast enough. What sane person won't spend $10,000 to get that down to two seconds?


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## HCMarkus (Oct 26, 2022)

colony nofi said:


> Some VI's do parallelise some of their workload within the plugin itself. Some meta-plugins (ie patchwork) do this extremely well. While others only work on a single core.


Interestingly, Patchwork's developer states this:


> *Multicore processing* support for _parallel_ chains.


That makes a lot of sense. As you noted in your post, in a serial chain, each subsequent plugin must be handed the output of the preceding plugin before it can know what audio it will be processing. 

It would seem a multi-timbral VI might be a different story if the VI supported parallel multi-core processing.

Thanks for the input, colony nofi.


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## HCMarkus (Oct 26, 2022)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> Oh no. This means I've wasted money on my Max Mac Studio.
> 
> Three seconds - literally - to launch Logic is nowhere near fast enough. What sane person won't spend $10,000 to get that down to two seconds?


I've been enjoying the speed with which _everything_ happens in my Mac Studio... can't see needing more Mac for a great while.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Oct 26, 2022)

Seriously, if you're doing surround mixes at expensive sample rates, maybe it would make a difference. But for everyone else, we've reached another plateau. M1s are going to be fine for years, I predict, just like ancient Intel processors were.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Oct 26, 2022)

HCMarkus said:


> I've been enjoying the speed with which _everything_ happens in my Mac Studio... can't see needing more Mac for a great while.


Same here. And this is after six weeks, i.e. it still hasn't worn off.


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## AudioBrewers (Oct 27, 2022)

Nimrod7 said:


> Genuine question, and feel free to ignore, or reply elsewhere since it's off-topic.
> Do you feel Logic's Atmos implementation is not good? I am planning to upgrade my studio early next year to Atmos and I was looking forward to test it.
> 
> Anything I can read more about it?


I can give you some deep insight here, since I work in Atmos in all DAWs for development.

Logic's Atmos is 'OK', but it's got so many limitations, that I just find it annoying. Below I'll list Pros and Cons of all DAWs in Atmos (as of latest versions of today. Also when I write Nuendo, I am almost sure it also applies for Cubase Pro).

Objects can be Three-Dimensional (i.e. 5.1, 7.1.2, etc. This is a freaking amazing feature I don't understand why other DAWs don't have)
Nuendo

Doesn't need an extra encoder
Nuendo
Logic

Easy to set up
Nuendo
Logic

Native Support of Ambisonics
Nuendo

Could use Ambisonics if you use a Plugin
Nuendo
Logic (limited support if the developer implements it, for sure no support for 3rd Order!!)
Pro Tools

Can be used with Airpods
Logic (this is pretty cool)


In short, I honestly believe Logic is a cool Atmos tool if you want to compose using Airpods... other than that, I believe Nuendo is MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH better in every single aspect.

Pro Tools is much more expensive to get into, you need to purchase the Dolby encoder separatedly and I found a labyrinth to set a project up.

Pro Tools and Logic can have Mono and Stereo objects, but Nuendo can have "anything" objects, it's amazing because when you use three-dimensional objects with three-dimensional recordings (Ambisonics, Surrounds, etc), you can control their depth, width, height, size, etc.

Goes without saying, a Logic project can only be opened in a Mac, so there's that too.

Let me know if you have any other questions  Happy to elaborate.


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## Nimrod7 (Oct 27, 2022)

AudioBrewers said:


> Let me know if you have any other questions  Happy to elaborate.


Thank you so much for the comparison, its extremely helpful! Much appreciated! 
I have better understanding of the gaps now, and I was hopping to survive with Logic / ProTools which I own already. I will definitely have a look at Nuendo, seems to be super powerful and easy to setup!


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## John Zuker (Oct 27, 2022)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> Oh no. This means I've wasted money on my Max Mac Studio.
> 
> Three seconds - literally - to launch Logic is nowhere near fast enough. What sane person won't spend $10,000 to get that down to two seconds?


I can't make my morning coffee in 3, let alone two seconds.


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## Technostica (Oct 27, 2022)

These are clearly workstations aimed more at video/graphics users rather than DAW users.
Although, there are always some up for the task of trying to push the envelope with a DAW. 
One area where Apple looks a bit weak now is single core performance.


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