The new Apple Silicon Mac Pro offers customers six available PCI Express expansion slots for storage, audio, video capture, networking, and more, but it’s no longer compatible with graphics cards as the system’s graphics processing is handled entirely by Apple’s M2 chip, with up to a 76-core GPU that can access up to 192GB of unified memory.
Apple’s hardware engineering chief John Ternus briefly touched on the matter in an interview with Daring Fireball‘s John Gruber last week, explaining that expandable GPU support for Apple silicon is not something that the company has pursued.
“Fundamentally, we’ve built our architecture around this shared memory model and that optimization, and so it’s not entirely clear to me how you’d bring in another GPU and do so in a way that is optimized for our systems,” Ternus told Gruber. “It hasn’t been a direction that we wanted to pursue.”
MacDailyNews Take: Every Mac Pro now has the performance of not just one but seven Afterburner cards built in and features the industry-leading media engine with M2 Ultra. The new Mac Pro can play an unprecedented 22 streams of 8K ProRes video.
When compared to the Intel-based Mac Pro, Mac Pro with M2 Ultra:
• Empowers demanding real-world pro workflows like video transcoding and 3D simulations to run up to 3x faster.
• Enables video engineers to ingest 24 4K camera feeds and encode them to ProRes in real time, all on a single machine, when using six video I/O cards.
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The post Apple’s hardware engineering chief on Mac Pro’s removal of graphics card support appeared first on MacDailyNews.
