Would Apple launch an AMD-powered Mac Pro in 2023? That would be Epyc
A splash of Epyc and a dash of Radeon Pro to propel Apple back in the game?
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It seems like we’re in the midst of something exciting forAMDwhen it comes to the creative market.
Team Red seems to have gotten a bit of its mojo back after having launched apair of new graphic cards for workstations(the Navi-3 infused W7900 and the W7800), GPUs may be the precursors to the followup of theRadeon Pro W6800X Duo, which can be found in theAppleMac Proand pairs twoGPUon one card.
There’s also the more widespread adoption of EPYC as a workstation-class processor (rather than just for servers) with at least a dozen boutique vendors worldwide offering AMD’sXeonrival in workstations (The Mediaworkstations aX2P deserves an accolade for being by far the most innovative with its 6-displaymobile workstation).
The Mac Pro is the last Apple product that runs on non Apple silicon and while many may argue that theMac Studio- Apple’s most powerful PC to date - is a great substitute for the majority of creatives, there’s a slim but still (probably) significant portion of professionals that would need (and want) more modularity and expansion capabilities.
Other than the fact that the Studio can be configured with up to only 128GB of RAM (the Mac Pro can take up to 12x more RAM), its GPU performance is still far behind what AMD andNvidia’s discrete professional video cards can achieve. So unless Apple chooses to eliminate the Mac Pro line (because it is no longer a priority) or if it manages to magically solve all the current obstacles to a Mac Pro with Apple Silicon, chances are the next Mac Pro will still be based on x86.
AMD-based Apple Mac Pro?
Is there a potential for an Epyc-based Mac Pro on the horizon? We wouldn’t discount that possibility. AMD is no longer the challenger,Intelis (at least based on market capitalization) and while future Intel Xeon products look very promising, right now, AMD, with itsZen 4architecture, has the upper hand and seems to be the logical partner for an x86-based Mac Pro, one that will buy Apple a few years until it finally get the Mac Pro on its own silicon.
So what would a top-of-the-range Mac Pro based on AMD parts look like? We went for a fairly comparable spec but there’s the possibility that Apple goes for a significantly more powerful system as Epyc processors can be paired with a total of 192 cores.
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Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled inwebsite buildersandweb hostingwhen DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.
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