In what’s turning out to be an oddly GPU-centric week for Apple , this morning the company has revealed that they will finally…
In what’s turning out to be an oddly GPU-centric week for Apple , this morning the company has revealed that they will finally be giving the long-neglected Mac Pro a major update in the 2018+ timeframe. Apple’s pro users have been increasingly unhappy by the lack of updates to the company’s flagship desktop computer, and once released, this update would be its first in what will be over 4 years.
Getting to the heart of matters, Apple invited a small contingent of press – including John Gruber and TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino – out to one of their labs to discuss the future of the Mac Pro and pro users in general. The message out of Apple is an odd one: they acknowledge that they erred in both the design and handling of the Mac Pro (as much as Apple can make such an acknowledgement, at least), and that they will do better for the next Mac Pro. However that Mac Pro won’t be ready until 2018 or later, and in the meantime Apple still needs to assuage their pro users, to prove to them that they are still committed to the Mac desktop and still committed to professional use cases.
Both of these articles are very well written, and rather than regurgitate them, I’d encourage you to read them. It’s extremely rare to see Apple talk about their future plans – even if it’s a bit vague at times – so this underscores the seriousness of Apple’s situation. As John Gruber puts it, Apple has opted to “bite the bullet and tell the world what your plans are, even though it’s your decades-long tradition — a fundamental part of the company’s culture — to let actual shipping products, not promises of future products, tell your story.”
However neither story spends too much time on what I feel is the core technical issue, Apple’s GPU options, so I’d like to spill a bit of ink on the subject, if only to provide some context to Apple’s decisions.
From a GPU perspective, the Mac Pro has been an oddball device from day-one. When Apple launched it, they turned to long-time partner AMD to provide the GPUs for the machine. What AMD provided them with was their Graphics Core Next (GCN) 1.0 family of GPUs : Pitcairn and Tahiti. These chips were the basis of AMD’s Radeon HD 7800 and HD 7900 series cards launched in early 2012.
