Apple’s updated Mac Pro looks like a massive leap forward in performance, but it abandons what made the last-gen model so impressive.
After four long years of waiting, Apple has finally transitioned its Mac Pro away from Intel processors. Now, the M2 Ultra is powering the workstation, and even without concrete benchmarks, there’s little doubt that the Mac Pro will clobber the previous generation. But it unfortunately also lacks everything that made the previous generation so impressive.
Apple has backpedaled on what made the previous Mac Pro such a monumental step forward for the company, and it’s hamstrung the Mac Pro by forcing it onto its own silicon. There’s no doubt the M2 Ultra will be impressive when it launches, but the flexibility afforded by the previous generation isn’t present this time around.It will be powerful
If you’re not familiar with Apple’s Ultra chips, they’re pretty easy to understand: Take two Max models, stitch them together, and get nearly double the performance. The M2 Ultra is two M2 Max chips connected, offering up to 24 CPU cores and 76 GPU cores.
Apple says that the M2 Ultra is up to three times faster than the fastest Intel-based Mac Pro overall, and up to seven times faster than the starting configuration of the previous Intel-based Mac Pro. That’s not really saying much, though. Even the $600 M2 Mac Mini beats the previous-gen Mac Pro into the ground.
We don’t have concrete performance numbers, but we can extrapolate. Up to now, we’ve only seen the M2 Max inside the 14-inch MacBook Pro. In our testing, it reached around 15,000 in Cinebench’s multi-core test. Double that, and add a little extra to account for the fact that the M2 Ultra isn’t squeezed inside a 14-inch laptop, and you’re nearing CPU performance on the level of Intel’s Core i9-13900K.
