The New New Mac Pro →

There’s a new Mac Pro in town, powered by the M2 Ultra chip that is also found in the new Mac Studio.

As you can see, the new machine utilizes the same design as the 2019 model, both outside and inside, plus a whole bunch of extra Thunderbolt ports around back:

That second image shows off the difference between this machine and the Mac Studio: internal PCI. Here’s Apple PR:

The new Mac Pro brings PCIe expansion to Apple silicon for pros who want the performance of M2 Ultra and rely on internal expansion for their workflows. Mac Pro features seven PCle expansion slots, with six open expansion slots that support gen 4, which is 2x faster than before, so users can customize Mac Pro with essential cards. From audio pros who need digital signal processing (DSP) cards, to video pros who need serial digital interface (SDI) I/O cards for connecting to professional cameras and monitors, to users who need additional networking and storage, Mac Pro lets professionals customize and expand their systems, pushing the limits of their most demanding workflows.

You will notice a real lack of GPU expandability in that paragraph. Even in this $6,999 machine,¹ Apple silicon graphics remain on-die.

It is, however, much, much faster than my old 2019 machine:

Mac Pro delivers the groundbreaking performance of M2 Ultra, plus the versatility of PCIe expansion, taking the most demanding workflows to the next level. While the Intel-based Mac Pro started with an 8-core CPU and could be configured up from there, every Mac Pro has Apple’s most powerful 24-core CPU, an up to 76-core GPU, and starts with twice the memory and SSD storage. The new Mac Pro can also be configured with up to a massive 192GB of memory with 800GB/s of unified memory bandwidth. This is far more memory than the most advanced workstation graphics cards. Now every Mac Pro has the performance of not just one but seven Afterburner cards built in. It also features the same industry-leading media engine as Mac Studio with M2 Ultra. Both 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.

RIP, Afterburner.

The M2 Ultra appears in all new Mac Pros, and can be specced to include:

• 24-core CPU, 76-core GPU and 32-core Neural Engine (+$1,000)
• 192 GB of unified memory (+$1,600)
• 8 TB SSD (+$2,200)
• Stainless steel wheels (+$400)

I for one am staying put with my 14-inch M2 Pro MacBook Pro as my primary Mac, but if I still had my 2019 Mac Pro, I’d be jonesing for an upgrade… and selling a kidney to make it possible.