Apple announces new Mac Mini, Air + 13" MBP featuring their own M1 chip.

[Ploki]

Fabfilter is AS ready

[Passing Bye]

Now that the hype of the new Apple silicon is starting to die down, and leaks of new processors with up to 32 cores are emerging, how will professionals view a new Mac Pro which is non upgrade-able ?

Or will the new models have to include the ability to upgrade the ram as a very least option ?

How will pros feel about having a clutch of external hard drives and cables hanging out of the back of a $10,000 new machine ?

Mac Pro’s are probably going to be about extra storage and PCIe slots, maybe additional GPU, Apple is going to milk on built to order soldered RAM, dunno, they announced smallest Mac Pro ever.

[Ploki]

Now that the hype of the new Apple silicon is starting to die down, and leaks of new processors with up to 32 cores are emerging, how will professionals view a new Mac Pro which is non upgrade-able ?

Or will the new models have to include the ability to upgrade the ram as a very least option ?

How will pros feel about having a clutch of external hard drives and cables hanging out of the back of a $10,000 new machine ?

Pros have machine rooms

[masterhiggins]

Can you even have upgradable unified ram? Doesn’t it have to be physically part of the chip? Depending on how powerful they are delivered, most pro studios probably won’t care. I’m guessing the focus will be on pci expansions and storage.

I can’t think of many studios that care about wires hanging out of the back of machines seeing as how literally all of their other gear has wires hanging out of them.

[dellboy]

Can you even have upgradable unified ram? Doesn’t it have to be physically part of the chip? Depending on how powerful they are delivered, most pro studios probably won’t care. I’m guessing the focus will be on pci expansions and storage.

I can’t think of many studios that care about wires hanging out of the back of machines seeing as how literally all of their other gear has wires hanging out of them.

At the moment the max ram on an M1 SOC chip is just 16GB. I have read of some studios needing hundreds of gigs of ram to load their sample libraries. So Apple will have to devise a way to either allow ram to be added or integrate much more ram on the SOC chip. Based on what we know at the moment a chip with just say 64 gig of ram is going to have an eye watering cost.

Even if Apple do manage to increase the ram and SSD sizes some people just like to know that they can upgrade there system if they want to. And of course intel based systems will always be able to go that route. It will be interesting to see where they go next.

[Double Tap]

What I don't understand is why you can't have RAM in addition to a SoC. Given that the SoC involves file swapping to the SSD, why can't that be done with some DDR4?

[Passing Bye]

Big studios don’t just use single machine either and have money to pay Apple to get top of the line anything, even pay ridiculous money for maxed out RAM or storage, I doubt Mac Pro will suffer from RAM amount issue.

[Ploki]

What I don't understand is why you can't have RAM in addition to a SoC. Given that the SoC involves file swapping to the SSD, why can't that be done with some DDR4?

Even the first gen 2012 MBP with soldered RAM had optimised RAM latency.
I suspect that having it integrated to the SoC makes it faster.
I guess you could have additional "swap" RAM and just treat whatever is in SoC as "L4 (or whatever) cache".

[Double Tap]

What I don't understand is why you can't have RAM in addition to a SoC. Given that the SoC involves file swapping to the SSD, why can't that be done with some DDR4?

Even the first gen 2012 MBP with soldered RAM had optimised RAM latency.
I suspect that having it integrated to the SoC makes it faster.
I guess you could have additional "swap" RAM and just treat whatever is in SoC as "L4 (or whatever) cache".

Yeah I think that's what I meant, except you seem to know what you're talking about and I've never heard of RAM latency before.

[Ploki]

What I don't understand is why you can't have RAM in addition to a SoC. Given that the SoC involves file swapping to the SSD, why can't that be done with some DDR4?

Even the first gen 2012 MBP with soldered RAM had optimised RAM latency.
I suspect that having it integrated to the SoC makes it faster.
I guess you could have additional "swap" RAM and just treat whatever is in SoC as "L4 (or whatever) cache".

Yeah I think that's what I meant, except you seem to know what you're talking about and I've never heard of RAM latency before.

https://macperformanceguide.com/mbpReti ... width.html

Old but still relevant
Check out engineer’s comment at the bottom.

[Sascha Franck]

I have read of some studios needing hundreds of gigs of ram to load their sample libraries.

It might be too early for proper predictions (too little tests so far), but this paradigm might as well be subject to change with the new M1 chips. Given currently available test results, even the baseline 8GB models seem to outperform previous generation Intel based Macs with, say, 4 times the RAM on certain memory-intensive tasks. Add to this super fast NVMe SSDs connected via PCIe or TB3/USB4 and streaming samples might be an experience just as instantaneous as loading everything into RAM.
It certainly might not completely eliminate the need for more RAM in some situations, but it could as well be that you just don't need much more than 32 GB (or even just 16) for pretty much anything you currently need 128 GB for.
However, quite obviously, your 10 year old external USB 2 HDD enclosure won't be up to all this, so one might have to spend quite some bucks on external TB/USB4 enclosures housing fast NVMe SSDs.

[Bombadil]

One thing I noticed in videos running stress tests is that the M1 models start to choke on playback independently of sample buffer size.

[dellboy]

However, quite obviously, your 10 year old external USB 2 HDD enclosure won't be up to all this, so one might have to spend quite some bucks on external TB/USB4 enclosures housing fast NVMe SSDs.

Or maybe it will be possible to connect a Mac to an 11th generation intel PC equipped with USB4 ( due in the first quarter 2021) and share data between the two machines ?

I have no idea if this would be possible, but I know files can already be shared via USB. I own a Mac and PC and it would be great to just pull stuff off of my PCs hard drives.

[Cinebient]

So since there are some report about bluetooth issues, wifi, extern usb speed, I tested it a bit more.
Bluetooth was fine mostly but my Seaboard Rise will disconnect if I use MPE mode and play a lot midi notes with lots of polyphonic modulations but I had the same problem with my old MacBook Pro late 2013. So not sure if its in general just too much midi traffic via bluetooth or both machines suffers from the same or the Seaboard is the joy killer here. In "normal" piano mode it works fine. Other bluetooth connections also seems stable so far.
Wifi: No issues here so far I could complain about.
Speed for extern SSD: Indeed, here I was a bit disappointed.
I tested now also the SSD speeds and yes, sadly I can confirm that on my late 2013 MacBook Pro my extern SSD (Samsung T5, format is APFS) has about 358MB/s write and 421MB/s read while on my brand new M1 MacBook Pro I get 307MB/s write and 384MB/s read.
Maybe I have should gone for the maxed out intern SSD with 2 TB since my old was just
681MB/s write and 709MB/s read compared to the new M1 with 2870MB/s write and 2869MB/s read.
I hoped at least the new could get the max out of the T5 which should be over 500MB/s.
Lets hope its a software thing.

[Ploki]

Hm. Still havent recieved mine but my Samsung Evo 970 in a tb3 box gets 2700/2400 r/w on the intels, we’ll see what it gets on the M1.

I also have a crucial in a usb3.2g2 10gbps box that gets 950mb/s directly to intel, but only 650 via caldigit ts3+.