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You are quibbing over the details. The information the journalist has is "Apple Preps Next Mac Chips With Aim to Outclass Highest-End PCs"; perhaps he was told that by a highly reliable source in the Apple Silicon team.

The rest is just him trying to make a long enough article out of one sentence of information.

The details are a shibboleth for the reader to assess the writer's reliability. Noting the errors in the commentary allows others to improve article consumption efficiency.

The article itself is essentially devoid of information and I'm surprised that it is on the front page here. Regardless the source, it is asinine to consider as news a prediction that Apple plans to continue in the same direction they've been going for some time. What's next, sun will rise again tomorrow, rain is wet, or Microsoft is planning a next version of .NET?

> "Apple Preps Next Mac Chips With Aim to Outclass Highest-End PCs"; perhaps he was told that by a highly reliable source in the Apple Silicon team.

I was told this by a highly reliable source in Apple’s executive team, Tim Cook when he declared their roadmap openly at WWDC.

Agree, this article is the best example of why one should not talk to journalist if they work for a as secretive org as Apple. A single sentence leads to a multi-page article.

I’d say Gurman’s reporting is probably, to a considerable extent, controlled leak. He usually gets salient facts straight, then mixes those with useless and sometimes subtly wrong (or just wrong) filler, and occasionally paints the wrong picture from the facts he was told. Fortunately it’s usually not hard to pick out the facts that were leaked to him, and ignore whatever conclusions he drew personally.

The problem is when the details are incorrect it indicates that the information has been filtered through people who don't understand it. I suspect that the original sources actually revealed a lot more specific information, but since the journalist didn't understand it they didn't preserve it when they reworded everything. It's a common and frustrating problem with journalism.

> "The rest is just him trying to make a long enough article out of one sentence of information"

This is how I understand the article too. Bloomberg probably tried to recruit a source within the Apple Silicon team who wouldn't provide much information, but did say "well the Mac Pro will have a CPU better than any other high end PC".

Bloomberg wanted to run with that line since they have "unique" information so they could capitalize on it. So the author was told to write an article about it, with really only half a sentence of fuel to run with. So the author states the half-sentence, and then proceeds to use conjecture and speculation to fill out the requisite 500 words needed per the Bloomberg Style Guide that they are forced to file for submitted work.

It’s Bloomberg Tech, remember when they told you your servers all belong to the PRC? They’ve been schnookered before.

I agree this article is sloppily written, Gurman has a strong track record of having the inside scoop on Apple's plans.

Essentially all this article is really saying is "Expect Apple to release a half-size mac pro in 2022 as the last, most powerful new product". That's it. There's no clue about discrete graphics, NUMA, power budgets etc. It could be that that new mac pro is heading back towards the non-expandable trash-can style design. All they really know is that there's going to be something in the mac pro space in 2022 and that's the last direct replacement to Intel Macs Apple are making.

> "Expect Apple to release a half-size mac pro in 2022 as the last, most powerful new product"

Even this piece of info can be extrapolated from statement's Apple has made public. They've said they were migrating their entire product line within 2 years. The Mac Pro is part of that product line. The only questions are how Apple is going to get there and on that front it's pretty clear this article is pure speculation.

Will the Mac Pro have integrated graphics or a discrete GPU? Maybe someone at AMD knows this based on order volume? Likewise, are they using external RAM, soldered on the logic board, or user-serviceable RAM?

How is performance going to compare to current top end processors?

Those are the only questions, and the answers here are pure speculation. It's likely only a handful of people at Apple even know the answers to these things.

> I don't even remember the last Apple hardware with Nvidia graphics.

All of the retina generation but for the very latest (« mid 2015 »).

Given that the (serial) compute task (only CPU/RAM) that I started before I went shopping finished in 4073 seconds on my iMac Pro, and in 2648 seconds on my Mac mini, the conclusion is not that weird (even if it is not much of a conclusion).

Interesting. What are the iMac Pro specs?

It's the 18-core one.

Thanks - and wow!

Depending on the workload, that's not as impressive as it sounds at first. Single threaded M1 performance is around 50-60% better than the 18-core Xeon in the iMac (which is impressive). But high-core CPUs are typically slower per core. I have plenty of programs that run faster on my dual core laptop than on the 16 and 24 core Xeon servers at work.

> But high-core CPUs are typically slower per core.

While this is true for intel CPUs, this hasn't been the case for AMD Threadripper. The 2990wx has marginally higher single core performance than the 2700x (https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-amd_ryzen_threadri...), while the 3990x has only slightly lower single core performance than the 3700x (https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-amd_ryzen_threadri...).

I think that’s the “typically” portion, and the comparison was against Intel anyways which does seem to follow that.

Fair comment - I guess I'd assumed that someone with an 18 core Xeon would be running multithreaded workloads!

OP explicitly said serial program tho.

I had a 2013 iMac with Nvidia 780m graphics I replaced with a refurbished 2019 model using AMD graphics. I ended up doing so because Nvidia dropped updates a few years back and Apple never did update the drivers.

I would like to see a world class GPU from Apple but again, I repeat this often, it won't mean much more than marketing materials if they don't get developers on board. This means more than just publishing oriented developers; video, pictures, and audio. That market is not sufficiently large to pull in other software as has been proven over the decades let alone get people to pay a premium for a system; because people do shop based on $$$ outside of gamers who wont' even look if there game isn't supported.

across Black Friday there were many good windows laptops at $500 or less with SSDs, some with dGPU, and most with 16gb ram. people see that and also that they know software just works and that is what Apple still is up against, hardware superiority or not

The article is by Mark Gurman, a fairly reliable Apple leaker. [1] Regardless of the fluff, the information about the apple chips is probably on the money.

1: https://appletrack.org/leaderboard/

> Threadripper is NOT a CPU for gaming.

I run two gaming VMs for my kids on my Threadripper server.

I don't think that fact that Threadripper is capable of running games makes it a "chip for gaming PCs", at least if that term is going to mean anything useful.

That doesn't make it a CPU for gaming, though.

That's pretty cool! I run one gaming VM on my 3900X but I always wondered how well it would be able to handle 2 Win10 VM's playing games concurrently. Do all the other components of the solution (both hardware and software) scale well enough for that? I assume threadripper has enough PCIe lanes and IOMMU grouping that allows for 2 passthrough GPU's + 1 for the host?

Should handle gaming fine, you can even pin VMs on specific cores (I didn't bother). My kids play No Man's Sky with me and the 12 core 2920X handles it no issues whatsoever even though the game is atrocious optimization wise. Should have gotten a 16 core so we all three could play on same box.

X<3|4|5>70 boards should allow 2 GPUs in separate IOMMU groups. My old system was a 1700X on ASUS Prime x370 Pro with 2 gaming VMs. Only issue with x?70 boards is the IOMMU groups for USB controllers. On the Prime x370 Pro, only one USB controller is in its own IOMMU group, so second VM needed a USB passthrough.

On the Threadripper, due to the vast amount of PCIe lanes, on the Asrock Taichi x399, I got two USB controllers in their own IOMMU groups and each of the 4 PCIex16 slots it's in its own IOMMU group. It's a dream virtualization motherboard.

I should keep this in mind when I upgrade my workstation some time in the future. I have an x470 Taichi and there the IOMMU grouping is pretty bad, it also has only a single USB controller in its own group, and all PCIe slots except the top x16 one are grouped with other stuff so it's not even possible to plug in a separate USB controller card or a second GPU for passthrough. A ThreadRipper would have been a much better choice considering I also use this machine for development and can use all the cores I can get.

Is it possible to swap GPU assignments from the host OS to a guest OS and back, or does it require some motherboard-level/boot-time settings that make that difficult?

Never tried, some people had success with NVidia GPUs. However, if you are willing to put your host in sleep and wake it up, then it should be much easier. Sleep usually resets the GPU and lets host drivers grab it.

I'd love to setup gaming VMs like that on a powerful server.

Do you have a link on how to setup something like that?

https://mathiashueber.com/pci-passthrough-ubuntu-2004-virtua...

I use NVidia video cards for VMs, AMD cards (other than BigNavi) have VM reboot issues.

Substantial progress on the AMD reset issue has been made recently. Many cards now reset properly and progress continues on those that aren't. No custom kernel required either.

https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/comments/jturbd/vendorreset_ne...

I got really burned by AMD GPUs, had a 5700 XT for myself and rx 580 and 570 for my kids. None of them reset properly, had to build special kernel, and even sometimes then they just froze the host. Sold them all, got NVidia cards, never had issues since (7+ months).

What do you do for GPUs? 3 of them?

You can use just two GPUs if the host is running a virtualization manager like Proxmox.

I currently run a Windows gaming VM and a bunch of Linux VMs on top of Proxmox using a single GPU. Planning to add a second GPU for transcoding in the near future.

Yup, el cheapo GT 710 for OS, and 970 GTX and 1050 Ti for gaming GPUs.

I know a guy who does the same with a Raspberry Pi.

>> Threadripper is NOT a CPU for gaming.

And a Ford Mustang isn't a sports car. It's a muscle car. Regardless, both are faster than my civic.

Threadripper might not be the best gaming CPU but any threadripper would be an improvement over my current gaming rig.

I believe their point is Threadripper is even poorer at gaming than some weaker and cheaper AMD CPUs (3900X, 5900X) or those Intel craps which have one single advantage: running at 5GHz+. A disgusting number of modern games still depends on mostly single thread performance.

So, you can beat highest gaming PC at gaming, but that doesn't reflect your power at running "productivity" workloads.

Single-core performance is certainly one measure of a gaming cpu. But I would argue that "gaming" has evolved a little since. Gamers now also want to stream. They want to record. They want alt-tab to a video chat. They want to play one game while Steam is downloading updates for several others. Having extra unused cores can be useful in such situations. There is a use case for threadripper in gaming.

There are also a few games (Factorio) where ram limitations can bottleneck before cpu/gpu limitations, where Threadripper's extra memory channels can really help.

>> And a Ford Mustang isn't a sports car. It's a muscle car.

The Mustang isn't a 'muscle car', either: it's a 'pony car'.

>Threadripper is NOT a CPU for gaming.

this is a really unimportant distinction

But a Threadripper is a HDET chip aka Highest Performing PC's

A pure gaming PC these days doesn't need a very powerful CPU

Depends on your game. My current obsession of choice, Cities:Skylines, eats RAM first, CPU second and GPU is a distant (distant!) third.

I've never heard any game complain they had too much CPU