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The took the giant overkill design meant to hold a hot Intel chip and possibly multiple big GPUs, and put a M2 Ultra in it.

It’s overcooled. There is no way it’s thermally limited. It’s got to have headroom for days.

I’m very curious where this idea I keep seeing in the comments that Apple refuses to run chips at full speed for cooling reasons comes from.

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The current Mac Pro is kind of pointless. Before you got a powerful workstation (power consumption was irrelevant), now you get a Studio Mac in a new package. I feel they just launched it for “compliance” not because it is a great product. They hit a wall with scaling the M chip architecture. Building an even larger chip than the Ultra would be insane and going multi socket is not possible.

They need a product for people who need expansion slots for non-GPU things, and it fits that.

I agree that it’s likely they wanted to use the quad M2 chip (jade 4 C die, if I remember the term correctly), which would have given them far more PCIE lanes and made it more desirable.

But that doesn’t seem to have worked out. And the lineup had a whole they needed to fill for some of their top end customers. So here we are.

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