Apple Preps Next Mac Chips with Aim to Outclass Highest-End PCs

Re:Apple Preps Next Mac Chips with Aim to Outclass Highest-E... by imtringued on Monday December 07, 2020 @10:53AM (#25333321)

I have a "low budget" PC with 32GB RAM and 8 cores. I don't know why anyone would want a workstation with less than 128GB RAM. Of course, the Apple world is extremely weird and you get massively overcharged for commodities like RAM.

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Re:Apple Preps Next Mac Chips with Aim to Outclass Highest-E... by dragontamer on Monday December 07, 2020 @01:25PM (#25335244)

Well... my point isn't so much "Apple is stupid", as much as "Apple would be stupid to use HBM2... and I don't think Apple is stupid".

I think Apple would want to release a 64GB or 128GB Mac Pro... but only to upsell its customers to a 256GB or higher Mac Pro. The ability to configure more RAM into a system is key for marketing (even if this RAM is soldered onto the motherboard: like LPDDR4x, it wouldn't be too expensive to make different motherboards especially in a niche $10,000 computer like the Mac Pro).

But if Apple did go with HBM2 itself... well... then its physically unable to go above 32GB (today), or maybe ~64GB (if bigger HBM2 modules come out next year).

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Sticking with LPDDR4x just seems like the most obvious, and best, decision for Apple. So that's my expectation. But then again: making a 8-way decoder + fat-as-heck execution pipeline wasn't part of my expectation either. So maybe Apple will surprise us again.

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