Apple’s refreshed Mac Studio and new Mac Pro are open for orders after their 5 June announcement, with availability due on 13 June. Both offer M2 Ultra, while Studio also has an M2 Max option.
Archive photograph: Apple logo on an iMac, © Håkan Dahlström, 2010, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. Resized and cropped. Not a photograph of the new desktops.
Memory capacity and software readiness
M2 Ultra supports up to 192GB of unified memory and 800GB/s of memory bandwidth. Apple’s machine-learning claim compares a preproduction 192GB Mac Studio with an RTX A6000 carrying 48GB, using selected transformer models. The release doesn’t identify those models or publish reproducible training results, so the claim establishes no general speed ranking.
Mac Pro’s six open PCIe Gen 4 slots accommodate audio, video, storage and networking cards. Macworld’s launch report says its RAM and graphics aren’t user-upgradeable. The US$6,999 tower therefore offers internal expansion without restoring the Intel model’s graphics-upgrade path.
In a Metal session available by 8 June, Apple demonstrates why renderer performance still depends on software. Its Blender example specialises shaders to eliminate unused paths and reduce memory waits. Asynchronous compilation keeps a general shader running while faster specialised versions are prepared.
The session puts its concurrent-compilation control in macOS 13.3 and calls for per-device testing when tuning compute kernels. A larger memory pool doesn’t remove those renderer-specific implementation decisions.
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