An Apple executive talks about the New Mac Pro’s inability to support graphics cards

Apple recently introduced its new Mac Pro at WWDC 2023. As per the information, the new Mac Pro features six PCI Express expansion slots. These slots are dedicated to video capture, audio, storage, networking, and others. One thing to notice here is that the desktop tower no longer supports the GPU. Rather than the compatibility of the GPU with the desktop tower, the task has been handed over to the M2 chip. Reportedly, the M2 chip consists of a 76-core GPU. It has the capacity to access up to 192GB of unified memory.

John Ternus, head of hardware engineering at Apple, made a brief mention of the subject in an interview with John Gruber of Daring Fireball last week. He stated that the company has not investigated expandable GPU capability for Apple chips. Ternus said to Gruber that “Basically, we’ve built our architecture around this shared memory model and that optimization, so it’s not entirely clear to me how you’d bring in another GPU and do so in a way that’s optimized for our systems.” It hasn’t been a course of action we wanted to take.

In contrast to the Intel-based Mac models, the new Mac Pro has another limitation. The new Mac Pro lacks user-upgradable RAM since the unified memory is linked to the M2 Ultra chip. Furthermore, the largest amount of RAM that the Intel-based device could support is 1.5TB, which is eight times the maximum amount of 192GB for the Apple silicon variant.

Well, there are several benefits associated with the unified architecture of the new Mac Pro. The company claims that the new Mac Pro variant is 3 times faster as compared to the Intel-based model given some real-world systems like video transcoding and 3D simulations. Given the video processing, the performance of the new Mac Pro is equal to an Intel-based model that accompanies 7 Afterburner cards. When it comes to the overall CPU performance, the base model Mac Pro priced at $6,999 is two times faster as compared to the 28-core Intel-based Mac Pro. This model is available for $12,999.

Users can place their orders for the new Mac Pro. It is set to launch in stores by tomorrow. Consumers who are not interested in the PCI Express expansion can select the Mac Studio. It will be a less expensive option for users since it can be configured with the M2 Ultra chip for $3,000 less than the Mac Pro.