Apple's SVP of hardware engineering addresses the Mac Pro's lack of external graphics support

Apple's announcement of the new Mac Pro was completely overshadowed by the unveiling of its new Vision Pro headset.

However, one shortcoming of the new Mac Pro that's been on everyone's lips is the lack of support for external graphics cards. This is despite the new Mac Pro having no less than six PCIe expansion slots.

John Ternus, Apple's SVP of hardware engineering, explained why:

Fundamentally, we've built our architecture around this shared memory model and that optimization, and so it's not entirely clear to me how you'd bring in another GPU and do so in a way that is optimized for our systems. It hasn't been a direction that we wanted to pursue.

This corroborates my earlier assessment that the Mac Pro will be a tricky thing to engineer mostly because of the way how Apple's Mac SoCs are so tightly integrated. And that the way Apple Silicon is architected is perhaps more suitable for consumer applications rather than enterprise/professional ones.

For the new Mac Pro, graphics processing will be handled entirely by the Mac Pro's M2 Ultra chip, which, in its ultimate form, has 76 CPU cores and can be equipped with up to 192GB of memory.

This should be enough performance for most people, but some professionals obviously want even more performance, along with upgradeability and longevity, and I can certainly see this issue being a dealbreaker for some.

Source: MacRumors

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