SFF.Network Ars Technica Reviews M2 Ultra Powered Mac Studio

Image Credit – Apple
 
Ars Technica has gotten their hands on the newest Mac Studio and this time it’s packing an M2 Ultra chip. What does that mean? Imagine cramming the nearly the power of an Intel i9 – 13900K CPU and desktop class Nvidia RTX 4070Ti class GPU performance in an approximately 3.7L case that only uses 61 watts under CPU load. That’s a lot of power under the a tiny, tiny hood.
It does come at a price, though. For those that don’t know, Apple has eschewed Intel, AMD, and Nvidia chips in favor of creating their own ARM based processors. This transition has resulted in performance that rivals the highest-end PC components at a fraction of the power usage and heat generation. Of course this isn’t all due to ARM RISC based processors alone.
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[Skripka]

It is a pretty sweet little SFF machine with great industrial design...but.

1. People doing work don't care about efficiency of compute. They care about performance.
2. Noise is a compromise. Don't get me wrong--I love a silent PC. There are some cases like audio mastering/engineering where a quiet PC is a must--but in those cases you make like I do at home and put the machine in a physically isolated space away from your mixer.
3. The performance is pretty good, but you give up performance in the name of efficiency and noise.

That being said, I suspect the Mac Pro is using the same SOC as the Studio for a fairly mundane/simple reason....Like Nvidia SLI and AMD Crossfire of yore--Apple probably ran into massive headaches getting the high-bandwidth inter-chip connect to not only work, but work well without glitching out.

I do wonder how much longer PC will keep using x86 for as good as ARM is. Given 40 years of enterprise dependence on x86, I expect that will be the holdout--rather than consumer space. That and TBH Microsoft, like basically all tech megacorps really suck at innovating and transitioning technologies. Microsoft has already colossally failed at getting ARM Windows out once; nevermind their 30-years-long fumble of selling WindowsCE or ARM smartphones. Apple is basically the only major tech company that has shown an ability to do it (and not once, but twice)