Apple explains why the new Mac Pro doesn’t support graphics card

At the previous WWDC 23 conference, Apple introduced a plethora of new hardware, including the Mac Pro equipped with the M2 Ultra. This heralded the completion of the M2 chip series and the successful transition of the entire Mac product line to Apple’s self-developed chips.

In contrast to previous Mac Pros equipped with Intel’s x86 processors, despite the M2 Ultra’s formidable performance, the new Mac Pro doesn’t support the addition of graphics cards, limiting upgrade options. Recently, John Ternus, head of Apple’s hardware engineering department, addressed these concerns in an interview reported by Wccftech.

Ternus articulated that the possibility of adding a graphics card was not considered in the initial design stage because the entire design was centered around the M2 Ultra chip. The M2 Ultra is optimized for a shared memory architecture. Introducing a graphics card would certainly affect its combination with the M2 Ultra, a direction Apple did not wish to pursue.

Upgrading memory is also not possible in the new Mac Pro because the unified memory is soldered onto the M2 Ultra chip. This lack of future upgrade flexibility could be disadvantageous for some users, requiring careful consideration of required configurations from the outset. Moreover, while the Intel version of the Mac Pro supports up to 1.5TB of memory, the Apple self-developed chip version maxes out at 192GB. Of course, the architectures of the two versions differ, making it challenging to directly compare memory capacities.

The M2 Ultra integrates 134 billion transistors, 20 billion more than the M1 Ultra. It supports a maximum memory capacity of 192GB in its unified memory architecture, 50% higher than the M1 Ultra, and its memory bandwidth reaches a staggering 800GB/s, double that of the M2 Max. With a maximum of 24 CPU cores (16 performance cores + 8 efficiency cores) and a 60 or 76 core GPU, it also features a 32-core neural network engine. Additionally, it includes dedicated hardware accelerators for H.264, HEVC, and ProRes encoding and decoding engines. Its display engine can support up to six Pro Display XDR screens simultaneously. The M2 Ultra also boasts the latest secure enclave, along with authenticated hardware-based secure boot and runtime vulnerability prevention technologies.