🖥️ What happens to the Intel Mac Pro?

With the Mac Studio now at hand, and power to match the Mac Pro, what is the fate of the Intel Mac Pro?

The 2019 Mac Pro is a beautiful and almost perfect machine. It’s wickedly powerful and expandable. It takes a huge amount of ram. The Radeon cards have been upgraded and are wonderfully powerful. Apple has done a decent job of keeping it updated. It needs little improvement, except for that Intel processor…?

Will it be retired out?
Will it be refreshed with a minor Intel upgrade?
Will it be refreshed with a more powerful Intel processor?
Could it be replaced with a chip from AMD? Threadripper?
Could it be replaced with a non-M1 (MP1) chip from Apple that accesses external ram and video?

Intel could redeem themselves for those idiotic Intel vs Apple commercials. Those were embarrassing and insulting.

Can Intel deliver a 40 core processor or even a 64 core processor that won’t cost $20k?

Could they slip in something from their i9 Alder Lake series? Something in a high end workstation variant?

Will they even want to?

Despite their insults, Intel wants Apple’s business and to make chips as fast as Apple Silicon. Has Intel spent their last two years in the penalty box working on something spectacular?

Is this a chance for AMD to couple their processors with their video cards? The door is wide open for that kind of change.

It’s doubtful any of those are true.

Realistically, the most plausible outcome is an MP1 based, Mac Pro “Studio” that accesses external ram and video. It’s still Apple Silicon where they control the number of processor. It uses the current video cards and ram, and keeps the Mac Pro modular.

Apple Silicon doesn’t have to be system on a chip.

The current Intel Mac Pro will be kept around a couple years for people who need it. The Mac Pro Studio will use all the same hardware, but with an Apple Silicon processor, based on M1, but not M1 or M2. A specific Mac Pro chip.

While they’re under the hood, they need to make 4TB of storage the standard.