Many of the home users who were buying $3000 base model cheese grater Mac Pros could get by now with a 6-core i7 Mac Mini.
Price would be around $1300 for the computer, $300 for an eGPU enclosure, and $700ish for a Radeon R7, plus aftermarket RAM. AMD's not in a great spot for high end GPUs right now, but when the Navi 23 cards land next year it will be looking better.
This doesn't scale as well for multi GPU machine learning workloads and Apple needs to get over their shit with Nvidia, but as a lower end "modular" Mac than the $6000 cheese grater 2019, it's an option.
> Price would be around $1300 for the computer, $300 for an eGPU enclosure, and $700ish for a Radeon R7, plus aftermarket RAM. AMD's not in a great spot for high end GPUs right now, but when the Navi 23 cards land next year it will be looking better.
I used to want an eGPU. Then I learned that you need to disable SIP in order to do so...
> This doesn't scale as well for multi GPU machine learning workloads and Apple needs to get over their shit with Nvidia, but as a lower end "modular" Mac than the $6000 cheese grater 2019, it's an option.
No one is going to wait for that hypothetical future where MacOS supports Nvidia GPUs.
> No one is going to wait for that hypothetical future where MacOS supports Nvidia GPUs.
True, but their Navi cards are at least competitive in the price ranges where they exist. Hopefully the high end ones next year continue that. If you’re looking at Titan or whatever the current ML thing is in the $1000+ range, then you might be stuck with Nvidia.
> True, but their Navi cards are at least competitive in the price ranges where they exist. Hopefully the high end ones next year continue that. If you’re looking at Titan or whatever the current ML thing is in the $1000+ range, then you might be stuck with Nvidia.
I am rooting for AMD's Navi cards too. It's just unfortunate that CUDA seems to be more supported than OpenCL.
Agreed on that. AMD put a bunch of work into the Cycles rendering engine (for blender) to get their OpenCL support up to par with CUDA, and now it's completely disabled on the Mac version thanks to Apple deprecating it. Disappointing.
My Windows machine is admittedly more modular than a mini+eGPU would be. I can pull the CPU out and put in a new one whenever I want! But over the course of 12 years and 3 computer builds, I've never done that once. By the time there's a noticeable CPU upgrade available I'd need a new motherboard to go with it.
So I think there's a big segment of the "modular" market that only really cares about having GPU options and upgradeable RAM.
It's not for everyone, but the people in between the high end Mac Mini (6-core i7 + thunderbolt GPU) and the low end Mac Pro (8-core Xeon W and internal expansion slots) are a small enough slice that Apple doesn't care.
Missed the edit window but for GPU I meant the Radeon VII not R7. Double checking benchmarks, the RX 5700 XT compares pretty well to that, but 2nd gen Navi will have a new higher end card.
Price would be around $1300 for the computer, $300 for an eGPU enclosure, and $700ish for a Radeon R7, plus aftermarket RAM. AMD's not in a great spot for high end GPUs right now, but when the Navi 23 cards land next year it will be looking better.
This doesn't scale as well for multi GPU machine learning workloads and Apple needs to get over their shit with Nvidia, but as a lower end "modular" Mac than the $6000 cheese grater 2019, it's an option.