Apple Mac Pro with M2 Ultra chip from $6999 does not support discrete graphics cards

Last week Apple unveiled a Mac Pro desktop computer based on the new M2 Ultra processor. It is not known to have support for discrete graphics cards.

Here's What We Know

The Mac Pro has a large chassis and a motherboard with six PCI Express 4.0 x16 slots. In theory, this configuration allows for discrete graphics to be plugged in, but Apple has decided to leave computer buyers without such an option.

The desktop PC was originally designed with the Apple M2 Ultra in mind, which uses a powerful graphics chip with 60 or 72 cores. It has access to unified memory, which has a maximum capacity of 192GB.

According to the manufacturer, the GPU has access to more video memory at any given time than any discrete graphics card and any workstation graphics card can offer. The GeForce RTX 4090, for example, is equipped with 24GB of GDDR6X-type VRAM.

The Apple spokesperson also noted that the company is focusing on features that are most important to customers, and it's doing a pretty good job with that. This was in response to the question that the lack of discrete graphics support could hurt Apple's reputation, since NVIDIA GPUs are widely used in training artificial intelligence algorithms, for example.

As for the PCIe 4.0 slots. They are not installed for the sake of beauty. They can be used to connect network cards or additional drives. By the way, in the new Mac Pro, four of the six PCIe 4.0 slots operate in x8 mode, not x16.

To wrap up, sales of the Mac Pro start today, June 13. Pricing starts at $6999 and goes over $12,000 for the max configuration with pre-installed software and accessories.

Source: PCMag