Apple has discontinued the Mac Pro and has removed the machine from its website, reports 9to5Mac. Apple said it does not plan to design a new version of the Mac Pro, and no new model will be coming in the future. The Mac Pro was last updated in 2023, which was when Apple added an M2 Ultra Apple silicon chip, but the chassis has not been refreshed since 2019.
Unified memory is awesome. It lets you do things like handing over tasks to the GPU with zero overhead.
That means you can choose whether to do something on CPU or GPU based on which is more suitable for the task. With a traditional discrete GPU with it’s own VRAM you sometimes do things on the CPU even though the GPU would be better suited as the overhead of copying data to and from VRAM would negate any performance benefits of letting the GPU do it.
I feel like discrete GPUs could be so much faster at these kind of cross compute tasks through ReBAR/SAM if not for all the proprietary crap and half baked drivers. Unified is a view into that perfect world of what could be if we stopped with the monopolistic BS.
ReBAR may make things bit more efficient, but you still need to move data back and forth to VRAM over the slow PCIe bus.
This is not a huge problem for games, as it’s mostly sending data to VRAM that stays there for a long time, but it is a major bottleneck for many GPGPU tasks.
Since even Nvidia doesn’t seem to care about games anymore (and consoles have always used unified memory) I expect the discrete GPU to go the way of the dodo.