The announcement of Apple Silicon at WWDC 2020 marked a major transitioning point for Apple, mainly focused on their return to a proprietary CPU platform. The compound effect of years of improvements on the iPhone ARM CPU platform had finally made their way to the desktop consumer market, and by extension, the Pro market.

Akin to the transition from PowerPC to Intel, the 2023 Mac Pro retains a nearly identical exterior to the 2019 Mac Pro. While there are no optical drives to draw obvious differences, the interior is surely of different character. Gone are the MPX modules, their corresponding MPX logic board slots, and interchangeable RAM. What you buy is what you get, and wind up sticking with. Out goes the Intel Xeon, In goes a “second generation” 5nm 3.68 Ghz M2 Ultra CPU, with a giant die, and a gigantic CPU cooler. Packing 134 Billion Transistors, an 80-90w TDP, 24 CPU cores, 60 or 76 GPU cores, a 32-core Neural Engine, and up to 192 GB of unified 3200 MHz LPDDR5-6400 SDRAM. PCIe 4.0 is introduced for the Mac Pro, along with Bluetooth 5.3, Wifi 6E (802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax), HDMI 2.1, Thunderbolt 4, and reduces the total number of PCIe slots to 7, down from 8 in the previous model. The 2023 Mac Pro also features 8 Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports with USB 3.1 v2 support, a rack mount configuration, and 3x USB 3.0 type A ports.

Details

• Announced 2023.06.03
• Model Identifier: Mac14,8
• Model: A2786 (EMC 8163)

Mac OS

• Requires macOS Ventura 13.4 (Build 22F2073) or later

Core System

• The 2023 Mac Pro bucks the trend of having a socketed CPU, opting instead for a soldiered Apple Silicon “chip” at time of purchase, which cannot be removed or replaced except potentially by soldiering.
• CPU: 24-cores, 16x 3.68 Ghz “Avalanche” High Performance Cores: 16x 192 KB (3MB) L1i, 16x 128 KB (2MB) L1d cache, 16x 32 MB (512MB) L2, 96 MB System Cache
• 8x 2.42 Ghz “Blizzard” energy efficient cores: 128 KB L1i, 64 KB L1d, 8 MB L2, 96 MB system
• 32-Core Neural Engine
• Starts at 64GB of PC5-6400 3200 MHz LPDDR5 SDRAM of unified memory, configurable to 128GB (+$800), and 192GB (+$1600).
• 800 GB/s Memory Bandwidth

Video

• Integrated Apple M2 Ultra with 60-Core Metal 3 Hardware Accelerated GPU, configurable to 76-cores (+$1000).

Drives

• Drive bus: PCIe 4.0, up to 7.4 GB/s, offered standard with 1 TB of storage.
• Configurable to: 2 TB (+$400), 4 TB (+$1000), and 8 TB ($2200).
• Prices in 2024 USD.

Expansion

• PCI Express: 6 total full-length slots, 1 half-length 4x slot populated by a USB-C I/O card. Two x16 slots, Four x8 slots.
• 300W available power, 2x 6-pin 75W, 1x 8-pin 150W.
• Eight USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports with USB 3.1 Gen 2 support
• Three USB 3.0 Type A ports (One Internal)
• Two Serial ATA 3.0 ports (6 Gb/s)
• Two 10 Gb Ethernet ports
• 3.5mm headphone jack
• Bluetooth 5.3
• Wifi 6E (802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax)
• No additional GPUs allowed, and no kext will load if a GPU is plugged in. Driver support is hit or miss on the AS Mac Pro. Devices made by companies with larger user bases, especially those leaning toward professional use cases, will tend to work fine. The lack of 3rd party driver support is, perhaps, a two-fold reverberation of prior forces in motion: The proliferation of dongles/external expansion solutions with a wide level of acceptance, while users sought other devices in the time between the Mac Pro 6,1 and 7,1.

Included Peripherals

• Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and Numeric Keypad, Magic Mouse
• Magic Trackpad Optional
• USB-C to Lightning Cord
• A Power cord

Physical

• Size (HxWxD): 20.8″ x 17.7″ x 8.58″ (52.9 x 45 x 21.8)
• Weight: 37.2 Lb (16.86 Kg)
• Height with optional wheels: 21.9 inches (55.7 cm)
• An optional rack mounted enclosure is offered with rack mount rails.

Accelerators & Upgrades

• It is not possible to upgrade the CPU or GPU configuration on an Apple Silicon-based Mac.