The current Mac Pro is kind of pointless. Before you got a powerful workstation (power consumption was irrelevant), now you get a Studio Mac in a new package. I feel they just launched it for “compliance” not because it is a great product. They hit a wall with scaling the M chip architecture. Building an even larger chip than the Ultra would be insane and going multi socket is not possible.
They need a product for people who need expansion slots for non-GPU things, and it fits that.
I agree that it’s likely they wanted to use the quad M2 chip (jade 4 C die, if I remember the term correctly), which would have given them far more PCIE lanes and made it more desirable.
But that doesn’t seem to have worked out. And the lineup had a whole they needed to fill for some of their top end customers. So here we are.
It’s overcooled. There is no way it’s thermally limited. It’s got to have headroom for days.
I’m very curious where this idea I keep seeing in the comments that Apple refuses to run chips at full speed for cooling reasons comes from.