New MBP M1 Pro and M1 Max

Anyone notice that these new chips seem to have killed off the Afterburner card, since there's now built-in ProRes acceleration?

I never understood the importance of the AB card since regular ProRes is already optimized and ProRes RAW is pretty fast -- esp. on a Mac Pro. Also the AB card is decode only -- it does not help ProRes export and there is no such thing as ProRes RAW export.  There's a greater need for improved hardware acceleration on codecs which are computationally difficult, not ProRes. But the AB card did not address those.

The primary use case on the Mac Pro was apparently for multiple streams of > 4k ProRes RAW. While software decoding of ProRes RAW is relatively efficient, the overhead can build up on 4k multicam and higher resolutions. If editing four multicam angles of 4k, 6k or 8k ProRes RAW on a 12 or 16-core Mac Pro, the AB card would greatly offload the CPU, making it available for other tasks.

It makes sense to continue the integration of accelerators into Apple Silicon, which would include ProRes (for whatever good that does) and ProRes RAW.  Supposedly the M1 Pro/Max can accelerate ProRes *encode*, not just decode. All that implies that any future Apple Silicon iMac, iMac Pro or Mac Pro will use on-chip acceleration, and (as you say) the AB card is history.

On my late 2013 Mac Pro I have never once had a thought similar to "Man I wish this ProRes could play better" or "Man if only I could encode this ProRes file FASTER!" Not that I'm against hardware acceleration in any way, but I'd rather they put it to use for .264 and .265 stuffs. Encoding a .265 file on my late 2013 Mac Pro can take over a day, depending on the length. Granted I bet my machine could do it even faster if the software were written better. Compressor barely even uses a single core and not much of it at that.