Nehalem launch may be as soon as September

[GuyCalledPete]

Hmm, I know everyone thinks there will be no new Mac Pro until Nehalem...

Well Nehalem may be slightly sooner than we thought...
http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/604512/rumour-control-intel-nehalem-launch-brought-forward.html
http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/602559/rumour_control_nehalem_x58_chipset_revealed.html
http://www.digitimes.com/mobos/a20080724PD205.html

Sounds good... :)

-- Pete.

[indiochano]

holy crap if apple can pull it off by that time, it'd be ****ing fantastic... but i highly doubt theyre gonna rush the mac pro for sept.

I still believe the launch date will be on Jan. 09

[CWallace]

Bloomfield is a single-CPU solution so it will almost assuredly not go into the Mac Pro, which will almost assuredly use the dual-GPU Gainestown solution.

Also, there is a good deal of talk that Bloomfield will be expensive when it launches. Part of this is the inability of Intel to get product out (lack of fabrication space) and part of this is with (them feeling that they have) AMD on the ropes, Intel does not feel they need to discount. So we could see CPU prices many hundreds more then current Penryns, and then you have to add in the cost of the new systemboard and DDR3 memory.

If Gainestown also comes out with "high" prices, Apple might not launch it quickly as they may not be able to maintain current pricing points without serious margin erosion. And I am not sure they would want to raise the price points (say $2999 for the base dual-CPU model) to maintain margin. Then again, perhaps that is part of the reason Apple is saying their future margins will see some erosion...

[m1stake]

Bloomfield is a high end chip and has a separate socket from the mid and low end because of the QPI which has not yet been implemented across the whole line. Think extreme processors or in the same neighborhood.

[Tallest Skil]

Nope. The Tuesday before MacWorld.

[Salavat23]

Apple will wait until the 3.2ghz Gainstown is released, which will be several weeks after the official release of Nehalem-based Xeons in September.

[m1stake]

As long as it's not from Rev A Hell, I've got $4,000 burning a hole in my pocket.

[Salavat23]

So I think we can conclude that the Mac Pro will launch 100% between late September 2008 to January 2009.

[Tallest Skil]

So I think we can conclude that the Mac Pro will launch 100% between late September 2008 to January 2009.

More like: 100% after Gainestown is released.

[m1stake]

Not before Christmas. The Mac Pro doesn't do the same numbers as the notebooks. There is no reason to release a product like that at that time because it doesn't benefit from the Christmas rush.

The September launch is a soft launch, the product will become available in October.

[Saladinos]

Not before Christmas. The Mac Pro doesn't do the same numbers as the notebooks. There is no reason to release a product like that at that time because it doesn't benefit from the Christmas rush.

The September launch is a soft launch, the product will become available in October.

I'm thinking the new Mac Pros will be available in October. No, you wouldn't expect the Mac Pro to benefit from the Christmas sales surge, unless it had a BTO configuration that lowered the price significantly (unlikely).

I'd buy a Mac Pro today, if Anandtech hadn't shown us what a massive upgrade Nehalem really is. With Snow Leopard, a 2x performance increase isn't unthinkable. With multiple cores and HyperThreading, that figure may grow quite a lot. The new chipset is also slated to support SLI and CrossFire, which may mean OSX will see some support for the technologies (especially considering Snow Leopard will take advantage of GPGPU technology).

Snow Leopard is a much more hardware-focused upgrade than traditional OSX upgrades. You should wait for the new Mac Pros, as they will be the last revisions to be released before SL, and likely designed to take full advantage of it.

[m1stake]

SLI was licensed on the X58 Intel platform, there is no word that it was licensed on ALL Intel platforms. Long term though that seems like an obvious solution - only supporting AMD's CrossfireX platform probably bothers more than a few people at big blue.

Remember that Harpertown processors were also released in October 2007 or so, and did not appear until just before MacWorld.

If you're right I certainly won't hold it against you, I've been waiting for this ever since they scrapped the concept of monolithic quad core in Penryn.