New Mac Pro not designed to be stand alone?

cmanderson said:

Smugness begat the name calling, which I apologize for but I was not responding to you in the first place. If you noticed.

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Read this and especially focus on the last paragraph of the first stanza "The Profusion of Fusion Confusion"

http://blog.macsales.com/17624-os-x...tup-option-for-non-fusion-drive-equipped-macs

Click to expand...

First off I respect the smug call out. Sorry.
So I read through that. I did every single thing on that tutorial exactly as they have diagramed months ago FYI. There was no step on there that made me think I skipped any step including writing the data to the volume. I created a Fusion Drive not a core storage volume. I have verified by watching the chatter whilst idle. What Apple does is the same as what you can do at home on either an external (not recommended) or internal. Why the disconnect? You just need to post the correct tutorial. (Me, not you) Mine may been from Ars or Anand can't remember. Anyway this was a proof of concept for me as I use symlinks and control my hybrid setup personally. Cheers.

derbothaus said:

First off I respect the smug call out. Sorry.
So I read through that. I did every single thing on that tutorial exactly as they have diagramed months ago FYI. There was no step on there that made me think I skipped any step including writing the data to the volume. I created a Fusion Drive not a core storage volume. I have verified by watching the chatter whilst idle. What Apple does is the same as what you can do at home on either an external (not recommended) or internal. Why the disconnect? You just need to post the correct tutorial. (Me, not you) Mine may been from Ars or Anand can't remember. Anyway this was a proof of concept for me as I use symlinks and control my hybrid setup personally. Cheers.

Click to expand...

10.8.3 shipped Mid March. You very well may have a proper Fusion Drive, but I haven't questioned whether or not you do. I've questioned your statement that all Core Storage is equivalent to Fusion Drive tech, which is not true. Additionally, I've done this as well, on a 2011 iMac, but with OS X 10.8.3. And I have verified it is properly configured.

My statement is simply that Core Storage is required for Fusion Drive, but it is not one and the same with Fusion Drive. It is the foundation.

cmanderson said:

10.8.3 shipped Mid March. You very well may have a proper Fusion Drive, but I haven't questioned whether or not you do. I've questioned your statement that all Core Storage is equivalent to Fusion Drive tech, which is not true. Additionally, I've done this as well, on a 2011 iMac, but with OS X 10.8.3. And I have verified it is properly configured.

My statement is simply that Core Storage is required for Fusion Drive, but it is not one and the same with Fusion Drive. It is the foundation.

Click to expand...

Well now it makes sense.
I re-read what I wrote and I apologize as it really was not my intention. I make too many assumptions that people know what I mean without specifically calling every detail out. But I understand all too well the need to keep info concise on these boards. I also had no idea there were incomplete directions and it was a "thing". So thanks for cluing me in on that. Buddies?

derbothaus said:

Well now it makes sense.
I re-read what I wrote and I apologize as it really was not my intention. I make too many assumptions that people know what I mean without specifically calling every detail out. But I understand all too well the need to keep info concise on these boards. I also had no idea there were incomplete directions and it was a "thing". So thanks for cluing me in on that. Buddies?

Click to expand...

Hey now. This is no place for civil discourse!

New details on another thread about MacStadium

The thread is -----"Mac Pro Label" on the new MacPro 2013?

http://www.macstadium.com/blog/new-mac-pro-hosting-and-colocation-will-be-here-soon/

Posters are questioning the spec details that MacStadium is giving for the new Mac Pro in regard to dual CPUs.

Could a supposedly legit company like MacStadium custom order dual CPU's instead of dual GPU's ??

ABCDEF-Hex said:

The thread is -----"Mac Pro Label" on the new MacPro 2013?

http://www.macstadium.com/blog/new-mac-pro-hosting-and-colocation-will-be-here-soon/

Posters are questioning the spec details that MacStadium is giving for the new Mac Pro in regard to dual CPUs.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm positive MacStadium has it wrong with the dual cpus. They are saying single or dual configuration, but still claim just up to 12 physical cores. They could be referring to 12 physical cores "each" but it would just make more sense to say "up to 24 physical cores."

And I know we only have pictures to go off of so far, but a dual configuration doesn't even seem physically possible.

The new Mac Pro being stand alone depends entirely on what you want out of it. The only thing I'd probably want is a backup drive (I'll probably move to network storage for that.)

ABCDEF-Hex said:

The thread is -----"Mac Pro Label" on the new MacPro 2013?

http://www.macstadium.com/blog/new-mac-pro-hosting-and-colocation-will-be-here-soon/

Posters are questioning the spec details that MacStadium is giving for the new Mac Pro in regard to dual CPUs.

Could a supposedly legit company like MacStadium custom order dual CPU's instead of dual GPU's ??

Click to expand...

I'm not sure what your comment is in context to as it seems to be completely self contained. Whatever the case MacStadium and the people who write those articles are no more or less informed than the individual people who offer opinions here.

The ONLY details we or ANYONE outside Apple have access to are detailed in the WDC video and we have a perfectly good written assemblage of those specifications here: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1594991/ Anything else is complete BS!

Gonk42 said:

But it struck me that it is actually designed to be a node in a processor array (i.e. a render farm). In that role it requires only a single TB cable, its small size and vertical cooling allows a high packing density (though no stacking) and it has been stripped of most if not all unneeded components.

From Apple's point of view they want to sell to big customers, they want a flag ship product that is used to render block buster movies and so long as it can be used by itself they can call it a new mac pro.

It is a bit like if Mercedes dropped their sports cars and concentrated on F1, but allowed customers to buy F1 cars which had been made road legal by the bolt-on addition of lights and number plates with a trailer option for those who wanted to carry luggage!

Click to expand...

I think the problem with this line of reasoning is that there is a standard large, high-performance customer form factor. A rack.

The new Mac Pro is probably the least rack mountable thing I've ever seen. Port access assumes verticality, and the way the fan is designed it'll blow hot air up, which will both disrupt the flow of air from Front to Back for most rack products at best, and at worse pull hot air through the machine from the devices below and blow even hotter air up to the machines above.

It's clearly meant to be sitting on a desk, not a farm.

I think a guess that does take its design into account is that Apple is paring down what is considered to be necessary for an on-desk workstation, under the assumption that you send out jobs that need a higher number of processor cores, more storage etc. to a farm.

So it extend it to your analogy, the Mac Pro becomes the nice sports car your F1 driver gets to the track in. It's fast enough for most tasks, but then the really heavy lifting is sent to a rack mounted NAS/node farm/etc. elsewhere.

I'm not sure how I feel about this paradigm yet, but there it is.

FluJunkie said:

I think the problem with this line of reasoning is that there is a standard large, high-performance customer form factor. A rack.

The new Mac Pro is probably the least rack mountable thing I've ever seen. Port access assumes verticality, and the way the fan is designed it'll blow hot air up, which will both disrupt the flow of air from Front to Back for most rack products at best, and at worse pull hot air through the machine from the devices below and blow even hotter air up to the machines above.

It's clearly meant to be sitting on a desk, not a farm.

I think a guess that does take its design into account is that Apple is paring down what is considered to be necessary for an on-desk workstation, under the assumption that you send out jobs that need a higher number of processor cores, more storage etc. to a farm.

So it extend it to your analogy, the Mac Pro becomes the nice sports car your F1 driver gets to the track in. It's fast enough for most tasks, but then the really heavy lifting is sent to a rack mounted NAS/node farm/etc. elsewhere.

I'm not sure how I feel about this paradigm yet, but there it is.

Click to expand...

These guys seem to disagree...

VirtualRain said:

These guys seem to disagree...

Image

Click to expand...

"Those guys" are going off the same information we all have and they are still even listing wrong dual cpu info on their site. I wouldn't put too much stock into that right now. First, the design looks kind of ridiculous and I fail to see how it's any better than the rack mounted configurations we have now. I'd actually be surprised if that thing ever comes to being. But who knows?

VirtualRain said:

These guys seem to disagree...

Click to expand...

That's an entirely bespoke rack for the Mac Pro (note the lack of any rack mounted switches, etc.), clearly a concept rather than a finished product what with the very short time since the Mac Pro has been announced, and a non-typical airflow pattern for a rack setup.

I'm going to stand by what I said.

Surely your better off with much more specialised rack mounted hardware for stuff like that?

I like the concept of the new mac pro but this kind of thing doesn't seem to be what its designed for.

FluJunkie said:

That's an entirely bespoke rack for the Mac Pro (note the lack of any rack mounted switches, etc.), clearly a concept rather than a finished product what with the very short time since the Mac Pro has been announced, and a non-typical airflow pattern for a rack setup.

I'm going to stand by what I said.

Click to expand...

handsome pete said:

"Those guys" are going off the same information we all have and they are still even listing wrong dual cpu info on their site. I wouldn't put too much stock into that right now. First, the design looks kind of ridiculous and I fail to see how it's any better than the rack mounted configurations we have now. I'd actually be surprised if that thing ever comes to being. But who knows?

Click to expand...

If you do a google image search for mac mini rack you'll find a bunch of equally innovative solutions for racking a ton of Apple products that were never designed for a rack so I'm sure this will get sorted out soon enough.

Just a quick update on Macstadium:

I sent them an email about the dual CPU spec that appeared on their website and this was their response:

We are all speculating on several aspects of the new platform…

However, an educated guess shows that based on Intel’s spec here:

http://ark.intel.com/products/family/59138/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-Family/server

This page zero E5 CPU’s with more than 8 physical cores. They are all 4/6/8.

So, if Apple is advertising 12 Cores of E5, that to mean would mean 2 CPU’s * 6 Cores Each =12 Total Cores.

Unless, of course Apple was advertising threads then that would mean 1 CPU * 6 Cores, Hyperthreaded = 12 Total Cores

ABCDEF-Hex said:

I sent them an email about the dual CPU spec that appeared on their website and this was their response:

We are all speculating on several aspects of the new platform…

However, an educated guess shows that based on Intel’s spec here:

http://ark.intel.com/products/family/59138/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-Family/server

This page zero E5 CPU’s with more than 8 physical cores. They are all 4/6/8.

So, if Apple is advertising 12 Cores of E5, that to mean would mean 2 CPU’s * 6 Cores Each =12 Total Cores.

Unless, of course Apple was advertising threads then that would mean 1 CPU * 6 Cores, Hyperthreaded = 12 Total Cores

Click to expand...

They're just not in touch with the latest rumours A simple google of Ivy Bridge E 12 core would solve this riddle for them.

VirtualRain said:

If you do a google image search for mac mini rack you'll find a bunch of equally innovative solutions for racking a ton of Apple products that were never designed for a rack so I'm sure this will get sorted out soon enough.

Click to expand...

Two notes:

1. Most of those Mac Mini racks put the mini into a typical rack form factor, with the same in the front, out the back airflow. Along the same lines, the Mac Mini, while not designed for a rack, is a much more conventional form factor.

2. I didn't say it was possible. But if the Mac Pro was "designed" to be stand alone, it shouldn't need third party "innovative solutions" to work. I'm sure folks will be able to shoehorn them into racks, but I think suggesting that is Apple's intent for them utterly ignores the consequences of their design.

VirtualRain said:

These guys seem to disagree...

Click to expand...

These guys seem have several flaws...

A. they assume this is big reduction in power. Apple didn't get rid of the largest power components. In fact, in some cases there are more ( 2 GPUs ). These are not going to be Mac Mini light sippers of power. Somewhat lower than current Mac Pro but still much closer to the current one than the mini.


B. Not sure what their hosting business is for but for standard web services the two GPUs probably aren't going to add much value.

Send in your Mac Pro will likely be just that unit.


C. Unless there are hidden fans flipping that vertical cold air into horizontal air... this has air flow problems. they can pump in pressurized cold air but is that going to come out evenly? Likely this single fan Mac Pro as going to be more sensitive to screwing things up with flow.

D. As others have mentioned the lack of realistic accounting for cabling and network infrastructure is a huge missing piece. ( maybe they consider figuring that out is a competitive advantage and want to keep it secret... or maybe just pulling the design out of the butt. Coin flip as to which one this is. )

They are going to have to bend and secure the Ethernet cable (as opposed to letting it drop )

The 6 Thunderbolt ports appear to go down the drain here too. Either that or will need to decrease the density. [ Perhaps one port to connect to their Enterprise SAN storage , but I suspect that is just another 1GbE pipe. ]


E. Don't really believe the density claims. Only 150 in the diagram. That could be only half of a POD but for folks without any concrete power numbers .... kind of skeptical.

Gonk42 said:

I had been judging the new mac pro as an existing mac pro replacement, i.e. a stand alone workstation. On this basis the new design makes little sense - a small device requiring a mess of things to be plugged in such as monitors, keyboard, external hard drives, external optical drives, external sound cards and so on.

But it struck me that it is actually designed to be a node in a processor array (i.e. a render farm). In that role it requires only a single TB cable, its small size and vertical cooling allows a high packing density (though no stacking) and it has been stripped of most if not all unneeded components.

From Apple's point of view they want to sell to big customers, they want a flag ship product that is used to render block buster movies and so long as it can be used by itself they can call it a new mac pro.

It is a bit like if Mercedes dropped their sports cars and concentrated on F1, but allowed customers to buy F1 cars which had been made road legal by the bolt-on addition of lights and number plates with a trailer option for those who wanted to carry luggage!

Click to expand...

I didn't realise that the current MacPro had a built in monitor and keyboard. Wow.

A couple questions to think on

1) From looking at the guts of the new tube, I assume the power supply is external. I would think that this thing would need a 400-500W power supply. Anyone have an idea how big that will be?

2) I'm guessing that the top end machine 2-3GB FirePro, 12-core Xeon, 16GB RAM, and 1TB SSD, is gonna cost well in excess $5,000. In order to hit the current $2500 price point I would think they would have to offer a single 1GB GPU, a 4-core Xeon, 4GB RAM, and 256GB SSD. Given that low end, and the option to get that in a classic MacPro tower, or a Tube which would you choose? I think that question would be a valid poll question.

I would hope that Apple would offer an updated mac tower, in addition to the new tube, and let the market decide which they want. But a MacRumors poll might tell which way the winds are blowing.

ABCDEF-Hex said:

I sent them an email about the dual CPU spec that appeared on their website and this was their response:

We are all speculating on several aspects of the new platform…

However, an educated guess shows that based on Intel’s spec here:

Click to expand...

Given Apple alluded to these are the next generation Xeon processors why would they already be in ark.intel.com ???????? They won't.
If Intel hasn't formally introduced them they are not in ark. So looking there is the wrong place.

As opposed to someplace like:

" ... Xeon E5-2600 v2 series is coming a quarter earlier than the Xeon E7 v2. The CPUs will have up to 12 cores (24 threads), ... "
http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2013/...upcoming_Intel_Xeon_E5_v2_and_E7_v2_CPUs.html


It is actually balantly obvious is actually just look at the pictures of the upcoming Mac Pro. There are only 4 DIMM slots. For a dual machine they'd need 8 DIMM slots. There is nowhere 8 slots could be hiding on that device.

tralfaz said:

1) From looking at the guts of the new tube, I assume the power supply is external. I would think that this thing would need a 400-500W power supply. Anyone have an idea how big that will be?

Click to expand...

There is a pretty good chance that the "cheese grader" thing when looking down from the top is the power supply stuffed between the CPU/Chipset board and the I/O output panel. ( go to the "Thermal core" picture which looks down from the top with the fan off.

Oriented it vertically allows it to ventilate its heat "up the chimney" too.


To run a 130W Xeon E5 and two 250+W AMD FirePro W9000 equivalents it is more like 700W ( given that some of the other things need power too. USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt power distribution among a few other things. )


The major other clue is the "Expansion, vastly expanded " picture. It shows the back panel. There is a standard three prong connector for a power cord right there.

2) I'm guessing that the top end machine 2-3GB FirePro, 12-core Xeon, 16GB RAM, and 1TB SSD, is gonna cost well in excess $5,000.

Click to expand...

Probably 6GB FirePros and north of $5,000. The 12 core Xeon all by itself is probably around $1800-2100 before any Apple profit margin applied.
Apple always has crackhead pricing on max sized SSDs ( so something over $1K ) . And haven't even started to pay for the video cards ( and VRAM) yet.

That's top end BTO or "best " ( out of 'good' , 'better' , 'best') entry?

In order to hit the current $2500 price point I would think they would have to offer a single 1GB GPU, a 4-core Xeon, 4GB RAM, and 256GB SSD.

Click to expand...

Probably cannot have on GPU. In order to hit the $2,500 price point Apple will have to struck a deal with AMD to make their own GPU cards more aligned with what the cards cost rather than AMD FirePro pricing structure.

Given that low end, and the option to get that in a classic MacPro tower, or a Tube which would you choose? I think that question would be a valid poll question.

Click to expand...

It isn't likely the low end and won't get the same functionaly if decouple the GPUs ( since will loose the TB ports ).

I would hope that Apple would offer an updated mac tower, in addition to the new tube, and let the market decide which they want. But a MacRumors poll might tell which way the winds are blowing.

Click to expand...

Winds blowing about alternative universes???? Apple has already sailed in their ship. It was a sneak peak, not a solicitation of votes of what they might do next.

There were 7 years of towers based on Intel from 2006-2013. The "voting" ( buying of systems ) has already been done. The growth died and Apple moved on to something new.

tralfaz said:

1) From looking at the guts of the new tube, I assume the power supply is external. I would think that this thing would need a 400-500W power supply. Anyone have an idea how big that will be?

Click to expand...

I very much doubt the new Mac Pro will have an external PSU. Even if it is going to need 2x235W for GPUs + 130W for CPU + a whole lot of other small drains = well over 600W, if not closer to 700-800W PSU.

I'm guessing that the top end machine 2-3GB FirePro, 12-core Xeon, 16GB RAM, and 1TB SSD, is gonna cost well in excess $5,000. In order to hit the current $2500 price point I would think they would have to offer a single 1GB GPU, a 4-core Xeon, 4GB RAM, and 256GB SSD. Given that low end, and the option to get that in a classic MacPro tower, or a Tube which would you choose? I think that question would be a valid poll question.

Click to expand...

The top-end comes with 6GB VRAM per GPU AFAICT. Pricing is very difficult. All I can suggest is that if Apple can't field a ~$2K Mac Pro that is significantly more powerful than a 27" iMac, it won't sell IMO. Apple do say that dual GPUs are standard. However they do not say that they must be the same. For example, it is not clear if Apple will give the option to have one high-end GPU, and one low-end GPU.

I would hope that Apple would offer an updated mac tower, in addition to the new tube, and let the market decide which they want. But a MacRumors poll might tell which way the winds are blowing.

Click to expand...

It is hard to say if it would be in Apple's best interests to release a brand new "Classic Mac Pro" with dual 12 core Xeons, and the same case as the present-day MPs. I'm sure many people who are on MacRumours would jump on one a-quick. But I do not believe that people on MacRumours represent anything similar to the general population. So I seriously doubt such a thing would happen. I would expect someone to make a hackintosh 24-core Xeon in an old MP case, however.

Sneak peek at the PSU

Erasmus said:

I very much doubt the new Mac Pro will have an external PSU. Even if it is going to need 2x235W for GPUs + 130W for CPU + a whole lot of other small drains = well over 600W, if not closer to 700-800W PSU.

Click to expand...

I think I can see the power supply at the bottom of this photo:

http://www.bing.com/?FORM=MFEHPG&PUBL=Google&CREA=userid1743go51d367c64cb6b50c6d8b0b7fe5f35618

Just a weak attempt at some humor for Thursday morning. I'm so hyped about new MP that when I saw this it came to mind. I know this is a frivolous post and please don't respond that it would be triangular inside.