New Mac Pro release date, rumours and leaked images

[derbothaus]

^^^ Yuck dude.

[scottrichardson]

Originally Posted by derbothaus

^^^ Yuck dude.

Haha really? You don't like? It's not so different to the existing towers, just narrower and with centrally aligned front ports.

[spoonie1972]

if they use the same horrible sharp "handles", i hope its less than 44lbs this time around

[derbothaus]

Originally Posted by scottrichardson

Haha really? You don't like? It's not so different to the existing towers, just narrower and with centrally aligned front ports.

It was the central ports and Apple logo that killed the design for me. But I am not an industrial designer.
It is like the iPhone 4 and 5 next to each other though
Tall and taller. lol.

[Phrygian]

always nice to see a troll post on these forums. reminds me its an internet forum.

[Pakaku]

Originally Posted by scottrichardson

Haha really? You don't like? It's not so different to the existing towers, just narrower and with centrally aligned front ports.

My question is about the central ports... since at the moment, the Mac Pro's front ports are on the motherboard, hence being on the side.

[scottrichardson]

Originally Posted by Pakaku

My question is about the central ports... since at the moment, the Mac Pro's front ports are on the motherboard, hence being on the side.

Connected to mobo via hidden cables

[Tanax]

Why do you insist on going with AMD cards? I thought it was obvious that Apple switched to Nvidia cards?

[derbothaus]

Originally Posted by Phrygian

always nice to see a troll post on these forums. reminds me its an internet forum.

What are you talking about? The whole thread is troll bait. Oh wait...

[wonderspark]

I thought half the reason for the ports being on the side was also to keep airflow as unhindered as possible, not just the motherboard location.

[ScottishCaptain]

Hey guys, I've got a great idea! Hey guys! Hey!

Let's take all- all- Let's take all the rumours, all of them- every single one of them. Hey guys, let's take all the rumours, every one we can find, we'll take all of them, and pack them into one giant speculative article. All of them! Even if most of them are wrong some of them will probably be right!

Then, then, hey, hey guys, then we'll take some awesome 3D images and- hey, a lego Mac Pro, and we'll put those in there too to make it look uber legit!

genius.jpg

-SC

[Phrygian]

Originally Posted by derbothaus

What are you talking about? The whole thread is troll bait. Oh wait...

i meant the OPs post... not yours. i didn't even read the rest

[deconstruct60]

Originally Posted by wonderspark

I thought half the reason for the ports being on the side was also to keep airflow as unhindered as possible, not just the motherboard location.

This. If someone purposely wanted to impair the large diameter fans' effectiveness could hardly pick a more obstructive position to put these port panel.

If looking for a visual place to put the ports then into the old space occupied the door to the ODD drive would be a better place (rotated horizontally). Like also adversely impacts air flow on the back also for the internal CPU thermal zone.

This "photoshop skill demonstration" design also misses the boat on issues of where to locate the lid-locking mechanism on the back. The gratuitous slimming here likely throws that mechanism under the bus also for no good reason.

[scottrichardson]

Originally Posted by deconstruct60

This. If someone purposely wanted to impair the large diameter fans' effectiveness could hardly pick a more obstructive position to put these port panel.

If looking for a visual place to put the ports then into the old space occupied the door to the ODD drive would be a better place (rotated horizontally). Like also adversely impacts air flow on the back also for the internal CPU thermal zone.

This "photoshop skill demonstration" design also misses the boat on issues of where to locate the lid-locking mechanism on the back. The gratuitous slimming here likely throws that mechanism under the bus also for no good reason.

I really feel deflated by the way you snidely say 'photoshop skill demonstration'. Why do people have to have a dig simply for the sake of it? Ouch dude.

Anyway, that aside, LOL. I put the ports there coz 'it looked good', and secondly, the lock mechanism could be placed on the side without any problems as there's more than enough room for PCI slots, other ports, power etc. The Ivy Bridge CPU's require less power, if I recall correctly. So less fan cooling, no?

[calaverasgrande]

Originally Posted by deconstruct60

As pointed out it isn't a flagship product. Biggest and heaviest isn't even flagship in naval terms.



No, the marketplace is killing off Firewire. Apple is largely just reflecting what most folks are buying and system vendors are deploying.





The vast majority of these vendors all sold PCI-e cards. The thunderbolt devices are pragmatically these same PCI-e cards wrapped in an external container. If you need the functionality it is availble in two forms. The Mac Pro already takes the PCI-e card form factor of their solutions. Most shops oriented around the Mac Pro already have them. That makes those Thunderbolt form factor devices redundant and better matched to the Macs without PCI-e slots.

For example, Blackmagic Intensity.

http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/intensity/

the Intensity Pro (PCI-e card ) and Intensity Extreme (Thunderbolt ) take the same breakout cable. There is no in bandwidth. This pattern repeats itself for the large majority of offerings in the A/V capture space.

The huge problem is the many folks fixate on storage which is slightly different due to the connector being nominally hidden from view. The TB storage solutions are PCI-e eSATA/RAID card solutions repackaged. The external eSATA/SAS connector disappears inside the box. However, the SATA/SAS connect is still present on the drives.

So for example the BlackMagic Cinema camera ( http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/prod...acamera/design) takes an internal SSD drive for storage. That drive moved to a SATA enclosed connected to a Mac Pro is perfectly viable "sneaker net" solution to the transport of that data.

Similarly a Seagate GoFlex with a Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 connector could be used in a "sneakernet" set up for the core SATA USM modules being moved around.

Similarly a









It is far more likely with higher end A/V capture cards that it is proprietary, non standard, connectors that you are buying. This issue that primarily matters is having that particular vendor's connector. I think you are looking at the wrong end of the box.



This is just misdirection. First, these are all tools. Matching the right tools to the right job is the primary task to be undertakend. Second, there is a better than 50/50 chance that the Mac Pro will have Firewire. The Mac Mini has it and has plenty of room on the Mac Pro edges for at least 2 Firewire (there are 4 ports now. Dropping down to 2 would actually be simpler and more cost effective to do than doing the current 4. ). Third if there was some huge driving market demand for combo USB 3.0 + Firewire card they would pop up for a PCI-e slot enabled Mac Pro.







Two factors. First, in the context of current Mac Pro ( and competitive workstations ) user base which is the larger group.

Group A : have PCI-e cards that connect to SATA standard drives
Group B : have drives where the only way to extract data is solely from a TB connection.

The answer should be relatively obvious. Retreating into the very small corner case where the importance of Thunderbolt is overinflated doesn't justify Thunderbolt in the overall market.


Second, there are no pure TB drives. There are SATA drives inside of TB enclosures but there are not TB drives. So you do run into an issue if the embedded SATA/RAID controller writes the data onto the standards based SATA drives that you cannot read the data on the drives if those drives are moved to another enclosure/adapter. However, if the data is written in a standard readable format the drives themselves can be read by a Mac Pro with a suitable adapter and/or drive sled. So the root cause issue on something like a Promise TB enclosure data being encoded in that controllers RAID layout format is the root cause issue. Not the lack of Thunderbolt.

Anyone who captures data into a proprietary format suffers the lock-in of that format. But that is a choice. There is little to no requirement that lock-in formats be used in disk file layout.



It isn't the Mac Pro's that are primarily constrained. If problem solving is reduced to matching the logos on the connectors on the cables to the one's on the sockets on the box then yeah there are limitations.

we dont have time at my job to remove a drive from its enclosure, mount it in another one, then reassemble it back the way it was for return to the agency/affiliate/franchise.

About firewire in general, it's going away, face it.
I am not a cheerleader for the death of firewire. I used it a lot over the past 15 years or so. But it had its problems. The various Windows speed crippling bugs, the bad implementations in some 1394 chips, and firewire's higher licensing fee than USB did not help.
Scsi went away as a connector. Dont see many centronics printer cables, or adb mice. serial ports on mac and pc are kind of dead. IDE is dead. It happens.

[PowerPCMacMan]

This is all irrelevant information and does not hold water. We simply don't know what the new Mac Pro will be like, but I am sure it will get some kind of a case redesign and will probably fall in line with upgrade restrictions just like the iMac.

Again, I am not speculating here.. Given what we know so far there is not one proof that the Mac Pro for 2013 is going to look like the designs shown in the pics in this thread.

I don't buy it for a second... Until we get more reliable information leaked from an employee or someone close to Apple hardware design teams, we are all just speculating.

[DJenkins]

Originally Posted by scottrichardson

I really feel deflated by the way you snidely say 'photoshop skill demonstration'. Why do people have to have a dig simply for the sake of it? Ouch dude.

Anyway, that aside, LOL. I put the ports there coz 'it looked good', and secondly, the lock mechanism could be placed on the side without any problems as there's more than enough room for PCI slots, other ports, power etc. The Ivy Bridge CPU's require less power, if I recall correctly. So less fan cooling, no?

Please folks, continue your attacks on scottrichardson, what he has presented here is undoubtedly the final design of the new mac pro! You should all be outraged! God forbid he might have moved the front ports to the right hand side, or even worse... in a horizontal layout!!!

But seriously I like people sharing ideas for these things, it shows not everyone is a salivating Apple zombie waiting to feast on whatever they release. (Although those designs don't stray very far from the original anyway :P)

//offtopic//
Scott for a while I thought you were the Sydney cameraman of the same name but after finding your site I see you're from the sunny town of Ulladulla which I've been to a few times

Anyway continue everyone I'm sure this thread will still bring much entertainment!

[scottrichardson]

Originally Posted by DJenkins

Please folks, continue your attacks on scottrichardson, what he has presented here is undoubtedly the final design of the new mac pro! You should all be outraged! God forbid he might have moved the front ports to the right hand side, or even worse... in a horizontal layout!!!

But seriously I like people sharing ideas for these things, it shows not everyone is a salivating Apple zombie waiting to feast on whatever they release. (Although those designs don't stray very far from the original anyway :P)

//offtopic//
Scott for a while I thought you were the Sydney cameraman of the same name but after finding your site I see you're from the sunny town of Ulladulla which I've been to a few times

Anyway continue everyone I'm sure this thread will still bring much entertainment!

Haha thanks Mr Jenkins! Amazing how many people know of Ulladulla, have relatives here, or own a holiday home here! Great place.

No, certainly not a cameraman by any standards, I prefer to stick to showing off my 'photoshop skills' making web sites

Hey, if you guys have better ideas for the design of the pro, and can't photoshop, let me know and I'll try to mock something up in my spare time. Honestly I'm just kicking time until the new pro comes out, so coming up with quick concepts in photoshop is a nice way to kill the time.

[calaverasgrande]

okay lets look at general update trends in the Apple universe.

First Apple has been a big proponent of ditching connectors even when they are useful. EG the rMBP without ethernet or 1394. Compared to the cMBP which has both.

Second Apple used to enforce design language orthodoxy across all of it's product lines. Now it seems to introduce several design language "dialects" concurrently and let the market decide. EG: the iPhone 5 vs the iPod touch vs the Mac mini.

Third the current obssesion at infinite loop seems to be thin. It is understandable with portable devices, but what exactly is the overriding benefit of the thinner Mac mini or iMac?
We also see a continuing form over function aesthetic. Even more so than in the past.

Taking that in account, I expect the new Mac Pro to be smaller, have less external ports than the current model, none on the front, no optical drive, no firewire (if they are totally bonkers they will kill the ethernet), and it will most likely derive from either the Mac mini/MBP designs or the iPhone 5/iPad mini designs.
I am expecting something like a fat mac mini mated with an iphone 5 (not with a tiny screen haha!).
Excessive shedding of "obsolete" ports and more TB ports than the iMac but not enough to make up for killing firewire.


I believe that Apple really only keeps the Mac Pro around for dev use. I do not think they really place much value on people in post and scientific roles that expect to be able to use PCIe cards. So I would not be surprised to see those excised from the design criteria either.
I pretty much expect a box just big enough to handle the thermal envelope of two cpus and decent but not earth shattering GPU.

I dont expect it to be in imac-esque multiple colors, I do not expect it to be modular. I kind of doubt it will be sealed against any upgrades, but I wouldnt be surprised if Ram is the only user accessed upgrade.

[slughead]

Originally Posted by Peace

Deceptive article.
It says "leaked images" when in fact they are simply concepts from someone.

I saw those a few months ago on this forum. Old and fail.

[Concorde Rules]

I'm not convinced that Thunderbolt will appear on the Mac Pro as it does on the rest of the line.

It shouldn't be integrated onto the GPU itself because:

1. A PCI-E 3 x16 slot has a max one-direction transfer rate of 15.75 GB/s (128 GT/s). Thunderbolt is a current max one way bandwidth of 1.25GB/sec, going to 2.5GB/sec when this new Intel controller comes along. Using up bandwidth that may *currently* not be utilized by the GPU is dumb for a future PoV.

(Actually the current gen GPUs running GPGPU tasks ARE being limited by the PCI-E bandwith: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5264/s...ie-30-it-works).

2. A custom GPU card would be needed and therefore people upgrading (Similar to the 6870, GTX 6xx series card situation) would loose the ability to use it. This is a BAD thing for us and I feel this won't happen but there is a fair probability of it but still falls foul of point 1.


It can't be on the motherboard itself due to the SB-E Xeon's not including a GPU chip on die. Adding a discrete GPU means that at some point the main GPU needs it's DP output pipped to the connector (see point 2 why again this doesn't work).

So, my opinion is:

1. An external cable links the mDP output of a GPU to a Thunderbolt minus DP connector on the motherboard, to form 'Full' Thunderbolt.

2. The GPUs display outputs are pipped through the PCI-E slot and through a Thunderbolt connector on the motherboard. although again, DP V1.2 can transfer ~2GB/sec per channel for 4k res, which is a chunk of PCI-E bandwidth.

Personally Thunderbolt and the Mac Pro don't go together. A version of Thunderbolt without DP with the ability to merge them in a cable makes the most sense but doesn't fit within Apple's simple ethos.

The bottle line is I feel that TB can't be efficiently added to the Mac Pro without sacrificing something else.

I'm really interested in what Apple come up with when they finally release it...

[theSeb]

Originally Posted by scottrichardson

Haha really? You don't like? It's not so different to the existing towers, just narrower and with centrally aligned front ports.

Looks like it's about to topple over. It's narrow for no reason, other than to be narrow. Oh wait, iMac.

[deconstruct60]

Originally Posted by theSeb

Looks like it's about to topple over. It's narrow for no reason, other than to be narrow. Oh wait, iMac.

Hardly iMac.

First, the iMac is still, if not more, stable now. It is even less likely to tip over due to higher weight perched in the air.

Second, the iMac dumped the ODD drive. That is a reason. Some may not agree with the reason but there is a rational and quantitative evidence (real user usage patterns ) behind it.

Similarly laminating the glass onto the screen (thinness) has a functional improvement ( dramatically lower glossy reflectivity).

For the Mac Pro dumping one ODD isn't going to make the box thinner as there is one left ( as if that was the primary driver to Mac Pro width ... it isn't. ) . Even if two ODDs were removed the largerst component in the upper thermal zone in a Mac Pro is the power supply. The Power supply if anything is likely going to get larger ( increased power demands), not smaller. So dumping the ODDs isn't going to drive huge space savings. The ODD bays could be filled with 2.5" drives since need the 3rd thermal zone roughly the same size anyway.

[theSeb]

Originally Posted by deconstruct60

Hardly iMac.

First, the iMac is still, if not more, stable now. It is even less likely to tip over due to higher weight perched in the air.

Second, the iMac dumped the ODD drive. That is a reason. Some may not agree with the reason but there is a rational and quantitative evidence (real user usage patterns ) behind it.

Similarly laminating the glass onto the screen (thinness) has a functional improvement ( dramatically lower glossy reflectivity).

For the Mac Pro dumping one ODD isn't going to make the box thinner as there is one left ( as if that was the primary driver to Mac Pro width ... it isn't. ) . Even if two ODDs were removed the largerst component in the upper thermal zone in a Mac Pro is the power supply. The Power supply if anything is likely going to get larger ( increased power demands), not smaller. So dumping the ODDs isn't going to drive huge space savings. The ODD bays could be filled with 2.5" drives since need the 3rd thermal zone roughly the same size anyway.

I am not talking about stability when I mentioned the iMac. I was talking about form over function. The edges of the iMac were made thinner for no reason, other than aesthetics. The screen lamination is a good thing, but that's not a reason/excuse to try and make the edges thinner and compromise on thermal efficiency and possibility of better components and some serviceability purely for looks.

[deconstruct60]

Originally Posted by scottrichardson

Anyway, that aside, LOL. I put the ports there coz 'it looked good', .

"Looked good" isn't product design. It is derisional of what real product design is all about. Being in a hurry to slap the Apple logo on the front quickly lead to not doing much more highly useful with the space.
[ If anything it would be plastic or non-metal logo so that the Mac Pro could implement a multiple antenna Wifi 802.11ac or MIMO 802.11n solution. ]

The Ivy Bridge CPU's require less power, if I recall correctly. So less fan cooling, no?

The Ivy Bridge E5's aren't out yet. But no, they are not projected to need substantively less power. The Xeon E5's are still looped into the "core count" war. That means the process shrink power savings gains are blown on yet even more cores and/or higher clock speeds.

One rumor pegged Ivy Bridge at
"... In my mind, based on the power and performance gains assessment, I'd expect 2.4 GHz 10-core parts at the 95W TDP level, 3 GHz 10-core parts at the 130W TDP level, and 3.3 GHz 10-core parts at the 150W workstation SKU grade, all plus minus 100 MHz or so. ..."
http://vr-zone.com/articles/ivy-brid...#ixzz2HPQgPnOm

2x 95W is 190W. That is still a substantive heat dissipation problem. Throw on top of that a 200-240W PCI-e GPGPU card and have approximately the same types of thermal problems the current Mac Pro design addresses.

Apple would have to transition to Xeon E3 Ivy Bridge to get a large enough TDP reduction to warrant major changes to the case. Intel has a "significantly lower power" Xeon solution. It has nothing to do with "Ivy Bridge" , "Sandy Bridge" , "Haswell" , or any other architectural code name. It is called Xeon E3. The substantive trade off made by that taking that path though is that it is capped at 4 cores.



Frankly, most of the tech specs on your work up is a laundry list of misconceptions.

There is no new Thunderbolt coming soon.

" ... Intel's focus on Thunderbolt is to drive adoption and it doesn't want to quickly rev the spec before the initial release has a chance to gain popularity. As a result, Intel told me that we won't see any increase in Thunderbolt speeds for the next two years. ... "
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5405/t...likely-in-2014

I suspect a portion of this "new faster Thunderbolt coming soon" is spinning being dribbled out to try to take the wind out of the CES announcement of 10Gb/s USB 3.0 due out around the same time as Thunderbolt will bump its speed.

Thunderbolt can't move forward that quickly when it doesn't even have widespread traction at 10Gb/s. Nevermind that internal bandwidth connections aren't pragmatically available to move that much data to the controller. ( IOhub chips or the mainstream Core i chips would either need v3.0 PCI-e links or more links respectively. That isn't going to happen this year or next. )

Even normal Thunderbolt likely means have an embedded GPU. So AMD 89xx would be less likely than an AMD 8600M or 8700M to be present in the Mac Pro specs. (While an optional 89xx would be present it is far more likely that a 8700 8800 sequence card would represent the basic line up).


With respective to storage there is no reason for the Mac Pro to drop below 4 bay if Apple makes a sensible move to add 2.5" bays to the Mac Pro. Leaving one 3.5" and 3 2.5" would reduce space and keep the count the same.


Fusion drives with 3 or 4 set membership are highly dubious. A 3TB or 4TB fusion drive maybe. But 6 and 9 ( presumable 2 and 3 3TB drives) is extremely dubious. The probability of total Fusion drive failure goes up as you make the set size larger. The performance actually goes down, if as likely the case, the SSD drive size stays approximately the same.

Fusion has traction when the SSD size is a significant percentage size of the HDD. Otherwise what you are doing is reducing the relative amount of "fast access" date available. The more HDDs you add the more the performance of Fusion drive will trend to that of HDDs drives. The primary value add for Fusion is to get "close to SSD" like performance .... not "marginally faster than HDDs" like performance. [**]

The Mac mini uses 2.5" drives to implement Fusion drives. There is at least 50% chance that the Mac Pro will follow that approach ( rather than Apple's derviative mSATA drive form factor. )


[** storage systems like ZFS use SSD as cache accelarators but they also implement redundant storage of data. A SSD + 2-3 HDDs CoreStorage ('Fusion') set up may help with a file server who users are making a large number of highy random yet relative small data requests. But for single user workstation it is unlikely to show substantive improvements relative to the increased risks. And certainly not a standard supported config sold by Apple. ]