when will the 2nd generation Mac Pro's come out?

There have been a couple threads already on this topic, but speculation never gets old...

Personally, I don't think Apple is inclined to upgrade the Mac Pro as frequently as they do their other products. I'd be (pleasantly) surprised to see any upgrades to the Mac Pro earlier than 2015.

sigmadog said:

There have been a couple threads already on this topic, but speculation never gets old...

Personally, I don't think Apple is inclined to upgrade the Mac Pro as frequently as they do their other products. I'd be (pleasantly) surprised to see any upgrades to the Mac Pro earlier than 2015.

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LOL. Haven't you heard...there's quite a few people on here that think Apple doesn't follow traditional manufacturing rules. Plus their engineers love to work non-stop..even after launching a major overhaul.

Seems to make some people feel good about holding off their purchases.

i know it won't happen but i hope they bring back the old design.

Good question. Chances are it will be sometime between now and the future.

Is the new Haswell XEON the same socket as the Ivy Bridges currently used? Or different?

Retaining the same form factor and giving us an updated spec sheet for the CPU, GPU, RAM and Storage doesn't seem that far out of the realm of possibility for somewhere near the end of 2014.

Haswell XEON v3 are due out in the latter months of this year. AMD ALREADY has a new range of consumer GPU parts out - in fact they did when the D700 etc were announced. Since the D700 is a Radeon 7970, we can safely assume that Apple could use the R9-280 and R9-290 series of GPU's to make their faux 'Fire Pro' integrated cards for a Mac Pro revision. Maybe they will be called the D400, D600 and D800 GPUs.

I can't imagine Apple will use the R9-3XX series GPU's since they are not out yet and will likely be too new for Apple to use at the end of this year. Apple will likely need a little time to refactor the ships into their custom PCBs etc. The R9-2XX series is a decent performance jump up from the 79XX series anyway, no?

I could see Apple sticking with the current RAM offerings, in order to lee profit margins up. But it would be nice for the low end offering to be 16GB and the next step up to be 24GB. I see 16GB as general minimum for Pro work, with 32GB being the sweet spot at the moment, unless you're doing lots of video/3D/computation work. RAM will be 2133MHz DDR4 based on the info we know about the new LGA2011-3 socket/chipset Intel is preparing for the Haswell E5 XEONs.

Flash storage, well, it sure would be nice if 512GB was the entry level offering and there were 2TB options. We're not going to see a 2nd SSD in these machines due to lack of PCIe lanes, so it all comes down to wether Apple uses Samsung's new 3D/vertical NAND type SSDs - like the technology used in the new Samsung SSD 850 Pros. This allows for vertical stacking of the data rather than merely horizontal placement of the data. It means Samsung can actually INCREASE the size of the NAND for more reliability, but have greater capacity due to vertical space. It's opened up a whole new world of SSD capacity possibilities. 4TB SSDs are not THAT far off any more.

Haswell XEON's will offer a small but useful increase in CPU performance per clock, and also slightly higher clock speeds in the range of +~200MHz, as well as more cores, with a 14-core model in the pipeline (and even an 18 core model apparently spotted in the wild in China). We may see the low end become a six core machine.

lip5016 said:

when will the 2nd generation Mac Pro's come out?

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The Mac Pro 2,1 was released in 2007 and is the second generation Mac Pro. The current Mac Pro is the 6,1 and was released in 2013.

MacProCard said:

Plus their engineers love to work non-stop..even after launching a major overhaul.

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I wasn't aware Apple paid their engineers to sit around playing Xbox every other year.

Engineers work non stop. That's what they do. That's why they're also paid non stop, and have jobs non stop.

Apple doesn't pay people to sit around and have a break.

goMac said:

I wasn't aware Apple paid their engineers to sit around playing Xbox every other year.

Engineers work non stop. That's what they do. That's why they're also paid non stop, and have jobs non stop.

Apple doesn't pay people to sit around and have a break.

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Apple do have limited engineering resources and move them between projects which has been cause for delays over things. There is a limited talent pool available unfortunately.

Umbongo said:

There is a limited talent pool available unfortunately.

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A limited talent pool willing to work for Apple at least. I'm a 20 year veteran whom I'm sure Apple would love to get, but they'll never get their claws into me. What engineer wants to work for such an uptight, closed company like that when there's so many options?

Cubemmal said:

A limited talent pool willing to work for Apple at least. I'm a 20 year veteran whom I'm sure Apple would love to get, but they'll never get their claws into me. What engineer wants to work for such an uptight, closed company like that when there's so many options?

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Well, it seems obvious under Tim Cook's Apple things are loosening up, but I don't think Apple will ever have the culture where, for instance, everyone who worked on Pages gets their name on the splash screen.

There's also the factor that Apple seems to like keeping smaller, more generalized teams rather than balkanizing into specialized large groups. Probably good for avoiding burnout and keeping things fresh, not so good for reliable, constant updates to all its software.

Cubemmal said:

A limited talent pool willing to work for Apple at least. I'm a 20 year veteran whom I'm sure Apple would love to get, but they'll never get their claws into me. What engineer wants to work for such an uptight, closed company like that when there's so many options?

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Yup that's one of the big problems facing silicon valley right now., not just Apple. Even the better companies are having trouble as everyone wants to do their own startup.

Umbongo said:

Apple do have limited engineering resources and move them between projects which has been cause for delays over things. There is a limited talent pool available unfortunately.

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Yeah, that would be a more believable reason to see the Mac Pro delayed.

I haven't heard how much crossover there is with the other teams. I doubt they have the same guys working on the Mac Pro that work on the MacBook Pro, but it's possible.

My gut feeling on the Mac Pro is it'a probably just not a large team. They used to farm a lot of the work out to Intel, separating the Mac Pro from Apple's own engineering talent situation, but I don't think they're doing that any more.

Still, even if Apple only had a half dozen hardware engineers on the Mac Pro, Haswell-EP is not a hard upgrade to do.

goMac said:

I wasn't aware Apple paid their engineers to sit around playing Xbox every other year.

Engineers work non stop. That's what they do. That's why they're also paid non stop, and have jobs non stop.

Apple doesn't pay people to sit around and have a break.

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Really!? Where do you come up with this stuff? They're actually professionals and you better treat them as such or your company will have brain drain faster than you can say "cheese" at a wedding.

MacProCard said:

Really!? Where do you come up with this stuff? They're actually professionals and you better treat them as such or your company will have brain drain faster than you can say "cheese" at a wedding.

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Burn out rates at Apple are pretty high. Better with Cook. But I've still never heard of whole departments getting vacations more than a few days.

Heck, even I don't get enough vacation to take off for months at a time.

goMac said:

Burn out rates at Apple are pretty high. Better with Cook. But I've still never heard of whole departments getting vacations more than a few days.

Heck, even I don't get enough vacation to take off for months at a time.

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I've been wondering where Tim Cook goes whenever he gets a break, which is rare.

If Tim had like a 4-day weekend all to himself, what would he do with it?

DisMyMac said:

I've been wondering where Tim Cook goes whenever he gets a break, which is rare.

If Tim had like a 4-day weekend all to himself, what would he do with it?

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The media seems to imply he's a workaholic.

I think Apple is a company that is mostly built for workaholics. Would you rather go on vacation or work on the iPhone? I mean, Apple employees have families that they spend time with, but the sort of people they hire are just excited to be there.

The other thing about the new Mac Pro is there isn't any reason they couldn't do what they've down with the oMP: Hand the schematics over to Intel and let them do the upgrade planning. Then Apple's team deployments wouldn't matter as much. That said, with Broadwell delayed, Apple's workload on hardware engineering did just get a little bit lighter.

New GPUs could probably be done the same way: Hand the schematics over to AMD, let them do the upgrade.

Once that's done, just build some prototypes to test, and then punt it over to production. Not much work required.

goMac said:

The media seems to imply he's a workaholic.

I think Apple is a company that is mostly built for workaholics. Would you rather go on vacation or work on the iPhone? I mean, Apple employees have families that they spend time with, but the sort of people they hire are just excited to be there.

The other thing about the new Mac Pro is there isn't any reason they couldn't do what they've down with the oMP: Hand the schematics over to Intel and let them do the upgrade planning. Then Apple's team deployments wouldn't matter as much. That said, with Broadwell delayed, Apple's workload on hardware engineering did just get a little bit lighter.

New GPUs could probably be done the same way: Hand the schematics over to AMD, let them do the upgrade.

Once that's done, just build some prototypes to test, and then punt it over to production. Not much work required.

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Do you have any sources on "handing upgrade planning over to Intel" for the oMP? Never heard about that before and I'd be interesting in reading more.

Mac Pro 6,2

Here is the article that Scott mentioned above..

18 cors.. sounds good to me..

http://wccftech.com/intel-haswell-e...enched-haswellep-xeon-e5-cpus-spotted-retail/

fuchsdh said:

Do you have any sources on "handing upgrade planning over to Intel" for the oMP? Never heard about that before and I'd be interesting in reading more.

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I don't have any handy. My understanding is that Intel had a unit that was dedicated to Apple needs, and for the Mac Pro, Apple basically sent them over a G5 case, and told them to fill it up. I'm sure Apple was a bit more involved than that, but besides that the oMP was basically as close as one could get to an Intel machine delivered straight from Intel. I'd bet Apple still had some workings in the case design itself, but that's the story I heard.

It's why it was so solid and stable, but also why it was so unmessed with. Intel wasn't going to throw a third party USB 3.0 controller into the design or anything. It's also why the case was never significantly changed. Apple wasn't deeply enough involved in the development to do any major case redesigns until the nMP.

I don't believe this same Apple task force at Intel was involved with the nMP, at least the first revision.

goMac said:

I don't have any handy. My understanding is that Intel had a unit that was dedicated to Apple needs, and for the Mac Pro, Apple basically sent them over a G5 case, and told them to fill it up. I'm sure Apple was a bit more involved than that, but besides that the oMP was basically as close as one could get to an Intel machine delivered straight from Intel. I'd bet Apple still had some workings in the case design itself, but that's the story I heard.

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Did you know that Intel does manufacture and sell systems?

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/server-systems/server-board-s2600gz-gl-systems.html

goMac said:

It's why it was so solid and stable, but also why it was so unmessed with. Intel wasn't going to throw a third party USB 3.0 controller into the design or anything. It's also why the case was never significantly changed. Apple wasn't deeply enough involved in the development to do any major case redesigns until the nMP.

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Intel puts 3rd party USB controllers in their own systems and boards.

http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/g34153004_s2600ip_w2600cr_tps_rev14.pdf

AidenShaw said:

Did you know that Intel does manufacture and sell systems?

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/server-systems/server-board-s2600gz-gl-systems.html

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Yes. They used to make consumers boards, I owned one. I had heard they discontinued them, and a web search seems to verify anything intended for the desktop is gone, but server stuff is still around.

Regardless, I meant that the box, beyond the board, was pretty much designed by Intel. Intel doesn't make entire build to order towers, besides some of their smaller Atom based projects that don't really count.

AidenShaw said:

Intel puts 3rd party USB controllers in their own systems and boards.

http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/g34153004_s2600ip_w2600cr_tps_rev14.pdf

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True, it looks like one upgraded version of that board comes with USB 3.0. But it's a retail board, which is a little different.

I'd heard from a few sources that Intel had done the oMP, with information down to the location it was designed at, so I'm pretty confident in that. I'm sure Apple contributed a bit, but there was a lot of Intel partnership stuff going on there. I'm also fairly certain Intel's involvement with the nMP was much more limited, possibly non existent.

Apple's pro team had been focused on the PowerPC and very custom design. The G5 engineers just didn't have the same set of skills. They were versed in Open Firmware, PowerPC, and all the other custom layout. There was no way they could transition to doing Intel based designs with EFI in a year. I had heard they had mostly moved on to other things and weren't involved with the Mac Pro, rather Intel had to do the Mac Pro to get it done quickly enough.

In fact, while the Mac Pro was being done there was still one more revision of the Power Mac G5 done, which would have meant the G5 team would have had mere months to pivot to an Intel based design.

goMac said:

Yes. They used to make consumers boards, I owned one. I had heard they discontinued them, and a web search seems to verify anything intended for the desktop is gone, but server stuff is still around.

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You should have gone to Intel, and clicked the Desktop Boards link on the products menu.

goMac said:

Regardless, I meant that the box, beyond the board, was pretty much designed by Intel. Intel doesn't make entire build to order towers, besides some of their smaller Atom based projects that don't really count.

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The box was a PowerMac G5 - minus the pumps, tubes and radiators.

Please support your idea that Intel designed the first MP, and handed it off to Apple to build.

Most of the stories from the day talked about Intel helping Apple, e.g.

By the end of 2006, Apple completed the transition of the Macintosh to Intel-based processors. The changeover went faster than Apple originally expected, which can be attributed to the help Intel's engineers provided, and to the Apple engineers who had maintained a secret Intel-compatible version of OS X since the original version (Cheetah) was introduced.

http://macs.about.com/od/rumorsinthewild/ss/apples-decade_7.htm

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AidenShaw said:

You should have gone to Intel, and clicked the Desktop Boards link on the products menu.

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All of which are Atom motherboards. They simply don't make motherboards for the Core-series any more.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/23/intel-will-discontinue-desktop-motherboards/

AidenShaw said:

The box was a PowerMac G5 - minus the pumps, tubes and radiators.

Please support your idea that Intel designed the first MP, and handed it off to Apple to build.

Most of the stories from the day talked about Intel helping Apple, e.g.

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Don't have any more support for you, sorry. I can't tell you where the information came from, for obvious reasons. You can choose to believe it, or not. Apple already admits they got help from Intel publicly, which is a nice starting point.

It also doesn't make sense that the Power Mac team at Apple was able to deliver a new G5, and then a complicated Intel box based on an entirely different architecture and firmware which they were unfamiliar with within the span of 12 months, along with revising every other Mac Apple made.

I'm not even saying it was a bad move. The Mac Pro was the best workstation of the era, even if you were just running Windows. The Power Mac series had always been problematic, even down to custom chipset issues, so it was a good move for reliability. And, when we go back to the reason why I brought this up in the first place, both of us admit Intel has the capacity to help Apple build new machines, so it doesn't seem unreasonable they could even do the Haswell-EP upgrade for Apple.

goMac said:

All of which are Atom motherboards. They simply don't make motherboards for the Core-series any more.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/23/intel-will-discontinue-desktop-motherboards/



Don't have any more support for you, sorry. I can't tell you where the information came from, for obvious reasons. You can choose to believe it, or not. Apple already admits they got help from Intel publicly, which is a nice starting point.

It also doesn't make sense that the Power Mac team at Apple was able to deliver a new G5, and then a complicated Intel box based on an entirely different architecture and firmware which they were unfamiliar with within the span of 12 months, along with revising every other Mac Apple made.

I'm not even saying it was a bad move. The Mac Pro was the best workstation of the era, even if you were just running Windows. The Power Mac series had always been problematic, even down to custom chipset issues, so it was a good move for reliability. And, when we go back to the reason why I brought this up in the first place, both of us admit Intel has the capacity to help Apple build new machines, so it doesn't seem unreasonable they could even do the Haswell-EP upgrade for Apple.

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First board on the list is for 4th gen i series...

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/motherboards/desktop-motherboards/desktop-board-dh87rl.html

And there are plenty more of LGA1150 board available on that page.