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Apple May Launch 27-Inch Retina iMac With AMD Graphics as Soon as Next Month

Liberty. said:
But it looks like rubbish then.
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Or you can render it at exactly 1/2 resolution, which would make it look completely identical to if you viewed it on the current non-Retina displays. Just with four physical pixels making up each rendered pixel.

Yes, rendering below native resolution will look worse than native resolution. But if you do it at exactly 1/2 (i.e. the current iMac resolutions, based on the rumors of a doubling each dimension,) then you would get the same visual image as if you were on a native screen of that resolution - which is all that is available now.
 
koyoot said:
First of All, R9 M290X is slower than GTX780M that is in current iMac.
Secondly, it cannot run 5K resolution. 4K it will handle quite good, but not 5K, and were talking about 5K.
Better GPUs are due for next year, and desktop GPUs use too much power, and produces too much heat for them to be used in iMac.
Only way to go for Apple if they want 5K display is to go with Nvidia Maxwell GPUs.
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Why don't you open your imac and try to search for hdmi, dp and tb connectors from inside? The bottleneck for 5k is connection to external monitor. Because of this, you either need hdmi2.0 or dp1.3 or some proprietary way, which won't work with all.

So, 5k imac is easy for Apple, but 5k TBD or support for 5k capability in mini is hard to make now. Apple's TB game has cornered them to do some hard decisions.
They either have to drop TB as "the best" display connection or leave even further behind in graphiic sector with macs, if they wait for dp1.3 to be implemented in TB3.
Either way nMP owners will be pissed off that the machine they waited for years is outdated already and can't support present high-end monitors. Once again this raises a question how wise is it to buy expensive machine with zero upgradability.
scottrichardson said:
Let's hope they move to all-flash storage, but keep that bump in the back for cooling for a desktop-class GPU rather than a mobile one.
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I'd rather choose Fusion: ssd speed and hdd size. Well, form over function, there's probably no room in imac, not that anybody have any use of the space on top of imac's base, but you surely can't use it for computer...
Aloft085 said:
Anything will last 8 years if you're willing to deal with old technology. If you're thinking that you can continue to upgrade that Dell for 8 years, dream on.
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Why you couldn't upgade your computer for let's say 6 years and then use it 2 more years? If you look back at computers in 2008, which parts are not available to upgrade any more?

Aloft085 said:
You'd take a major hit to the performance. Thunderbolt 2 has a bandwidth of 20Gbps (that's gigabits, or 1/8th of a gigabyte). PCI-e 3.0 has a bandwidth of 32 GB/s (or 256 Gbps). You can do the math on that, you get about 1/12 of the bandwidth. Although not all of the PCI-e bandwidth is used anyway, typically a little more than half. Some websites suggest you can pull it off with about a 30% performance loss, although the added equipment is going to add at least $300 to the cost of whatever graphics card you buy. Possibly worth it if you're a wealthy individual.
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TB3 will have enough bandwidth to put GPU outside of computer or inside of the display. It will not be optimal still, but usable. With TB4 (if that ever comes) there will be enough bandwidth for even high-end use.
Umbongo said:
AMD will heavily compete on price, that's the big reason why they are in all the gaming consoles. With less than 15% of the workstation graphics market and the chance to sell two GPUs per system you can bet they jumped at this and made an offer that NVIDIA wouldn't compete with.
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This would be no-brainer for Apple; half the performance, quarter the price. Even with more expensive display panel, profits would be better.
 
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IMAX iMacs!

Behold the IMAX iMacs!

It’s hard to believe so few have used that pun.

Should this be true, it’s awesome and I look forward to it, but there are a few bad points that only a cynic like me can find excuses to complain about. One possible disadvantage might be, as others have mentioned, is that by pushing the res. so high it could go beyond what current GPUs can comfortably handle and there might be some frame rate lags or other issues. Maybe the 5K iMac to buy will be the next model after this one to give them time to work out the bugs?

This also means that Apple intentionally held back and that 4K displays were economical some time ago, but not implemented due to an insistence on quadrupling resolution, as if 3840x2160 would have somehow been unacceptable in the interim. 4K at current or slightly higher screen sizes might not work so great for pixel doubling, but have been fine for a spacious, though ppi tight work environment. I’ve suspected for some time that Apple’s refused to release a 4K non-iMac display for pro users since they were holding back to get them in the iMac at the same time, but maybe the real threshold was 5K all along.

And then there’s my own silly ideals. I really wish the iMac would go even larger than 27”. Though that 35” iPro mockup (with laughably close-to-but-not-4K 3382x1964 resolution) may have been overkill, a nice 30” 4K iMac would have been great. And I’ll bet anything that if and when these 5120x2880 iMacs come out, the display will still bizarrely have that thick black border around it. It’s a relic, no longer technically necessary and needs to go with the screen taken all the way to the edge.
 
I just hope they find a way how we can connect a 5k screen to our nMPs...dont wanna buy a new one already.
 
4God said:
I think he's talking about a Quad Core i7 with multithreading. 4 hardware cores and 4 virtual cores - they show up as 8 cores in Activity Monitor.
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Thanks :) That's what I meant.
 
Mattsasa said:
False. It would look absouktely no worse than it would look like on a montior with a native resolution of 2560x1600
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Liberty. said:
That doesn't make any sense. Anything below the native resolution will always look worse.
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What Mattasa said does make sense, I think he's correct. When you're colouring exactly four pixels of a 5120x3200 screen with the same colour, you'll have an image which looks just like it would were the native resolution 2560x1600. There is no blurriness as you'd get when running a non-integer-scaling non-native resolution on a typical LCD display.

Of course such an image won't look as clear as it would on a 5120x3200 screen, but that's not what Mattasa claimed.

Come on, this has been working on iPhones for years now! :)
 
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The next iMac 27" retina will be 4K period, no matter pixel doubling (Apple simple would offer pixel doubling on fHD instead qHD), those expecting an 5K iMac will need to wait until 2016.
 
Interesting to see what is announced on October the 15th; I'm in the market for both a new iPad and iMac, could be a bumper Christmas for Apple at this rate.
 
wim.v said:
you definitely aren't talking about the late 2013 27" imac model. I have one. I rendered a 3d movie last week. 8 cores were rendering at 100% workload for a few hours and my iMac was certainly not "hot" It was still comfortably cool.
Also when I play games the iMac is not heating up.
On the other hand, my older Apple laptops are getting very (and I mean extremely) hot when doing stuff like this, or even browsing. When using the laptops on my lap, I almost burn myself (so I know the difference).
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lol you can't compare to a laptop to a desktop..the iMac has a terrible history for blown GPU's..2009 right up to 2014, play games every day ,wait another year and see how yours does..

----------
raybo said:
HDD Fan Control is your friend...solves all heat issues I had in my 21.5".

http://www.hddfancontrol.com
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Yep I have it, awesome app..
 
For those didn't read my post on other threads.

Updated *leaks* suggest something really different on the iMac retina, apple will ditch the iMac 27, the iMac retina will arrive at 21.5" 4k space gray with wireless keyboard/touch pad combo with back light and Rechargeable, nVidia gpu 9x0m, and very likely to be renamed instead retina iMac will be named new Macintosh.
 
Mago said:
For those didn't read my post on other threads.

Updated *leaks* suggest something really different on the iMac retina, apple will ditch the iMac 27
Click to expand...

Are the 27" sales really so low that they would just get rid of it outright?
 
jfischer said:
Are the 27" sales really so low that they would just get rid of it outright?
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Who knows, this it's just the same scenario when the retina MacBook pro was launched, they ditched the 17“ model since no hardware capable to handle 4K at that time (and slow sales); while this time it's different the Macintosh 27 5K would arrive late 15 with the Intel Skylake and Thunderbolt 3 update (along an 5k Thunderbolt3 cinema display) not early.
 
Mago said:
For those didn't read my post on other threads.

Updated *leaks* suggest something really different on the iMac retina, apple will ditch the iMac 27, the iMac retina will arrive at 21.5" 4k space gray with wireless keyboard/touch pad combo with back light and Rechargeable, nVidia gpu 9x0m, and very likely to be renamed instead retina iMac will be named new Macintosh.
Click to expand...

Interesting, Ditching the "i" from Mac is a nice idea. Can't see the 27 going away (Retina or Non) if that's what you mean.
 
thedeske said:
Interesting, Ditching the "i" from Mac is a nice idea. Can't see the 27 going away (Retina or Non) if that's what you mean.
Click to expand...
At least no retina iMac 27,neither retina cinema display yet, not ready for mainstream. Apple will sell some 5k monitor maybe from Sharp but only the upcoming Mac Pro will be ready for it.

Those 5K iMac widows must wait at least 12 months for it.
 
Remember this report from MacBidouille about the scaled resolutions in the DisplayProductID-ae03 file?

Well, I checked out the screenshot of that file here, made a text file from the information, and used plutil (as explained in the thread). Here is what I got after I converted the resulting hexadecimal numbers.

Code: 
 #  Hex        Dec        Aspect ratio

 0  1900 0e10  6400 3600   16:9
 1  1680 0ca8  5760 3240   16:9
 2  1000 0900  4096 2304   16:9
 3  0c80 0708  3200 1800   16:9

 4  1000 0870  4096 2160  256:135 (~1.9:1)
 5  0f00 0870  3840 2160   16:9
 6  0a00 0640  2560 1600   16:10
 7  0780 04b0  1920 1200   16:10
 8  0500 0320  1280  800   16:10

 9  0b40 0654  2880 1620   16:9
10  0a00 05a0  2560 1440   16:9
11  0800 0480  2048 1152   16:9
12  0780 0438  1920 1080   16:9
13  0640 04b0  1600 1200    4:3
14  0640 0384  1600  900   16:9
15  05a0 032a  1440  810   16:9
16  0540 02f4  1344  756   16:9
17  0500 0400  1280 1024    5:4
18  0500 02d0  1280  720   16:9
19  0400 0300  1024  768    4:3
20  0400 0240  1024  576   16:9
21  03c0 0258   960  600   16:10
22  03c0 021c   960  540   16:9
23  0348 020c   840  524  210:131 (~1.6:1)
24  0320 0258   800  600    4:3
25  0280 01e0   640  480    4:3

26  1900 0e10  6400 3600   16:9
27  1680 0ca8  5760 3240   16:9
28  1400 0b40  5120 2880   16:9
29  1000 0900  4096 2304   16:9
30  0c80 0708  3200 1800   16:9
If the MacBidouille poster and this link for the 13" MBP (see here for the 15" MBP) are correct, then the native monitor resolution should not appear in the first set of rows (0-3). Since 5120x2880 and 3840x2160 are both missing from that set, the set doesn't seem to tell us anything useful. Can anyone interpret this better?
 
iMacmatician said:
Remember this report from MacBidouille about the scaled resolutions in the DisplayProductID-ae03 file?

Well, I checked out the screenshot of that file here, made a text file from the information, and used plutil (as explained in the thread). Here is what I got after I converted the resulting hexadecimal numbers.

Code: 
 #  Hex        Dec        Aspect ratio

 0  1900 0e10  6400 3600   16:9
 1  1680 0ca8  5760 3240   16:9
 2  1000 0900  4096 2304   16:9
 3  0c80 0708  3200 1800   16:9

 4  1000 0870  4096 2160  256:135 (~1.9:1)
 5  0f00 0870  3840 2160   16:9
 6  0a00 0640  2560 1600   16:10
 7  0780 04b0  1920 1200   16:10
 8  0500 0320  1280  800   16:10

 9  0b40 0654  2880 1620   16:9
10  0a00 05a0  2560 1440   16:9
11  0800 0480  2048 1152   16:9
12  0780 0438  1920 1080   16:9
13  0640 04b0  1600 1200    4:3
14  0640 0384  1600  900   16:9
15  05a0 032a  1440  810   16:9
16  0540 02f4  1344  756   16:9
17  0500 0400  1280 1024    5:4
18  0500 02d0  1280  720   16:9
19  0400 0300  1024  768    4:3
20  0400 0240  1024  576   16:9
21  03c0 0258   960  600   16:10
22  03c0 021c   960  540   16:9
23  0348 020c   840  524  210:131 (~1.6:1)
24  0320 0258   800  600    4:3
25  0280 01e0   640  480    4:3

26  1900 0e10  6400 3600   16:9
27  1680 0ca8  5760 3240   16:9
28  1400 0b40  5120 2880   16:9
29  1000 0900  4096 2304   16:9
30  0c80 0708  3200 1800   16:9
If the MacBidouille poster and this link for the 13" MBP (see here for the 15" MBP) are correct, then the native monitor resolution should not appear in the first set of rows (0-3). Since 5120x2880 and 3840x2160 are both missing from that set, the set doesn't seem to tell us anything useful. Can anyone interpret this better?
Click to expand...
Simply no 5K, as you can see 4K resolution (as I insist) is the top native resolution to be offered (at 21~inch display).
 
Mago said:
For those didn't read my post on other threads.

Updated *leaks* suggest something really different on the iMac retina, apple will ditch the iMac 27, the iMac retina will arrive at 21.5" 4k space gray with wireless keyboard/touch pad combo with back light and Rechargeable, nVidia gpu 9x0m, and very likely to be renamed instead retina iMac will be named new Macintosh.
Click to expand...

A swing, and a miss! :)
 
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