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Am I crazy to think this? (7 day limit poll)


  • Total voters
    9
  • Poll closed .

adam9c1

macrumors 68000
Original poster
May 2, 2012
1,893
315
Chicagoland
With the way Apple ARM architecture is desiged currently the Mac Pro ARM will either be a non-upgradeable unit all in one.

or
hear me out...

ACSP servicable or perhaps even end user replaceable main logic board on a caddy (think of the cMP 4,1-5,1 CPU boards).
secondary RAID storage for additional local storage comprising of SSD drives. (not 3.5") but m.2 or some other factor.

Am I crazy?
 
With the way Apple ARM architecture is desiged currently the Mac Pro ARM will either be a non-upgradeable unit all in one.

or
hear me out...

ACSP servicable or perhaps even end user replaceable main logic board on a caddy (think of the cMP 4,1-5,1 CPU boards).
secondary RAID storage for additional local storage comprising of SSD drives. (not 3.5") but m.2 or some other factor.

Am I crazy?


A little crazy.

If you take the bulk of the main logic board and turn it into a horizital/vertical (tower / rack ) plug in card then it won't fit inside the case. You would have perturbed the internals so that would have flipped a tower board into a rack enclosure board and vice versa.

Nor would it control costs an any significant way as who have an extremely complex , proprietary socket to plug the board into and a board with lots of stuff on it. The Apple SoC is a 'system on a chip" so there are a wide variety of different types of communications channels coming off the package. All with different standard versions evolutionary cycles. . The wider the diversity the more long term brittle that connector is likely to be.

The 4,1-5,1 main logic boards had the I/O 'Southbridge' chip with large diverse communication fan out on the main board ( and not on the plug in tray). The M-series chip largely subsumes all of that. T2 , PCH chipset , Thunderbolt controllers, display output controllers all get pulled into the "system on a chip".

That will put very high tension to pull the back edge TB ports, video out , and primary boot SSD all onto the tray along with the RAM. Fighting that tension just gets you a more and more proprietary and long term change brittle connector back to the base board.

People want the old 4,1-5,1 tray to come back but where the subcomponents are on the old 4,1-5,1 board moved significantly.


PCI-e fan out could primarily be done from a base board PLEX switch , but when PCI-e v5 , CXL 2 , etc come along probably not going to be "future proof" viable.



What is more likely to fail and need a ACSP work is people 'blowing up' their Type-C , Type-A ports. Apple is already routinely using micro-boards to cover the ports, so when they get physically damaged the primarily logic board says the same and just replace the Port and the associated PHY chips at relatively low cost.


Apple's SSD ( as well as practically all other desktop/high end lapotp (i.e. non MMC drive) ) already use aspects of RAID internally anyway. If the write speeds are very close to the read speeds of the SSD, then it is using RAID internally already. Apple doesn't need any fancy or custom RAID SSD facility on the main or tray logicboard any more than what the standard Apple SSD controller provides. Nor do they need chiplet building blocks that drag in largely redundant SSD controllers and secure elements with each die/tile. That's is largely dubious. The Apple SSD has a bunch of boot security elements built into it that doesn't particularly need tons of redundancy or high duplication for vast majority of workloads. Users need backups if there is an fundamental Apple SSD problem. failure; not more drives with a single point of the exact same failure mode.
 
With the way Apple ARM architecture is desiged currently the Mac Pro ARM will either be a non-upgradeable unit all in one.

or
hear me out...

ACSP servicable or perhaps even end user replaceable main logic board on a caddy (think of the cMP 4,1-5,1 CPU boards).
secondary RAID storage for additional local storage comprising of SSD drives. (not 3.5") but m.2 or some other factor.

Am I crazy?
Not crazy at all, and I won't be surprised if the MP8,1 follow this approach, Apple waited for few key technologies: CXL and inFO-LSI, is known whatever apple is reading integrates both, even some people analysing delided m2 max seems have found not one but two UltraFusion connection paths, this is the case m2 max could stacked like dominoes in line making possible 1,2,3,4...? Chips interconnected by InFO-LSI bridges aka UltraFusion, it would look like a very long chip, add this they're customers for CXL like AMD and Intel for servers and workstations but only workstation suitable for CXL is the Mac pro, what does CXL basically is enable PCIe5 to act as a pluggable UltraFusion allowing Even add memory thru pcie5 expansion slots, only at the cost of latency, given PCIe5 has a 256GT bandwidth capacity compared with UltraFusion (on chip) just 2.5Tb/s ( or 5-6Tbs for UltraFusion2) , PCIe5 has almost 100x the bandwidth to spare, but PCIe5 ads meaningful more latency. sorry PCIe5 BW actually is 63GB/s or 500Gbit so a PCIe5 is way below UF bandwidth, maybe in 32 lines mode it reach 1Tb/s so unlikely Aplle to adopt PCIe5 as UF extension, just for peripherals

I think it could be an cheap approach for Apple, not imposible to craft something like MP7,1 MXP modules with two PCIe5 x16 buses, and integrating everything on board except power and storage, you could combine 2 of these modules to combine it's APU and processing power almost trasnparent for user on user replaceable MXP-like modules, even those requiring extra ram storage or peripherals just adding an PCIe5 slot with CXL RAM and or nvme or capture device in STD PCIe4/5 form factor.

But rumors point out an more conservative Mac Pro with only M2-ULTRA or M2-Extreme plus 16 DDR5 ram slots and a number of PCIe5/4 slots.

But your solution (not even the first time I read about It), solves another important problem, while an M2-extremme may have upto 52 TFlop fp32 of performance it's long behind GPUs like AMD MI200, and commodity rtx4090, it would allow the Mac Pro to scale to 304 cores with theoretical performance close or over 100TFlop (and 80 arm cores 64+16 Hi-Lo) which sits the Mac Pro in the same league as Ampere Altra+ AMD MI200 or as Nvidia's Grace (both have CXL 2.0, PCIe5), it Will put the Mac Pro again as a serious workstation offer, an real Pro system as the 5 and 7.

I don't buy Gurman leaks IMHO hee just an idiot spying on Apple's employees garbage looking for cues he actually can't understand.

I thrust Apple, they need not just show a Mac pro for the fanboy's pride, they need an platform where say the industry Apple supports professionals doing AI, Big data, quite meaningful in short term. Apple had the money and people to build and deliver an actually PRO Mac Pro, they won't disappoint with an Cheese grater Mac Studio neither another obsolete Intel xeon Mac Pro.
 
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A while back, I thought the unibody Mac Mini... or maybe the trashcan was gonna be a stackable modulear with interconnected link on the top and bottom of each "stack module".

PSU/APU/main processor, storage, memory/additional graphics/additional storage etc.
each susbystem with it's own cooling fan and optimized to cool the module.

Access panel on top and bottom of each module to add the uplink port module to stack down or up.
 
With the way Apple ARM architecture is desiged currently the Mac Pro ARM will either be a non-upgradeable unit all in one.

or
hear me out...

ACSP servicable or perhaps even end user replaceable main logic board on a caddy (think of the cMP 4,1-5,1 CPU boards).
secondary RAID storage for additional local storage comprising of SSD drives. (not 3.5") but m.2 or some other factor.

Am I crazy?

According to hardcore Mac Pro fans yeah you are crazy. But I had the same idea where the Apple Silicon parts are modular. There's evidence in the Mac Studio of potential modularity as the SSD is easily removable but due to software locking not replacable, so maybe they're going to release the Apple Silicon Mac Pro as a platform, then instead of having to refresh the Mac Pro, they refresh the parts and you can just buy new parts overtime.

I just want the next Mac Pro to not cost the absurd prices the current one does. $6000 for base spec is absurd.
 
Heck, you could fit a mac m2 mini , and a thunderbolt dock, external pcie box and drives into a case....

so why not have some kind of link between the mobo and pcie slotted video cards, extra storage and even secondary cache ram of some sort... you could even have the cpu tray replaceable, all within that lovely case... and do it properly, so yes, I am optimistic.
 
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