This looks like an interesting option as well, an 8-core that's 3.3 Ghz base / 4.0 Ghz turbo boost, with the same socket and the same TDP as Apples 8-core. Also costs about as much as apples upgrade from 4 to 8 cores, but then again, you have the 4-core left to sell after the upgrade so it does become a bit cheaper.
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New Mac Pro Confirmed to Have Removable CPU
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Hmm for those on to 6 core...
apple offer this
Xeon E5-1650 v2 6 / 12 3.5 GHz 3.9 GHz 12 MB 1 130W HT, TBT >
while there is another faster 6 core avail but of coz the price will be double of what Apple go for...
Xeon E5-1660 v2 6 / 12 3.7 GHz 4 GHz 15 MB 1 130W HT, TBT
apple offer this
Xeon E5-1650 v2 6 / 12 3.5 GHz 3.9 GHz 12 MB 1 130W HT, TBT >
while there is another faster 6 core avail but of coz the price will be double of what Apple go for...
Xeon E5-1660 v2 6 / 12 3.7 GHz 4 GHz 15 MB 1 130W HT, TBT
They are going to post that ..... they don't like the black color anyway
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Nobody ? A lot of people did !
Well known Apple bashers stormed the forum with the "it's not upgradeable" complain ...
Ok, now they will switch to the "it's not GPU upgradeable" complain
Well, this is all good news. You can start out with a quad core base model and then, somewhere down the line, you can pick up a used 8 or 12 core Xeon CPU on eBay to extend its usefulness. Likely a better graphics card too, perhaps one pulled from a higher-end configuration.
I'll say it again that I worked at sites were MacPros contained nothing but the stock hard drive, with data stored on networks or FW drives (easy to plug a FW chain into another machine if need be). So the 'lack of expansion' argument is pretty moot.
Only thing I don't like about the design is that there seems to be no space for a dual-processor version later on in the current form factor.
I'll say it again that I worked at sites were MacPros contained nothing but the stock hard drive, with data stored on networks or FW drives (easy to plug a FW chain into another machine if need be). So the 'lack of expansion' argument is pretty moot.
Only thing I don't like about the design is that there seems to be no space for a dual-processor version later on in the current form factor.
Maybe because your MP, still a wonderful computer, is an old concept of workstation, while the nMP is a different one.
Better or worse I don't know, we are going to discover it in a while, but it is a totally different concept, and you left TB totally out of your discussion ....
GPU socket
I'm I the only one who thinks that the socketed GPU cards in the nMP are nothing but a manufacturing necessity and not Apple's choice to be able to offer upgrades later or whatever? Sure it makes it easier for them to upgrade/replace the boards without serious cost implications but the real reason imo is the manufacturing. Right now the male (I suppose) part of the connector is on a ribbon cable soldered to the round baseplate pcb, while the female is soldered on the GPU daughtercard. Both these parts can be manufactured on a robotic assembly line with high precision soldering robots to make sure all the 300+ pins in that connector are soldered correctly. There is no space for a normal PCIe connector obviously, due to space constraints. So Apple would have had to come up with a very complicated way of soldering the daughtercards to the baseplate. That is at a 90 degree angle, and it would have to be soldered on in a late stage of assembly, after the daughter cards have been attached to the thermal core. Then that solder joint, apart from being virtually impossible to do, would also have to account for tolerances in the sandwiching of the gpu to the heatsink etc. It's pretty much impossible. The socket on a ribbon cable is by far the easiest and most flexible solitution I can think of.
This was a manufacturing necessity, not a choice. Prove me wrong if you can.
I'm I the only one who thinks that the socketed GPU cards in the nMP are nothing but a manufacturing necessity and not Apple's choice to be able to offer upgrades later or whatever? Sure it makes it easier for them to upgrade/replace the boards without serious cost implications but the real reason imo is the manufacturing. Right now the male (I suppose) part of the connector is on a ribbon cable soldered to the round baseplate pcb, while the female is soldered on the GPU daughtercard. Both these parts can be manufactured on a robotic assembly line with high precision soldering robots to make sure all the 300+ pins in that connector are soldered correctly. There is no space for a normal PCIe connector obviously, due to space constraints. So Apple would have had to come up with a very complicated way of soldering the daughtercards to the baseplate. That is at a 90 degree angle, and it would have to be soldered on in a late stage of assembly, after the daughter cards have been attached to the thermal core. Then that solder joint, apart from being virtually impossible to do, would also have to account for tolerances in the sandwiching of the gpu to the heatsink etc. It's pretty much impossible. The socket on a ribbon cable is by far the easiest and most flexible solitution I can think of.
This was a manufacturing necessity, not a choice. Prove me wrong if you can.
well, the difference is only about $500 but for that you get 50% more cores so for rendering the 12 core is better choice I think
Your Mac Pro doesnt have any user-serviceable parts, except for memory and SSDs.
http://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/1000/MA1668/en_US/mac_pro_late-2013_ipig.pdf
Taken from the Apple Support Website Product Information Guide. Apple clearly here don't intend anything but the RAM and SSD to be changed by the User.
If you are prepared to strip down something enough then you can upgrade ANY computer. Hell if prepared to strip down an rMBP and change the whole logic board then you can upgrade those as well.
Apple has been very restrictive with what it calls "user serviceable parts". I opened my last iMac and replaced HDD and such, and while there was some tinkering involved, it wasn't really that much harder than swapping a HDD in a standard PC tower. However the nMP is orders of magnitude more serviceable than the iMac for example. Even though apple doesn't recommend it, it's nice to see that all parts are quite easilly accessible and socketed.
I thought it was more than 25.
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I think it's also for heat issues. Too many cores too fast is too much heat for the fan to remove.
How about an apology for increasing the noise in the signal to noise ratio, trolling people, and making incorrect claims, thus wasting everyone's time? Lot of trolling to have to read through from people making incorrect claims. Lot of waste time.
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Moving on...
While people claim gaming performance isn't important, I think it is. It's very important. For game developers, that is. We are pro users, right? Last I checked there's more game developers than there are musicians or video editors, and we still need to make music and edit video, use photoshop and 3D packages. So keeping the gpus highly performant for games is the weakest link for these machines, and that's still a problem.
I also need to know exactly how bootcamp performs. Half of us will run this with boot camp due to the fact that big consoles do not have software for os x, and you can only compile with that software to consoles from windows. There is also 3DS Max which is something of a staple in our industry, and it would be more expensive to re-train people. So we need to see how well it all performs with boot camp too.
Why not buy a windows box then? well we do not like to build our own systems. We feel Apple has the most reliable systems from past experience. A computer that goes down and needs a couple of days to get fixed, is a lot of time and money wasted. A plug in upgrade takes a couple of hours, so that's not the same thing.
I await more upgrade news with baited breath, as we would probably just buy the entry level mac pros, and then upgrade every few years, hopefully squeezing 5-6 years out of the old girl without breaking the bank!
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As I recall, the concern was the CPU would be soldered into the socket, making potential upgrades all but impossible. That concern has now been laid to rest. Simple as that.
When I say optical side of TB, I mean the original "Lightpeak" they were talking about several years ago. The mini-displayport style connection was kind of supposed to be an interim thing that seems to have become standard now.
I was pulling for the optical version because it eliminates the possibility of electrical connection (grounding issues) between devices and EM/EFI interference. And, gosh it's just so darn futuristic.
I do not think Xeon processors that require soldering even exist. Why exactly was it a concern?
You wrote ... "Last I checked there's [sic] more game developers than there are musicians or video editors"
Can you supply a link to this information please?
Do you mean where you work, or in general?
There are a LOT of musicians out there.
It was Apple's choice to build a machine in this form factor, so ultimately, yes, it was a choice. People can argue all day long about whether or not Apple's choices were warranted or optimal, but somewhere along the line they chose a form factor that excluded certain upgradability. Let's not pretend Apple does anything at all they don't want to do.
I do not know, to be honest, but there was a fair amount of that going on for a while. Hopefully they are now reassured.
thats crazy, I understand TB max length is 3 meters.
Unless they changed something, or that has a built in repeater?
wow
i wouldn't mind that screenshot at 3840x2400 as a desktop wallpaper
Why would Apple lie to us .......... They never mentioned the CPU was not upgradeable only the memory...
Come to that, it also turned out so was the GPU too, since it was just a card.
Why Apple chose specifically to socket the CPU chip ? If Apple really wanted this to be not upgradable, they would have soldered it.
Why, Apple do you lie to us constantly, we're only going to find out later via tear-downs..
Nice try though, but you can't fool the experts...
i wouldn't mind that screenshot at 3840x2400 as a desktop wallpaper
Why would Apple lie to us .......... They never mentioned the CPU was not upgradeable only the memory...
Come to that, it also turned out so was the GPU too, since it was just a card.
Why Apple chose specifically to socket the CPU chip ? If Apple really wanted this to be not upgradable, they would have soldered it.
Why, Apple do you lie to us constantly, we're only going to find out later via tear-downs..
Nice try though, but you can't fool the experts...
Apple did not make a choice here, the Xeon is only offered in socketed form from Intel.
This is exactly the issue right there. Personally I think it's highly unlikely Apple will issue "upgrade kits" like they did for the previous model and even less likely 3rd parties will jump in. They even say in their manual replacing the GPUs would void the warranty.
The machine has so little PSU power (450W total) there would be extremely limited options anyway. According to the dissected EFI update, it's less than <150W TPD per card (W9000 is 275W), even with the D700. They do this with 13-30% under-clocking and binning.
Anyone hoping to throw a GTX680, 770, 780, 780Ti, Titan, Radeon 280X, or R9 290 can kiss that dream goodbye.
The OWC (and primary market, Corning) cables are fiber optic with media converters in each plug to go from copper to optical and then back again at the other end.
http://www.corning.com/CableSystems/OpticalCablesbyCorning/products/thunderbolt.aspx
It's Intel for you. In a nut shell, a socket is deprecated right after you buy the Intel CPU for it.
OTOH, AMD has major problems due to the promise of socket forward/backward compatibility. Last time I was checking, the biggest performance bottleneck of AMD was the memory bandwidth but they couldn't do anything about it because of the compatibility promise. At the time, even the announced and forthcoming AM3 socket was already slower than the next Intel socket. AMD when through 2 sockets at the time - Intel through ~5. (That's not counting the server sockets. On the server side of things, AMD adopted the same strategy as Intel: break socket compatibility/make new socket when needed.)
Are you kidding me?
And what about the gpus? they don't have TDP?
If the D700 are really based on the Radeon HD 7970, they have a TDP ~250W, each! So of course they are heavily underclocked by Apple. The D500, if based on the Radeon HD 7950, has ~200W TDP, so of course it is not only underclocked, but also emasculated (1536 processors vs 1792, for the retail version). the D300 being probably a customized Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition is a 175W part.
Those gpus were priced at $350, $450 and $550 at launch ~Jan-March 2012, almost 2 yeard ago! Today, the cost should be around $179, $249 and $349, and much lower for Apple, even if they created their own Firepro drivers.
20W of TDP for the cpu is nothing compared to the combined TDP of the gpus. The fact is that for plenty of usages a model with dual-cpus and a single gpu would offer lower total TDP, and plenty of fire power. Along with better RAM support (8 slots) and faster IOs altogether (80 PCIe lanes vs 40). A nMP with dual 150W Xeons + a single D700 (~250W) should be more STABLE than a nMP with a 130W Xeon and dual D700 (~250W each).
Add to that the fact that Apple didn't even cared to offer a 2nd SSD slot on the other gpu card while there is (or at least was) a placeholder for it on the prototypes we have seen earlier, is beyond belief. A Mac mini can hold internally more SSD storage (2x1TB) than the nMP! Ridiculous.
The thing is that with very few modifications to the existing design, they could have offered a much more versatile workstation, still offering their single-cpu+dual-cpu configurations for those video/3D guys. Just not forgetting about other customers.
What about TB?
Even the v.2 is still 4x PCIe 2.0, that kind of bandwith was "amazing" in 2007. It's a great midrange/mobile technology (replacing FW), but it is still just a subset of PCIe, which FYI is 16x PCIe 3.0 capable today (8 times the bandwidth in a single slot), doesn't require heavily modified drivers (under OS X) or offers locking connectors in most cases.