nMP CPU Upgrade

[flowrider]

It's now been done:

http://blog.macsales.com/22188-owc-confirms-mac-pro-2013-processor-upgradeable

Lou

 

[jasonvp]

It's now been done:

Nice find Lou. That's the exact processor I'd consider putting in, too. The challenge is: that one is a bit tricky to find in the retail channels. Instead, Intel seems to want to sell consumers the 3.4GHz 150W 8-core.

 

[wallysb01]

Nice find Lou. That's the exact processor I'd consider putting in, too. The challenge is: that one is a bit tricky to find in the retail channels. Instead, Intel seems to want to sell consumers the 3.4GHz 150W 8-core.

Personally, for the same price, the 2690v2 looks better to me, but I guess it depends on how much you want the 4GHz turbo vs. the extra 2 cores.

 

[Gav Mack]

As far as I recall:

There's a going to be a physical change in the socket of Haswell Xeons: The new socket (LGA 2011-3) looks the same, but are wired differently, so you will be denied the option of upgrading to a better CPU introduced i.e. next year or two years from now.

You will probably be able to upgrade to other LGA 2011 socket CPUs (i.e. the other ones in the current nMP line-up) though, but you'll be stuck in Ivy Bridge Country, when tech moves to Haswell and later on Broadwell.


It is quite strange, that the nMP is introduced with an "old architecture", though Apple had no choice at this point in time. But they could have updated the oMP to Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge architecture and let the old chassis survive another generation - then made an 2-month exclusive deal with Intel on the Haswell Xeons for the nMP. That would have sent shockwaves through the industry.

Introducing the nMP with Ivy Bridge is, just as everything with the nMP, a strange and totally unnecessary compromise.

Intel anticipate production starting towards the end of 2014, but yields is another issue altogether. It will be mid 2015 before they can make enough to satisfy Apples demands, never mind ironing the bugs out of a seriously large change in architecture with the chipset. Then finally supply of the other stuff such as ECC DDR4 coming down from insane prices.

I think they wanted the design out there and I have no doubt like yourself the Mac Pro 8,1 is going to see some big changes under the can.

Until then though the e5's will be available progressively cheaper on the grey market for those who want to swap their CPU out for an upgrade!

 

[jasonvp]

Personally, for the same price, the 2690v2 looks better to me, but I guess it depends on how much you want the 4GHz turbo vs. the extra 2 cores.

The 10-core is interesting, but as always: it's the core vs clock speed debate. My app of choice: Premeire Pro, really likes clock speed. It seems the 8-core is a good compromise.

 

[deconstruct60]

Intel anticipate production starting towards the end of 2014, but yields is another issue altogether. It will be mid 2015 before they can make enough to satisfy Apples demands, never mind ironing the bugs out of a seriously large change in architecture with the chipset. Then finally supply of the other stuff such as ECC DDR4 coming down from insane prices.

Intel is targeting Q4 like time in 2014, but there are already engineering samples out. The likelihood that they don't know about a 'tough to crack' defect is getting lower every month. There is more QA testing done by customers and system vendors done on this class of Xeon gear than desktops That is one reason it comes out at a slower pace. It shouldn't take 6+ months to shake out these kinds of bugs.

The basic Haswell microarchitecture is already out. I wouldn't be surprised if more than 4 cores exposed a transactional memory (TSX) bug but they have time to fix those.

DDR4 has been "just around the corner" for a long time. By the time E5 v3 is ready to roll out will be close to time that mainstream will be getting close to Skylake (which also has DDR4 components). Lower speed DDR4 is already getting mobile wins due to lower power. By the end of 2014 DDR4 isn't going to be the same kind of bleeding edge that PCI-e v3.0 was in the Q3-Q4 2011 intro that slid into 2012.

Similar issues with the chipset.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/di...icroprocessors_for_Launch_in_2015_Report.html

[ both E5 v3 and v4 ( Haswell and Broadwell ) will use this same chipset. ]
C610 (Wellsburg) has some enterprise features but mostly the same as the mainstream chipset deployed now. USB 3.0 ( yeah that should be a problem; not) and moving from 2 SATA 6Gb/s lanes to 10 6Gb/s lanes. The first is more so driven that the chipset is only updated every complete tick/tock cycle (minimally two years) and the second is completely superfluous to the Mac Pro.

If anything there hopefully is a C610 variant that dumps some of the SATA and USB lanes and allows "Flexible I/O" to deliver 10-12 PCI-e 2 lanes. Another 2-4 lanes and can get a 2nd SSD into the Mac Pro relatively easily.

Not just the Mac Pro, but there are lots of blade servers than have absolutely zero need for more than 1-2 SATA lanes let alone 10. It isn't like this would be an "Apple only" chipset. There is a broad spectrum of folks building smaller logic boards with E5s. A blade/cluster node only really needs a boot drive and maybe a DVD drive to boot off of in diagnostic mode. Same general trend as Mac Pro with the bulk storage on "SAN/NAS/Direct attach" rather than directly attached to the main logic board.


If Apple lags past Q1 '15 on an update it is far more likely that there lack of appling resouruces to the new update was the gating factor far more than Intel's roadmap.