I'd like to point out that nobody in this thread has yet defined what a "workstation" truly is, exactly.
I've heard one person say a "workstation"
may have an opteron or xeon, and
may have ECC RAM. When I offered up a Xeon running non-ECC RAM, or an i7 running ECC RAM on LGA 2011, I get nothing but crickets.
There IS NO strict, universal definition of workstation, and anyone choosing to define it is being pedantic. There are a lot of "borderline" motherboards / configurations that can be viewed either way. There are a lot of old workstations whose feature-sets are found commonly in PCs today and a lot of current non-workstation configurations that would've been called workstations 5 years ago. Does obsolescence remove the "workstation" moniker from previously high-powered machines?
The best anyone can do is take what is out there and say that the current "workstations"
tend to have one set of features or another. As such, the nMP will definitely be on the borderline when it comes out and may even fall short of industry standards.
First off, the nMP will be released in 6 months, so really we should be comparing it to offerings coming out around that time. Second, TB, like MacVidCards said, is a serious downgrade in terms of bandwidth and upgradability (unless you think that the ability to have 36 devices makes up for the fact that they have the combined bandwidth of less than one PCIe 3.0 8x slot). There are already (or very soon will be) 3GBps PCIe SSDs that the (future) nMP will be incompatible with. Moreover, as someone else pointed out, there are already Xeons configurations capable of 80-144GBps.
Workstations these days typically have a handful of PCIe slots capable of at least 40 lanes as well as > 4 RAM slots. In addition to having only 4 RAM slots, it sequesters 32 lanes for the Video cards (regardless of what the user wants) and uses only 6 TBolt channels (6GBps) to be divided among 6 TB ports (throttling all of them to 50%, when used all at once). In short, the nMP has less PCIe throughput than basically all other LGA2011 configurations available
today (let alone 6 months from now), and forces 80% of that bandwidth into the two GPU slots. If Apple offers a single GPU option, this will be an even bigger joke as 16 lanes will just remain unused--this will put it on par with my gaming PC (22 GBps vs 20). The TB+PCIe configuration on the nMP at the very least limits maximum per-device throughput and at most dramatically limits consumer choice. This is not even factoring in the annoyance of PCIe chassis or lack of/expense of native TB devices.
As far as the lack of Dual CPU, that really is a big deal. In a time when the rest of the industry is dramatically increasing their computing power from the previous generation, Apple will have only a modest speed bump. Not only does this limit the computing power, but it also limits the number of lanes. Dual E5 configurations can run 80 lanes
today!!
That's the bandwidth equivalent of 40 Thunderbolt 2 ports.
All we're seeing here from the nMP = workstation crowd is excuses like
"we don't need more than 4 RAM slots"
"we don't need a second CPU"
"we don't need more than 6GBps for all our non-GPU devices"
Well I am happy for all of you, I also do not require those things, but perhaps before labeling this thing a "Workstation", you should view it in the context of the available technology and what is commonly labeled as a workstation, otherwise I'm inclined to call my
Haswell gaming PC a workstation because it compares favorably with my old Powermac G5. Better yet, how about you anticipate what the market will look like in 6 months and how the nMP will compare to the standard offerings then? I'm not arguing the nMP is not a workstation, but I definitely see only a cloud of excuses from those who are certain that it is. To me it's a lot more murky.
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