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Teardown of New Mac Pro Reveals Surprising Amount of Accessibility, Circular Daughterboard
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I believe there are two TB controllers. But very possible about the PCIe lanes if there are 40 and each GPU probably takes up 16. That's a downside of only doing single cpu machines, and forcing dual GPU. Frankly for non graphics folks, substituting the second GPU for a card that has three more of those SSD slots would be absolutely killer. Or even having more channels of external TB2. I wonder if the next generation xeon will allow more lanes and if that could allow more expansion in that regard.
I assume this machine is PCIe version 3, meaning just under a GB per second per lane?
I wonder how does a 450W power supply could drive 2 high end AMD cards and a beast of a processor?
That is a good question! The first thing that pops into mind is this: does the high end machine use the same power supply. The other reality is that many PC power supplies are a bit phony in the way they are rated. A good power supply should put out its rated power continuously and cleanly, many don't.
Beyond all of that we can add up individual board power demands but that might get tricky as the boards appear to be thing as far as extraneous chips go. So it is probably going to be difficult to compare board demand to what you might see in the PC world. So we can take a guess at the CPU of 130 watts which leave 320 watts. Most likely they budgeted at least 60 watts for the I/O ports so that leaves 260 watts for both GPUs or 160 watts apiece. Considering that it is very unlikely that the entry level and maybe even the mid range GPUs take that much power, I'd have to say the power supply is probably over rated in the entry model. Beyond that there is some evidence that the GPUs are down clocked from what you would see in the PC world on the high end machine. This of course impact ultimate power draw.
One further piece here, PC power supplies are rated on total power delivered across all outputs. At times this means wasted power capacity.
In any event I'm hoping for a more engineering oriented teardown from somebody. There are some very interesting concepts in this machine.
What is this non sense and why the obsession with upgrades? The only things worth upgrading in modern computers are the mass storage devices and the RAM, both of these known to be upgrade able for over six months now. In simple terms the nay-Sayers are complete idiots.
Consider this, by the time it is worthwhile to upgrade this machine Intel will be implementing new sockets, new memory interfaces and a host of other technologies requiring a new circuit board. The same thing is likely to happen with the GPUs. You are far better off these days saving you money for a new machine 3-5 years down the road.
The odds of these being proprietary is very low. They may be uncommon, but I bet that they're a standard part.
Exactly!
Especially right now as new (several in fact) RAM standards are just around the corner. No matter which one Apple and Intel select in the future the tech will require new motherboards and and processors. Depending upon just how fast they want the RAM to run, that RAM may be required to be soldered into the motherboard. The realities of the past simply don't apply to the technologies of the future.
That's what I was about to say. But you could always sell it every 2 years and get a new one.
Shame it performs so poor for it's price in general computing situations.
Still it "looks" cool so I guess that's all that matters these days.
sigh
Nope. New GPUs can offer massive performance boosts over even a single generation. A card two generations removed from the one you have now can potentially give you a 100% performance increase running off the same bus, all without requiring you to spend another $8000 buying an entirely new machine to benefit from it.
I'm not saying the lack of upgradeable GPUs will break the new Pros. It's got enough of its own strengths to overcome this one weakness. But it would've been really, really nice if they were in there.
Shame it performs so poor for it's price in general computing situations.
Still it "looks" cool so I guess that's all that matters these days.
sigh
When did you get your hands on one?
Beyond all of that, these days you simply don't get the huge percentage gains in performance with an upgrade to a one or two year old machine. It is far harder to justify upgrades to modern hardware in a three year time frame.
Well there are at least two competing standards for SSDs interfaced over PCI Express. It would be interesting to see if Apple implemented any of the APIs or went completely proprietary.
It is fairly funny to here the complaints about the SSD anyways, as nothing comes close in the PC industry. The performance and size are light years ahead of PC hardware on the market PCI Express or not.
It is hardly a tax in the Mac Pro. Yeah it has a high price, even for the starter machine, but the price is extremely competitive.
The bigger myth is that it is an important concern. The reality is this, there is little value in buying upgrades these days. RAM and storage are about the only two upgrades that can justify themselves expense wise these days.
In the end what you have is personalities that simply like to complain. It really doesn't matter what as long as they can whine.
I should of added, that is a brilliant design. I think it's what you get for using daughter board tech, not many others do that, they just have the motherboard and everything slots into it. But as Apple has showing in this mac Pro and the last one, if you make an internal bus and connector that are fast enough, you can have some radically different thinking in a computers overall design.
It's a great piece of tech and thinking, I understand why some hate it due to lack of upgradability but you have to admire it's beautiful simplicity in it's design surely?
Even if it does look like a mini rubbish bin/ trash can.
It's a great piece of tech and thinking, I understand why some hate it due to lack of upgradability but you have to admire it's beautiful simplicity in it's design surely?
Even if it does look like a mini rubbish bin/ trash can.
At the moment nobody knows for sure. IT probably comes down to having enough PCI Express lanes. Lack of power might be an issue too now that I think about it. If Apple slipped up in anyway I think the lack of this extra slot is probably the biggest short coming of the machine. If nothing else an ultra fast scratch disk would make for a far more interesting Mac Pro.
I'm going to wait until the Mac Pro S comes out next year.
That might seem funny to some but I see interesting possibilities here. For one Intel is working on a system processor capable version of Xeon Phi. If Apple went this route you might see 32 to 64 Intel cores in a Mac Pro. Even if they don't go the Phi route 14nm will enable Intel to add more cores to a single die.
in a nut shell the Mac Pro will just become more and more impressive in the years to come.
There's three controllers.
I don't think it's possible for each GPU to take 16. Otherwise, there's only 8 lanes left, which isn't possibly enough for everything else.
TB takes x4 2.0 lanes (weird, huh?).
My best guess:
Both GPUs = x16
TB controllers = x12
Internal Storage = x2 (or x4, not sure)
That leaves between 8 and 10 lanes for the rest of the IO (pretty much USB 3.0).
Either that or one GPU is x16 and one is x8. It'll be interesting if any tech sites are actually able to determine the lane allocation.
And that's just rough guesswork. I will admit I really don't know that much beyond the most rudimentary basics of lane allocation.
Do displays take additional lanes, or is that bandwidth included in the GPU lanes? How do the GPUs interact with TB, since both take lanes, but one clearly connects with the other (the GPU drives the display signal on TB).
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SATA Express is right around the corner. I wouldn't call that light-years.
Yes, Apple did a great job designing this machine. But let's not give them credit that isn't due to them.
It would take a fairly high shipping volume and at least 2 card generations to really see upgrades here. Look at the last mac pro. The mac version cards came out a year later when they used identical hardware. Now the hardware is a separate barrier to development. I suspect if anything you'll just see cards from the next generation show up as upgrade kits, as we've seen with prior cards. The 5770 and 5870 were both available on Apple's site as add-on kits. The sustained volume (not day one shipments) may not be enough to attract some of the card vendors.
There is some evidence that the top end GPUs run at a slower clock rate than in the commercial workstation PC Cards. However since part numbers are not directly comparable one can't state such with absolute certainty. The other thing is that the lower clock rate might not have anything to do with heat and might have everything to do with reliability. Top end GPUs have high failure rates which very likely are due to simply being pushed to hard to get those wonderful performance figures. Considering that Apples designs are often conservative and targeted at reliability it is totally believe able that the GPUs (top end ones) are running slower clocks.
In more general terms though I don't think you will see any issues here with the power supply. First; if you notice there is little if any fluff on the PC boards so wasted power is minimized. Second; you don't have a a lot of power supply power going to fans which isn't insignificant in some machines. Third; Apple can precisely tailor power supply output to the loads seen in the machine, thus no wasted wattage rating for unused power supply capacity. You have to remember PC power supply wattage ratings include all power supply rails. I really doubt we will see an issue in anything but the possibly the top end machine and even then who is to say it has the same power supply.
The Mac Pro review from Anandtech is up!
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013
Thanks for the correction, I remembered it wrong from when it was discussed way back when, reinforced by seeing two controllers in the teardown and not noticing the third on the other side of the board.
On the memory issue, are we sure that single CPU is limited to four memory slots? On intel's site for the 1620 it says max memory of 256, and I see PC motherboards that are for single socket E5 v2 with eight ram slots. I would think it's four memory channels per cpu, not four total slots per CPU.
The math doesn't seem to add up, but aren't virtually all graphics cards x16? I suppose with custom cards Apple could have made them something else, but if that were possible why wouldn't we be seeing other x8 or lower cards so people could save lanes in their machines? I agree that it would be interesting for one of the tech sites to figure out how the lanes are distributed. I wonder if System Information still includes a PCI cards section on those machines.
Supposedly intel will have a socket compatible 18 core CPU down the road. And even if intel never releases any more cpus that can swap in, that doesn't change the fact that someone who buys a quad or six core today can swap it for more cores when the prices come down.
Of course there are people who over-upgrade when it would be wiser to buy a new machine, but they are no more idiots than those who declare that all upgrades are stupid.