Teardown of New Mac Pro Reveals Surprising Amount of Accessibility, Circular Daughterboard

[mdelvecchio]

yes, you're always going to pay an Apple tax.

not according to the Anandtech article -- it's cheaper than comparable PC brands.

the machine is upgradeable with almost all its core components. That was people's main fear, that when purchasing this you'll be forced into buying a new one if you need to upgrade.

that is not the pro's fear. we don't upgrade CPUs -- we retire the workstation and get a new one. dorking with DIY component upgrades is an enthusiast's activity, not an enterprise pro's. the pro's concern is with performance. apple has delivered on that.

 

[wizard]

If I swap a CPU and it actually gives me a major improvement in performance, how exactly is that "silly"?

It is silly if you don't buy the right performance to begin with and then try to upgrade it two years latter.

And the fact is, it is possible to swap the CPU for a much faster one, and doing that does give a major improvement in performance.

The question then becomes why didn't you buy the faster processor in the first place? My point is that new processors don't improve that much from one generation to another so by the time you have significantly faster chips available to justify the upgrade it might be 3 years down the road. At that time Intel is likely to be on a different socket and frankly support new RAM technology.

You need an entire motherboard update to really benefit from the changing technology and as such I have a very hard time seeing the benefit of a 10% speed upgrade every year when you can just put off a new machine purchase for 3 years and get significant speed improvements.

I really just see it as a very bad time in the technology cycle to even be concerned about upgrading the CPU on this machine.

 

[mdelvecchio]

I'm waiting for the MPc. It's last year's package in a plastic box, and comes in 5 gruesome colours.

the iPhone 5c is one of the carrier's best selling handsets:

http://allthingsd.com/20131213/ipho...major-u-s-carriers/?mod=atd_homepage_carousel

I really like the green color, and it's smoother edges.

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Very clever design but not "innovative" given that passive plane technology has been around a long long time. However, it is a very resourceful use of this type of architecture.

what rubbish. show us another one out there half as clever. oops.

also, let's see your idea of innovation....an iPhone clone android handset?

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... Only if I may buy the second round.

then you two can get a room. you know, to discuss the hardware.

 

[wizard]

Many people will consider this silly because in this scenario you do not pay Apple. Keep in mind that many members on this forum are Apple investors and their perspective is very different from yours.

Some of us have no interest in Apple stock at all, yet see this obsession with CPU upgrades as silly. Mind you I'm being kind when I use the word silly. I really don't see the math working out all that well in most cases and I especially don't see it working out well for this time period. It isn't like the 90's anymore where you could see substantial increases in performance from one generation or another or even enjoy the clock rate benefits of a process shrink on a current gen product.

Look at it this way we already know what the CPU performance delta between Ivy Bridge and Haswell is. It is hardly enough to justify a CPU upgrade if performance is the major metric. At best you get better clock rates which will help some. So you will have to wait for another generation before you see a substantial performance increase per core and that is only if Intel gives a hoot.

The next question then becomes this: does Intel give a hoot? Well they publicly have said the emphasis is on mobile and that desktop chips should not expect the latest and greatest technology next year. Since XEON is effectively a desktop chip enhanced for server duty where will these mystery chips be with their massive improvements in performance?

If you buy into this (it is up to you), it should be pretty obvious that traditional performance increases will be hard to come by. When the do it is likely to require a substantial system upgrade to be realized. Right now there is a limit to how many cores Intel can out on a chip, not so much because of technology but because of bandwidth to memory. You can disagree, but from my perspective by the time a decent upgrade is possible you will likely need a new motherboard at the very least to benefit from the new processor.

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I didn't catch the TWICE slower. I though it was in the realm of 17% IIR?

The guy probably has reading comprehension issues. By the way power consumption probably is a major factor in the down clocking but I still wouldn't be surprised to find out part of the issue is reliability. But yeah how 17% worst case becomes "twice" is beyond me.

The other thing I noticed is no ECC RAM for the GPUs. That will take the machines out of the running for some usages.

 

[Piggie]

That would be for the quad.

Guess what, they make it in 6, 8, and 12 core too. Those are your all around fast machines.

I can't wait for the blinding games benchmarks with high end AMD GPU's SLI'd together destroying current entertainment benchmarks.

Showing what an all round powerhouse this is.

 

[wizard]

The performance gains per generation have slowed down quite a bit over the last few years, but there's still enough gain there that couple of years could make for some big differences.

That is consistent with what I've seen lately which more or less supports my perspective that it takes at least two years and probably more to justify an upgrade for most users. After that you have to seriously consider just replacing the machine especially as we move past three years.

The biggest thing to take into consideration isn't raw graphics performance, but it's GPGPU capabilities, since this is what the new Mac Pro is more or less focused on.

This I would agree with, the Mac Pro isn't a gaming system even if people want to make it into one.

With the former, you won't see much difference on a year to year basis, and isn't really all that important as far as the Pros usual workload is concerned. But the latter is still a relatively new thing, and has seen some huge performance increases as newer cards have come out to better take advantage of it.

GPU compute is certainly a rapidly evolving technology I can't dismiss that and frankly I've been following the developments at AMD and elsewhere. In the case of AMD they have a long schedule in which they intend to roll out support for heterogeneous systems going beyond 2015. Obviously Apple runs their own software stack so the schedule is different but the point is this stuff is still a ways off and the hardware and software is evolving.

I just see us at a plateau right now that is going to last for a couple of years after which hardware will evolve again. If you look at this Mac the one thing that I see coming up short is memory. This both in regards to current capacities and performance or bandwidth. This across the board on both the GPU and CPU cards.

These little things add up and I don't see a big opportunity here in the near term for a big performance boost. By the time that performance boost is justifiable I suspect the Mac Pro will have a new design iteration addressing these issues.

 

[CitrusPisser]

Don't need to.

Reviews already in are showing it barely much faster than the current iMac unless software is specifically written for it.

which is great it you happen to wish to run that particular program

I want a fast all found general machine

The nMP CPU performance is way ahead of the current iMac in multithread processing. Because of the difference in single thread performance between ivy bridge and haswell this brings the nMP performance in that category down.

This is not really an issue considering a majority who will buy this machine will rely on a lot of multithreaded/core and GPU processing.

 

[borad]

iFixit mention thermal paste for the CPU, but not the GPUs. So that makes GPUs a little more user-replacable, assuming supply is available.

 

[DrManhattan]

I would probably never want to replace GPU's I just don't care that much. Replacing the CPU would be quite nice. I could buy a 4 Core, and wait for 8 or 12 core to drop in price, and just swap it. I'm not confident any replaceable SSD's will ever come out at a decent price. 2TB SSD for $500 will probably not happen for a long time.

Also, looking at those photos, I'm wondering if Apple will release a dual SSD config at a later time. Seems like it would be really easy to do. Could do 2x1TB configuration sometime in the near future. But that price would be insane.

 

[ytoyoda]

Serious question. If the new Mac Pro had these same components and offered identical performance in a conventional form factor, would it still have the wow factor?

No, for me.
I quote from the Final words of AnadTech review, "The new Mac Pro is compact, quiet, powerful all while looking and feeling great."

I ordered a nMP, to replace my big, noisy 6 core windows PC.
The value of nMP for me is in following orders.
1. Quiet
2. Compact
3. and still is is very Powerful
In addition to this, it looks and feels great, but this is a bonus.

 

[5590982]

Two SSD slots?

So, if the socket for the SSD is mounted on one of the GPU cards, why don't both the GPU cards come with sockets, one empty, so you can add more storage later?

 

[3282868]

Was on the fence, but now I'm sold.

Selling my 6-Core w/ 256GB SSD, BD, etc. Only decisions:

- 8-Core
- D500 or D700

I'm guessing 8 with the dual D500's, I don't need a beast but I do need punch for HD rendering.

 

[zObsidian]

The cooling capacity is strong with this one...

 

[AppleScruff1]

No, for me.
I quote from the Final words of AnadTech review, "The new Mac Pro is compact, quiet, powerful all while looking and feeling great."

I ordered a nMP, to replace my big, noisy 6 core windows PC.
The value of nMP for me is in following orders.
1. Quiet
2. Compact
3. and still is is very Powerful
In addition to this, it looks and feels great, but this is a bonus.

Have you received it yet? I hope you'll share your impressions here. I'd like to hear how you like it.

 

[jasonvp]

It is silly if you don't buy the right performance to begin with and then try to upgrade it two years latter.

What if your workload changes over the course of that time?

What if you want to save some money and avoid the Apple tax on the Xeon chips themselves?

What if you want a Xeon chip that isn't (currently) an option through Apple?

None of these reasons are silly, and they're precisely why some folks will be adventurous enough to swap the processor. Count me as one of them, when I finally do pull the trigger.

 

[wiz329]

It's on the Gaming Performance page. For dual D700 with CrossFire enabled pretty much all comparisons there look like this one:

Image

Ideal usage isn't exactly encapsulated by a PC game.

 

[ytoyoda]

Have you received it yet? I hope you'll share your impressions here. I'd like to hear how you like it.

Not yet. I will share how the space around my desk changed, with my impression. Hopefully sometime in January.

 

[wiz329]

Very interesting article to say the least. I totally missed that the CPU chip had 8 extra PCI Express lanes. If Anandtech is right the TB ports should deliver excellent performance in most cases.

I just skimmed around to the good parts, that is the stuff I'm interested in. Might read the article in depth later. In general though it should be pretty clear that we won't get any extra SSD slots this year. However that could change if Intel ever gets USB 3 built into the chip set as Anand is indicating that Apple had to use a PCI Express to USB 3 bridge chip. So maybe with a little consolidation whenever Intel delivers the next Xeon chip set we might actually see a Mac Pro with two internal SSD ports.

In any event if anybody is really interested in the new Mac Pro the article is highly recommended. Notably he had to work extremely hard to get the machine to back off on clock rates due to thermal issues.

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Did you miss the part about the 8 lanes on the north bridge chip? That right there eliminates my confusion about where all the I/O goes. It is a very interesting design to say the least. Apple was very good at supplying plenty of bandwidth to the various chips in the platform.

I'm not sure I understand you correctly, but I don't think there are 8 extra lanes. There are simply 8 lanes to go AROUND for 2x ethernet, wifi, 3x TB 2.0, and 4x USB 3.0. It's not a problem if few of these are being used, as the PLX switch gives full access to all 8 lanes, but I wonder if we could start to see bottlenecks as more external peripherals are added.

 

[bagelche]

Was on the fence, but now I'm sold.

Selling my 6-Core w/ 256GB SSD, BD, etc. Only decisions:

- 8-Core
- D500 or D700

I'm guessing 8 with the dual D500's, I don't need a beast but I do need punch for HD rendering.

Not sure what programs you're using, but it looks like the 700s are a significant upgrade over the 500s. With many programs now (or soon to be) relying heavily on the GPUs for rendering and video crunching that looks like an upgrade worth doing. In various video forums I trawl, it looks like the preference is for 6 core/700 combo (or 8/700 if you can swing it).

 

[Matt Leaf]

Hoping we see a range of external chasis products (HD's etc) that are round and stackable, so the pro could just sit on top of externals and minimize clutter.

Still, I'm concerned about the security of this machine. Still haven't heard anything about how you would lock this down. Something so portable would be so easy to steal - unlike a mac tower. Your laptop you always take with you, but this thing will live on a desk.

Looking forward to see if apple release of a range of accesories to match - new keyboard and trackpad/mouse in black, and redesigned TB displays both at the current res and 4k...

I love the Mac Pro but can't see myself picking one up just yet. Interested to see where they take it all in the next year or two and what they add to the package...

 

[designgeek]

This has to be the most incredible piece of technology I've ever seen. I rewatched Apple's promo video and damn, it looks like star trek practically.

 

[iSayuSay]

I must admit it's a beautiful machine. It's what Mac Mini should have been. Replace the CPU with consumer desktop i5 or i7, along with single desktop graphic such as GTX780 Ti or R9 290 and consumer class price point like in $1500 or $2000 and millions of this machine will fly off the shelves.

 

[Piggie]

I must admit it's a beautiful machine. It's what Mac Mini should have been. Replace the CPU with consumer desktop i5 or i7, along with single desktop graphic such as GTX780 Ti or R9 290 and consumer class price point like in $1500 or $2000 and millions of this machine will fly off the shelves.

Indeed, we all know that, but apple won't make what many want, they make what they want people to buy.

If they made what people want it will hurt iMac or mac pro sales.

 

[Patrick J]

If they made what people want it will hurt iMac or mac pro sales.

Apple aren't scared of cannibalising their existing options. The iPhone all but killed the iPod.

 

[Michael Scrip]

Indeed, we all know that, but apple won't make what many want, they make what they want people to buy.

If they made what people want it will hurt iMac or mac pro sales.

Apple shouldn't care what you buy... as long as it makes them money.

People have been screaming for a headless xMac for years. But Apple only sells a tiny cigar box Mac Mini... an all-in-one iMac... and a powerful Mac Pro workstation.

Who cares if sales of the xMac would take away sales from the iMac? A sale is a sale! Everything Apple sells makes them a handsome profit anyway... so it shouldn't matter what you buy.

Selling an xMac would be better than selling no Mac at all... and that's exactly what happens. A lot of people are turned off by the idea of the iMac... but the Mac Mini isn't a great solution either.

So they buy NOTHING.