The 2009 (Gainestown) Mac Pro: Everything We Know

[nanofrog]

I wonder if we'll see 3 sets of risers instead of 2? I'm assuming we'll have to organize our RAM purchases in groups of three from here forward, with Gainestown. And having 3 risers would make it easier for me to organize chip sets.

No, not 3 risers.

2 processors, one riser each.
Just look at the diagram posted by Umbongo.

If that's the case, will this force a new case design? I'm hoping no. I like the look as is.

It will require some internal redesign to fit the new boards, etc. Externally, no way to know for sure, but it could, given the length of time Apple's kept the current exterior.

 

[ButtUglyJeff]

No, not 3 risers.

2 processors, one riser each.
Just look at the diagram posted by Umbongo.

If RAM optimization is best in 3's, then how would you organize chips on the risers, if there will only be 2 of them?

 

[Horst]

All nice and dandy, but what are the gains for someone who's actually going to work with the future Mac Pro ?

RAM silly expensive as of now, and there is no substitute for size when it comes to RAM yet, crunch the numbers as much as you wish.

Highspeed external storage and other connections : FW 400 remains to be the most affordable, most common solution; USB sucks, no improvement exists, eSATA is a can of worms, NAS a joke, adapters and/or FW400-800 cables will cost a serious users several hundreds, if they work at all for that timid video camera or digital back of yours.

Again, there is not one single substitute in sight, but Apple will move on anyways.

HDD performance will remain to be a bottleneck for years to come , new graphic cards sound better on paper, but might still lack proper drivers, and chances are no affordable GPU for 3D apps will be offered by Apple, as usual.

If it works for that silly, bloated thing called Aperture, I guess that's good enough for iJobs , RIP .

Oh, and Intel is loosing it big time, really hurting right now. Not a good time to invest in new hardware, if I may say so.
R&D is likely to suffer first, along with quality control .

 

[Tallest Skil]

All nice and dandy, but what are the gains for someone who's actually going to work with the future Mac Pro ?

Would anyone care to point him to the latest Gainestown benchmarks and then tell him that Snow Leopard should double the % improvement over Penryn that already exists?

 

[J the Ninja]

If RAM optimization is best in 3's, then how would you organize chips on the risers, if there will only be 2 of them?

2 riser's, six slots per riser, as discussed on the previous page.


As for SAS, I popped over to Seagate's site, and it seems they carry 15,000rpm SAS drives in the 450 and 600GB flavors, among others.

All nice and dandy, but what are the gains for someone who's actually going to work with the future Mac Pro ?

RAM silly expensive as of now, and there is no substitute for size when it comes to RAM yet, crunch the numbers as much as you wish.

Highspeed external storage and other connections : FW 400 remains to be the most affordable, most common solution; USB sucks, no improvement exists, eSATA is a can of worms, NAS a joke, adapters and/or FW400-800 cables will cost a serious users several hundreds, if they work at all for that timid video camera or digital back of yours.

Again, there is not one single substitute in sight, but Apple will move on anyways.

HDD performance will remain to be a bottleneck for years to come , new graphic cards sound better on paper, but might still lack proper drivers, and chances are no affordable GPU for 3D apps will be offered by Apple, as usual.

If it works for that silly, bloated thing called Aperture, I guess that's good enough for iJobs , RIP .

Oh, and Intel is loosing it big time, really hurting right now. Not a good time to invest in new hardware, if I may say so.
R&D is likely to suffer first, along with quality control .

Intel is in fine shape. The economy may suck, but they make a product everyone needs, and they make the best ones around for the time being. HDD's don't bottleneck everything. A lot of things yes, but to say they drag the system down to the point where better CPUs and GPUs are useless is simply idiotic and not true.

And FW400-800 cables costing "serious users" "hundreds"? Uh.....Monoprice sells the things for about $5 a whack, unless you need 4 dozen, they won't cost hundreds. And if you need that many, doesn't that imply you have some 15-30 computers?

 

[Horst]

Would anyone care to point him to the latest Gainestown benchmarks and then tell him that Snow Leopard should double the % improvement over Penryn that already exists?

Would anyone point him to my posting and have him reply accordingly, for a change ?

And while anyone is at it, can you advice him there are no benchmarks about Gainestown in combination with Leopard, much less Snow Leopard ?
Oh, and there is no real-world Nehalem benchmark either .

 

[Tallest Skil]

Would anyone point him to my posting and have him reply accordingly, for a change ?

And while anyone is at it, can you advice him there are no benchmarks about Gainestown in combination with Leopard, much less Snow Leopard ?
Oh, and there is no real-world Nehalem benchmark either .

Everything else you said I have taken care of.

Yes, there are no OS X Gainestown benchmarks yet, but we can extrapolate from the Windows benchmarks.

Define real-world benchmark, because there was a demonstration of Gainestown in Mayish of last year.

 

[m1stake]

Real world benchmark is this close to being an oxymoron.

 

[Horst]

2 riser's, six slots per riser, as discussed on the previous page.


As for SAS, I popped over to Seagate's site, and it seems they carry 15,000rpm SAS drives in the 450 and 600GB flavors, among others.



Intel is in fine shape. The economy may suck, but they make a product everyone needs, and they make the best ones around for the time being.

The latter might be true, but you really should read the news .

HDD's don't bottleneck everything. A lot of things yes, but to say they drag the system down to the point where better CPUs and GPUs are useless is simply idiotic and not true.

Alright, I'm an idiot then; maybe you can teach me about the benefits of improved CPUs and GPUs for pro apps.
If it's less than 50% plus, don't bother.

And FW400-800 cables costing "serious users" "hundreds"? Uh.....Monoprice sells the things for about $5 a whack, unless you need 4 dozen, they won't cost hundreds. And if you need that many, doesn't that imply you have some 15-30 computers?

I don't think I have ever heard of Monoprice, is that US based or something ?
Also, I'm using some equipment with dual 4.5m FW cables and repeaters, I kind of don't like the idea of going lowest bidder for that.

But according to you, I can get a 5$ 15" cable and it will work just fine ?

Man, I have to tell the dudes in that photography forum they are just being anal, and could have saved a bundle had they just ignored them app and system crashes and told the client all was well.

Now I really feel idiotic .

 

[Tallest Skil]

But according to you, I can get a 5$ 15" cable and it will work just fine ?

Man, I have to tell the dudes in that photography forum they are just being anal, and could have saved a bundle had they just ignored them app and system crashes and told the client all was well.

Now I really feel idiotic .

Please do not turn my thread into an insult-fest. Monoprice is a legitimate site with cheap, reliable cables.

There are $8,000+ Pear audio cables, and then there are wire coat hangers. Guess what? They sound the same. Buying from somewhere like Monoprice saves people a lot of money over buying from, say, Wal-Mart. You can get a 3 foot HDMI cable at Wal-Mart for $25, but can get a 30 foot cable of the same quality from Monoprice for the same amount of money.

 

[jjahshik32]

Please do not turn my thread into an insult-fest. Monoprice is a legitimate site with cheap, reliable cables.

There are $8,000+ Pear audio cables, and then there are wire coat hangers. Guess what? They sound the same. Buying from somewhere like Monoprice saves people a lot of money over buying from, say, Wal-Mart. You can get a 3 foot HDMI cable at Wal-Mart for $25, but can get a 30 foot cable of the same quality from Monoprice for the same amount of money.

Monoprice is the bomb. Any cable whether it is a $9.99 hdmi cable or a $99.99 monster cable are exactly the same thing.

Once a cheap cable works it just works the same way as an expensive cable. Only difference is if the cable works or it just doesnt, no quality differences.

People buy monster cables, seriously gets ripped off.

 

[Horst]

Everything else you said I have taken care of.

Yes, there are no OS X Gainestown benchmarks yet, but we can extrapolate from the Windows benchmarks.

Define real-world benchmark, because there was a demonstration of Gainestown in Mayish of last year.

Oh, there was a demonstration sometime last year, I guess I stand corrected, eh ?

Now don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a quantum leap in Mac Pro performance, compatibilty notwithstanding - a matter you keep ignoring, btw..

However, I dont see it happen anytime soon.

Realworld benchmarks might be : process 200x 100MB image raw files to 16 bit 200mb files, open all and convert to jpeg, create contact sheets.

Render times in Cinema 4D , HDRI lighting/ GI etc. , 16 bit , for 11x14 print size at 360 DPI .
Enable decent OpenGL previews in C4D w/o lag, and w/o spendig 1-2k on the GPU.

 

[TheStrudel]

Barefeats and other sites have shown some rather amazing tests where they put some intel SSDs, among other things into a RAID0 array and thereby achieved blinding speed increases on a Mac Pro. Gainestown will show some improvements, but I'll be extremely surprised if they amount to 20% of the gains you'll experience from putting everything on, say, 4 of the top-notch intel SSDs in two RAID0 arrays.

Given what holds my system up - and it is always the hard drives - I might go so far as to say that Snow Leopard, if it is all it claims, may be more of a speed boost than Nehalem. After all, developers are not yet programming for tasks to be shared by 8 cores routinely. Maybe they're up to 2. But not yet routinely 4.

Cables: If the cable in question is digital, provided it's intact, it always works. Cable quality matters if you're using ludicrously long cables or going analog, like old analog component video connections, sure, but if it's digital, it just works. Regardless of how much one paid for the cable in question. Gold plating isn't going to show a measurable performance gain over copper or silver in the connections.

This is all according to what I've read from several independent sources, and I'm always interested in being proven wrong. Anybody read or tested otherwise?

 

[m1stake]

I still don't buy into 100% of the SL hype. There is only so much that benefits from being multithreaded.

 

[RobLS]

Um update to the 'realworld' nehelam testing. There IS realworld nehelam tests, as its being sold now. Just no gainestown bench, since it is not out yet.

 

[barkmonster]

Yes, let's add $500 to a machine that already costs $3k for the base config.


If we did, would you mind if we also sold a three-thousand dollar computer that only came with 80GB of built-in storage?

I was meaning the same way the BASE model currently has dual 2.8Ghz CPUs as standard, you'd just swap it for a 7,200rpm model as a BTO option the same as you might drop it down to 1 CPU to knock off $500 if need be or when the superdrives were introduced and you could knock it down to a CD/RW if you wanted to.

This would remove any additional cost and as the casing, hard drives, optical drives and other components save the Motherboard, RAM and CPU have come down in price quite a lot over the past few years compared with apple's prices as BTO options. I imagine apple will aim for a price similar if not exactly the same as the current range and still offer more than simply a new range of CPUs.

I was thinking of "buying power" combined with a deal Apple could make with intel at the same time, a system running an intel CPU, intel SSD and Apple motherboard would make the most expensive component apart from the RAM and Graphics Card come from 1 company or in-house and I'm sure if Apple order 100,000 CPUs for instance, they'd get a discount if they ordered 10,000 SSDs at the same time.

They'd be ordering a lot more than that I imagine seeing as they'd be perfect as BTO options in laptops too.

A small change to the iMac to allow a second, 2.5" SATA drive to be fitted internally and then the whole mac range could have SSDs as a BTO option and apple could buy them for peanuts (so to speak).

sorry if I sounded naive

 

[rylin]

After all, developers are not yet programming for tasks to be shared by 8 cores routinely. Maybe they're up to 2. But not yet routinely 4.

FYI:
Developers don't really write for specific cores.
The OS handles assigning threads to cores.

If you write a massively parallel renderer with X threads, it'll instantiate those threads on 1 - X cores.

Coding for two cores is pretty much the same as coding for 8 cores.

So long as the OS manages to spread things out, everything's nice and dandy.

 

[rylin]

Highspeed external storage and other connections : FW 400 remains to be the most affordable, most common solution; USB sucks, no improvement exists, eSATA is a can of worms, NAS a joke, adapters and/or FW400-800 cables will cost a serious users several hundreds, if they work at all for that timid video camera or digital back of yours.

ATA over Ethernet could be an option.
Build a simple Linux, OpenSolaris or FreeBSD machine with lots and lots of disk.
Turn aforementioned disks into a nice big ZFS volume on top of RAID-Z or RAID-10 and export the volume*.

Create a HFS+ partition on your newly mounted remote disk and enjoy.
You should easily be able to saturate a gigabit link, so you might want to consider 10gbps cards for the host and your Mac Pro.

* I'm not sure if you gain ZFS' benefits by exporting a ZFS volume, so you might want to just export each block device and implement the ZFS volume on top of that on your Mac Pro. Latency might be a bit increased, but all in all your little remote storage controller has 1+GHz of horsepower and 1+GB of RAM

Edit: Oh and, if you're not interested in hacking it together yourself, you could buy a case from coraid themselves.
A 24-disk host will cost you $5k -- that's up to 48TB of storage at > 200MB/sec (several bonded gigabit controllers).
4-disk host = $2k, 15 = $4k.
If you want 10gbps controllers in their appliance it costs a bit more, but still very doable, and in return you get > 500MB/sec throughput.

What's your definition of high speed?

 

[teleromeo]

Very interesting thread. Please keep it updated. Also, to avoid other people from making other similar threads it would be a good idea to make it a sticky or to add a link to it in the buyers guide.

Personally, I hope that Apple does not wait until snow leopard is ready and introduces the new model as soon as possible. I really need a pro computer, I can wait for a few months but on the other hands the new Macbook Pro is very tempting.

 

[amoergosum]

Very interesting thread. Please keep it updated. Also, to avoid other people from making other similar threads it would be a good idea to make it a sticky or to add a link to it in the buyers guide.

Personally, I hope that Apple does not wait until snow leopard is ready and introduces the new model as soon as possible. I really need a pro computer, I can wait for a few months but on the other hands the new Macbook Pro is very tempting.

I actually hoped that Apple would release the Mac Pro this month.
It would be my first Mac Pro purchase. I wonder how long the wait is gonna be now...

 

[Dragonforce]

In the worst case (and it usually IS the worst case) around 6 more months ...

 

[nanofrog]

If RAM optimization is best in 3's, then how would you organize chips on the risers, if there will only be 2 of them?

Here's how it works:

Each riser has 6 slots. Those slots are in pairs. So you have 2 slots per channel. Possibly using alternating colors to distinguish the primary and secondary slots for each channel. (Look to some of the Core i7 boards available now).

All nice and dandy, but what are the gains for someone who's actually going to work with the future Mac Pro ?

If you look at the current Core i7 and how it compares to the Penryn parts, the evidence is clear.

In the case of a server/workstation, the gains should be more evident, given the level of memory access that these systems are designed for. Whether it's used in this fashion, only an individual user can answer.

RAM silly expensive as of now, and there is no substitute for size when it comes to RAM yet, crunch the numbers as much as you wish.

It's the nature of server memory. If additional memory is needed, you'd have to buy more. No different from the current model, as most members have upgraded through 3rd party sources.

However, the costs aren't as bad as the FB-DIMM when it first came out. So though it's not cheap, it will be a little less expensive this time around.

HDD performance will remain to be a bottleneck for years to come , new graphic cards sound better on paper, but might still lack proper drivers, and chances are no affordable GPU for 3D apps will be offered by Apple, as usual.

HDD's are a bottleneck, and have been with single drive solutions. But it's the result of a compromise, as the consumer desktop market is aimed at being cheap.

f you're running a workstation/server, you have a high speed, professional option. RAID. Not cheap, as speed never is, but people/companies pay for it if they actually need it.

Drivers and firmware are always a problem. Nothing is developed to a point it will absolutely work with anything, with absolutely no problems what so ever. It's just a sad truth of computer technology, and it seems to be getting worse IMO. Products are being released too prematurely.

Oh, and Intel is loosing it big time, really hurting right now. Not a good time to invest in new hardware, if I may say so.
R&D is likely to suffer first, along with quality control .

From my POV, it already is. Low margins and greed have a negative effect on R&D. No investments are being made while a current technology is milked for every cent possible. Then that company finds itself in deep **** with nothing to sell.

QC has been dropping for awhile. Failure rates have gotten higher than they should ever be. Seagate's 1TB & 1.5TB drives are a perfect example. Newegg's customer review sections are another hint. Do the math on DOA products as a minimum.

It's noticeable in other products as well, just look around.

I still don't buy into 100% of the SL hype. There is only so much that benefits from being multithreaded.

It will only be able to do so much, until apps developers manage to write code that can take advantage of the multi threading capabilities. The software tools aren't common/standardized yet, and still being developed last I checked.

Even then, some programs may not scale well. Particularly the simple ones.

 

[iMacmatician]

LOL, how did I miss this thread for so long?

The Nehalem Mac Pro will start at around $2,999*.

The past two (three if counting the 2007 one) Mac Pros have had BTO options that lower the price quite a bit (HD and/or CPU). I'm wondering if that'll happen with this one too. If the base model has 2.8 GHz and 3-channel RAM, maybe there could be 2.67 GHz and/or 2-channel RAM options to lower the price. If the HDD increases, then we may see the 320 GB remain as a cheaper option.

And about the RAM, is it true that in 2-channel mode the maximum speed that can be used is 1600 MHz, while in 3-channel mode the maximum speed is 1333 MHz?

The three graphics options will be: GeForce 9600GT or Radeon 4670, GTX 260, and the nVidia Quadro FX 4800 or 5800

I'm assuming there will be options for multiple 9600/4670 GPUs too.

500GB HDD standard

I was thinking 400 GB until I saw the $50 BTO option of the 500 GB in the Apple Store.

Things we won't see:
USB 3.0 (2010, people)
WiMax (just making sure you're paying attention)

Blu-ray.

(Point to be clarified upon: what are we hearing now in terms of date of production?)

Someone in the forums said by the end of March or something (it was either production or release, I think).

Television manufacturers are starting to make half-Super Hi-Vision TVs (4096x2160) on the highest-end already.

Isn't it 3840x2160, because 3840 is half of 7680? And that reminds me, where's the 40" (or whatever) 3840x2400 Cinema Display? It better be coming with the Nehalem Mac Pro.

Release date: Based on the pushing back of production dates and the build time required thereafter, late spring or WWDC 2009 are good dates for release.

The week before WWDC 2009 is another date to look for, if Apple has "bigger" stuff at WWDC, given that Apple's released products the week before major keynotes.

$2,999: Apple should be getting a better price than that of the 1,000 lot price, because they'll be ordering more. However, Apple is a for-profit company. This price is based on the assumption that Apple's profit margins push the per-consumer price of the chips back to their 1,000 lot price, and then adding the cost of the other components and case on top of the cheapest potential Gainestown chip.

I'm assuming that Apple did the same thing with the Harpertowns, so per-consumer Harpertown prices would be similar to their 1000-lot price. So then we can just use the 1000-lot prices to estimate Mac Pro price increases (since price increases/decreases are relative).

 

[Umbongo]

Some things on memory on the Tylersburg DP/Gainestown platform:

It will surely be some form of DDR3 PC3-10600 (1333MHz) memory. While the platform may support both ECC and non-ECC and Registered and Unbuffered memory I expect Apple to only reccomend and support ECC only. It may be the same case for Registered memory too.

If Registered and Unbuffered are both supported then I'd reccomend anyone who needs memory performance or large capacity to wait for extensive benchmarking to be done on both before they buy. Apple will probably only offer ECC Registered, but I'd hope they don't force it via firmware despite the number of threads we will get on Registered vs. Unbuffered. From my understanding users can benefit from both types depending on what they plan on doing, and not just on price.

There will be 1GB, 2GB and 4GB DIMMs available. I'd expect these to be the ones on offer from Apple and officially supported. 8GB DIMMs should also be out. It has been suggested prices won't be over extortionate when compared to similar capacity made up in smaller DIMMs, but I doubt that will be the case.

16GB DIMMs look like they will also be available but there appear to be at least two technologies in place to bring it in to play (same for 8GB). Hynix are using MetaRAM's technology to put more 1Gb chips on a DIMM (see picture). The last time they were demoed they were only runnning at 1066MHz, but they say they can improve it to 1333Mhz. They also say 32GB DIMMs could come with 2Gb chips.

Micron appear to have 2Gb chips comming and so should have 16GB 1333MHz DIMMs available using them. They already have 8GB DIMMs using 1Gb chips, so it seems feasible they can do it without over-sized DIMMs. There was suggestion that Micron and Samsung could adopt the MetaRAM technology and Intel are supporting them.

16GB DIMM:

 

[Tallest Skil]

LOL, how did I miss this thread for so long?

Yeah, how DID you?!

If the base model has 2.8 GHz and 3-channel RAM, maybe there could be 2.67 GHz and/or 2-channel RAM options to lower the price. If the HDD increases, then we may see the 320 GB remain as a cheaper option.

So... you're saying all four CPUs, with the 8-core 2.66 being equivalent to the 4-core option now?

And about the RAM, is it true that in 2-channel mode the maximum speed that can be used is 1600 MHz, while in 3-channel mode the maximum speed is 1333 MHz?

*shrug*

I'm assuming there will be options for multiple 9600/4670 GPUs too.

Adding that, thanks.

Blu-ray.

I thought by reading my Blu-ray section you'd get that. I'd better put it in the list...

Isn't it 3840x2160, because 3840 is half of 7680? And that reminds me, where's the 40" (or whatever) 3840x2400 Cinema Display? It better be coming with the Nehalem Mac Pro.

You'd think so, but no, it isn't. Someone needs to tell those TV manufacturers that they're building them wrong. I'm serious; they're doing the resolution I stated. Oh, but I also said "half-Super Hi-Vision", didn't I... Yeah, it's not "half", but there's no name for it and that's what they're doing, so...

And a 40" LED ACD would be, what, $3,000?

The week before WWDC 2009 is another date to look for, if Apple has "bigger" stuff at WWDC, given that Apple's released products the week before major keynotes.

Thought about it, given the last "Tuesday before" Mac Pro release, but that was because MacWorld was a consumer conference (yes, they did the PowerMac G5 then...), and they released the first one AT WWDC, remember?