upgrading processors on new Mac Pro's

[pilotError]

Let's see - 8 core uses a far more efficient heat-dissipating solution that corresponds to more difficulty in cpu swapping. Could be:

1) double the heat generated in the same space requires a more efficient cooling solution -OR-

2) a vast conspiracy to prevent you from upgrading your cpus, something almost no one does in the first place.


Yeah, (2) makes a lot more sense.

You people frighten me.

Actually they use more cores instead of clock speed to keep the heat down. It uses the same amount of electricity +- ~ 20% for double the compute power. The chips are no hotter than the 4 or 5ghz behemoth's that IBM was pumping out. In fact they aren't much hotter than some of the high end dual core CPU's of a couple of years ago.

Enthusiasts upgrade their processors. Hobbyists upgrade their processors. College kids upgrade their processors. Pros don't. The vast majority of "pros" have IT staffs, IT budgets with all sorts of rules and limitations, and require warrantees. Most pros use their machines for business, deduct them by depreciation, and have no interest in marginal, unsupported, warrantyless upgrades.

Yes, a fraction of a percent do upgrade their processors. But millions of workstations have been sold by Sun, IBM, DEC, HP, SGI, all without upgradeable processors. No company I have ever worked for has upgraded processors in any of their boxes. It happens, but not often, and you are trying to make it a requirement (or at least an expectation) but it simply isn't one.

I have to agree here. Then again, I know that DEC/HP would upgrade your machines at the drop of a hat. For a fair price they would come in and swap the entire logic board if they had to. They were very big on customer service and bent over backward to keep you happy.

I'm a little split on Apple's need to lock down the hardware. The Mac Pro borders on Prosumer hardware.

I think what they did with the newest Mac Mini was petty. I've been keeping my Mac Mini / iMac up to speed with CPU swaps, but as others have commented, there's only a few of us (small percentage) that actually do it.

I was looking forward to the Mac Pro, as I would like to get one, but I think I'm going to wait until the next set of CPU's and see what hardware changes come about.

 

[polterdice]

It's looking like a no, see here:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/664724/

Post #560 on

Now it's looking like a yes. Dude doing the upgrade realized it wasn't working due to bent pins. Check out posts #619 and #623.

 

[Tesselator]

my purpose isn't to argue and sorry if you've already said, but in what line of work are you?

2D/3D CG, video editing, soundtrack and score composition and editing:
Hollywood feature film production (CG),
TV Commercials (all),
Corporate Promotional Videos (all),
Corporate Instructional Videos (all),
Game general production (all),
Music Videos (all).

Coding, design, and documentation:
CG tool and application development. (all)
Games (all)
Automobile (doc)
Electronic goods (doc)

And don't worry, there's a fine line between argument and discussion but I accept all as legitimate tools for learning - communication is kewl! It's all guud!

 

[cmaier]

Actually they use more cores instead of clock speed to keep the heat down. It uses the same amount of electricity +- ~ 20% for double the compute power. The chips are no hotter than the 4 or 5ghz behemoth's that IBM was pumping out. In fact they aren't much hotter than some of the high end dual core CPU's of a couple of years ago.



I have to agree here. Then again, I know that DEC/HP would upgrade your machines at the drop of a hat. For a fair price they would come in and swap the entire logic board if they had to. They were very big on customer service and bent over backward to keep you happy.

I'm a little split on Apple's need to lock down the hardware. The Mac Pro borders on Prosumer hardware.

I think what they did with the newest Mac Mini was petty. I've been keeping my Mac Mini / iMac up to speed with CPU swaps, but as others have commented, there's only a few of us (small percentage) that actually do it.

I was looking forward to the Mac Pro, as I would like to get one, but I think I'm going to wait until the next set of CPU's and see what hardware changes come about.

You're cheating At a given feature size, to double the compute power you either:

1) double the frequency, which quadruples the power

or

2) double the number of cores, which doubles the power (not 20% - if power increases only by 20% it's because the feature size got smaller or you aren't really doubling the compute power - i.e. both cores are not saturated).

or

3) double the IPC w/o doubling the cores (more pipelines, better branch prediction, trace caches, deeper reorder buffers, better scheduling, etc.) Increases power ?? %. (less than doubling the cores, though).

At AMD, we started the multi-core war because we couldn't keep up in the frequency war and didn't have the manpower or time for #3


note: when i say "power" i mean "heat" unless i preface it with "compute"

note 2: since the feature size halves every few years, it's not fair comparing today's quad cores to dual cores from a few years ago, heat-wise. It's not adding more cores that made it cooler. It's the shrink. Smaller features, thinner gates, less capacitance to charge and discharge and smaller voltage swings. Of course leakage current has gone way up, so idle power has gotten worse.