MP 7,1 Waiting for Mac Pro 7,1 A1991 (no more)

[Flint Ironstag]

Ok. Link me one that supports Thunderbolt graphics from the dGPU without a breakout PCIe card. Bonus points if you can find me one that supports Xeon.

There are boards out there that only support iGPU without the breakout card. But Xeon has no iGPU and that’s not very Pro.

The PC world has not done it which is why it’s not a piece of cake for Apple.

Damn, I can't find it at the moment but MacVidCards had a very interesting writeup a few years ago regarding the Xserve, mezzanine graphics, and how Apple could have implemented just such a setup. I seem to remember there were clues that lead him to think maybe this was a direction Apple was considering.

Can't find it though, may not even have been on this forum. Anyone else remember?

 

[singhs.apps]

Once intel frees up the thunderbolt spec next year, we can expect to see them on dGPUs. And perhaps 4x thunderbolt 3 port PCIe cards.

 

[spoonie1972]

I think it's going to be a SFF unit, not like a NUC, but bigger, but lighter than a traditional SFF. I predict it'll feature user upgradeable PCI-E SSD, RAM, and other neat features. Was the CPU upgradeable on the old Pros?

Oh yah. To the point where it handily out-cpu'd the trashcan by quite a price/performance metric.

IIRC, only the most expensive E5 xeon option is quicker than a pair of x5690's ?

This ignores the defecits of TB/Sata2/usb2/videocards etc, but most of those things are updatable through the (now older) PCIe bus.

 

[Mago]

Check This, comes from our old Friend DarkNetGuy: now he describes the Macintosh Pro -new (old) MP7.1 name-.

• 3 AMD Vega 64/ Vega20 GPUs later , Mezzanine Form Factor with liquid cooling, independent cooler/radiator for each GPU.
• Singe Socket AMD CPU 8 to 32 Cores Liquid cooled also.
  
• 128 GB ecc/non-ecc ram
• 2 NVMe PCIe X4
  
• 4 Thunderbolt 3
• 2 Thunderbolt 3 at Tb2 speed
• 8 USB 3.1 G2
• 2 10GB Lan
• Size: about 10x12x8 inches (pretty small for such powerful rig)

now the interesting part that worth to pin this 'prediction/leak':

Aluminum/Glass chassis, glass on the sides, aluminum on the frames/grill, 2 radiators in front 2 (DNG do not specify how many on top or front) on top, PSU (1200W) on the floor, the front and top resembles the cheese grater but on black aluminum no slots, just an power on switch like a pencil's eraser. The Glass Panels on the sides Shown a Giant Apple Logo. (no backlit logo, sorry)

Also pin the Name (this may be not a leak, just forum reading, as I noted Craig named it will proudly be named Macintosh at April's mea culpa talk)

(may someone imagine it on 3D Studio ? at least look interesting very cool).

Modular? Yes for Apple production lines, no one could replace a **** on this as expected.

To be priced from 2500 to 9000$ 8-32 cores 16-128gb ram, 512-4TB SSD. Sinlge Vega 56 (12GB) to triple Vega 64(16GB).

Vega 20 Compute Gpu Option Available later post WWDC, Availability April or August 2018.

Full Loaded the Macintosh Pro (~10,000$) to offer 128 GB Ram, 3x Vega 64 GPU, 32 Cores CPU, 4TB SSD. (who said: take may money ?)
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No Chinese manufacturer has a ready to go design that does PCI-E GPUs and Thunderbolt in a package Apple would accept.

The upgrade can Mac Pro idea seems more realistic than this mess.

Please Read my previous post about DNG leak, it changes everything, while i dont give him full thrust, at least has some hits on record, as the TouchBar, the iMac Pro etc.

About your comment, worth to say, Gigabyte a major PC MB manufacturer is selling X399 (amd) and X299(intel) both having on board TB3 (yes the AMD MB too) both having a separate pin header for dGPU feeding TB3 chipset, the only bad thing is to date those TB3 are disabled and Gigabyte do not mention when bios enable and which GPUs will be compatible with this pin header.

Also I'd like to mention Intel's NUC SkullCanyon has TB3 on board and few mini-PC from Zotac also have TB3, both fully capables to drive 5K 60p HDR displays.

 

[AidenShaw]

128 GB ecc/non-ecc ram

DNG better be wrong on this one.

The MP6,1 works with 128 GiB (only 64 GiB officially supported, but 32 GiB DIMMs do work).

The new HP Z4 supports 256 GiB, the new Z6 supports 384 GiB, and the new Z8 an awesome 1.5 TiB at intro and 3 TiB in 2018Q1.

Or maybe one of the Amigos will update the urban legend of "nobody needs more than 640 KiB" to "nobody needs more than 128 GiB".

 

[Mago]

Aluminum/Glass chassis, glass on the sides,

This is the harder to believe from this leak, as those glass-sandwich cases are trendy, Apple makes trends not follows others trends. otherwise very feasible.

Note same configuration its possible with Intel Xeon-W (same as the iMacPro) but one gpu will run at 8X, and CPUs options are quite more expensive, lets see.
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Or maybe one of the Amigos will update the urban legend of "nobody needs more than 640 KiB" to "nobody needs more than 128 GiB".

I fear DNG is rigth this time....

 

[CWallace]

Well we are talking workstation, not server, so I can understand why Apple may feel Terabyte RAM configurations are unnecessary.

I expect more outrage / concern over the AMD-only GPUs and using Ryzen/Epyc instead of Xeon (though 1P Epyc appears to have a fair bit more PCI lanes than 1P Xeon as I understand it).

 

[Mago]

using Epyc

not Epyc, but ThreadRippers, Epyc has 128PCIe lines (so no need to cut 3rd TB3 header to half speed) also Epyc comes from 16 to 32 cores, these comes from 8 to 32 cores, DNG didn't specify Epyc, just AMD CPU. (at least is not an ARM cpu)

 

[AidenShaw]

Well we are talking workstation, not server, so I can understand why Apple may feel Terabyte RAM configurations are unnecessary.

The only things certain in life are "death", "taxes", and "applications will want more RAM".

Merely matching the RAM capacity of the five year old MP6,1 isn't going to be well received.

 

[zack123]

Threadripper only goes to 16 cores.

 

[CWallace]

not Epyc, but ThreadRippers, Epyc has 128PCIe lines (so no need to cut 3rd TB3 header to half speed) also Epyc comes from 16 to 32 cores, these comes from 8 to 32 cores, DNG didn't specify Epyc, just AMD CPU. (at least is not an ARM cpu)

Epyc 7251 is an 8 core CPU for 2P configurations so the Macintosh Pro might be available in 1P and 2P configurations.

And Ryzen Threadripper does not currently offer an option above 16 cores, though a 32 core Engineering Sample is known to exist.

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The only things certain in life are "death", "taxes", and "applications will want more RAM".

Merely matching the RAM capacity of the five year old MP6,1 isn't going to be well received.

How much RAM can Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro realistically make use of? (If the MP 7.1 is really AMD GPU only, then one assumes that it will be designed around Apple's Pro Apps since Adobe's apps work better with nVidia GPUs per comments on this forum).

 

[AidenShaw]

How much RAM can Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro realistically make use of?

Good point, if the MP7,1 is only a better LP and FCP appliance than the MP6,1.

But the most damning criticisms of the MP6,1 were that it was a decent FCP appliance, but not much else.

I added $20K of RAM to an ML-training system because of "out of memory" errors with *only* 1 TiB of RAM. That (2 TiB total) fixed the errors, but we're watching things grow and wondering if the next jump need to be 4 TiB instead of 3 TiB.

The ML/VR/AR future will need lots of RAM. Apple needs to look beyond editing cat videos for YouTube.

 

[Mago]

The ML/VR/AR future will need lots of RAM. Apple needs to look beyond editing cat videos for YouTube.

Hey Craig Federerighi HairForceONE take note on this...

 

[CWallace]

I added $20K of RAM to an ML-training system because of "out of memory" errors with *only* 1 TiB of RAM. That (2 TiB total) fixed the errors, but we're watching things grow and wondering if the next jump need to be 4 TiB instead of 3 TiB.

I am going to hazard a guess that is a 2P system with high core counts?

The ML/VR/AR future will need lots of RAM. Apple needs to look beyond editing cat videos for YouTube.

Well if Apple is being real with the "modular" aspect of the Macintosh Pro, then this might be the initial configuration because it addresses the most immediate need - replacing the MP 6.1's slow CPU and GPU with faster models.

Future configurations could then offer multiple CPUs and higher RAM densities (Epyc supports 8 channels to Ryzen's 4).

 

[Mago]

Epyc 7251 is an 8 core CPU for 2P configurations so the Macintosh Pro might be available in 1P and 2P configurations.

It's possible, even I noted the 3rd TB3 header to run a half speed due pcie lines is not accurate the AMD X399 chipset has 60+4 PCIe, So this 3x GPU MP requires Epyc to at least 70PCIe lines (not including WiFi/Bt), so with 128PCIe lines it could have 3-4 NVMe 4 full spees TB3, even a 4th GPU and still have plety spare PCIe lines, of course EPYC is expensive (while a bit cheaper than latest XEON-W).

 

[William Payne]

I think we are just in the realms of guessing now. No matter what had been "leaked" we really have no idea.

 

[AidenShaw]

I am going to hazard a guess that is a 2P system with high core counts?

No.

But the point is that the application needs a huge working set - this isn't directly related to the number of cores.

If touching some of the working set requires faulting pages off disk - the application runs like molasses. With the same number of cores - if the data is in RAM it's fast. Fault - slow. Resident - fast.

It's an ML training app. Want your self-driving flying Iphone? A lot of ML training needed. Want to train on HPE systems running Linux, or do it 1000 times slower on Apple OSX systems?

 

[CWallace]

If touching some of the working set requires faulting pages off disk - the application runs like molasses. With the same number of cores - if the data is in RAM it's fast. Fault - slow. Resident - fast.

Ryzen is limited to 128GB so that could be why DarkNetGuy says the Macintosh Pro will have 128GB. So if Apple wants more, that means Epyc (2TB per socket) or Xeon SP (1.5TB per socket) / Xeon W (512GB).

 

[AidenShaw]

Ryzen is limited to 128GB so that could be why DarkNetGuy says the Macintosh Pro will have 128GB. So if Apple wants more, that means Epyc (2TB per socket) or Xeon SP (1.5TB per socket) / Xeon W (512GB).

That sucks for Ryzen.

Although I doubt that Apple will jeopardize their "special" relationship with Intel by using cheap CPUs. Especially if the cheap CPUs only support the RAM of five year old Intel CPUs.

So little to gain, so much to lose.

 

[mattspace]

Check This, comes from our old Friend DarkNetGuy:

• 3 AMD Vega 64/ Vega20 GPUs later , Mezzanine Form Factor with liquid cooling, independent cooler/radiator for each GPU.
• Singe Socket AMD CPU 8 to 32 Cores Liquid cooled also.
  
• 128 GB ecc/non-ecc ram
• 2 NVMe PCIe X4
  
• 4 Thunderbolt 3
• 2 Thunderbolt 3 at Tb2 speed
• 8 USB 3.1 G2
• 2 10GB Lan
• Size: about 10x12x8 inches (pretty small for such powerful rig)

*facepalm*

 

[William Payne]

That sucks for Ryzen.

Although I doubt that Apple will jeopardize their "special" relationship with Intel by using cheap CPUs. Especially if the cheap CPUs only support the RAM of five year old Intel CPUs.

So little to gain, so much to lose.

I am with Aiden on this, I highly doubt Apple will leave Intel. Even with Intel allowing others to use thunderbolt, Apple has been their biggest thunderbolt supporter. I highly doubt Apple will just abandon them.

If I am wrong then I am wrong. We will see.

 

[Aldaris]

I’m not sure it’s abandoning them, it’s one product that given it’s attention in recent years really isn’t a priority for Apple. I am open to anything to update or at least show there is something left in a Mac Pro desktop with decent performance. I’ve never been an AIO fan, and will likely go to Boxx or HP Z if 7,1 is complete crap. I really don’t want to leave the macOS environment, but doing arch models and renderings I want something with some ‘umpf’ and it’s completly possible that the iMac pro could be a solution but I really think Apple needs to hit it out of the Park.

 

[PortableLover]

128 max is way too low. Apple needs to offer much more. Imo they need to make something that matches the new hp z8 series. That machine supports 3Tb memory. What is apples excuse?

 

[Aldaris]

Apple has no excuse.

All Tim needs is an iMac and an iPad Pro and a watch... why would anyone else need anything more powerful?

I remember the pics of Steve’s desk with a G5 sitting there, messy as hell... then there are the pics of Tim’s desk... everything in its place with nothing on the desk...

I’d rather have the genius of Steve challenging and pushing then someone settteling for the status quo.

 

[CWallace]

128 max is way too low. Apple needs to offer much more. Imo they need to make something that matches the new hp z8 series. That machine supports 3Tb memory. What is apples excuse?

Well if the thing is using Ryzen CPUs, AMD is their excuse since that platform can only support 128GB.