Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
MP 7,1 Waiting for Mac Pro 7,1 A1991 (no more)
- Thread starter Mago
- Start date
-
- Tags
- macpro 2016
- Sort by reaction score
What exactly are you calling a "micro-11"? I don't remember Digital ever using that name.
I used a bunch of PDP-8 systems before we got our PDP-11/34 with a gob-smacking 96 KiB of RAM. The labs also had a few LSI-11 systems doing real-time work - but the only "networking" that we had depended on RT-11 device drivers that I wrote to let the RT-11 systems use 9600 baud serial lines to access virtual floppies on the huge 20 MB drive on the PDP-11/34.
We replaced the PDP-11/34 with a "baselevel 5" (pre-release field test) VAX-11/780 system with an unheard-of 512 KiB of RAM. (Our IBM 360 mainframe had 256 KiB.)
Then (after the Rainbows) I had a MicroVAX I at home and at work. A painfully slow system - but it let us "knock the socks off" with the MicroVAX II.
Last edited:
I have one of those in the closet. My 1st MacApparently it's been decided that this will be the new Mac Pro
I had the model up, the 7100/66 AV. Its little rubber feet eventually liquefied, and dripped onto the shelf below. Still got the motherboard in my collection of sculpture materials.
A few years after this model’s introduction I upgraded from a Mac Plus to a Power Computing Power Base 180. I used it for 7 years. Their cases were spartan but they were a much better deal than what Apple was offering to someone off the street. Those were the days of big educational discounts and the gray market.Apparently it's been decided that this will be the new Mac Pro
6100/66 was my first Mac as well. Nice machine while it was up to snuff. Another backed-themselves-into-a-corner design there, an expansion slot for which there were very, very, very few options (the 486 card is the only one I can remember actually being available). After that, a beige G3/266 tower…that was a real classic. Quick, expandable, not too big or heavy.
It's true that the official name was "microPDP-11/*," Aiden, but it's also true that everybody I knew at DEC always called it the "micro-11" first, and then if context didn't give the model number, "23" or "53" or "73" was appended. I think there might have been an "83" but by then I was in the VAX world and not paying attention.
For example, and I think I told you this in a PM a long time ago, once when I was doing a downtown race in Buffalo, not far from one of DEC's offices (where I knew everybody) my microPDP-11/23 had a failure and I rushed over to the DEC office and said "I need your micro-11," and they said "Sure," and I grabbed it, took it to the race site, opened the front, took out their disk, slid in mine, and had everything all up and running properly before the race started.
I do remember being at MIT and looking into a machine room where VAX 780/2 (? was that the model) with two processors was at work. Two processors! Great excitement. 1984. Another interesting big VAX sighting was at BBN (Bolt Beranek and Newman) where a friend was doing classified work on a 750 or 780 that was in a Faraday cage behind a door that could be locked from the inside; when you got through the door there was a curtain hiding the terminals. Air gapped, of course.
This is sooo off-topic right now, fellows.
I started my computer life with a Spectravideo at 80's. It cost something like 2999 finnish Marks (maybe something like 500 in euros, but it was at 80's remember). It was a great, great christmas present for me. Thank You dad and mom.
I programmed a couple of usable apps with microsoft basic. A game of not getting hit (duck and dive), a hidden line removal program for 3d surfaces (i'm proud of this one), and a 3-point gravitudinal stars gearing rounds of each other -program (very demanding one computiotinally).
I started my university life with a "Dec-system going down in one minute". It was a mainframe without sufficient resources. It was allways down. The system did always die as we loaded it too much with programming.
God, or Jobs or whoever helped, and we got these macintosh plus systems to do our Pascal programming exercises to a finish line. I did a basic finnish hashing program to do the hashing within a finnish word or words. The rules were quite simple, and I understood them easily. I got some help from a friend, because Pascal was not so easy for me. I was used to use microsoft basic. I had a braindamage because of that, they said.
I even learned how to use recursion. And I learned how to document my doings. I learned a lot from my friend at 80's.
Thank You Petri. Hope we meet again someday.
I started my computer life with a Spectravideo at 80's. It cost something like 2999 finnish Marks (maybe something like 500 in euros, but it was at 80's remember). It was a great, great christmas present for me. Thank You dad and mom.
I programmed a couple of usable apps with microsoft basic. A game of not getting hit (duck and dive), a hidden line removal program for 3d surfaces (i'm proud of this one), and a 3-point gravitudinal stars gearing rounds of each other -program (very demanding one computiotinally).
I started my university life with a "Dec-system going down in one minute". It was a mainframe without sufficient resources. It was allways down. The system did always die as we loaded it too much with programming.
God, or Jobs or whoever helped, and we got these macintosh plus systems to do our Pascal programming exercises to a finish line. I did a basic finnish hashing program to do the hashing within a finnish word or words. The rules were quite simple, and I understood them easily. I got some help from a friend, because Pascal was not so easy for me. I was used to use microsoft basic. I had a braindamage because of that, they said.
I even learned how to use recursion. And I learned how to document my doings. I learned a lot from my friend at 80's.
Thank You Petri. Hope we meet again someday.
Well we're probably still six-plus months out for Apple to announce the 7,1 Mac Pro so...
Quote:
"Longest gestation period
Elephants have the longest gestation period of all mammals. These gentle giants' pregnancies last for more than a year and a half. The average gestation period of an elephant is about 640 to 660 days, or roughly 95 weeks."
Let's see if Apple can get the new modular Mac Pro out the door, before 95 weeks is up, or not?
Counting from April 4, 2017 + 95 weeks, gives a potential release date of about January 30, 2019.
"Longest gestation period
Elephants have the longest gestation period of all mammals. These gentle giants' pregnancies last for more than a year and a half. The average gestation period of an elephant is about 640 to 660 days, or roughly 95 weeks."
Let's see if Apple can get the new modular Mac Pro out the door, before 95 weeks is up, or not?
Counting from April 4, 2017 + 95 weeks, gives a potential release date of about January 30, 2019.
...the III becomes a V.
Although, honestly, if the MP7,1 doesn't arrive in early 2018 Apple will have lost so much momentum in the Pro market that it won't matter how what its features are. Apple's Pro customer base will have migrated to other platforms.
And I'm using "Pro" in the high end content creation sense - of course a lawyer using a MacBook Air is also a "Pro".
So, the 30-odd weeks from June 2018 until January 2019 will make it worse than the 200-odd weeks from 2014 until 2018?
I thought it was an interesting theory, that Apple started feeling the loss of the pro market afer 3 years when the pros usually update their machines. Interesting, but hardly realistic as I can't believe all pros saved up until the 2013 release, then all bought at the same time, giving enough of a peak that it's noticeable 3 years later for the refresh (which is usually even more spread out than the original release peak).
I like the idea of a highly modular mac. I don't see how Apple could make an ARM-based mac that has lots of PCIe (does that even exist yet?) or HBM (licensed from AMD then?). So I'm quite certain there won't be an ARM-only mac. ARM as a co-processor, yes, nice. But not ARM as a main CPU.
There's plenty of room to turn an Intel based machine into something more modular. It should be possible to create a connector for x16 PCIe for a stackable pizza box scenario. But I don't know if that would be very flexible. PCIe is usually used point-to-point with dedicated PCIe channels for one peripheral (e.g. 16 lanes to the GPU). But a pizza-box like scenario would benefit from daisy-chaining or other flexibility. That requires an additional PCIe switch. GPU over a PCIe switch? It might be faster than over Thunderbolt, but not certain if it's optimal. If you have a mac pizza + SSD pizza + GPU pizza, then there will be bus contention and it just won't work very well.
Concluding, I think the mac pro 7.1 will be more modular, but in a more traditional sense of the word. Swappable memory, storage, GPU and CPU would be more than good enough.
That would be the VAX 11/782 which introduced asymmetric multiprocessing with the primary CPU performing all I/O operations and process scheduling while the second CPU was only used for compute.
The primary handled all kernel and interrupt code (ring 0). Rings 1, 2, and 3 could run on both processors.
(not-so)Happy long weekends debugging these rigs...
[doublepost=1511810389][/doublepost]
I think (and I hope so) the mMP will be the less innovative and more conservative Mac about introducing innovations like design, peripherals (tb kbd, face ID) it will focus on performance and unless its required by an future apple development it wont include anything groundbreaking.
Tell me about it - one task I had was to do a bunch of the drudge work to implement SMP so that later versions of VMS could run all 4 rings on all processors.
FWIW, one thing about the PBM configuration is that there's design trades to consider on the 'size' of the box. Cooling is one place that this crops up, as is also the box size if that is chosen to be standardized for all PBMs. For example, considering box height only, there will be components which will result in a box that is either "too thick" or "too thin" when the racking plan needs a uniform height (such as what appeared to be the case with Razor's project Christine).
There's some design history to learn from here, such as from "Half Height" and "Third Height" drives as a means to approach this without getting too many permutations/variations. The key question is the degree to which Apple will want to "perfect" things (1mm height variations) at the cost of its manufacturing have less standardized parts (equals higher costs). For example, a PBM functioning for data storage could be made to be tall enough for 3.5" drives and simply be willing to have "wasted space" for 2.5" HDDs/SSDs as a means of not having two PBM designs for data storage.
Or if Apple wants to put their billions where their mouth is, come up with a mini fridge (not nearly as large) like case. A way to keep the inside very cool without fans but condensation will not cause the internal items to go poof! Refrigerators are on 24/7 for years!
Well, it could be interesting if Apple decides to try using a Ranque-Hilsch Vortex Tube, as these are space-efficient for some applications (higher thermal densities) even though they can be larger overall (think of it as more allowing the air pump to be located further away from the heat source) and don't use the conventional gas-liquid chilling cycle (which can only break & leak fluids). In any event, the smart move on cooling would include (maintainable) filtration to keep dirt & dust out of the machine.
40? I would have just gotten my driver's license when you were born. Enjoy your youth while it lasts!