Thunderbird
macrumors 6502a
Same here. I gave myself a deadline of this summer. Looks like there'll be no new nMP anytime soon.
Off to order parts for my workstation PC.
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Will there be a new Mac Pro in 2015?
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Same here. I gave myself a deadline of this summer. Looks like there'll be no new nMP anytime soon.
Off to order parts for my workstation PC.
Broadwell doesn't apply for Mac Pro's but Haswell-EP/EX and Haswell-E, Broadwell don't include Xeon, or 6 cores i7 Yet.
Maybe the Issue with Thunderbolt 3/ USB-C is delaying the nMP update
Apple is a product design company now. PC users are now in the "post-Apple era." Time for us to let it go.
I ordered a 6 core model last week for a project and was biting my nails this morning about a new one, thank god it wasnt announced. Im expecting late 2015/early 2016 refresh as well.
See you later guys! don't let the door hit you on the way out. Have fun tinkering with drivers, fan noise, power supplies, and all the other quirks of DIY machines that hinder you from actually getting work done.
spoken like someone who hasnt built a PC in the last 10 years....
seriously, that stuff was a problem in the mid 00s...
fan noise? you've obviously never heard of Noctua (surprised Apple hasnt bought them yet)... the last PC i built makes about as much noise under load as an iMac does under load.
power supplies? my FANLESS Seasonic power supply has a 7 year warranty. Name an Apple product that has a warranty that long.
drivers? its called class compliance. again, you clearly havent built a machine since the 00s.
seriously, that stuff was a problem in the mid 00s...
fan noise? you've obviously never heard of Noctua (surprised Apple hasnt bought them yet)... the last PC i built makes about as much noise under load as an iMac does under load.
power supplies? my FANLESS Seasonic power supply has a 7 year warranty. Name an Apple product that has a warranty that long.
drivers? its called class compliance. again, you clearly havent built a machine since the 00s.
The other major blocking issue is that there isn't room for 4 more DIMMs slots even if could convert another one of the 3 "thermal core" boards to CPU. The design has a significant amount of embedded ( soldered) RAM assumption built into it. If a 2017 Xeon E5 16xx v5 (Skylake ) era CPU package had some eRAM built into the package I would not be surprised. It would match the HBM track the GPUs of that era would also be on. The RAM DIMMs are the next highest layer up from that.
That's where the Mac Pro design is going toward.
Xeon E5 26xx v4 is probably going to max out around 22 cores ( for the money is no object option at the top). That is almost double the current 12 ( what two CPU packages would 'buy' with v2 technology. ).
The folks who critically need 20 cores can do it with one CPU package. The pool of users being "left out" because the core count isn't high enough is shrinking over time. Enable the core count on the GPGPUs and merge the RAM spaces into one NUMA set and that group shrinks even faster.
Intel marketing over promised. Technically, hotplugging is part of the PCIe standard. PCIe drivers could optionally cover it. Those that did have few problems adjusting to the Thunderbolt context. The expectation mismatch though is that developers often skip optional stuff in standards. That amount of already existing drivers that were going to work with zero additions was small. There was a substantive set of drivers that would "happen to work" if just avoided the corner cases they ignored. Better expectation setting should have been that most driver developers wouldn't have to start from scratch. Some folks like GPU drivers not only ignored the optional stuff but explicit presumed it would not be used at all. That's why eGPU were not put on the table early by Intel even in the "oh it will just work" context were using for other PCIe driver adjustments.
The one "cable/port" to rule them all is another one of those "don't look at the man behind the curtain" statements where things are never going to be quite that simple.
Not likely at all. As Apple just announced with OS X 10.11 the direction they are going is to get more out of those 2 GPUs. OS X picking up Metal which takes load off the CPUs and puts substantially more load on the GPGPUs. That's the future; more shifting of the load via the standard core libraries so wide range of apps simply just move forward using the standard APIs. There are a bunch of folks in denial about it but that is where the industry and Apple are going. "that future may not come" is even more arm flapping denial than it was a 1.5 years ago.
The process shrinks that Intel is doing is putting what used to be the two CPU package set up into a single package. If want the historic "two CPU" system then the future one Xeon E5 class package is what delivers that. The current/future package set up is really a two level NUMA set up. OS X doesn't even highly adapt to just single level NUMA, the double is far past the complexity Apple is going to tackle.
Gutting the GPU doesn't particular do anything good for the basic design constraints of the current device.
If looking for just dumping the GPGPU aspect then just dropping the 2nd GPU would make the system optionally cheaper. That doesn't necessarily make room for a second CPU and another quad set of DIMMs ( another CPU without more memory doesn't really work well. )
The GPGPUs don't just do graphics. What Apple is tardy on is getting the expose to the general computation resources out to more apps. They aren't at the forefront of OpenCL as much as they should be at this point.
Metal is a step forward, but they still aren't delivering what the this new Mac Pro design really needs in terms of software.
The best Apple could come up with is Split Screen multitasking that only works on one device and a few OS updates. Music streaming - what a con that has and always will be. I cannot understand its popularity. Will the dudes that use it stop eating up precious bandwidth and put music you love on your device already!
They really have gone "soft" (ware) in the head.
Im not sure if a New Mac Pro is something we should look forward to if it ever happens.
They really have gone "soft" (ware) in the head.
Im not sure if a New Mac Pro is something we should look forward to if it ever happens.
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It is a developers conference. It is not required or suppose to be a hardware dog and pony show. From a real developer perspective what gets covered in the keynote is more glossy overview than real substance as to what the vast majority of engineering work hours went into. Although there are lots of developers physically present in the audience the majority of the WWDC keynote is not aimed at them.
If Apple has put major work into fixing what was broken and 'Half baked" implemented then it isn't soft in the head. That is what they have been missing more of in the last iteration than new "insanely great slideware and demo" features.
If the iPad Pro rumors are on track, the Split Screen and greatly improved external keyboard suppose are going to be a big money maker. They just didn't show the hardware that does the major leverage of it. IMHO is pokes more holes in the "OS X is moving to ARM" theories. iOS is a player all by itself. It got the bulk of the stage time at the keynote. There will be more contention between high level iOS devices and low level OS X devices but the space that top end laptops and top end desktop live in with OS X is pretty much different.
OS X without a track pad though is going to get more limited though. ( Force touch external track pad should be in the works somewhere in Apple. )
OS X moving away from OpenGL as the foundational graphics layer is a major move. ( how much overlap there is with Metal and Vulkan (glnext) is something that they should have talked more about... or will in the future. )
Great points deconstruct. CPUs are great for serial tasks and GPUs are great at parallel tasks. Might as well put in 2 GPUs and then make use of the high core count CPUs intel is coming out with for anything that can't be run on GPUs.
I am hoping to see reports from developers who install the OS X 10.11 beta that the built in apps that use Metal are making better use of multiple GPUs.
I saw a lot of bells and whistles, and I know they are meant to make things easier, but to me they add another layer of UI functions to memorize. One thing I can say for sure is that Apple makes really good commercials/videos. They make music really hip, cool and sexy.
Hey maybe next year everybody will be able to view HD movies on their Apple watch? Something to look forward to. BTW thats my idea and I want royalties if Apple pinches it. 😉
I must admit Metal looks pretty exciting on the GPU front.
I must admit Metal looks pretty exciting on the GPU front.
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flat five
macrumors 603
you say that as if the designers were like "we really need more than one cpu but we can't because it will ruin our aesthetic vision"
don't you think apple could of designed a dual socket / dual gpu computer that was still much smaller and sleeker(?) than the past macpro. something like 4x smaller instead of 8x smaller.. 4x smaller is still an impressive accomplishment.
it seems more likely the computer was designed around a single cpu/dual gpu concept from the getgo.. the actual aesthetic came later in the process.
apple knows intel's roadmap. they don't have to guess like we do. when v3 comes out with the option for 24cpu cores, will that satisfy you? or will you then claim you need 48 cores? do you have any idea how much a machine like that would cost? would you or anybody seeking a personal computer be willing to pay that price? are you saying if nmp had dual-12core, you would buy one?
in 5 years, do you realize how backwards it's going to seem for software to rely on multiple cpu cores for parallel processing when there are thousands of cores available in a gpu which can accomplish the same thing?
I'm sorry but your views on this stuff will change eventually.. you just can't see it yet is all.
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I was really hoping for a Mac Pro or a Retina iMac Refresh at WWDC but oh well, guess I will be using that 4k on a custom water cooled graphic design and gaming beast... unless they release one before I am done saving my money (Nvidia Titans Would be great in a Mac Pro) 😛
Absolutely !
Which is why it is especially ridiculous that they only offer 2011 era GPUs in nMP, and there are no upgrades from the ancient things. (courtesy of that lovely "design")
Maybe Apple think somehow Metal will go some way to solving all their "bad" GPU decisions!
Great software will never solve crappy (old) hardware.
Great software will never solve crappy (old) hardware.
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Well after studying this thread for a number of weeks, I went ahead and bought a nMP 6 core with 1 TB flash storage and 64 gigs of RAM a week ago. I suspected that they would not have an upgraded version at the developers conference.
Should have it in a couple of weeks.
Maybe it isn't as cutting edge as is available but better than the 2011 iMac I have now. And it still is the best Mac Pro available in the config I wanted.
So overall I'm happy.
Should have it in a couple of weeks.
Maybe it isn't as cutting edge as is available but better than the 2011 iMac I have now. And it still is the best Mac Pro available in the config I wanted.
So overall I'm happy.
flat five
macrumors 603
to most (and i mean most!) people, those gpus are from 2013.. not even two years old.. maybe a case of ignorance is bliss or maybe an example of bleeding edge technology isn't really bleeding edge.. in the big picture, the nmp is the most advanced desktop computer we've made to date.. (as in-- up til now or maybe the imac, all of the 'designs' have be "fill a box with components".. exactly the same as the first computers and all that have followed.. with the nmp, it's pretty obvious the old concept was abandoned and the designers thought things through a little more.. like it or not)
the reality is, a 2014 gpu is going to provide you with a nearly identical experience as one from 2012.. in a blind taste test, i highly doubt anybody here will be able to distinguish high end gpus that are 3 years apart in age in all but the most particular of circumstances.. technology moves in blocks of decades.. not years and certainly not months.
but someone like you who knows way more about and are more passionate about gpus than most (by far!) people.. a couple of years seems like a much longer time regarding technological advancement than it really is.
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that stream aside..
apple designed a couple of completely new components than what we're used to seeing (ie- the gpus).. i get it that if they just used the same standard components which everybody else uses and are widely available then the nmp would have been immediately upgradeable.. considering they have gone with a different route for cooling the gpus than standard-- which required a custom component, it doesn't seem to make much sense for them to release upgrade parts alongside the initial release.. for one, nobody would buy them.. there are only 3 cards made for the nmp so far.. it's as if you expected apple to introduce the nmp with it's three cards then also release 10 other gpus to be sold individually as parts.. like they did with the watch bands?
point is about you saying there are no upgrades etc.. there are only three gpus.. what are you seriously expecting from them? release new gpu upgrades to a brand new computer 9 months after it was launched?
This probably means nothing but I've been monitoring the stock of refurb Mac Pros on the Apple Store (Canada). For quite a while there have been three models available but as of yesterday there are seven models ranging from the base right up to a 12 core model for over $8000. Perhaps a sign a refresh is coming?
Redneck1089
macrumors 65816
Perhaps, but I doubt it. I think if we see a refresh it will be a very minor one -- maybe a boost in CPU's, for example. Apple did this a few years back with the classic Mac Pro; new technology was around the concern but wasn't ready for prime time, and they did a small update simply because the computer hadn't been upgraded in over two years.
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