2015 nMP (7,1) Proposed Feature Wish List

[scottrichardson]

One wonders whether Apple could fit TWO CPU sockets into the small case IF the Haswell XEONs are lower power and cooler than the current IvyBridge XEONS?

I'm sure it would help win back some of the folk who feel hard done by through the lack of a 2nd socket?

My wish list would be:

RAM that runs at over 2000Mhz
Dual PCI SSD running in RAID 0 or RAID 1 (faster, or more secure)
Faster GPUs, a bit of a no brainer.
Faster CPU's - I'd actually like to see faster GHz not just a few extra cores.
Keyboard and Mouse and Trackpad included, seriously?

 

[wallysb01]

How about a $1,999 entry level price tag?

I think a price drop is probable, but not that far. $2499 maybe

 

[flat five]

One wonders whether Apple could fit TWO CPU sockets into the small case IF the Haswell XEONs are lower power and cooler than the current IvyBridge XEONS?

it almost 100% would have to happen in the same place as the current cpu..

the core isn't equilateral.. its more like a square which has been cut in half diagonally and the cpu is on the cutline.. it's wider than the gpus and i would assume it will capture more heat..

--which is maybe a case against the earlier claim of 100%? maybe it makes more sense, heat wise, to put each cpu where the gpus are then the gpus (or gpu) on the wide plate? at that point though, you start messing with the ssd
and ram so those need considered too now.. the design does appear to be modular like this to an extent but you may encounter some really tricky situations in order to get certain arrangements in there which still function well.

anyway, back to the picture -or- the most likely to be considered first version. the problem with the way the picture has the cpus arranged is that the whole thing is ultimately moving heat upwards so putting a cpu above a cpu is probably not too smart.. not sure if they could go side by side but possibly offset to the left&right so they sit diagonally to each other?

the ram though.. assuming you want something like 256gb, would probably have to be 4x64 in order to fit..

not sure what would happen with the power supply but probably some further innovations would be required from intel and amd as well as apple needing to further increase psu efficiency.

dunno.. sounds kind of tough but at this point.. i wouldn't say it's impossible.


[EDIT]-- oh wait.. that wouldn't work.. there are only 4 holes going into the core here and the picture needs 8 screw holes..
that probably brings up some serious heating issues.. either the board has to get something extra special happening to it or this idea is pretty much dead without needing to start putting new holes in the core.. but it's sorta more fun to try the exercise without modifying things other than ram/ssd/gpu/cpu.. at least at first.

 

[JesterJJZ]

Second CPU and second SSD are at the top of my list. My minimum requirement for me to ever get another MacPro.

 

[theSeb]

Second CPU and second SSD are at the top of my list. My minimum requirement for me to ever get another MacPro.

The single CPU 12 core is faster than your dual CPU 12 core.

 

[cinealta]

Honestly, I would expect the starting processor to be a 6-core.

Yes, Intel is expected to nix the 4-core in favor of 6- & 8-cores.

RAM that runs at over 2000Mhz

Yes, DDR4 should run at 2,133Mhz.

 

[Freida]

The single CPU 12 core is faster than your dual CPU 12 core.

You are missing two points:

1) His 2x6 is way cheaper
2) He has dual sockets so if the nMP had the same he could get 2x12 which for rendering etc. is pretty much DOUBLE the performance.

Until software gets benefits from GPU then I will stay away from this nMP although I love it a lot

 

[Micky Do]

Although it hasn't been physically released, the specs for the 2013 nMP are already out. I thought we could start a running wish list of features for a proposed 2015 7,1 nMP (v2). I will start:

- 8-core Intel Haswell-EP CPU with 20Mb L3 cache, Wellsburg (X99) chipset & 40 lane PCIe 3.0
- 1Tb PCIe SSD
- DDR4 RAM
- 10 Gbs USB 3.0
- 100Gb ethernet
- 802.11a(d) wifi
- HDMI 2.0
- quieter fan with magnetic ball-bearings & fiberglass blades (<8dBA at idle)
- dual D900 GPUs (or equivalent to > 12Gb GDDR6, 3,072 stream processors, 512 bit wide memory bus, 396 Gb/sec bandwidth etc)

Edits to original wish list based on suggestions:
- downgraded to 10 Gb ethernet
- retain ball-bearingless fan
- 10Gbs USB 3.1 with smaller connector & 100 watts power

Why? What do you want to do with the thing?

 

[stefmesman]

You are missing two points:

1) His 2x6 is way cheaper
2) He has dual sockets so if the nMP had the same he could get 2x12 which for rendering etc. is pretty much DOUBLE the performance.

Until software gets benefits from GPU then I will stay away from this nMP although I love it a lot

But a 12 x2 will be 4 times more expensive for double the 6x2 speed

 

[Freida]

But a 12 x2 will be 4 times more expensive for double the 6x2 speed

yes, of course but it would be an option for those that need it

 

[stefmesman]

yes, of course but it would be an option for those that need it

Those who need such power and have such budget are better of with an render farm. Imho.

There are only so little usages where u need raw power on every moment everyday.

 

[ender78]

As far as I know, no 10G Ethernet Port can throttle down to 1G, it only works at
10G. This means that about 99% of the user community would be unable to connect the machine to their network. I work in the network field and no one is running 10G to the desktop. Its too expensive. Go into Best Buy or the Apple Store and try to buy a 10G switch.

 

[beaker7]

As far as I know, no 10G Ethernet Port can throttle down to 1G, it only works at
10G. This means that about 99% of the user community would be unable to connect the machine to their network.

That's not even a little bit true. All 10Gbase-T ports auto negotiate down to at least 1 Gb. That is the whole point.

Take the x540 chipset from a little company called Intel, for example. Runs on Cat 6 1Gb no problem. We are running our infrastructure off these cards.

----------

There are only so little usages where I need raw power on every moment everyday.

There you go, fixed it for you.

 

[ender78]

That's not even a little bit true. All 10Gbase-T ports auto negotiate down to at least 1 Gb. That is the whole point.

Take the x540 chipset from a little company called Intel, for example. Runs on Cat 6 1Gb no problem. We are running our infrastructure off these cards.

My bad, we run 10G on optical exclusively and those optics dont throttle down. My note about cost of switches still stands.

 

[beaker7]

My bad, we run 10G on optical exclusively and those optics dont throttle down. My note about cost of switches still stands.

Yeh true but no way anyone would put optical on a motherboard natively. If it happens it would assuredly be copper.

True on the switching. But someone buying switches from Best Buy doesn't need 10G anyway.

 

[stefmesman]

That's not even a little bit true. All 10Gbase-T ports auto negotiate down to at least 1 Gb. That is the whole point.

Take the x540 chipset from a little company called Intel, for example. Runs on Cat 6 1Gb no problem. We are running our infrastructure off these cards.

----------



There you go, fixed it for you.

Ha, nice.. But that was not my question, what proffesion that needs 12x2 cpu's isnt better of with a render farm cost wise?

I work in the vfx industry and everything goes on render farm. Rendering locally is only for preview. And even previews are mostly rendered on the farm.

Im not stating there is no such profession. Just curious.

 

[beaker7]

Ha, nice.. But that was not my question, what proffesion that needs 12x2 cpu's isnt better of with a render farm cost wise?

I work in the vfx industry and everything goes on render farm. Rendering locally is only for preview. And even previews are mostly rendered on the farm.

Im not stating there is no such profession. Just curious.

My company does similar things. Product design and some vfx. We use a render farm, sure, but most of the designers are on 2P workstations. Iterative previews are faster, more memory, etc. Computer hardware is the cheapest part of our business so it makes sense.

 

[Michael73]

A nMP (7,1) won't happen soon, here's why...

I think most of us will acknowledge that the MacPro market is small when compared to the rest of Apple's business lines so there's already less of an economic incentive to throw resources at it than even say, an iMac whose own purchase numbers have dwindled in recent years versus portables. And this is despite healthy profit margins on both these products.

Next, they're already using the talking point that, "this is the machine for the next 10 years." If that's the case (which is a stretch, of course, but 4-5 years is easily doable), then Apple is going to need to make a strong case for upgrading.

So, the admittedly small market has now been fractured. Some want the "cheese grater" for internal expandability while others either don't need the external expansion model of the nMP or are willing to live with it. Because of the new radical design you've already lost some potential purchasers who went out and snapped up the last of the 5,1s or 4,1s and will mod them to milk more years from the physical design…if they ever move over to the nMP design at all.

IMHO, all this adds up to a refresh cycle that will probably be around the 2 year mark. The nMP is for all intents and purposes a 2014 vintage machine so I would think that in a best case scenario they unveil something at WWDC in 2015 and release it at the end of that year if not, early 2016.

 

[Cubemmal]

it almost 100% would have to happen in the same place as the current cpu..
...
the core isn't equilateral.. its more like a square which has been cut in half diagonally and the cpu is on the cutline..

The CPU gets the broadest face, and gets twice the cooling fin attachments as either GPU which each get half. If they did such a thing they'd have to put it there, assuming there's enough room with the support logic, which I doubt there is, and assuming it can take the thermal load, which I also doubt.

Apple has dropped the second CPU, if you want 12 cores, you can still get them, but it has to come in one cpu.

 

[deconstruct60]

Although it hasn't been physically released, the specs for the 2013 nMP are already out. I thought we could start a running wish list of features for a proposed 2015 7,1 nMP (v2).

Might want to find out what does/doesn't work so well in the 2013 model before seriously starting a wish list. If primarily asking for something that the current one doesn't do well it isn't likely it is going to get fixed in the next iteration if there is a major disconnect between Apple's current plans and these updates.

- 8-core Intel Haswell-EP CPU with 20Mb L3 cache, Wellsburg (X99) chipset & 40 lane PCIe 3.0
...
- 802.11a(d) wifi
....
Edits to original wish list based on suggestions:
- downgraded to 10 Gb ethernet
.,..
- 10Gbs USB 3.1 with smaller connector & 100 watts power

Has problems because there is not enough infrastructure bandwidth for all of that and the nominal 3 Thunderbolt controllers present along with the SSD.

USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt aren't the same in end usages but they do compete for the same limited resources. i don't see Apple being a early adopter for USB 3.1. Far more likely is that Apple is going to leverage to Wellsburg chipset's USB 3.0 to provision the same sockets as 2013 Mac Pro has and get to save/reallocate some space/bandwidth for something else.

The USB 3.0 discrete controllers have been x1 PCI-e v2.0 consumers. 3.1 is going to be more than that. If rolls in at x2 PCI-e v.2.0 then more than the old 3.0 controllers that the chipset absorbed but still not much head room.

Nevermind that new Mac Pro doesn't have an extra 50-100W to spare for external devices.

Dual 10GbE would be big PCI-e lane consumers also that there is a somewhat a shortage of. One 10GbE and one 1GbE port would be a better fit but not sure Apple's OCD will allow them to go asymmetric. Perhaps because they physically look the same.

I suspect Apple is going to ask for a Wellsburg variant that dumps SATA ports for additional PCI-e lanes. Or some way of boosting the PCi-e v2.0 lane count. But that is far more to take he pressure off the lane oversubscription the current design has more so than piling on with additional x2-x4 lane consumers.

For the market that Apple is targeting though DAS/NAS/SAN for external storage at least one 10GbE port would probably be best move. 10GbE isn't on high growth now, but it will be 2015-2017 time frame by the time this next Mac Pro goes through v3 (Haswell ) and v4 (Broadwell ) shared board design.

802.11a(d) is another potential multi PCI-e lane consumer but I have real doubts whether even 802.11ac works well in this new container, let alone another antenna and another whole class of frequency ranges. I suspect a(d) is going to play a shorter range backhaul role similar to how 10GbE plays a shorter backhaul role to 1GbE switches. It probably isn't coming to workstations any time soon in next several years.



another set of conflicts.....

- quieter fan with magnetic ball-bearings & fiberglass blades (<8dBA at idle)
- dual D900 GPUs (or equivalent to > 12Gb GDDR6, 3,072 stream processors, 512 bit wide memory bus, 396 Gb/sec bandwidth etc)

i don't think the D900 specs quoted are going to hit the thermal envelope of the new design. I think much higher on people who push the Mac Pro hard wishlist is going to be improved GPUs that get more done with the limited power budget they get. Not necessarily more stream processors but faster and more power effective ones. There is a pretty big processor budget range now given they come in pairs. Effectively utilizing that is a bigger deal than just slapping on "more" and hoping to go faster. Running two 710 at the same time is probably better than just being able to run the second D900 even slower speeds for even less time.

 

[flat five]

My company does similar things. Product design and some vfx. We use a render farm, sure, but most of the designers are on 2P workstations. Iterative previews are faster, more memory, etc. Computer hardware is the cheapest part of our business so it makes sense.

i'm willing to bet it's actually computer software which is the cheapest part.. (if talking somethng like the pc having 24cores)

software is also cheaper to develop (when compared to, say, re-re-designing the nmp so it suits your needs)

it's also the part which is most likely to result in noticeable gains when speaking within reason. or- if maxwell 4 goes pure gpgpu for applicable tasks, you're looking at 10-20x faster rendering with the entry level nmp than you would get from, say, a 32core super nmp..

not to mention this is also the scenario which is most likely to play out irl.. or- it's more likely that we'll see new developments in software as opposed to brute force hardware approaches which are in direct relation to the concerns you have.. as i understand them-- and for the record, i'm not trying to argue that your concerns themselves are invalid.. they're completely valid and the entire rendering industry needs great improvements.. what we need at this point is realtime rendering.. the main question regarding that is "how do we get there?"
to me, that answer is definitely not "just add some more cpus to a pc".. that wouldn't and couldn't solve the problem.

 

[deconstruct60]

One wonders whether Apple could fit TWO CPU sockets into the small case IF the Haswell XEONs are lower power and cooler than the current IvyBridge XEONS?

Extremely likely not going to happen. The Xeon E5 product lines still seem be committed to fighting the "core count" war. The 12 core product somewhat premature arrival is indicative they haven't gotten off.

What the power reductions and process shrinks are going to do is allow to just keep cranking on the core wars.

If look at the 12 core design

[from Anandtech's review of Xeon E5 v2
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7285/intel-xeon-e5-2600-v2-12-core-ivy-bridge-ep
]

it is indicative that Intel is on track to taking what was the Xeon E5 2600 design so far of layers with 2 cores, L3 segment , and loop bus (the middle design above ) and probably moving over time to layers of 4 cores and two L3 and multiple connection loops. This extra L3 and core is just an intermediate step because the process tech isn't small enough,

Essentially they are going to fuse what was two dies into one over time. What used to take two sockets will take one. Where dual sockets will generally go in the future from a CPU focused perspective is where 4-8 sockets are now. Namely not a large significant part of the workstation market.

Lower per core power means the same 130W TDP budget allows either more cores , faster clocks , or a bit of both if dynamically level them against each other. In short, Intel is trying to do more with the same budget with the E5 offerings. If folks need lower power consumption there is the Xeon E3 line up which is getting more capable without cranking up the core count.
The Xeon line up is much broader than when folks try to drag it down to only covering the Mac Pro class machines.

Folks were saying stuff a year or so ago...... "Apple is going to wait for Xeon E5 v2 (Ivy Bridge ) because there will be some power breakthrough" ... didn't happen. Probably not going to happen over the next 2-3 years.

I'm sure it would help win back some of the folk who feel hard done by through the lack of a 2nd socket?

What is going to win back a healthy fraction of those folks are:

a. cheaper 8 and 12 core options. if just counting core ( not their ability) then there are cheaper ways to 8-16 cores now with dual CPU package set ups.

b. more affordable dense RAM. Some folks don't particularly want more than 12 cores. They want cheaper, last year's tech, DIMMs so they can buy more of them to run up closer to the top edge that OS X supports.


Both of those will probably happen in 2015 with the E5 Xeon E5 v3 updates without having to resort to dual CPU packages.

My wish list would be:

RAM that runs at over 2000Mhz

Runs at isn't as important as throughput. Related but not the same.
Shouldn't be a problem since E5 v3 is going to require DDR4 and those are ramping up.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/08/30/samsung-4gb-ddr4-mass-production/

Dual PCI SSD running in RAID 0 or RAID 1 (faster, or more secure)

if Intel delivers some more PCI-e lanes then that will probably happen. For example new chipset that tossed some SATA capability for additional PCi-e lanes. if don't add more PCI-e lanes then RAID 0 is going no where fast because almost maxed out on bandwidth now with just one. Two of the same (or better ) performance SSDs doesn't any non shared throughput to leverage.

Faster CPU's - I'd actually like to see faster GHz not just a few extra cores.

Intel seems to be on better track now where entry E5 1600 model offsets the lower (than siblings) core count with faster clock . Likely will so what is an much more expensive "faster" 6 core model drop in price. It won't so much be something 'new' as something more affordable.

Keyboard and Mouse and Trackpad included, seriously?

How many folks don't have these already ? There are probably as many folks complaining about buying keyboards/mice they don't want as those complaining as want them included.

Not quite as heavily marked up RAM or SSD would be probably make more folks happier. (with savings can buy whatever smaller item that Apple left out than the individuals think are missing. )

 

[flat five]

I think most of us will acknowledge that the MacPro market is small when compared to the rest of Apple's business lines so there's already less of an economic incentive to throw resources at it than even say, an iMac whose own purchase numbers have dwindled in recent years versus portables. And this is despite healthy profit margins on both these products.

it's possible there's more at stake than the actual volume of units sold. there's a trickle down effect to all other products in apple's line (i don't really know of a concise way to put what i'm getting at.. but basically boils down to someone picking up their macbook air and sensing the flagship model in it)

i just don't think the "it's their least sold item so available resources towards its development are limited" line of thought really flies over so well..

i really don't know the true numbers here but i'm willing to bet more r&d/manufacturing spending went towards the nmp than any of their other products ever made.. and if it's not truly the mo$t ever, it's certainly close to it.

 

[Lesser Evets]

My 2015 McPro wishlist:

SOMETHING BETTER.

All I'd like is for Apple to redesign the MacPro like they usually do any second gen. device. They should iron out the kinks, they should improve performance, they should expand capability. Done.

 

[flat five]

Apple has dropped the second CPU, if you want 12 cores, you can still get them, but it has to come in one cpu.

oh.. right. don't get me wrong.. i would bet my computer fund that apple will not add a second cpu to the design..

but that doesn't mean we (or I at least) shouldn't still explore the idea of doing such a thing. even if it's only for the purpose of getting a similar type joy one may get out of doing something like a crossword puzzle.