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.
Any Interest in a New Modular Mac Pro Design?
- Thread starter Radiating
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I see nothing wrong with building both a proven Mac Pro *and* a Mac Mini modular system like this. They already have a great tower designed, so no harm in spending some time designing a modular mini system as well. Call it a hobby and see what they can come up with.
I have my doubts that it would ever succeed, based on the force of wind that blows through my Mac Pro when twelve threads are all maxed out. The tiny fans inside a tiny modular system would be loud and inefficient, as well as insufficient for a system filled with hot CPUs and GPUs. I also believe the TB connections would have too much latency to connect the modules, but I *am* open-minded enough to investigate benchmarks from such a device when it becomes available.
Just sitting here talking about it, no way. Sounds like a horrible design.
I have my doubts that it would ever succeed, based on the force of wind that blows through my Mac Pro when twelve threads are all maxed out. The tiny fans inside a tiny modular system would be loud and inefficient, as well as insufficient for a system filled with hot CPUs and GPUs. I also believe the TB connections would have too much latency to connect the modules, but I *am* open-minded enough to investigate benchmarks from such a device when it becomes available.
Just sitting here talking about it, no way. Sounds like a horrible design.
I'm of the opinion that the requests for i7s are poorly researched. If Apple still wanted to have access to hex core cpus, you would still be locked to Sandy Bridge E. The line would have two cpu options, the quad i7-3820 and the hex i7-3930K. Both are sold at the same prices as the Xeon equivalents. Whether one occasionally comes up $20 cheaper on newegg has little impact on oem pricing.
The complaint regarding ECC ram is also bizarre. In the early 2000s, ECC ram would be significantly more expensive. Today it's often the same price. The standard shipping configuration is 6GB. How much does anyone expect to save by shaving a few dollars off the cost of ram. Assuming the same metric for calculating price, the combination seems unlikely to even move the price by $100. If they were somehow interested in occupying lower price territory, it would more likely use the same parts as the imac. In that case you would have one i7 option, currently the i7-3770. Below that you would drop to i5s with locked hyperthreading.
I have never known that Mac Pro to have the additional chips and firmware to work with vPro. vPro requires that the processor AND motherboard support it.
The only thing non-modular about the existing Mac Pro is the chassis. It already has a single/dual CPU daughter card option with a range of BTO and after market CPU options. 4 RAM slots per CPU that take a wide range of DIMM sizes and speeds. There's 4 PCIe (aka 2 TB and 2 TB extreme) slots that take a wide variety of expansion cards. Four 3.5" drive bays that accommodate everything from SSD's to large multi-TB drives. Dual 5.25" drive bays for optical drives, other HD or SSD storage, or even add-on PSUs. And a PSU capable of driving all of that and more.
It's nonsense to request any of these things be sold separately in their own chassis... None of these components can work without the others.
PCIe expansion boxes already exist and work great.
As I'm sure you know, so do drive enclosures - both 5.25, and 3.5 inch - even mixed.
I certainly wouldn't mind if MP went modular and offered only 2 PCIe 3.0 slots in the central box. One for a gfx card and the other for an expansion connection (either card edge or cabled). In the expansion box Apple could allow 8 slots with 4 (staggered) being suitable for a "Maximus" configuration.
Likewise, I wouldn't mind if MP central came with no 5.25 and only one 3.5 bay and sold an "expansion box" for that too. I'd like to see one with drive bays 4 across and 6 or 7 high with one 5.25 bay atop. There could also be one with four or five 5.25 bays for those needing that sorta thing. For booting the MP I'd like dual mSATAIII SSD drive slots which can be mounted either on the main board or the CPU daughter board - I don't care which.
As far as the central system box it could be about half the current height - although it might be interesting to have multiple CPU Daughter-card slots for expandability. Such designs already exist actually.
Breaking it up into three sections with two of them being optional purchases would cater to much larger range of users and purposed build configurations. With the current state of Apple brand loyalty this would (potentially) deliver a much better profit margin curve for Apple too.
Who knows what Apple will come out with but this is possible and I'm not the first person to dream this up as a potential system configuration. I'd certainly be OK with it if they did.
Last edited:
in order to acheive anywhere near the bandwidth of a full tower desktop liek the Mac Pro it would need 6-10 Thunderbolt ports at the next generation 20gb speed. Otherwise if we have to chain peripherals to connect fiber channel, raid and media ingest solutions the data path will get congested quickly.
An analogy would be a switch set up I once saw in a clients server room. They had multiple cat5e patch cables running between two gigabit switches. Each cat 5 connection is capable of 1gig duplex. They thought they were getting 10 gig throughput by patching this way, but the backplane of the switches only went up to 3.2 Gb or so.
The moral of the story is they should have bought Cisco catalyst switches that have trunking connections for this kind of application. Professional environments require overbuilt high spec hardware. Especially when 24/7/365 uptime is critical.
An analogy would be a switch set up I once saw in a clients server room. They had multiple cat5e patch cables running between two gigabit switches. Each cat 5 connection is capable of 1gig duplex. They thought they were getting 10 gig throughput by patching this way, but the backplane of the switches only went up to 3.2 Gb or so.
The moral of the story is they should have bought Cisco catalyst switches that have trunking connections for this kind of application. Professional environments require overbuilt high spec hardware. Especially when 24/7/365 uptime is critical.
The positives -
Heavy duty Photoshop users do well with i7 machines with 32-64 gigs of RAM.
Typical low end movie editing do well on i7 machines with 32-64 gigs of RAM.
The list goes on.
I don't argue the value of XEON architecture but I certainly do have to say that i7 fits the bill for a large amount of Mac Pro users. The "proof" is in the counterpart world of Windows where i7 machines work very well for most moderate to heavy duty purposes. One might hope that OSX is not a real i7 killer in itself.
Why would you want an i7-3770 when the E3-1245V2 has faster graphics, ECC memory support, 4 more PCI-E 3.0 lanes, the additional Xeon features and costs less? Why would you want an i7-3820 or i7-3930K when the Xeon E5-1620 and Xeon E5-1650 support 4 times the memory and have additional features and cost the same? The Xeons don't increase the system cost and add features. There is no reason anyone should want an i7 in the Mac Pro.
Your design sounds like it has a lot of data cables, power cables, and possibly other proprietary connections.
The whole modular idea horrifies me. I would much rather have a single monolithic case with a ton of internal expansion than a collection of small loose boxes connected by a rat's nest of thunderbolt and power cables.
If anything, I'd rather see the internal capacity increased in the single box. More PCIe slots, more memory slots, more drive bays, more PCIe aux power, more rear USB ports.
I think the point is, have a Xeon-based Mac Pro and an i7-based 'Mac'. The Mac Pro entry level is too expensive for a lot of people and overkill. I would love a Mac tower that is i7-based. Ideally I'd like 64GB RAM for VMware, but 32GB would be ample and I'm not willing to spend an extra £1000+ on a machine for the odd occasion where I used over 32GB RAM. However I do need the flexibility of a Tower so I can add more internal storage and change the graphics if I need to. I don't like glossy screens so that counts the iMac out. A Mac Mini with a Promise R4 is around the right size, but I'd want better graphics.
This doesn't really answer many things. The only way i7 might be significantly cheaper is if Apple wanted to make a headless imac, which I find unlikely. It would lock you into quad cpu options only. This means reuse the LGA 1155 board and cpu options. If you're looking at Sandy Bridge E i7s being forked into another mac pro separate from the 12 core options, it wouldn't really change anything in terms of pricing structure if they used the same basis. Out of curiosity, which did you mean? Of course the use cases you mentioned work with i7s, but I'm not sure whether that would draw a lot of new users if it's still priced starting north of $2000. By the way, assuming maxed ram + ssd, you can get away with a mini for photoshop, even if your image files exceed 10k in either direction and you have groups of stacked up layers, alpha channels, etc. Most people just assume a powerful graphics card is a requirement when it isn't. 32GB would allow for larger thumbnails and longer history in the same scenario, but with the right settings it's possible to keep it running smoothly. Light video editing is the same. If you set your preferences up correctly for the available hardware, the requirements are surprisingly modest.
The Mac Pro is not expensive due to Apple using Xeons rather than i7 CPUs.
http://ark.intel.com/compare/58664,47917,37151,39721
I'm OK with this setup and the price drop may mean I actually buy one. However in regards to thunderbolt PCIe cards: I bought a Helios Accelssior PCIe based SSD RAID array. Throughput tests put it at nearly 700 mbps (over 10 times faster then the stock hard drive) however it didn't feel anywhere near 10 times faster. Over twice as fast and maybe even four times as fast, but I was expecting to be blown away. So I do wonder about a bit of i/o lag with thunderbolt.
So is the original posting legit? That's a lot of very detailed data.
----------
Yah plus I think this would go against Apple's whole "simple" thing too, no? So probably not likely.
It seems you wrote about the time I was writing a comment. I would point out that the price of the entry level mac pro isn't really due to the cost of what goes inside it. The only way you gain any possible cost savings is the headless imac route, and that is really due to the potential to share parts, not the cost of Xeon E5-16XX parts. I don't think Apple will ever fold the Mac Pro into such a solution. Right now they get a $2k minimum sale if you want the faster processors with the imac. They're able to ask that by bundling a display. I too hate the glossy display and lack of calibration features that have become almost standard features on other displays in the price ranges Apple tends to address. I totally understand your complaint regarding the cost of the single package one. Its alignment of pricing and hardware isn't that great. For those that purchased early, it at least has longevity considering they'll have to support the current model for several years after they retire it. I don't see software dropping off too fast, maybe support for the GT120.
Then your typical MP user should be fine with an iMac and a couple thunderbolt expansions.
If there was a Mac that didn't include the screen (headless), then yes, many would be as it would sit somewhere between a Mac Mini and a Mac Pro in its present incarnation. The chances of an i7 "middle machine" is not likely as it would screw up Apple's forced order of hierarchy on marketing/sales. The Mini remains somewhat crippled compared to what it could be so that the iMac is the "for everyone" computer. Apple certainly wouldn't want a headless system that competes with its upper line iMac line.
However, one can hope and one can wish but that is all it is. (Or bang their heads on a hackentosh).
I really don't care much what it looks like as long as the new MP has:
6 + very speedy cores
up to 64 GB RAM
room for multiple HDD and SSD (4-8)
a couple of slots for video cards and the like
a video card that has support for at least 1 dual DVI, better if 2
Thunderbolt
USB 3
SATA3
bluetooth
dual ethernet
superdrive would be nice, but not required
But if it does happen, I presume Apple will make it attractive.
6 + very speedy cores
up to 64 GB RAM
room for multiple HDD and SSD (4-8)
a couple of slots for video cards and the like
a video card that has support for at least 1 dual DVI, better if 2
Thunderbolt
USB 3
SATA3
bluetooth
dual ethernet
superdrive would be nice, but not required
But if it does happen, I presume Apple will make it attractive.
Lots of power supplies allow daisy chaining. This could be a done from PSU to PSU or also incorporated in a specialized cable. It could also be accomplished via a flush connector if the various external units are to be locked together. The same flush connector could optionally accept a cable if the user didn't want to couple-lock the boxes together.
----------
No. it's just made up malarky. The only idea in the whole post that's even logically feasible is the bit about modularity.