End of the line for discrete graphics cards on Macs?

[Dr. Stealth]

30 Years....

Well, it took 30 Years but Apple has become the ominous man on the screen of their famous 1984 ad.

 

[rGiskard]

There is little to zero evidence that demand was insanely huge. Severely out of balance supply/demand typically brings more suppliers. There were not any 3rd party vendors stumbling over themselves to provide solutions for the Mac Pro market.

Well Nvidia released Mac drivers for all of their video cards, and Sapphire released the 7950 Mac Edition. In contrast to past times, yes, they are stumbling over themselves to meet demand. As were all the sellers providing flashed PC video cards for use on Mac Pros.

Again, in normal procedures bugs go through triage to be prioritized by impact. Far more likely this didn't get fixed because it did not impact that many users relative to other bugs on the queue.

They didn't fix a bug that affected every single person who bought an OEM video card upgrade from Apple. Call it triage or blame it on a long bug queue if you like. I call it pathetic.

If that was a successful growth business for Apple they would have tracked that business with more timely upgrades. They didn't.

Or perhaps it wasn't a "successful growth business" because Apple didn't bother to improve the product. Anyways it doesn't matter if it's growing anymore than it matters to Chevy whether the Corvette is a successful growth business. The Mac Pro tower established that Apple was a serious player in desktop computers and the people who used it had an influence on the adoption of lower end Macs. If the iTrash gives Apple a reputation for making toy computers, then that can affect the sales of all Macs, not just the iTrash.

What's with this obsession on growth, anyways? Do you think Ferrari should up and quite because they're sales aren't growing leaps and bounds every year? Most people don't drive Ferraris, therefore stop making them, is that the way of it?

The fact is the underground hack video card market is where a signficant number of buyers were. Very few wanted to pay anywhere near $600 for a video card. The few vendors who did put in the extra work were largely undercut by folks who hijacked the work and undercut both the 3rd party vendor and Apple on the revenue. So no that wasn't a big motivator for Apple to keep the same model going.

No, the hack video market exists because Apple didn't keep their own line of video cards current. If Apple had always offered leading edge video cards, the profit margins for hacked video cards would have been too small to sustain the market.

Presuming not overloaded in most configurations, it has a few number of moving parts. If there are usage patterns were not all three are 100% loaded at once it should run cooler with lower complexity.

That's a good point. Fewer fans to go bad is usually a good thing.

Promoting competition is not innovative in and of itself. That is a different dimension. The mainstream model is standard is largely because that is the way things got done with the limited amount of integration available. It is the same form that was in place before could do things like laptops, handhelds , and tablets.

Promoting competition generally promotes innovation. It's been very good for the GPU market and if all we ever had was integrated GPUs, things like OpenCL and CUDA probably wouldn't even exist at this point. You can bet that if integrated GPUs become the norm even in workstations and gaming rigs, then the pace of GPU development will slow.

People vote with their dollars. Where dollars are being increasingly being poured in now is not with box-with-slots. People have higher value on the products they buy as opposed don't buy.

The whole desktop computer market is shrinking. Do you mean to suggest that Apple should switch to building only laptops? They sell more iDevices than laptops, so perhaps they should just forget about making computers altogether and become an iDevice company. Then they can kill the iPod because it doesn't sell as much as the iPads and iPhones. iPad sales aren't very impressive next to iPhone sales either, so may as well kill the iPad. OMG, look, Apple is a phone company!

I have no idea why you would think so. Other than not being a dual CPU package model, in a single CPU package to single CPU package comparison Apple didn't drop a single highest cost component. In fact depending upon how the GPUs are priced may have added an additional one. This is not a "goose the profit margins higher" move. Not by a long shot. The price points are probably going to around the same range as the previous single CPU package Mac Pro's and the high end BTO options go a bit higher.

Dropping empty space doesn't save a ton of BOM costs.

ODD. no. Multiple fans. no. Swapping a relatively mid range HDD for a PCI-e SSD solution, that is a BOM cost lowering move? Not even hardly.
Neither is swapping 1 FW controller and two standard PCIe socket connectors for three Thunderbolt controllers.

Your guess without seeing the prices, or even projecting them, don't really amount to much. There is no way to get to margin unless have price.

A single socket 10" cylinder computer is obviously cheaper to manufacture than a dual socket aluminum beast of a tower. The savings in frieght alone are going to be quite significant. Apple may have even got a deal on the dual GPUs that keeps their price close to that of a single full body video card. The iTrash not only has no SATA ports or PCIe ports, it has a less robust PSU. And those low cost parts do add up. It may be hard to believe, but there is more to the cost of manufacturing a Mac Pro than the CPUs and GPUs.

 

[rGiskard]

I intend to get as much mileage out of my 5,1 hexacore as possible. Thankfully, I don't see this machine growing long in the tooth anytime soon (it's still super fast, reliable, responsive and positively wipes the floor with 90% of computers out there).

Aren't they great? For less than $200 you can add SATA III and USB 3.0 to one and it's IO is right up to date. Drop in a little more coin and you've got a PCIe SSD. And no matter what you throw at it, it's remains a fairly quiet (or even silent) computer. With a little tinkering up in the ODD area you even can add several SSDs and leave all four HDD bays free.

I can see getting used to the iTrash someday, but it will always be just another computer. The Mac Pro tower is a masterpiece.

 

[MacVidCards]

Well, it took 30 Years but Apple has become the ominous man on the screen of their famous 1984 ad.

When we recreated that set for "Pirates of Silicon Valley" I had my assistant snap a shot of the Mac Girl bonking me on the head with the sledgehammer. (one that she throws through the giant screen at end) One of my favorite pictures and has recently gained new meaning.

And I agree 100%, they have become that which they used to parody.

 

[Cubemmal]

In any case, the chances of Apple offering GPU upgrades for iTrash owners are about the same as the chance of them dropping an xMac i7 tower on us for Christmas.

Except that nobody actually have no idea if that is true or not. It's all up in the air until release.

 

[ActionableMango]

Past behavior is a pretty good indicator of future behavior. If the pattern holds true, you'll be able to get upgrades but they will be outdated and overpriced compared to the PC.

I don't see why they wouldn't do it. Just like many 1,1 through 4,1 owners have upgraded to 5770 and 5870 when the MP 5,1 came out, I imagine 6,1 owners will be able to upgrade to whatever proprietary boards the 7,1 includes.

--------

Right now you can pop almost any current and previous gen AMD and Nvidia card into a MP and it works, with the exception of a view exotic cards. We've hardly had any time to truly enjoy this, and it's coming to an end with the iTube. <sigh>

 

[deconstruct60]

I don't see why they wouldn't do it. Just like many 1,1 through 4,1 owners have upgraded to 5770 and 5870 when the MP 5,1 came out, I imagine 6,1 owners will be able to upgrade to whatever proprietary boards the 7,1 includes.

You are assuming that 7,1 won't change the card size and connectors. Probably true. E5 v3 (Haswell) will keep same pins with different electrical assignment ( one subset change from DDR4 from DDR3 ). That means v4 (Broadwell) likely is stuck with that too.

May not be as true by 9,1. If Intel adjusts the PCI-e lane count on the E5 v5 (Skylake) CPU packages, the connection may change. It isn't just GPU but SSD on the cards. For example if there are more PCIe lanes than may want to give the SSD more bandwidth. Similarly if there is a shift to PCI-e v4.0 for GPU lane subset and stay at PCI-e v3.0 for SSD with a generational shift.

Similarly on the GPU output front the number of displayPort channels may change with 8,1. The thunderbolt links are DP v1.2 multiple streaming. If do more may need new/alternate links out of the card. (e.g., has the edge ports on Mac Pro cards stayed constant over the years? Generally no. ). The edges on Apple's custom cards are not just indicative of the standard PCI-e socket but also of the output connectors on previous generations.

The card dimensions may change also as GPU vendors move to include similar kind of eDRAM technology Intel is weaving into this year's Iris Pro ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/19/nvidia_gpu_roadmap_computing_update/ ) along with 3D RAM stacking.

While externals of the Mac Pro has remained relatively constant from 2006-2012 the internals have not.

Given AMD's (and Nvidia's) evolutionary roadmap for Pro cards I suspect this Mac Pro 7,1 with likely either have same cards or speed-bumped ones. So probably same basic design template.


I do suspect though that Apple will need to tweak this cylinder design a bit for 8,1 though ( if consumer demand keeps it around that long). If the power envelope of the major components changes then the system dimensions will have to change a bit. The current design is much more decoupled along that dimension.