I imagine if there's even a possibility, then a company like OWC will do it. They've been pretty good at supplying upgrades for MacBook Airs and keeping old Mac Pros going too. It's a big enough market for a small company to do it, if not Apple or the GPU manufacturers themselves.
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FirePro in New Mac Pro is FirePro W9000
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I imagine if there's even a possibility, then a company like OWC will do it. They've been pretty good at supplying upgrades for MacBook Airs and keeping old Mac Pros going too. It's a big enough market for a small company to do it, if not Apple or the GPU manufacturers themselves.
I think you are grossly underestimating the complexity present and the skillset required to pull this off. Apple's slightly less wide and longer mSATA SSD drive is still primarily still just a simple SSD drive. There are no cooling requirements out then to let the rest of the mac blow cool air on the SSD. Maybe Apple has a extra pin on SSD connector to monitor metadata but it it all pretty much mainstream SSD.
This is a graphics card unlike anything on the market.
It has no fans or self contained thermal management system.
It has no standard ports of any kind on it.
It has a PCI-e SSD card on the back.
It has a connector that has an extreme likelihood of being custom design explicitly just for this Mac Pro's needs ( not unlike the CPU/RAM daughter-card in the current Mac Pro because it is effectively plays EXACTLY the same role. A daughter-card part of a logical mainboard with multiple physical subsections. ) There is nothing to indicate that Apple is following any standard.
That is not in the "stretched out", standard SSD zone.
This card has to:
Seamlessly integrate back into the fixed thermal management system. That likely means very specific physical tolerances. ( that is possible but not necessarily easy )
The foreign GPU+infrastructure design needs to exactly match up to what the Mac Pro can profile cooling for. No one has a reference implementation design for this. Apple has mutated AMD's FirePro but AMD doesn't particularly hand out reference designs for FirePro cards. AMD only directly makes (well contract makes like Apple) those themselves. So probably talking about mutating a reference design card that hasn't been designed for this Mac Pro.
Need to reverse engineer the custom connectors.
Apple is probably going to have a zero tolerance warranty impact policy on non-Apple daughterboard designs. Storage drives based on standards is one thing. Completely custom Apple parts.... no there isn't going to be any certification process for that. So the target market is customers looking to toss their warranty out the window.
It would be extremely more commercially productive for OWC for focus on the PCI-e SSD card. Apple has likely used for more standard parts. That will lead to a far more higher ROI. The storage card like the RAM has all the appearances of being positioned for the intention of removal being an occasional user action.
It isn't impossible to make a card. However, with all that custom work are you going to have the volume to get to a price point that is lower than Apple's with some better performance metric. Are there drivers for the GPU?
The 3rd party GPU makes barely want to get into the Mac Pro market when it only meant using a standard Nvidia/AMD reference design and doing the differential driver work. Rejiggering a whole card to fit Apple's thermal system as opposed to one of their choosing represents even more risk with questionable reward.
AMD has little interest in messing with the profit margin "goose the laid the gold egg" in lowering FirePro prices. That Apple has completely physically segmented their cards from these is a good thing. Nivdia... again no. If Apple is signing up to do all the board work .... why? If they win the bake off for the next round Mac Pro Apple will just buy the parts and do all the work plus pay a fee to get access to the reference design. There is little to no upside in poking at stick in Apple's eye if they aren't interested in 3rd party cards for the Mac Pro. That just makes it more likey will loose the next design bake-off for Mac line on the next iteration.
As I said there will probably be a bone-yard market evenutally where some dead Mac Pro with OK high end cards drift down to Mac Pros of same design that had lower end version. That will allow a subset of owners to add another year or to to their 3-5 year old machine.
Does Apple sell dual capable CPU/RAM daughter cards so you can upgrade your single to dual Mac Pro now? No.
Does Apple sell replacement motherboards on the Apple Store? No.
Same reason.
Just because it is a serviceable part of the motherboard doesn't mean that Joe-Blow is going to bust out the trusty screw driver and do the upgrades at home.
Pulling the plug on the PCI-e SSD drive makes retirement easier. There is no need to pull the cards before retirement.
The "in store upgrade service" is more so that spare parts don't flood the open market. Eventually a bone yard market will open up. ( often as old systems a super low prices ), but there is little support service quality reason to float parts out there so unauthorized service reps can pass off as being authorized. Spare parts are typically strictly controlled.
ATI is AMD. They got bought years ago. Apple has put AMD solutions into the box so there isn't many more of these they'd sell.
Nividia will probably just try to win the next round of Mac Pro when it comes up for redesign next year for E5 Xeon v3 changes. Or skip if don't want any penetration in their Workstation GPU card market.
The two may continue targeting the deployed user base of current 2009-2012 Mac Pros as their is likely a faction that will be looking for upgrades over time. Depends upon the syngery of overall Mac design wins.
Really doesn't really matter long term if the Mac Pro 2013 doesn't sell out on day one.
The vast majority of the Mac Pro user base wasn't going to upgrade regardless of the new design.
I know ^^that's me and my studio^^....
but...
OK ...OOOOO K....i think this Mac Pro is freaking too many out^^ better keep quiet
(i know Ati is Amd..but thankS for reminding it to me^^)
and please forgive my mistyped words (...might sold instead of sell...)sorry .
Anyway,we don't know what Apple will do so..why not to dream quieeetly and then ..one day..compare that speculation with reality?Maybe its not,maybe it could be.who knows it?i don't^^
Have a nice day...and good 1st of July,you know today i realized ITS SUMMEEEER^^