Ivy Bridge Xeons soon?

[deconstruct60]

I understand your point, but that's unfortunately looking at a display with the eyes of a technologist and knowing

The disconnect is looking at it as a display. It is misnamed. Apple is in the docking station business. Not the display business.

The flaw here is that they should drop "Display" out of the product name.

If the user wants a multi input / multi input format device that primarily just displays the video signal Apple hasn't sold one of those for a couple of years. Even the precursor to the TB "Display" was really more of a placeholder for it than a display oriented to "connect to PCI-e video card" solution space. You only need to look at the dangling power supply connector to see that is really isn't primarily oriented to that task.

 

[electrao]

When looking at the specs on these Ivy brigde xeons, specially power (as low as 17W), i believe the best suited application for apple would be a mac mini server with single or dual cpu. Now that would be an interesting product!

 

[deconstruct60]

When looking at the specs on these Ivy brigde xeons, specially power (as low as 17W), i believe the best suited application for apple would be a mac mini server with single or dual cpu. Now that would be an interesting product!

Not really. First there is only one 17W version

http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2012/2012020701_Prices_of_Xeon_E3-1200_v2_CPUs.html

Second, it gets to 17W by chopping about 1GHz off the clock frequency. You are throwing alot of performance out the window. Even the current Mini didn't choose to cripple performance to limbo that low. For a device that is plugged into the wall and not insanely packed into a small space with other devices this doesn't make alot of sense. It is a trade-off that gives up much more than gains.

For some very niche applications that single grossly under-clocked version makes sense ( a kiosk for example. ) but not a mini.

If by "dual cpu you mean two CPU packages then it can't do that. The E3's are single package only. "Xeon" does not equal "multiple packages' in all cases. Nevermind that there isn't even room inside of a mini for another CPU package.

The otherwise while there are some aspects that are better with a Xeon E3 than a core i5/i7 what Apple would loose is "re-use" between the server and mainstream model. One reason the mini server hits the low price point is that really isn't that much different than the others. Made much more different the price would go up and it would start to entangle with the iMacs on price.

Much more viable if want to leverage the broader range of the Xeon E3 series is to jump to the other side of the iMac price range where there is a large gap between the iMacs and the Mac Pros.

 

[Doc69]

Does anyone know Intel's latest expected release date for the Ivy Bridge Xeons suitable for the Mac Pro? If it's very early in 2013, and there's no new Mac Pro announced on Monday, then perhaps Apple will skip the Sandy Bridge Xeons and go straight for Ivy Bridge.

One advantage would be native USB 3. And if I'm not mistaken, as Thunderbolt will soon work over fiber optics instead of copper, it may need a new controller which may not be out yet?

 

[deconstruct60]

Does anyone know Intel's latest expected release date for the Ivy Bridge Xeons suitable for the Mac Pro? If it's very early in 2013, and there's no new Mac Pro announced on Monday, then perhaps Apple will skip the Sandy Bridge Xeons and go straight for Ivy Bridge.

Given how highly inaccurate Intel's roadmaps were in late 2010 and early 2011 for the SB Xeons (and Ivy Bridge and .... ) ..... why would anyone believe any of their roadmaps for 2012-3? Seriously.

Given the "slow as molasses in January" real E5 product roll out here in 2012 , it is relatively safe to say they won't appear any sooner than 2013.

One advantage would be native USB 3.

Sorry, but USB 3 is not part of the Ivy bridge architecture. It is part of the supporting chipset. In the Xeon class Intel generally has not created a new supporting chipset for each iteration of the tick/tock cycle. One chipset is used for both the "tock" ( new arch ... which Sandy Bridge is) and the "tick" ( primarily shrink ... which Ivy Bridge primarily is. Graphics too but the Xeon base design doesn't have graphics. )

Just like the 2009-2010 Mac Pros the 2012-2013 Mac pros will probably used the EXACT same motherboard design with the same chipset used on both.

Apple can almost trivially put USB 3.0 on the Sandy Bridge Xeon E5 motherboards. Only have to do with many dozens of other designs have done and use a discrete controller on the expanded PCI-e v2.0 lanes of the support chip. Most announce SB E5 designs ( e.g., HP , Dell, ) have USB 3.0 on board. The only reason the Mac Pro wouldn't get it is laziness on Apple's part. That's it.

There is zero reason to wait. All of the competitive offerings have picked up USB 3.0 in this round.


Not sure if Intel has fully patched up the C600 chipset for the E5's. There is a very slim chance that Apple is waiting until a more stable version of that comes out. Since they would be sitting on it for almost two years, that has some upside of increased stability.

And if I'm not mistaken, as Thunderbolt will soon work over fiber optics instead of copper,

Again. Completely immaterial. The fiber cables will plug into the same sockets on the 2011 Macs that have TB. Those came out last year. There is extremely little "next year's is better" benefit there either.

There are some new TB controllers ramping up in volume right now, but that shouldn't be a show stopper for Apple. In fact, TB isn't really critically necessary on a Mac Pro at all for a extremely broad range of deployments.

 

[thekev]

Does anyone know Intel's latest expected release date for the Ivy Bridge Xeons suitable for the Mac Pro? If it's very early in 2013, and there's no new Mac Pro announced on Monday, then perhaps Apple will skip the Sandy Bridge Xeons and go straight for Ivy Bridge.

One advantage would be native USB 3. And if I'm not mistaken, as Thunderbolt will soon work over fiber optics instead of copper, it may need a new controller which may not be out yet?

Most of the rumors suggest they won't be out until the second half of next year. I wouldn't bother waiting if you need something soon. Annoyingly the other machines may be on haswell before the mac pro sees ivy bridge.

Given the "slow as molasses in January" real E5 product roll out here in 2012 , it is relatively safe to say they won't appear any sooner than 2013.

Bah... this time you used a generic simile . The comment about thunderbolt and usb3 making for a good family feud was funnier.

Sorry, but USB 3 is not part of the Ivy bridge architecture. It is part of the supporting chipset. In the Xeon class Intel generally has not created a new supporting chipset for each iteration of the tick/tock cycle. One chipset is used for both the "tock" ( new arch ... which Sandy Bridge is) and the "tick" ( primarily shrink ... which Ivy Bridge primarily is. Graphics too but the Xeon base design doesn't have graphics. )

Just like the 2009-2010 Mac Pros the 2012-2013 Mac pros will probably used the EXACT same motherboard design with the same chipset used on both.

I thought they did this for cost reasons. Workstations volume is lower, so this allows workstation vendors to better control their costs by making boards last two processor cycles.

 

[deconstruct60]

I thought they did this for cost reasons. Workstations volume is lower, so this allows workstation vendors to better control their costs by making boards last two processor cycles.

It isn't primarily board costs. It is support/testing/certification costs and risks as well. Notice how the Intel chips for both Sandy Bridge major lines ( the basic Core i Xyy and the C600 ) both had screwed up SATA implementations. Do they really want to risk going through that every single year ? Nope.

That screw up in 2010-2011 echoed all the way into 2012. A slow pacing means it is easier to recover from these screw ups without impacting the long term dependencies' timeline as much.

People who buy "expensive iron" boxes don't like surprises. The box should show up and work. No massive recalls after ship out the first 200,000 boxes. No major kludge patch 2 months later.

The design/test/validate/ship cycle on this stuff is longer than 12 months for more complicated boxes. So they ship once and keep the changes to a minimum until another set of significant changes. Sure they could pipeline the design but that isn't necessarily a winner ( the C600 didn't entirely dodge the earlier found FUBAR).

You are right that the churn rate on $8K boxes is no where near the churn rate on $899 specials. Even if they could turn out a new box every 6 months are there really going to be enough customers to buy them?
Apple does this on the iMac line from time to time too. What starts out on the "bigger" iMac is used longer on the smaller one. The MacBook used to get certain MBP 'hand-me-downs' too.