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Mac Pro 6,1 Cylinder - Fact Gathering.

Topper said:
This will not be a good computer for consumers.
Click to expand...

It looks like Apple does not really want to be in the consumer desktop market. For people who do not want an iMac the Apple choices are two.

Choice one is the less than full featured laptop-in-a-box mini whose performance, while great for what it is, is in not close to that of powerful desktops.

Choice two is the expensive, very powerful, and limited purpose Mac Pro which despite its advanced features and power is missing a whole list of things that are normally bolted to the inside of a desktop computer.

One way to not make sales is to not have a product for a particular market.
 
scottsjack said:
It looks like Apple does not really want to be in the consumer desktop market. For people who do not want an iMac the Apple choices are two.
Click to expand...

The flaw here is that the latter folks are not the consumer desktop market. It is a subset. Typically a highly price sensitive subset. Apple doesn't want the whole desktop market; just a subset.

One way to not make sales is to not have a product for a particular market.
Click to expand...

Another way to not to make sales is to try to sell everything to everybody.
 
Umbongo said:
You can only connect one display to a thunderbolt connection currently yes? So 6 displays supported in total? Or can you use splitting devices so this could have 12 (which the cards can support)?
Click to expand...


I have a 2012 AIR that I have run two thunderbolt monitors on (daisy chained). Thunderbolt does not have a limit on the number of displays, the limitation is the video card
 
pcd109 said:
It's amazing no one realize yet: THIS IS THE LEGENDARY xMAC FOLKS. Think of it:
- E5's - start at 4 cores;

- fire pro - from v4900 or w5000(entry level)

Can't help not to speculate(sorry) but starting price(quad core and dual v4900 or w5000; 4-8 GB RAM and 128GB flash) will be a shocking under 1900$.
Click to expand...

Doubtful. The bulk of the bill of material costs for the current Mac Pro are CPU , RAM , HDD , GPU , power supply , case.

roughly in order of price ( the CPU and GPU flip in non entry configs )

CPU --> no real change.

GPU ---> costs doubled . ( 1 GPU before , now two )

HDD --> increase. ( It would kind of really quirk if Mac Pro has less standard storage than a rMBP: 256GB. Not to mention the radical shift from 1TB default to a drop by an order of magnitude to ~100GB )


RAM ---> probably no real change ( 4x 2GB DIMMs )

power supply --> cheaper

case --> cheaper.

not to mention

3 TB controllers + infrastructure support ---> +$45-75
(versus physical x4 sockets and single PCI-e switch ... so probably net gain)


There is some cheaper stuff but it is in the tail end of the weighting. So would have to save $500 to get back to $1,999 and another $300+ to pay for the second GPU. The stuff chopped off is hardly $800 worth of stuff. It is doubtful they are going to undercut the iMac top end price. If they are under all they'd have to do is goose the GPU price higher ( faster and/or more VRAM) and they'd be above again.

There is a decent chance it may come in somewhere in $2,099-2,599 range (depending upon what kind of deal they wrangled for the parts for their entirely custom GPUs), but below $1,999 not so much. They didn't eject the two most expensive parts.


THIS IS THE xMAC we all asked for it since the 90's.... This is a fact no one seems to understand.
Click to expand...

Not really. A healthy fraction of the xMac crowd wants to tinker. Another huge subset of that crowd want something firmly priced inside the iMac's range; not the upper edge. Neither one of those factions is going to buy this.
 
jameswdmb said:
Thunderbolt does not have a limit on the number of displays, the limitation is the video card
Click to expand...

Pragmatically absolutely wrong although shifting over time.

Current TB controllers only have at max two DisplayPort inputs. Some have just one (some MBAs have that) , and few not allowed used in host computers have zero ( controllers used in dongles). So two is the max. Frankly there isn't room for much more... Even two large monitors means 'borrowing a small amount" from the PCI-e data channel. More than two would mean effectivey wiping out the PCI-e data channel. Current controllers won't do that. Future ones probably won't either.

The TB controllers gate what goes on/off the TB network so they do set up real, hard limitations as to what can run on the TB backbone even if the native TB protocols themselves don't particularly disallow it.


DisplayPort v1.2 changes things a bit. I suspect that Intel is going to once again cap the DP v1.2 inputs into the controller switching so that don't get more than 2. Depending though how the DP v1.2 backward compatiblity mode pass-through is set up though that could pass-through more but wouldn't be a TB network anymore.
 
deconstruct60 said:
Even two large monitors means 'borrowing a small amount" from the PCI-e data channel. More than two would mean effectivey wiping out the PCI-e data channel. Current controllers won't do that. Future ones probably won't either.
Click to expand...

My understanding is that connecting two displays will take both of the lanes, meaning no PCIe at all. Thunderbolt 1 doesn't support "mixed lanes" like TB2 does, so the lane is either PCIe or DP, and for two displays you need two DP. TB2 is smarter in the sense that PCIe and DP no longer require their own channels, so you should be able to run two monitors and still have some bandwidth left for PCIe.
 
Divine Yantra Geometry
 

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Don't know if this was mentioned but something slipped from the WWDC demo video was that he is "looking forward to getting one in the Fall". So we're probably looking at a Fall release date (not a big surprise).

Otherwise the video was more about animation than the new Pro.
 
deconstruct60 said:
Doubtful. The bulk of the bill of material costs for the current Mac Pro are CPU , RAM , HDD , GPU , power supply , case.

roughly in order of price ( the CPU and GPU flip in non entry configs )

CPU --> no real change.

GPU ---> costs doubled . ( 1 GPU before , now two )

HDD --> increase. ( It would kind of really quirk if Mac Pro has less standard storage than a rMBP: 256GB. Not to mention the radical shift from 1TB default to a drop by an order of magnitude to ~100GB )


RAM ---> probably no real change ( 4x 2GB DIMMs )

power supply --> cheaper

case --> cheaper.

not to mention

3 TB controllers + infrastructure support ---> +$45-75
(versus physical x4 sockets and single PCI-e switch ... so probably net gain)


There is some cheaper stuff but it is in the tail end of the weighting. So would have to save $500 to get back to $1,999 and another $300+ to pay for the second GPU. The stuff chopped off is hardly $800 worth of stuff. It is doubtful they are going to undercut the iMac top end price. If they are under all they'd have to do is goose the GPU price higher ( faster and/or more VRAM) and they'd be above again.

There is a decent chance it may come in somewhere in $2,099-2,599 range (depending upon what kind of deal they wrangled for the parts for their entirely custom GPUs), but below $1,999 not so much. They didn't eject the two most expensive parts.




Not really. A healthy fraction of the xMac crowd wants to tinker. Another huge subset of that crowd want something firmly priced inside the iMac's range; not the upper edge. Neither one of those factions is going to buy this.
Click to expand...

Assuming the gpu's are twin AMD FirePro™ W9000's then the power supply will surely be pricier, but nobody will notice, because the 9000 comes at 3400$ apiece!
 
scottsjack said:
It looks like Apple does not really want to be in the consumer desktop market. For people who do not want an iMac the Apple choices are two.

Choice one is the less than full featured laptop-in-a-box mini whose performance, while great for what it is, is in not close to that of powerful desktops.

Choice two is the expensive, very powerful, and limited purpose Mac Pro which despite its advanced features and power is missing a whole list of things that are normally bolted to the inside of a desktop computer.

One way to not make sales is to not have a product for a particular market.
Click to expand...

Remember the thing about the trucks?
 
Hexley said:
Ay news on the weight?

To visualize 9.9" by 6.6" you can compare it to the current iPad's 9.5" by 7.3" :)

****** tiny for a tower. But will it weigh at 3-4kg?
Click to expand...

Google Nexus 10 tablet is 10.39" x 6.99". Larger (in 2 dimensions) than a Mac Pro.
 
deconstruct60 said:
The flaw here is that the latter folks are not the consumer desktop market. It is a subset. Typically a highly price sensitive subset. Apple doesn't want the whole desktop market; just a subset.
Click to expand...

It almost seems like Apple wants this thing to fail, doesn't it ?
 
The two GPU boards are label A and B.

http://www.anandtech.com/Gallery/Album/2859#2

http://www.anandtech.com/Gallery/Album/2859#23

There is the obvious difference of the PCIe connector for the SSD, which is placed on the GPU board B. But have a look at the position of the two black thorx screws. GPU board A has them in the upper left, while GPU board B has them in the upper right.

So I'd like to state another fact: You can't take a GPU board B with the PCIe-SSD connector and simply plug it into in the GPU board A socket (e.g. to get two PCIe-SSD), because GPU board A and GPU board B are mechanically different.
 
tomvos said:
The two GPU boards are label A and B.

http://www.anandtech.com/Gallery/Album/2859#2

http://www.anandtech.com/Gallery/Album/2859#23

There is the obvious difference of the PCIe connector for the SSD, which is placed on the GPU board B. But have a look at the position of the two black thorx screws. GPU board A has them in the upper left, while GPU board B has them in the upper right.

So I'd like to state another fact: You can't take a GPU board B with the PCIe-SSD connector and simply plug it into in the GPU board A socket (e.g. to get two PCIe-SSD), because GPU board A and GPU board B are mechanically different.
Click to expand...

Good observation although the arrangement of caps at the top of the boards is slightly different as well so they aren't just mechanically different, but also electrically different. Strange.
 
VirtualRain said:
Good observation although the arrangement of caps at the top of the boards is slightly different as well so they aren't just mechanically different, but also electrically different. Strange.
Click to expand...

Yeah I noticed that earlier. These cards are SLI enabled (or the AMD version) so certainly they won't be the same. I don't know the technology they use but presumably there is a master/slave relationship.
 
ActionableMango said:
Where did you hear that?
Click to expand...

I didn't, but as an engineer I'd be shocked they weren't.

There's an asymmetry here I don't get. TB requires a video signal, which is why I've been expecting on board video all along. Six ports, which seems likely to be 3 TB controllers with two ports each. But two graphics cards. If they were separated, how do you wire two separate cards to six ports connected through three controllers?

If the cards were separated, then if you had just one monitor plugged in then the other GPU would be for naught, except for computing tasks. Oh they have an HDMI too, which makes it more interesting.

Doesn't seem to make sense unless they combined them into one GPU pool which could be allocated to the TB ports as necessary.
 
Only Tesselator is allowed to make jokes in threads....f'n hypocrite.
 
Last edited:
Ok thanks, just wanted to clear that up since the purpose of this thread is to gather facts. There are plenty of other threads for speculation.

I'm not the thread police or anything, but I do want to keep in the spirit of the thread.
 
Well, if they are all 2x GPU standard, it WOULD be crazy if there was no Crossfire. I have no doubt that most people only use a single monitor, so in that case, without XF the other GPU would be doing absolutely nothing. Because let's face it, OpenCL is still not wide-spread.
 
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