Understood, although I did note in the PR comments that it studiously avoided saying "New Mac Pro".
If Apple PR says there is a Mac Pro coming in 2013 is the "new" adjective necessary? If working on Mac Pro to be released next year it is inherently new since it is a future product.
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My tea leaves suggest at least a change in the enclosure if not substantially more...I can see a modular "stackable" approach with a single CPU per box, for example.
It is more likely the changes will be to a marginally less modular Mac Pro rather than more. For example, an embedded GPU versus being able to remove all the GPUs from the machine.
The CPUs and GPUs won't migrate to different boxes. Modularity is far more likely to be more akin to the "external Superdrive" (as path already on for laptops and Mac mini). Perhaps extra Firewire , USB , and perhaps Ethernet as with TB dongles and TB Display. There are definately some candidates of built in peripheral sockets and peripherals themselves that may move to external boxes.
The components that need very high bandwidth interlink won't. (CPU, RAM, greater than x8 PCI-e slots, and GPU )
...to illustrate other opportunities with Firewire that Apple has avoided pursuing (YMMV as to why) to improve external bandwidth.
Why? Because no personal computer system vendor or mainstream peripheral maker is interested in using them. Especially not Intel who is pretty adamant against Firewire. (won't find more than FW400 support from them and that only because of the wide use on video cameras at one point. ). With less than 10% of the personal computer market Apple can't push FW (or Thunderbolt) up the hill by itself. Draft USB 3.0 killed off those two before they every got out of the gate.
Frankly, Apple "gave up" on Firewire long ago when they used holding back FW800 from the entry level Macs a market segmentation technique. That killed FW800 momentum ( which was already weak) which essentially nukes the follow ons.
Thunderbolt has a chance because technically it is Intel that is pushing it forward. If Intel puts the TB controller on several design reference boards, then it will catch on in the overall market. They have (at this point with Ivy Bridge designs) and it is growing.
For example, a single spinning 3.5" HDDs can't even yet saturate SATA2,
Actually, it is getting pretty close when drop to 2.5". It only works on large sequential files but the new 1TB velociraptor peaks around 200MB/s ( 1,600 Gb/s ). (
http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_velociraptor_1tb_review) That means two in RAID 0 with everything aligned can ( 3,200 Gb/s > 3,000 Gb/s ) and that with four present many early SATA II controllers with bandwidth issues ( since the traffic consolidates into a single link eventually). That's one reason the new top end ones come with SATA III links.
3.5" aren't performance drives anymore. They are drifting to being almost elusively being the $/GB leaders with "reasonable" access times.
Sure, SSDs and RAID-0's are part of the answer, as are also the Professional Grade specialty devices too, but this simply drives further home the observation of how theese are non-mainstream customer requirements ...
No. One reason the relatively (compared to the rest of the Mac line up) CPU in the MBA 11" does reasonably well is because it is not hobbled by a small , slow HDD. The SSD storage basically equalizes the MBA 11" with the MBP 13" models on many metrics.
In the iPod and iOS space there is only one, largely comatose, HDD model right now. Again the success of the iPad/iPhone is in part because don't have seek latency hiccups that HDDs incur.
It would not be surprising if every Mac in the 2013 line up had a SSD on board, including the Mac Pro. ( if only as a cache accelerator to create a virtual Hybrid drive or as a OS/Apps drive. XServe had the latter long before it should up on other Macs. ). And yet another issue which should be driving a revision of the Mac Pro
Given Apple bought a SSD controller design company, it is likely that SSDs are more tightly aligned with long term strategic objectives than HDDs are. Sure they will be incomporated into ARM based SoC designs first, but it isn't like SSDs aren't displacing in Mac designs either.
In thinking about how/where to go forward for my individual needs, I expect that a PCIe SATA card and an aftermarket bracket to add 4xSSDs internally is probably next,
The aftermarket bracket is kind of thing that Apple will attack (e.g., like no need for 3rd party sleds in current model).
Likewise, a need for 3, 4, 8, or 12 'bulk storage' 3.5" drives is exactly the solution that Thunderbolt enables. Older, slower connections ( SATA II or SATA III ) in external boxes. That is far more likely to be directed at "modular" solutions than central core bandwidth tasks like connecting CPU and GPU.
A "snap on" , stackable enclosure with 4-5 bays for 3.5" drives makes much more sense. There are many existing server , storage systems , and even NAS boxes that have "expansion" boxes along these lines. It would likely be labeled "revolutionary" by Apple, but it already been done and has a proven to be effective.
Make it a HDD enclosure with a SuperDrive bay and could chuck both HDDs and ODDs out of the core Mac Pro box. Since the enclsure would likely include a SATA controllers effectively it would "look like" an internal ODD for those that "need" old Windows and App DVDs and CDs to see it as an "internal" drive.
