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Regulus67

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Aug 9, 2023
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I wonder if that chip would require the thermal capabilities of the cheese grater.
If not the full tower, a mid sized tower with good ventilation.
It won't need a full tower. It was only needed for the graphic cards. Just look at the present Mac Pro. It has a huge empty space for PCIe cards. With not a single MPX module capabilty.

Can't even fit the RAID MPX storage

th-2464900858.jpeg
 
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Boil

macrumors 68040
Oct 23, 2018
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Dear Apple, please make a M4 Extreme Mac Pro Cube, thanks...
I wonder if that chip would require the thermal capabilities of the cheese grater.
If not the full tower, a mid sized tower with good ventilation.
It won't need a full tower. It was only needed for the graphic cards. Just look at the present Mac Pro. It has a huge empty space for PCIe cards. With not a single MPX module capabilty.

Even in the 2019 Intel Mac Pro only one fan was blowing on the CPU heat sink, the ASi Mac Pro has the same fan configuration, with one fan blowing on the SoC heat sink; the remaining two fans are blowing on the add-in card slots...

Can't even fit the RAID MPX storage

Seems like it still has the physical room, the only thing missing would be the MPX slot & software support...?
 

Regulus67

macrumors 6502a
Aug 9, 2023
532
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Värmland, Sweden
Even in the 2019 Intel Mac Pro only one fan was blowing on the CPU heat sink, the ASi Mac Pro has the same fan configuration, with one fan blowing on the SoC heat sink; the remaining two fans are blowing on the add-in card slots...



Seems like it still has the physical room, the only thing missing would be the MPX slot & software support...?
The MPX slots supported extra power and Thunderbolt. Which isn't supported anymore with the new M-series in Mac Pro. But I have not tried to analyse the board layout, because I have not been curious enough.
Remember that Thunderbolt connections also used PCIe bandwidth (4 lanes of PCIe 3.0 for Thunderbolt 3).
But not in the new Mac Pro, as that is inside the SoC.

Must be more than just the slots that has been removed, as it does not have the T2 chip, and the extra PCIe lanes that was added to the Intel Xeon CPUs (64 lanes), for a total of 92 lanes.
The new M-serie does not support as many PCIe lanes (66 lanes), and are shared across the PCIe bus and other components.

PCIe lanes.png


Source: PCIe slots
 

Harry Haller

macrumors 6502a
Oct 31, 2023
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Threadripper Pro has 128 PCIe 5 and 4 lanes and up to 96 cores.
Apple is falling so far behind in the HEDT space that nothing short
of the fabled M Extreme chip will keep them even remotely competitive.
The Nvidia RTX5000 series arriving this fall might be the final nail in the coffin
of Apple’s middle performance, non-upgradable desktops.
I haven’t given up hope for one more insanely great thing,
but the reality of the situation doesn’t look good, imo.
Hopefully WWDC brings some good news in a couple of months.
 
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impulse462

macrumors 68020
Jun 3, 2009
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Yea real time compression was a 'thing' that bit NeXT at least a couple of times. At least the DSP mostly worked for the soundKit .snd native compression.

NeXT had a big problem with the NeXTdimension board (a crazy awesome 32bit color 'display card' for the cube that ran it's own postscript window server and had video input so you could watch a video feed). It was supposed to have a C-cubed JPEG compression chip to do realtime video compression when it was launched. The announcements went out with that feature spec'd. However, only a few prototypes were made and the compression would never work. It would try to compress a few frames and crash everything on the card. So it shipped without it.

It was still an absolutely bats*** impressive card for its time. You could get 64MB of ram on it (insane for its day), and it moved 32bit windows around real time back in 1991. Nothing really came close until you got to SGI level workstations. Plus, NeXT had realtime renderman running on it then, and it ran disturbingly well for machines that relatively primitive. More insane, realtime renderman was a system level supported file type and library. The Workspace (ie finder) inspector could show you .rib files (like the teapot) and let you render/rotate in real time anywhere. It was a standard library so all apps got realtime renderman 'for free'.

One of the many things that was lobotomized and dumbed down in transition for the apple audience. S*** we still do not have a full processes panel from Workspace.app in the finder with the ability to pause/kill individual workspace processes (eg copying processes, compression processes, moving processes, folder merge processes etc), among many other cool/better NeXTstep things. Sigh.

Anyway, it's one of the few computers I sold that I made a profit on selling (it and the Mac ][fx were the only 2 computers I sold for a profit), and one of the few computers I regret having sold.
Wow so were motorolla cpus just not efficient at running typical compression algorithms at the time? or was just compression so important for next that they decided on a dedicated chip for it? from your post, they even had dedicated on board memory. sounds similar to ML accelerators these days.

Also agree about the dumbing down lol, theyve been doing that even when steve was there though.
Threadripper Pro has 128 PCIe 5 and 4 lanes and up to 96 cores.
Apple is falling so far behind in the HEDT space that nothing short
of the fabled M Extreme chip will keep them even remotely competitive.
The Nvidia RTX5000 series arriving this fall might be the final nail in the coffin
of Apple’s middle performance, non-upgradable desktops.
I haven’t given up hope for one more insanely great thing,
but the reality of the situation doesn’t look good, imo.
Hopefully WWDC brings some good news in a couple of months.
i personally think apple is embracing a post-workstation era and (clearly) focusing everything on custom SoCs. for the datacenter they seem to be non-existent
 
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ZombiePhysicist

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Wow so were motorolla cpus just not efficient at running typical compression algorithms at the time? or was just compression so important for next that they decided on a dedicated chip for it? from your post, they even had dedicated on board memory. sounds similar to ML accelerators these days.

Just that cpus were slow back then for things like mpeg compression with the 68020 (which was the state of the art chip around 86). That didn’t even have a math coprocessors or a memory management unit. That wasn’t added until the 68030 which was around 1987, and the cube released in 1988. The 68030 added those things but was still pokey, so it just didn’t have the MIPs needed so the 56001 was helpful.

But then 68040 came out and was so much faster, there really wasn’t a need for the dsp. Still, mpeg was so much more cpu intensive that the original 25mhz chip could barely keep up with decoding n real time. The 33mhz was finally fast enough for playback. Compression for mpeg, for just one song, was hours upon hours back in that day.
 

Boil

macrumors 68040
Oct 23, 2018
3,477
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Stargate Command

d0sed0se

Cancelled
Mar 13, 2024
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None of that (PCIe slot specifications) has anything to do with the fact that, MPX slot/software aside, the ASi Mac Pro still has the requisite room for the Promise Pegasus R4i RAID to physically fit within...

I'm sorry, but... what?

What kind of argument is this?... What exactly are you getting at?

I can fit an RTX 3080 in my 7,1 right now, as in it PHYSICALLY fits inside my 7,1, but there is absolutely no software/firmware support for it in macOS, so what is the point here?... That unless I boot Windows or Linux, the 3080 is absolutely useless in macOS, just like the PCIe slots in the AS Mac Pro are useless because of the lack of support for anything you would traditionally use PCIe for (save for a few audio production cards), which makes the machine extremely niche, and ridiculous...

But, can you please elaborate on what you meant?
 

Regulus67

macrumors 6502a
Aug 9, 2023
532
501
Värmland, Sweden
None of that (PCIe slot specifications) has anything to do with the fact that, MPX slot/software aside, the ASi Mac Pro still has the requisite room for the Promise Pegasus R4i RAID to physically fit within...
Ok. Let us have a closer look at the Logic board, shall we? And see if there is obvious changes in the layout, beside the physical MPX slots.

MPX slots.png


REM_005_RP1998_Remove_MLB_Bottom_Screws_V1_1X.jpg


I have added photos of the two Logic boards as well.
 

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deconstruct60

macrumors G5
Mar 10, 2009
12,493
4,053

Apparently an M4 in early 2025 for the Mac Pro... Things are getting interesting.


Which alternative universe was that announced/leaked in? From the article linked.

" .... " the company will "follow up with more M4 Macs throughout 2025", including "updates to the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air by the spring, the Mac Studio around the middle of the year, and the Mac Pro later in 2025." ..."

If the Studio is coming in the 'Middle of the year " ( i.e. around June-July ), then the Mac Pro 'later" would be at best Q3, if not Q4. The Mac Pro is bringing up the 'rear' there.

Gurman reiterated even more explicitly here.



They could leave the Studio 'split' . The "Max"-like version goes in 'mid year' and the rest gets updated later. ( Apple left the Mini split on Intel/M1 l for a long while also. )


Decent chance the Mac Pro will ride in "Rip van Winkle" mode on M2 that whole time. Mid 2023 - Late 2025 would be about a 2.5 year update cycle for the MP. Still way faster than 6 or 4 years.

The bigger and more expensive SoC package is to make the more likely that Apple is going to ride that package for multiple years.
 

Boil

macrumors 68040
Oct 23, 2018
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But, can you please elaborate on what you meant?

Dude said the R4i would not even fit in the ASi Mac Pro, I said the space was still there; I never said it would WORK in the ASi Mac Pro...

Ok. Let us have a closer look at the Logic board, shall we? And see if there is obvious changes in the layout, beside the physical MPX slots.

View attachment 2368365

View attachment 2368366

I have added photos of the two Logic boards as well.

A few more screws that are in an area the MPX modules never went mean nothing...

Or did I need to point out every single change between the 2019 Intel Mac Pro mobo and the ASi Mac Pro mobo...?
 

deconstruct60

macrumors G5
Mar 10, 2009
12,493
4,053
The MPX slots supported extra power and Thunderbolt. Which isn't supported anymore with the new M-series in Mac Pro. But I have not tried to analyse the board layout, because I have not been curious enough.
Remember that Thunderbolt connections also used PCIe bandwidth (4 lanes of PCIe 3.0 for Thunderbolt 3).
But not in the new Mac Pro, as that is inside the SoC.

Must be more than just the slots that has been removed, as it does not have the T2 chip,

The T2 is just as much "inside the SoC" as the Thunderbolt controllers are. More so the case that the T2 subsumed :
i. the thunderbolt controllers
ii. the x86 cores
iii. the external x86 PCI-e controllers
iv. the GPU.

In short, "MPX" is a solution in search of a problem that disappeared. There are no Intel TB controller to provision on a separate card. The power sink GPU packages. Also gone.

The MPX 4i is a 'dinosaur'. MPX was never created primarily for a collection of just 4 HDDs. 4 SATA HDDs are swamped by x4 PCI-e v3 link which can come from the main bus. The 'extra' PCI-e bandwidth of MPX socket is beyond grossly overkill; it is completely unnecessary. If staggered started the HDDs probably would need much more than the 75W the standard bus give them. The power provisioned by MPX is gross overkill also.

Even if slapped 4 SATA SSDs in there.

graph-sustained-compressible,std.png



Not really stressing x2 PCI-e v3 worth of bandwidth ( ~7GB/s ); let alone x4 or x8 v3.

For those who just need 'slow moving', near term storage they can throw two 20TB drives in a J2i and basically cover the same capacity that the original 4i had. (e.g., 24TB in a single drive now.


RAID 1 and have failover coverage the RAID-5 4x8TB had at the same capacity. Not the speed. )


There is only a relatively shrinking narrow niche there of folks who want HDDs completely inside the box and can tolerate the relatively slow speeds being limited to just 4 HDDs in parity mode brings.


A modern SSD storage covers the capacities the nominal 4i covered ( 23-32GB ) in half the space and order of magnitude better performance.

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-8m2

( need to use SoftRaid but there are plenty of E-cores to cover that "overhead". That hardware SATA RAID controller in the 4i is a bottleneck at least as much as it is a 'offload'. )



the 4i was largely an expensive afterthought to placate/mollify a few folks grumbling about where the 4 HDDs in their MP 2010-2012 go in a 2019. It was dubious at 2019 SSD $/TB pricing and is even more dubious in 2023 when the next MP arrived. 4i may represent a large sunk costs for some folks, but there is extremely low motivation to put a MPX slot on a modern MacPro. The 4i was a large sunk cost in 2019 when it first came out; it always was one. Perf/$ was challenged from the start.


and the extra PCIe lanes that was added to the Intel Xeon CPUs (64 lanes), for a total of 92 lanes.
The new M-serie does not support as many PCIe lanes (66 lanes), and are shared across the PCIe bus and other components.

the MP 2019 has a PCI switch in it too. There is nothing 'new' in the 2023 MP with "shared PCI-e bandwidth". The MP 2013 had a PCI-e switch. The MP 2009-2012 had a PCI-e switch.

Moaning and groaning about "shared PCI-e bandwidth" in the context of a 4i is a joke. 4i could get covered by 1x PCI-e v4 link ( 16Gb/s , 8GB/s ) . Anyone who wants to stuff 6-8 HDDs into MP 2023 on carrier cards is not going run into any bandwidth problem. There is more room for multiple storage cards because there are no dGPU cards.
 
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Regulus67

macrumors 6502a
Aug 9, 2023
532
501
Värmland, Sweden
Anyone who wants to stuff 6-8 HDDs into MP 2023 on carrier cards is not going run into any bandwidth problem. There is more room for multiple storage cards because there are no dGPU cards.
I agree with everything you said, even if I only quote a few lines. To save space ;)

The last few posts I have here was made in response, starting with: It won't need a full tower. It was only needed for the graphic cards. Just look at the present Mac Pro....

Most likely I misunderstood the initial question, or I have done a poor job of "analysing" the Mac Pros.
Either way, I should read more, and talk less about what I am guessing. That is why I didn't jump to conclusions in my last post. But waited to hear what others, like yourself has to say about the subject 👍
 
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avro707

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Dec 13, 2010
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It won't need a full tower. It was only needed for the graphic cards. Just look at the present Mac Pro....

What we don't know is if they might some time later in the future develop some kind of additional GPU capability in addition to what is on the CPU itself.

Seeing what's on the horizon on the PC side it might become necessary.
 
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impulse462

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Jun 3, 2009
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What we don't know is if they might some time later in the future develop some kind of additional GPU capability in addition to what is on the CPU itself.

Seeing what's on the horizon on the PC side it might become necessary.
I'm hoping for expansion cards (with their own memory) specifically for ML training. It does seem like it could be a direction they are going. I think the only question is if they will default to HBM onboard memory or will it just be a paired down SoC with many more ANE cores + unified memory.
 

Boil

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Oct 23, 2018
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What we don't know is if they might some time later in the future develop some kind of additional GPU capability in addition to what is on the CPU itself.

I would not mind seeing an add-in card (or cards) that is designed to be used as a render client; active work on the SoC GPU and render jobs on the add-in card(s)...
 
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ZombiePhysicist

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What an s-show. tldr there will be no m3 Mac Pro. Wait for m4.

The m4 better come with pcie 5 and thunderbolt 5, or it may be another machine to skip despite the long (as usual) wait. Just so pathetic on so many levels.
 

avkills

macrumors 65816
Jun 14, 2002
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The MPX slots supported extra power and Thunderbolt. Which isn't supported anymore with the new M-series in Mac Pro. But I have not tried to analyse the board layout, because I have not been curious enough.
Remember that Thunderbolt connections also used PCIe bandwidth (4 lanes of PCIe 3.0 for Thunderbolt 3).
But not in the new Mac Pro, as that is inside the SoC.

Must be more than just the slots that has been removed, as it does not have the T2 chip, and the extra PCIe lanes that was added to the Intel Xeon CPUs (64 lanes), for a total of 92 lanes.
The new M-serie does not support as many PCIe lanes (66 lanes), and are shared across the PCIe bus and other components.

View attachment 2367996

Source: PCIe slots
This is a very interesting chart. Guess not as gimped as I thought. Although I agree that the PCIe slots in the 2023 Mac Pro are mostly useless since no GPU support. Shame they did not at least include the extra power part of the MPX slots, so anything other than GPU cards using it could work still.
 
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