New in-house monitor for the Mac Pro.

[CWallace]

Thanks. What say you? Doubt?

From what he has described for the smaller one, it's a Space Grey aluminum slab on a black aluminum pedestal. That sounds like an Apple design to me.

The "monolith" is a clamshell where the top and bottom come off to allow access. The CPU is on a card, so it might not be designed to be user-replaceable, but third parties (OWC?) might be able to engineer them. There are 8 user-accessible RAM DIMM slots which means either AMD Epyc or Intel Xeon-SP CPUs. The GPU is electrically compatible with PCI-E, but is a custom board like the processor card and is designed to be replaceable. And then there are four "drive sleds" that can hold M.2 SSDs. All of this sounds reasonable for Apple - it's modular and the most-likely to be modified components (RAM and storage) are user-accessible and the CPU and GPU are designed to be upgradeable by Apple and possibly end-users.

 

[pat500000]

From what he has described for the smaller one, it's a Space Grey aluminum slab on a black aluminum pedestal. That sounds like an Apple design to me.

The "monolith" is a clamshell where the top and bottom come off to allow access. The CPU is on a card, so it might not be designed to be user-replaceable, but third parties (OWC?) might be able to engineer them. There are 8 user-accessible RAM DIMM slots which means either AMD Epyc or Intel Xeon-SP CPUs. The GPU is electrically compatible with PCI-E, but is a custom board like the processor card and is designed to be replaceable. And then there are four "drive sleds" that can hold M.2 SSDs. All of this sounds reasonable for Apple - it's modular and the most-likely to be modified components (RAM and storage) are user-accessible and the CPU and GPU are designed to be upgradeable by Apple and possibly end-users.

That does sound like an apple product.

 

[ManuelGomes]

8 DIMM slots is not -SP, those are 6 channel so that would have to be 12 slots.
8 slots seems -W to me.
And indeed, like that it sounds Apple all the way.

 

[goMac]

I don’t think Xeons can be soldered so you’re likely to see socketed Xeons anyway.

Better question is (if that is the design, reminds me of some older Macs) how much of the Mac Pro would be on such a card and how much of the machine could be swapped out. Like if you could jump a whole CPU generation on a card.

Hard to see third parties doing that.

If they do a custom sort of internal slot I hope they get Intel to help them standardize it.

 

[mattspace]

I'm not sure that a cMP can drive one using two of the TB2/DP1.2 ports. And the HDMI 1.4 port can only support 4K output (and then barely).

cMP - as in cheesegrater with no thunderbolt

theoretically any of the higher end Nvidia or AMD cards should be able to push dual DP1.4, which I think is the requirement for Dell's 8k.

 

[CWallace]

8 DIMM slots is not -SP, those are 6 channel so that would have to be 12 slots. 8 slots seems -W to me.

Xeon W only supports 4 DIMMs.

And while Xeon SP is designed around 6 channels (so 12 DIMM slots), there are evidently motherboards that will provide 16 DIMM slots. Though it is also possible the CPUs will not be Xeon SP, but instead E7's (which support 8 DIMMs). Or what Ph.D saw was an Epyc processor card.

cMP - as in cheesegrater with no thunderbolt

Got it. I think of the "c" as "current".

 

[William Payne]

theoretically any of the higher end Nvidia or AMD cards should be able to push dual DP1.4, which I think is the requirement for Dell's 8k.

I don't know about AMD but Nvidia says that one of their DisplayPort 1.4's can drive one 5k monitor and that two can drive an 8k.

The 8gb+ quadros that have 4x DisplayPort 1.4 are advertised as being able to run 4x 5k monitors and 2x 8k monitors.

The GeForce cards are a bit different as they have fewer 1.4 ports and generally an hdmi chucked in there somewhere.

 

[PortableLover]

How accurate or rather precise will the monitor be?

 

[ManuelGomes]

-W has four channels and at 2 slots per channel makes the 8 slots, that was what I was saying.
16 slots on a 6 channel arch would be odd, unbalanced.
Maybe Epyc indeed, awesome. But I doubt it. They could start moving to AMD in a low volume model as the mMP though. But that would mean we should start seeing some info on High Sierra related to Epyc. Maybe.
Anyway, forget the E7s, don't think Apple will ever use those in WS gear.