New Mac Pro: Only 64BG Ram ...?

[Trailerman]

That looks more like it. Even if a 32GB DIMM is double the price of the 16GB plus an extra 20ish% premium, it'll still be cheaper.

Macramdirect seem to be doubling the price of the 16GB DIMMS for the 32GB DIMMS, and then doubling them again! Hopefully that kind of pricing will disappear once there's a proper market happening.

 

[deconstruct60]

... HP Z420 mini-tower has 8 DIMMs, 256 GiB
... HP Z620 midi-tower has 8 DIMMs, 256 GiB (12 slots with dual socket - 384 GiB)
... HP Z820 tower has 8 DIMMs, 256 GiB (16 slots with dual socket - 512 GiB)

The z820 only comes in duals. Not the same issue.
The z620 again designed for duals.

Multiple ranks requires "Registered" ('Buffered') DIMMs. So far Apple has avoid that and gone with Unbuffered DIMMs. In terms of speed, simplicy of design, and alignment with where DDRx technolgy is evovling towards ... 4 DIMM slots is aligned.

There is no "memo" to get here. It is a design selection. Whether it makes a difference is far less dependent upon the 'monkey see, monkey do' mechaniics of the general PC market than of what people actually do. Wouldn't be surprisin if there are PS/2 keyboard sockets on many of those too.... that is generally not what folks are doing.

With admittedly limited Macrumors forums demographics, but probably indicative of the usage curve Apple can get if they are sampling configs.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1598539/

Look again...

.... half-width server board ....

Try looking at the workstation boards / Core i7 boards. That boards is meant exactly what it says it is for: server blocks. " But yes, there are server variants that have multiple ranks. Also, most, if not all, of the E4 4600 and E7 variants do.

 

[Tutor]

You mean this.. Its 165$ for a 16 gig stick - $330 for 32 , $660 for 64.. or wait.. I guess they don't have matched pairs/sets?. Have people bought off of superbiiz before? any good or bad experiences?

http://www.superbiiz.com/query.php?dp=1&dt=2&categry=727&name=DDR3-SDRAM-Server-240-Pins&brand=&pa0=&pa1=DDR3-1866&pa2=&pa3=&pa4=&pa5=&pa6=&pa7=&stock=No&nl=30&searchStr=Search+from+current+results&ob=r&myanchor=%23displaytop

Like Wonderspark, I buy from SuperBiiz, and consider them as trusted as Provantage, B&H or Newegg. As a matter of fact, I buy my Big Iron (and mostly everything that goes in it) only from Superbiiz-1st and Provantage-2nd.

 

[deconstruct60]

I didn't really want to start an argument here, but I'll happily put my hand up as one of the prospective customers that the 2013 Mac Pro's specifications don't satisfy.

There is no Mac product that solves everything for everybody. That is actually never a design objective.

I also can't really agree with the statement above:

Data doesn't really match that.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1598539/

much as we all expect that system demands will eventually plateau, they never do,

It is not really about demands plateauing as much as user demands not rising as fast as technology is increasing. What get to is a state in which the incremental upgrades that come over time cover a broader set of users.

, power users will often still prefer multiple CPUs.

want ( prefer) and need at two different things.

Ultimately, we can all only speak for ourselves.

To be blunt, these soliloquies aren't all that informative. Most of the readers and folks with an agenda here are not aggregating the responses into quantitative results. Markets into which products are developed and sold into are about aggregates not individuals.

I personally need more than 64GB out of the gate. ... From what I'm hearing and reading, I'm not the only one.

I'm quite aware there are different submarkets. What doesn't help is the sweeping generalizations that a small subset characterize both the workstation market and the subset of that which is targeted by the Mac Pro.

(I will never need even one of the GPU's this machine ships with, never mind two)

Again sweeping generalizations don't really illuminate things. Software now leverage them; not much. Software never could ... coming from folks who don't write software.

What I find hard to swallow is that Apple's ultimate machine has radically reduced the level of 'choice' that it's previous models offered.

Apple sprinkles hyperbole on almost every product they sell. This isn't an "ultimate machine". That is just P.T. Barum sales pitch smoke. The P.T. Barum smoke on the competing smoke on the other competing workstation is just puffery.

At the top end, professionals value choice and flexibility more than design. And I can't help feeling, the balance here is tilted totally the other way.

That is joke. The Mac Pro tops out at 3 times the number of cores the rest of the line up. There are four CPUs to choose from. Any other single Macs products have 4? The RAM is at least double ( and will also be 3 times over time).

Apple chopped off dual package systems. The rest is largely the same. The rest of the line up is no more unbalanced state than when the XServe got dropped. For the folks who can only buy dual package systems, it is canceled. Period. But there is nothing inherently defining of "top end" or "professional" about a dual package system.

That 10.9 "Uncorks" potential in the 2010-2012 Mac pros up to 128GB probably means those "high memory footprint" folks weren't going to buy anyway since their priorities are ordered by RAM size. By the time their CPU/GPUs fall behind the densities that 4 DIMM slots cover will have gone up. Will Apple get everyone? Nope. Will they likely get many.... probably yes.

 

[AidenShaw]

The z820 only comes in duals. Not the same issue.

Wrong again.

See http://shopping1.hp.com/is-bin/INTE...-Site/en_US/-/USD/ViewProductCompare-Dispatch

And don't look at the $2759 price for a 6 core E5-2630v2....

 

[AidenShaw]

That is joke. The Mac Pro tops out at 3 times the number of cores the rest of the line up.

And half the cores and an eighth of the memory of a Dell/HP/Lenovo workstation.

Don't you see what the joke really is?

Hint: It's (usually) black, and could be mistaken for a trash can.

 

[Trailerman]

There is no Mac product that solves everything for everybody. That is actually never a design objective.

Deconstruct

That's a rather patronising misinterpretation of my comment.

I'll have to bow to your evidently superior intellect on this issue - I'm just a composer, not a technology expert like yourself.

All I was saying is: from an entirely subjective perspective (and I've never pretended anything else here), Apple got some of the specs of this system wrong. Generation after generation of G4, G5 and Mac Pro has suited me and many other composers and music creators like me well. The new one suddenly doesn't. Whilst we may be a tiny niche within a tiny niche, Apple have traditionally been our supplier of choice. Now they're potentially not.

You may be able to justify their design decisions by looking at IT trends, but it doesn't change the underlying fact that this machine is less suitable for our needs than previous generations, or than competing solutions. That may be of little or no consequence to you or to Apple, but it unfortunately matters to us, a small but loyal band of customers.

Out of interest, can I ask what you use your Macs for and whether you intend to buy the new Mac Pro?

 

[Mactrunk]

I'm using the MP for music production too.
So happy to be on an old 12 core with plenty of memory.
I am waiting to see how this all shakes out.
In the meantime, my current system is excellent.

 

[haravikk]

I'd put money on it supporting 128GB with 4x32GB DIMMs. Apple probably just couldn't get them at 1866MHz yet.

I believe the Xeon E5's can happily support 32gb modules, so this shouldn't be an issue. Are there any 32gb 1866mhz ECC RAM modules out there yet?

I was a little disappointed to see only 4 RAM slots, but then the whole ethos of the new Mac Pro is OpenCL, in which case you're hopefully taking as much advantage of the VRAM on the GPUs, at which point your RAM as mostly for queueing up data for processing.

Wasn't the Apple RAM compression to do with only compressing background app usage?

Sort of; the purpose of the compressed memory is to avoid paging memory out to disk to make room by instead compressing it. While idle/cached apps and files are definitely prime candidates for this, apps with large memory requirements could also have chunks of their memory idle and liable to paged out.

If you have an app that demands more than 64gb of actively in-use RAM then sure, compression may not help, but I think we'll get pretty close to the 50% saving for most real-world uses, which is pretty sweet. Means if you can get the pro and can leave with 18gb/24gb of effective RAM then you can just make do with what the new Mac Pro comes with, and upgrade later.

There are other important tools in Mavericks as well such as apps being able to mark memory as used for cache (i.e - can be discarded and re-built as required). If professional apps actually start to adopt this then it could also help with getting most out of RAM, as instead of trying to compress or page out such regions of memory OS X can just discard them and inform the application. But yeah, it's an API so we'll have to wait for it to gain traction.

one reason why the inactive memory is being compressed is so that it does not have to be paged out to disk. That should leave more disk I/O bandwidth to actually moving user data as opposed to OS virtual paging maintenance.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned is whether memory that is paged out to disk will do so in its compressed form. While having to resort to paging is always bad, if only half the amount of bits need to be read back from disk then that'll be improved as well; still suffers comparatively huge latency, but with a Fusion Drive you'd be able to get more virtual RAM space out of an SSD, and page out or in in half the time (+ latency). So it's a pretty exciting feature all round IMO, especially for laptop and Mac Mini users.

 

[Trailerman]

I'm using the MP for music production too.
So happy to be on an old 12 core with plenty of memory.
I am waiting to see how this all shakes out.
In the meantime, my current system is excellent.

Agreed. I have the same machine, and the lack of RAM options in the new machine makes the case for upgrading far less compelling. Maybe the benchmarks will sway us, when they finally emerge, but for now there's a strong case for doing nothing, or even upgrading our existing machines rather than replacing them.

 

[SamTheeGeek]

Its great that we can upgrade the ram in the future but i think 16gb is enough for me

 

[iBug2]

And half the cores and an eighth of the memory of a Dell/HP/Lenovo workstation.

Don't you see what the joke really is?

Hint: It's (usually) black, and could be mistaken for a trash can.

Are you sure? No Dell workstation currently manufactured has more than 6 cores. They seem to have discontinued all their dual processor towers or they are in the midst of replacing them with something else but I can't find any of their 12 cores in the website anymore.

Their premium model features 6 cores at 2.6 Ghz (Probably even slower than Apple's 4 Core offering), comes with 32 GB Memory, Quadro 4000 (I don't know how this'll compare do D300) and a 3TB 7200rpm HDD (compared to Apple's PCI-e SSD this is a joke), and it costs 3400$. I assume that if you configure Apple's entry level Mac Pro to 32 GB memory you'll get a comparable price, and for the same price Apple offers an insanely fast SSD instead of a run of the mill HDD, and a faster CPU. So, which of them is better value I wonder. (I'm being sarcastic).

 

[Gav Mack]

I would imagine they aren't offering larger modules because they can't get the right sized and high enough capacity chips to fit them just yet. Unlike server/workstation mobos they are in a far more enclosed space in the new Mac Pro not only physically but thermally too.

I guess within the next six months they will source the right sized semis, usually when the foundries go to a lower sub micron process and they can package them smaller.

 

[Umbongo]

already quoted elsewhere, please delete

 

[AidenShaw]

Are you sure? No Dell workstation currently manufactured has more than 6 cores.

Nor does any Apple. (I assume that you mean "per socket".)

Your point?

 

[iBug2]

Nor does any Apple. (I assume that you mean "per socket".)

Your point?

Not per socket. Right now none of the Dell workstations is over 6 cores, probably they are in the midst of replacing them though. My point is that none of the Dells have 24 cores and 512 GB Ram. The premium one has 32 GB RAM maxed at 6 cores for 3400$, didn't realise Dell started to offer worse value than Apple.

 

[Umbongo]

Not per socket. Right now none of the Dell workstations is over 6 cores, probably they are in the midst of replacing them though. My point is that none of the Dells have 24 cores and 512 GB Ram. The premium one has 32 GB RAM maxed at 6 cores for 3400$, didn't realise Dell started to offer worse value than Apple.

You can put 12 cores and 512GB of RAM in a Dell T7610 though. If you look at HP and Dell online and start adding memory and storage or the top tier of CPUs then prices go way up, that is how they play the game. Don't forget they come with 3 year next business day support. Play the "catch a sales person at the right time" game and/or buy in bulk and those prices are a lot less.

You can buy a Dell T3610 for $1,100 online with the E5-1620 V2 and then buy your storage, graphics cards and memory from a third party and get a lot more for your money. Yes that isn't the exact same as the new Mac Pro, but if the new Mac Pro started with 4GB of RAM, 500GB HD and cheap GPU for $1,100 plenty of people would be delighted.

End of the day the new Mac Pro is limited compared to all the alternatives, expensive compared to iMacs, Minis, custom builds and lower end builds from Tier 1 and Tier 2 workstation vendors. The limitations and price aren't totally outrageous for the intended audience.

 

[AidenShaw]

I had no problem selecting a 16-core system

Not per socket. Right now none of the Dell workstations is over 6 cores, probably they are in the midst of replacing them though. My point is that none of the Dells have 24 cores and 512 GB Ram. The premium one has 32 GB RAM maxed at 6 cores for 3400$, didn't realise Dell started to offer worse value than Apple.

Perhaps you should take a night course in internet shopping

 

[Umbongo]

Perhaps you should take a night course in internet shopping

That's the old model, he was looking at the T3610, T5610 and T7610 which are not configurable at the moment online.

 

[AidenShaw]

That's the old model, he was looking at the T3610, T5610 and T7610 which are not configurable at the moment online.

Which is pretty absurd, when you consider that http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/mac-pro has no options whatsoever for any machine, old or new....

 

[iBug2]

Perhaps you should take a night course in internet shopping

Ah finally, the retarded Dell website gets you to 7610 when you select "best" and that's not configurable for more than 6 cores. I was wondering what's going on. Still quite bad value, 12 core with 32 GB RAM and 256GB SSD gets you to 7400$. I bet Apple's 12 core will be cheaper than this even with 32GB memory and double GPU's.