Next Mac Pro to Feature Intel's Xeon Phi?

[24Frames]

Now this looks very interesting.
50 Cores on a card.
Availability in early 2013.
Price TBA.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6017/intel-announces-xeon-phi-family-of-coprocessors-mic-goes-retail

Could Apple be planning to use this in Mac Pro 2013?

 

[Wardenski]

We have not seen Tesla for Macs either so I say no.

Are Macs still used for HPC these days?

 

[nanofrog]

I'd say no as well.

 

[theSeb]

They're going to put in three of those

One of these
http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/12/fusion-io-iofx/

Then add RED Mag card readers.

And finally a RED Rocket Accelerator card

 

[deconstruct60]

We have not seen Tesla for Macs either so I say no.

On factor in that though is the Tesla cards bust the thermal/power budget if the typically standard configuration GPU card is left in the Mac Pro.

It would be more likely if they were changing the design to boost the power/thermal budget of the PCI-e card thermal zone. There would likely be moaning and groaning because couldn't put them in older Mac Pros, but going forward if Apple widened the range of the power supplied to the PCI-e cards they could loop these in.


It really depends upon whether Apple wants to "grow" the workstation market or not. Co-processor/GPGPU workstations is where there will be substantive growth in the workstation market.
Workstations taking on tougher problems. Chasing the apps from the last decade is only going to increasingly shift to iMacs over time.

Are Macs still used for HPC these days?

As workstations where you try out the code on a smaller scale ( develop/test/debug cycle) before going to bigger boxes, yes. For problems that fit on a single workstation, yes. As a multiple node grid/cluster "supercomputer" , generally no. [ there pockets where folks are doing grids "just because" it is convenient or had done previous Mac oriented ones, but it isn't a major component of the cluster HPC market. ]