You are correct - I forgot about stone age architectures that had a North bridge.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Next mac processor update?
- Thread starter dred67212
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
You are correct - I forgot about stone age architectures that had a North bridge.
To my knowledge there is no current plan for Quick Sync on Xeon except for the bottom-end E3 (which Mac Pro does not use). It is already present on Xeon E3.
Quick Sync will be further enhanced on Skylake "Core series" CPUs (i3, i5, i7). This will apparently include JPEG, JMPEG, MPEG2, VC1, WMV9, AVC, H264, VP8 and HEVC/H265 video and image formats. The Skylake CPUs are scheduled to ship later this year.
It is obviously frustrating that Xeon E5 and above still doesn't support Quick Sync, especially as it is being further upgraded. This is because Quick Sync is tied to the on-chip GPU, and Intel apparently judged the required transistor budget too costly to include in the mostly server-based E5/E7.
While Quick Sync uses on-chip GPU resources, it is not a GPU task per se. It is essentially an on-chip transcoder ASIC. For this reason a discrete GPU (no matter how fast) cannot compete with Quick Sync for encoding. Interframe encoding is an inherently serial process which requires frame 1 to be processed as input to frame 2. The central algorithm cannot be parallelized so isn't amenable to acceleration by GPU or AVX. The GPU and AVX can assist to a limited degree by marshalling the data for the CPU to handle, but that's all.
Why on earth would you think it's cheap? Also, why do motherboards cost so much to begin with if they're really no big deal to produce? I mean you couldn't get a business loan for the best technology in the world if you had this approach to product development.
BTW, Apple almost went out of business at one point thinking they could ignore market movements and sound business principals. Obviously, someone got the memo to them and maybe you should read it to.
Great information, and good to know. Thanks for the clarification. My assumption was that Quick Sync was a feature of Haswell in itself, and would be implemented in Haswell-EP.
There's a difference between cheap and free. Redesigning the motherboard wouldn't be free, but relative to the Mac Pro annual revenue? We're talking about a $3000 computer here. I just looked online what PC world is getting for motherboards these days and there's a lot in the $50 to $80 range. That's retail. Now deduct the cost to manufacture the board and the parts that go on it and the design can't be that much given a reasonable number of units. It's not like they start designing a new board from scratch either. I'm sure they are constantly designing for new chipsets and processors coming down the pipeline regardless of what they might apply it to.
BTW, my roommate in college went on to design circuit boards, so I know they don't just design themselves. He was constantly complaining about the stuff the EE's would send him and how he'd have to rework it. I'm an ME so it was a little jab at engineers in general.
MP is a low volume product, but I don't think that low. I did a ballpark estimate and came up with $330 million annual sales for the Mac Pro. Seemed like a lot to me, so maybe I'm off. I used this as a starting point:
https://www.macrumors.com/2013/07/2...main-popular-macbook-pro-is-best-selling-mac/
Last edited:
Yeah but how much did they cost when they first came out? Some new motherboards cost upwards of $500. I doubled in software and management.
The reason New boards cost so much more than Old boards..They have to cover the cost to design and manufacture the New boards. The old boards have presumably had this cost covered by now and are much cheaper.
Last edited:
The $500 boards you mention are always the latest/wildest Extreme Series gamer boards. The main reason they're priced that high is that gamers will gladly pay the price for the latest and greatest, and the mobo makers will gladly take the higher margins.
Even now X99 (Socket 2011-v3, DDR4) motherboards can be found for less than $200. Newegg has a Supermicro Xeon E5-26xx v3 board for $262. There's a dual socket E5-26xx v3 board for $320.
It's also important to note that the MP6,1 will only need a minor tweak to the existing motherboard and CPU daughtercard. Much of the design expense (thermals, mechanicals, etc) is already being amortized. There will even be some cost reductions (e.g. USB3).
Last edited:
Apple marks things up enough to justify it. As has been pointed out, these things are good for two cycles. If they skip one, the amortized cost is actually higher due to being spread across fewer units.
Apple is now the biggest of bigs.
Many of us have been using macs for many years.
They could give us something amazing.
Even as a fun project, Apple could do something beyond the scope of current processors etc.
They have the capitol to do that.
I fear that we are like tiny ants.
It seems that Apple doesn't give a rat's ass about our Mac Pro segment.
Why should they?
Maybe just to send a message to the folks who helped them get started.
Just sayin'
Many of us have been using macs for many years.
They could give us something amazing.
Even as a fun project, Apple could do something beyond the scope of current processors etc.
They have the capitol to do that.
I fear that we are like tiny ants.
It seems that Apple doesn't give a rat's ass about our Mac Pro segment.
Why should they?
Maybe just to send a message to the folks who helped them get started.
Just sayin'