Perhaps you should Yahoo! for "Acorn RISC Machine" before making a comment like this.
Apple will never have complete control over the IP without an incredibly disruptive reset.
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NVIDIA Pascal in 2018 Mac Pro
- Thread starter aaronhead14
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Apple will never have complete control over the IP without an incredibly disruptive reset.
I don't think they have any more incentive as before because nobody even knows what the new MacPro will look like... just because they say it will be modular doesn't mean that it will accomodate Nvidia cards at all
I think they do! I mean, they have messed up the nMP 2013, everybody knew it and they even admitted to it, in a VERY Apple-unlike way. So they have something to loose here I'd say, and if its "only" about reputation in the Pro area (and beyond that). Seems they are finally aware of that, but not sure.
Exactly! And who says that this machine will have PCI slots? All we know is that the machine will consist of several, replaceable components, which of course is a good start. But which components, from what vendor and at what price, we don't know. Am quite curious - but also a bit wary - if we really get what most of us would like to have. Maybe time to give Apple some additional feedback about what we really want, so they do not screw again
Exactly! And who says that this machine will have PCI slots? All we know is that the machine will consist of several, replaceable components, which of course is a good start. But which components, from what vendor and at what price, we don't know. Am quite curious - but also a bit wary - if we really get what most of us would like to have. Maybe time to give Apple some additional feedback about what we really want, so they do not screw again
Well, I think we should all hope and cross our fingers that there will be PCIe slots. Let's stay positive and hopeful! I think if we keep letting Apple know what we want, then maybe they'll do it. (Especially since we pro users are the only people that buy the Mac Pro anyway, so they have no reason to not listen to us now that they've admitted that the 2013 Mac Pro was a mistake).
So yes, Apple, please give us PCIe in the 2018 Mac Pro!
I just hope they are back on their feet again, esp Jony. They really lost connection to reality a bit back then when they apparently crossed the line from "form follows function" to "function follows form".
Yeah, PCI Slots, ANY GPU from ANY vendor, room for at least four drives, NO Apple proprietary BS. Then we may be talking again. Until that I stay on my hack and wait ...
Yeah, PCI Slots, ANY GPU from ANY vendor, room for at least four drives, NO Apple proprietary BS. Then we may be talking again. Until that I stay on my hack and wait ...
I am guessing Apple might Develop their own Graphics card for in house use. But that would have its own problems.
Sure - Angry Users, if nothing else is allowed ... but if its a card like anyone, I mean why not?
This is a more direct route:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/mac-pro.html
There is even a "how many PCI cards you use" section:
...
i fear that too... it was such a great moment when apple switched to intel and a world of hardware components and software was suddenly compatible and (easier) portable on macos. that were the golden years. nowadays apples goal seems to be to alienate their systems again with non-standard inventions like the touchbar making development of software for both system more complicated. if they would be wise, they would stop such efforts and just offer beautyfully designed standard "pcs" with their powerful and superior macos to create a big eco-system as a real alternative to the windows world. instead they create odd solutions for amateurs and non critical fan-boys.
While Tech Crunch says "next year" ... just sentence or two before that is:
"... Ternus says that the team didn’t fully come to grips with the limitations of this architecture until much later than they’d hoped — though none of the speakers will give an exact timeline. ... "
Schiller's direct quote is '... and that’ll take longer than this year to do.” ...'
Gurber's blog
" ... These next-gen Mac Pros and pro displays “will not ship this year”. (I hope that means “next year”, but all Apple said was “not this year”.) ... "
http://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives
You mean like Tim Cook's June 2012 statement of the Mac Pro coming late 2013 which turned into December 2013; 18 months later?
https://www.macrumors.com/2012/06/1...c-pro-and-imac-designs-likely-coming-in-2013/
Apple more so announced the discontinuation of the current model is coming more than anything about when the new model would be done. Basically it is "not this [calendar] year". That leaves all of 2018 open. Doesn't strictly rule out 2019 although that is unlikely. ( maybe one of the Apple execs made an off-the-record comment discounting 2019 so that is being spun as 2018 ) Apple did not put themselves on a deadline. Since this is a "we need to reboot", there is some expected urgency on it so it won't take multiple years.
If resources needed to be pulled off the Mac Pro to fix some other higher priority Mac (or other) system problem, they could be and the Mac Pro would slide. The components Apple targets for next year could slide. etc. etc.
I saw an interesting thing said today (not from the "chat with our friends"), which is that the overwhelming feedback Apple received from those Mac Pro customers they have talked to in trying to get their heads around this, is that customers want Nvidia GPUs, and they want the ability to use multiple, full-fat off-the-shelf versions. That has been an unambiguous message - people don't want buying Apple pro hardware to be a risk that they'll be out of sync with the rest of the industry when the next disruption like the GTX1080 arrives. It doesn't matter how exciting Metal is, if Resolve is better with CUDA, then Apple needs a machine that can do CUDA, because if you use Resolve, your competition will buy that CUDA machine.
Pro customers don't want Apple to be "exciting" and "innovative" with tools they rely on to earn a living. Predictable and reliable seems to be a theme, and it was interesting to see Phil acknowledge that people who rely on Apple tools are hurt by Apple's screwup.
Apple were given an important lesson here - they can't control where the creative industries go, and when they get too far from the mainstream of how systems are architected, they can't make something better enough, that it's worth the risk if they get it wrong, and everyone else zags. They thought multiple low power GPUs would be the future, whereas it's actually been single, and multiple high-power setups.
They poured a boatload of money into developing the 2013 machine, and the bet didn't pay off - you'd have to hope the lesson learned is that they need to reduce their exposure to getting it wrong, and concentrate their resources on building the best scaffold, for hanging industry standard parts off.
It's a bit like the whole PPC / Intel transition, and now the arguments for AMD macs - it doesn't matter what argument is made about which is faster in a bakeoff or on paper - everything you do different to the competition eats marketing resources - if you've got the same CPU as everyone else, all you have to market is the things you do better.
Pro customers don't want Apple to be "exciting" and "innovative" with tools they rely on to earn a living. Predictable and reliable seems to be a theme, and it was interesting to see Phil acknowledge that people who rely on Apple tools are hurt by Apple's screwup.
Apple were given an important lesson here - they can't control where the creative industries go, and when they get too far from the mainstream of how systems are architected, they can't make something better enough, that it's worth the risk if they get it wrong, and everyone else zags. They thought multiple low power GPUs would be the future, whereas it's actually been single, and multiple high-power setups.
They poured a boatload of money into developing the 2013 machine, and the bet didn't pay off - you'd have to hope the lesson learned is that they need to reduce their exposure to getting it wrong, and concentrate their resources on building the best scaffold, for hanging industry standard parts off.
It's a bit like the whole PPC / Intel transition, and now the arguments for AMD macs - it doesn't matter what argument is made about which is faster in a bakeoff or on paper - everything you do different to the competition eats marketing resources - if you've got the same CPU as everyone else, all you have to market is the things you do better.
The 2009-2012 Mac Pro had a modular processor tray. That was proprietary. Commodity parts and modular parts are two different dimensions. Apple leveraged a tray so that could do both dual and single socket CPU package system with same infrastructure.
Have about the same issue now. Only Apple has extremely likely committed to single CPU package; so no CPU tray. That roadblock Apple hit was needs more commonality between one and two GPU systems. Apple could easily solve that with a customer GPU tray in basically the same way.
The other huge assumption you are making is that Apple is going to take a huge shift and not pump the display port output through Type C sockets like every other Mac that has been updated in last year or so. Thunderbolt output is highly likely (The Macbook is the only odd-ball non TB system and that's highly likely to change on the next upgrade). In that context, a pragmatically embedded GPU is also likely.
The shift to more generic standard physical PCI-e socket would only be the case if Apple had decided to get out of the GPU card design business. There is nothing in the statements they made today to support that in the slightest. Apple got 'stuck' putting custom cards into their own custom case. Honestly, there is something a little screwy with that story. Everything they described about loosening the integration to make it easier to design something that is upgradable more often would just make their custom work easier. That isn't punting the work completely off to others.
If Apple got "stuck" because there is chronic lack of resources to get a wide variety of custom GPU cards done in-house then perhaps they will punt. The trend line in every other Mac system though is for Apple to do their own GPU board work. But that may leave them overloaded to cover the Mac Pro.
Only if Apple is getting out of the business of doing GPU cards. Apple was luke warm in this session to the external GPU issue and as long as Nvidia can't win a design bake off for an Apple system ..... things aren't necessarily going to be better for Nvidia.
Drivers for just the Mac Pro isn't really alot of incentive. From the numbers given in the session from Grubers article
"... Even among pro users, notebooks are by far the most popular Macs. In second place are iMacs. The Mac Pro is third. Apple declined to describe the Mac Pro’s share of all Mac sales any more specifically than “a single-digit percent”, but my gut feeling is that the single digit is a lot closer to 1 than it is to 9. ... "
I'd go farther than that in that Mac Pro percentage is probably closer to 1 than it is to 0. It is doubtful the Mac Pro is anywhere near 9 percent unless cobbling together Mac Pros over a 10 year span of sales. Apple has about 6-7% of classic PC market space. 1% of 7% is approximately zero. Even 9% of 7% is essentially zero. The Mac Pro all by itself can't drive a robust GPU card market. The ecosystem even back in the 2009-2012 era was a race-to-the-bottom market where one vendor would do a Mac card and there there was a huge raft of other copying the work cutting them off from return on investment. It is likely one reason why Apple when custom with the Mac Pro 2013 ( beside the TB issues. ).[/QUOTE]
Thanks for the link. I just finished the feedback. I told them I want the next Mac Pro has at least 4x PCIe 3.0 slots and looking for 4x 8pin power avail to 2x high end GPU. I know the chance that they design the next Mac Pro which can fit my request is low. However, at least I voice it out in the official way.
I agree. It seems very unlikely that Apple would go with another option for the display other than TB3. This would leave them with the chore of designing custom GPU's again.
I would be ok with this if they also left room in the machine and capacity in the power supply to run an additional card in a PCI slot, OR supported eGPU over TB3.
eGPU would solve a lot of issues, and give them an out for customers that wanted to change GPU's with every manufacturer refresh.
As GPGPUs get better shared/mapped memory allocations eGPU over TBv3 is going have a set folks who balk at he bandwidth increase. The "send a copy and them compute for long time" model, it should work for more than few folks.
eGPUs would be a wider market than just Mac Pro systems. That would help with scale up the market a bit to a more support a more healthy Mac qualified/support ecosystem.
The problem with eGPU is that is more OS and driver driven than anything localized to Thunderbolt hardware/firmware. Apple's graphics stack is partially written by Apple ( and overall direction 'owned'/'directed' by Apple ). There are a set of drivers that the GPU vendor does where get into the high optimizations to implementation specifics.
Timing wise it is bad in that Apple is on verge of emerging as a GPU implementor ( for own consumption ) and there is coupling between macOS and iOS graphics stacks. I suspect suspect moving to Metal and getting the front end adjustment pretty for the 'new' Apple GPU is going to rate higher priority than changes that extremely smoothly support eGPU standards compliance would take.
GPU implementor also opens door for another patent dust up with Nvidia. That also would probably de-prioritize the work. If Nvidia is saber rattling at Apple that isn't going to help them.
I suspect that eGPU is queue, but as long as bigger macOS or any iOS drama pops up to consume resources that eGPU needs to progress it won't move forward much in the queue.
WWDC is window to see if there is going to be some major movement. If Metal gets even broader and expands alot in GPGPU flexibility. But eGPU may have worked itself to the front of the queue and an indicator may pop up in low level WWDC session.
CUDA versus Metal in the scope of the all possible platform solutions... CUDA has an edge. But CUDA versus Metal inside of Apple, folks are seriously deluding themselves that CUDA has tremendous leverage there. Threats of "we are going to walk". Yeah the iPhone makes the money of the whole lot of you were going to spend in next two years in the span of a week or month. Metal doesn't really cover the same entire space, but direct threats on it are misguided. It is doing "Metal and ...." that Apple probably needs to work on more.
Ha, as a former owner of a G4 Cube, I can tell you Apple does this about once a decade. They have learned, and in about 10 years they will forget and deliver the Mac Pro Sphere, which will need to be on a custom hover cart with all wireless connections.
Addressing CUDA is an immediate need if Apple intend to capture as much of the lost or losing workstation market, at least in the short term. Judging by the tone of Apple's statements, what I take from them is they will stand in a much more laid back position as to allow commodity 3rd party hardware components, as the lack of PCI slots and TB2's slow adoption rate on the nMP meant it was too much of a hassle to config it for much of real world tasks and scenarios. Whether or not it is in a form of a single tower, or externally modular stacks of interfaces, at least they will make sure the option of plugging in a single powerful full length video card is there, and for the foreseeable future this must include a nVidia card.
Pascal Drivers coming this month
https://9to5mac.com/2017/04/06/nvidia-titan-xp-beta-pascal-drivers-mac/
My hack will be happy.
https://9to5mac.com/2017/04/06/nvidia-titan-xp-beta-pascal-drivers-mac/
My hack will be happy.
I hope Apple stays with AMD, however, I LOVE the fact that Nvidia is back in the Mac fold! Maybe this also means going forward, PCIe is coming back to the Mac?
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