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RED President played a role in making the new modular Mac Pro
- Thread starter aaronhead14
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I think you're spot on. I work in the film industry. You have no idea about how many people I meet everyday who are working on what we would consider very obsolete machines/workflows. Their motto is "It works, why should I change" as their MacPro 1,1 coughs, exhausted.
I think the modular approach to a Mac Pro makes sense. As noted, Mac Pro users don't always add/upgrade components after the initial purchase; those customers would be best served with a base MP module. Customers who need expansion for graphics, storage etc can add on as needed.
RED's RAW media format requires heavy lifting and their Rocket PCIe card can debayer that footage in realtime, which saves going through a time consuming transcode that loses the advantage of RAW file format, or using lower rez proxy files.
RED's RAW media format requires heavy lifting and their Rocket PCIe card can debayer that footage in realtime, which saves going through a time consuming transcode that loses the advantage of RAW file format, or using lower rez proxy files.
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Price
Price has never been an issue. Performance and reliability have.
If Apple built a modular Mac Pro, and offerer proprietary components for it to be upgraded during the years, most people would be happy (if said components were actually performing well compared to off the shelf components)
Price has never been an issue. Performance and reliability have.
If Apple built a modular Mac Pro, and offerer proprietary components for it to be upgraded during the years, most people would be happy (if said components were actually performing well compared to off the shelf components)
This is Mac PRO we are talking about. Relevant quote from Phil Schiller:
Single or dual eGPU over TB3 is probably seen as fine for iMac and laptop users.
In acknowledging 6,1's shortcomings though, it's clear that MP users aren't content with Thunderbolt's limitations and want an elegant solution with more than 2x the power available to iMacs and laptops. MP 7,1 will come with a ton of TB ports, but expect some other serious external expansion that the other Macs can't touch.
Yes, Apple re-invented the wheel, by telling everyone Thunderbolt is better than PCIe, it is right?
USB/Firewire and all connection ports, yes for them to die, TB3 is amazing as a replacement!! But PCIe has no replacement but a faster PCIe . I have a feeling PCIe 3.0/3.1/4.0 won't be DIFFERENT enough for Apple.. Apple is going to do just do PCI-E expansion over TB3 or PCIe over multiple TB3 connections. Which will be a bummer. Their are a lot of people who use Windows/PC's for Heavy lifting. Davinci Resolve, Adobe CC, The Foundry, Autodesk Programs all run great on Windows. Right now NVIDIA drivers only work to their fullest on windows anyway, and with the Threadripper and overall builds getting cheaper Apple will have a hard time building something faster with better and easier expansion than a PC. A PC workstation and MacOS laptop seem to be the perfect future.. While Apple is scrambling to make a new MacPro it might be too little too late.IMHO if Apple was going to do just a PCIe based MacPro it would already be in the market, their time to re-invent the wheel and create something new and different will inevitably be the MacPro 7,1's downfall.
The pro uses want to use MacOS with high end hardware, and be able to use that hardware for years to come with standard PCIe expansion. That is it. Jarred Land, Mr. PiBB or Dr. Pepper, or whoever else doesn't need to get in the middle of this. There are thousands of users asking for this, and have explained this repeatedly, why won't Apple listen.
Also what flagship programs does Apple have anymore?? They killed them all, they just have Final Cut Pro X, which can't replace Adobe Premiere CC combined with Adobe After Effects CC, or BlackMagic Davinci Resolve combined with BlackMagic Fusion or The Foundry Nuke with HIERO. Apple has a lot of catching up to do, on all fronts... Especially if they want that high end film industry prestige back.
Heh - I thought about clarifying but glad you brought it up. I think what they're after is a way to get that high speed fabric out of the motherboard, so you can attach a module with 4 GVxxx or whatever with minimal detriment to bandwidth and latency. If Schiller was serious about building an expandable, modular, high throughput system, this seems to be a decent way of going about it.
The more I think about it... the core module could be something very much like MP 6,1. A compact box chock full of power - with full high speed fabric + TB3 expansion. Users who want dual CPUs but no PCIe slots are satisfied. They simply don't buy the expansion chassis (Lisa). Any user configuration could be satisfied with this approach.
They could still be Apple and provide a highly flexible and powerful machine again.
I think you're on to something here. I don't know if it's possible to aggregate PCIe over multiple TB3 for increased performance, but it's not a solution they would employ. Something FASTER than PCIe is definitely something Apple would like to tout. Would give them nice bragging rights on HP, Dell, Boxx, etc. as well.Yes, Apple re-invented the wheel, by telling everyone Thunderbolt is better than PCIe, it is right?
IMHO if Apple was going to do just a PCIe based MacPro it would already be in the market, their time to re-invent the wheel and create something new and different will inevitably be the MacPro 7,1's downfall.
The pro uses want to use MacOS with high end hardware, and be able to use that hardware for years to come with standard PCIe expansion. That is it. Jarred Land, Mr. PiBB or Dr. Pepper, or whoever else doesn't need to get in the middle of this. There are thousands of users asking for this, and have explained this repeatedly, why won't Apple listen.
Also what flagship programs does Apple have anymore?? They killed them all, they just have Final Cut Pro X, which can't replace Adobe Premiere CC combined with Adobe After Effects CC, or BlackMagic Davinci Resolve combined with BlackMagic Fusion or The Foundry Nuke with HIERO. Apple has a lot of catching up to do, on all fronts... Especially if they want that high end film industry prestige back.
Just proprietary enough (the chassis, backplane, and connector) to be Apple, yet addresses pro needs by offering really high expansion via stacking modules with little loss of performance.
If they were just doing another tower, we would have it by now. Thinking of where they could differentiate the Mac Pro... this seems feasible.
I don't think Apple can re-invent a new external bus technology, they are so heavily invested in Thunderbolt, I think they would figure out a way to use lots of external Thunderbolt3 connections over a new Property single cable. Economically as well as logistically.. But I could totally be wrong.
Isn't it possible we could do the Math and see what Apple could do? Each CPU could have ~48ish lanes of PCI traffic, With Duel XEON that could double, and from their we have Thunderbolt 3 using 4 lanes, if that is our only external connector. Everything will either be 16, 8 or 4 lanes. If we have dual XEON with 80ish lanes is that enough to have CPU, Memory, Internal Storage and have 8 full speed Thunderbolt 3 connections per CPU, yeah it is possible. I mean it would look really really silly, but you would need at least 4 external Thunderbolt3 to create a 16x Lane. So you would have a tower with Dual Xeons, and 16 Thunderbolt 3 Ports and your external "Modular" PCIe enclosure would be connected by 4 thunderbolt 3 cables...?? ugh.. Seems awkward, but possible.
I can't even guess what Apple is going to do.. All scenarios seem a little weird. I think Apple will surprise us all again. Though Apple will probably go low to save money and it will be to be single Cable Thunderbolt 3 external enclosures that can only go PCIe 4x. That will be our "MODULE." I also think Apple might only do a single XEON, to save space, which then gives us only ~48sih lanes. And AMD Threadripper with 64 PCIe lanes is out because of Thunderbolt.
The future will be awesome or awkward, can't wait to find out which.
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I still laugh at some of the stuff people are asking for. I have seen people ask for expansion expansion expansion then follow that with saying they want a small form factor. Pick one you can't have both.
Actually, you can.
If your SFF had two PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, you could have:
- one double-wide GPU
- two single-wide GPUs
- one single-wide GPU and an x16 expansion chassis
- two x16 expansion chassis
Correct I was more meaning internally in one case. No external expansion chassis.
If Apple makes a 5,1 tower with 7,1 guts then most old Pros would be happy, but that won't happen, it is far too easy. If Apple goes the MacMiniPro route, which seems to be highly possible, then we are kinda in for another generation of Apple making us think differently on what it means to be pro. It might work out with lots of cables and modules and wires everywhere as long as those wires connect to a PCIe.
Another option would be to have an SFF system and a mini-tower. Basically the same (cheap) motherboard but one mobo has more slots and is in a larger box with a more powerful power supply.
Mac Pro and Mac Pro²
(This assumes that Apple continues to ignore the people asking for dual-socket systems.)
They could conceivably use some existing PCIe based fabric for the Lisa (expansion chassis). Now if you populate your Lisa with cards that are fabric-aware (like NVLink capable), now you have a whole bunch of power at your desk. Now the question becomes "how do you manage the acoustics?"
They're doing something to advance the current state just beyond raw cores and sheer amount of addressable RAM. Yes these are important constraints and those limits need to be in line with other workstation manufacturers. But they seem committed to this path of aggressively high optimization and reducing I/O bottlenecks.
Or Apple could simply get a mobo from SuperMicro, and some PCIe extenders from OneStopSystems, and tell Jony and his elves to make some pretty cases, and ship it by the end of the month.
No need to invent a new proprietary fabric, or proprietary modules. Just make a single socket mini-tower, and a dual-socket midi-tower. And make a "matching" PCIe expansion chassis.
Ship it before September.
and will apple go out of there way to make it so no hackintosh system will ever boot with an AMD CPU.
9K for an Intel system for that an $2K-2.5K desktop AMD can destroy with more pci-e.
or even an rack-mount system server system with AMD dual 16-Core/32T with 128GB EEC 6.7K base price and that is with a lot of server hardware that an apple workstation will not have.
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To drive that they may need dual cpu or 1 AMD epic.
4X16
+
4X4
is 80 give you about 16 left over for TB and other IO + DMI link.
I surely hope Apple just makes a regular desktop tower computer, much like the 5,1 but with new components and T3. That would be the dream Mac for me.
Exactly.
It's funny that people are suggesting Apple make a tiny Mac Pro... and then you'd need a separate box for all the stuff that pros actually want: PCIe expansion cards, extra drives, etc.
I said this earlier... just make it a tower. There's no shame in that.
It's supposed to be a workstation... not a work of art.
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Most likely: make a thin'n'crispy sealed unit with a better choice of build-to-order CPU, SSD and GPU options than the current nMP.
The whole modular thing could be a red herring - just to re-iterate what we actually know from that press conference:
So, reading comprehension 101, this is what we know about Apple's definition of "modular":
(1) A fundamental feature of "modular" systems is that they don't include a display. That's the only explicit definition of "modular" I can see in the whole article.
(2) "Modular" systems are already being used by Apple users. So it's not some new concept Apple are dreaming up for the next Mac Pro.
(3) Schiller splits their current systems into three categories: notebooks, all-in-one desktops and modular desktops, then says "We’re making three different designs for pros" (present tense) and "We’re going to continue to." (removes any doubt that "we're making" referred to currently available systems). So those three categories describe Apple's current range - i.e. MacBook, iMac and nMP cylinder.
Conclusion: when Apple say "modular" all they mean is "a desktop that isn't all-in-one".
That doesn't rule out the new Pro having proper PCIe slots (good idea) or some clever (and expensive) proprietary docking system (silly idea), but there's no other mention of any of those in the transcript - and, unfortunately, it doesn't rule out a minor variation of the current nMP with better BTO options.
Now, a PCIe MP would be a great idea. However, this is Apple we're talking about: a hatch in the back of the iMac Pro for RAM/SSD upgrade/replacement would have been a good idea, too (even if it made it 5mm thicker).
I agree 100%. The fact remains they have chosen not to do that. They are using this time for something, but what? It has to differentiate the 7,1 from HP, Dell, etc. and not just clever industrial design + macOS.
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I think most folks are saying it will be tiny in comparison to cMP. 2 optical drives and 4 spinners no longer need to be accommodated.Exactly.
It's funny that people are suggesting Apple make a tiny Mac Pro... and then you'd need a separate box for all the stuff that pros actually want: PCIe expansion cards, extra drives, etc.
I said this earlier... just make it a tower. There's no shame in that.
It's supposed to be a workstation... not a work of art.
A 2-4 GPU box with NVME storage and 2 sockets doesn't need to be large. So everyone, even base Mac Pro buyers will get their PCIe slots back, and if you need more, there will be an officially sanctioned expansion chassis.
....except a professional would never squish a movie poster to fit the venue's frame size.... They'd make a custom poster that properly fits the frame, lol