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theory regarding Mac Pro delay
- Thread starter chewky
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Just a rumor. Even still, I have no confidence in apple to regurly update the pro lines
Tim Cook said at the AllThings D chat that the post-pc world will cause the PC to see a longer refresh time. I would expect the Mac Pro to see refreshes every two years now.
Well if he is being pedantic SB-E is the tweaked version that is marketed as Core i7 ( Extreme and more recently as i7 39xxK or 39xxX ) .
This seems to be part of the never ending campaign for xMac. "Apple should make a much cheaper box " blah, blah blah blah blah.
Technically, the E5 are part of SB-EP. Are they 99.99% the same die.. yep. Are they basically the same price. Yep. So it is a dubious xMac point in terms of price point. Does have more traction with the "overclocking" tweaker crowd though.
Normally, there isn't as wide a gap between the two so there isn't a huge material "time to market" difference. If Apple has also been waiting on PCI-e v.30 GPU cards it is also moot. There were other major components that would have delayed the Mac Pro anyway.
The SB-E product model designs don't cycle any faster than the SB-EP ones do.
Poster should not have mentioned Xeon and Sandy Bridge and "Apple choose not to update". Not sure what they were getting at. We have another year or 2 until Ivy Xeons. SB is all we have. There is no skipping.
If it was Westmere hex 3.46GHz chips never made it into the Mac Pro I see the logic.
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What do you mean? There are Sandy Bridge Xeon chips that exist, that's why I mentioned it in the post....not sure what you are talking about...
Sandy Bridge EP
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5553/the-xeon-e52600-dual-sandybridge-for-servers/1
http://ark.intel.com/products/codename/33170/Sandy-Bridge-EP
My mistake was believing that they were updated at the end of 2011, but those were the consumer Sandy Bridge-E chips, that's my fault; the Xeons were actually released only in early March.
Yes, but Dell, HP etc are only shipping the machines with these new Sandy Bridge Xeon CPUs now. There have clearly been delays in getting them to the market. An announcement is one thing.
Really? I did not know that, I've been trying to find evidence that their workstations are only shipping now, but couldn't find any.
Seems like a couple vendors announced availability in March, and the Dell Precision line-up was unveiled in April.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5769/dell-precision-t3600-review-dells-new-enterprise/2
Kind of strange nobody mentioned anything about delays, and we heard tons of stuff about Ivy Bridge being delayed. Oh well.
HP started shipping towards the last third of May. Lenovo at the end of May. Fujitsu have many models unavailable. Dell have ship dates of July 19th on their E5-2600 Precision workstations. 15th of June on the E5-1600 ones. News and rumour sites mostly just regurgitate each other's stuff and know or care little of what is happening in the enterprise sector. They play to the their audience and those interested in workstations are a very limited number.
The information is in forum threads but when people don't read them and just make new threads it gives the impression to others that there is no information.
Yes. They exist and they have just started shipping (reviewed a few months ago as is the case) and they will be in the new Mac Pro (if indeed it happens). Nothing was much of an upgrade until then.
My precious iMacs weren't updated either, but at least they get annual updates. Sticking with my mid 2010 iMac in the meantime. However, Apple is SLOWLY pushing me to a Windows build if they don't get their desktop situation under control.
If I would have waited and not pulled the trigger back in October for my iMac I would be really disappointed right now 
Even after the WWDC, I totally agree about Intel and the MacPro no-show. There is precedence for this. Apple has had to wait on CPUs from Intel, Motorola and IBM that has held up new Mac releases in the past. I'm very disappointed with Intel. Or perhaps it's Moore's law, but Intel performance increments over the last few years have not been very impressive. That could have a lot to do with the MacPro not being upgraded. I mean, other than Thunderbolt, a faster internal bus speed, and USB 3.0 (I guess), what else is there to update?
Still, Apple should at least do an incremental update with Thunderbolt, 6Gb/s SATA bus, and any new tech that's become available recently.
I think Apple wants to build killer PCs. The new "flagship" MBP is certainly a killer PC. Perhaps they're not ready to build a killer MacPro, but they should do something before they lose their entire pro level user base.