MP 7,1 Waiting for Mac Pro 7,1 A1991 (no more)

[fuchsdh]

In my opinion, Apple wont release the Mac Pro 7.1 until the Xeon E5 V5 Skylake are available, and this wont happen until end of 2017 thanks to Intel's bad management. So it is irrelevant if Vega is ready within the next few months. The Mac Pro will be then 4 years without an update.

Even if they'd shipped without Thunderbolt 3, a Mac Pro bump to Broadwell/DDR4 memory and slightly better GPUs at the beginning of 2016 would have been a lot more preferable to still waiting. Not every revision has to be earth-shattering. No one put a gun to Apple's head and told them they had to skip chip generations.

 

[viersen]

Even if they'd shipped without Thunderbolt 3, a Mac Pro bump to Broadwell/DDR4 memory and slightly better GPUs at the beginning of 2016 would have been a lot more preferable to still waiting. Not every revision has to be earth-shattering. No one put a gun to Apple's head and told them they had to skip chip generations.

Yes, that would be ideal for us but not for a company who is looking to get the best sales result when a new product is launched. Mac Pro is not a product to be updated the same way the iMac or the Macbook are. They are more powerful computers and more expensive with such a longer life cycle so they aim to hold for more meaningful updates and sell as much as possible. As soon as Apple release the Mac Pro 7.1 I will be one of the buyers and believe me, I won't update it at least until 7 or 8 years after purchased cause it is not necessary. If I would have bought the Mac Pro 6.1 three years ago, I would still use it for another 3 or 4 years. But I don't have one.

If Apple would have reduced the price of the nMP considerably, I would have bought one by now. At this point, the best I can do is to wait sadly another 6 months until 7.1 is released.

 

[fuchsdh]

Yes, that would be ideal for us but not for a company who is looking to get the best sales result when a new product is launched. Mac Pro is not a product to be updated the same way the iMac or the Macbook are. They are more powerful computers and more expensive with such a longer life cycle so they aim to hold for more meaningful updates and sell as much as possible. As soon as Apple release the Mac Pro 7.1 I will be one of the buyers and believe me, I won't update it at least until 7 or 8 years after purchased cause it is not necessary. If I would have bought the Mac Pro 6.1 three years ago, I would still use it for another 3 or 4 years. But I don't have one.

If Apple would have reduced the price of the nMP considerably, I would have bought one by now. At this point, the best I can do is to wait sadly another 6 months until 7.1 is released.

I agree. There's no reason for Apple to update products like the mini and Mac Pro every year like their more popular products.

But we're not talking about skipping a year, we're talking about coming up on four years without a refresh if they're waiting for Skylake. Even with desktop CPU tech slowing there's still massive amounts of stuff Apple could have done.

 

[askunk]

On a pure marketing side, the 6,1 is still faster than most iMacs and offers greater resistance to long workloads, plus it offers faster SSDs (than the iMac) and greater graphics, even though I still wonder whether there are apps other than FCP which use fully the dual GPUs.

As much as I would agree they could at least show some mercy and lower the price, I can understand why Tim Cook is ok with keeping it as a high end with a higher price than an iMac.

The thing is: with the new Kabylake and Polaris, new SSDs (like the blazing fast of the MBP) and fast TB3, many models could easily show more muscles than the 6,1. That, I think, will oblige Apple to work on a quick turnover. Will they go up to September? I doubt it, although I do agree with many of you that, after such a long wait, I would at least know I'm buying an innovative new model, not just a simple refresh. I want to see the distance in performance between MBPs and iMacs, being at least as the gap to the 7,1.

Dual SSDs (hopefully in RAID 0 with R/W around 5GB/s) would be a viable option to start with configurations from 512GB (2x256), 1 TB (2x512) and 2TB (2x1TB). It could be even cheaper than fitting a single SSD with the same total capacity.

 

[Bubba Satori]

Bubba, why not Itanium or a successor? Wouldn't it fit nicely in the nMP?

The only company left using the Itanic is HP.
Everybody else has jumped in the lifeboats.
It's a niche within a niche for HPC, not workstations.
Oracle paid $3 billion just to get away from it and not do a DB for it.
As soon as HP's contract with Chipzilla ends it will be officially buried.
It was an epic *urd.

The last version of the Itanic, Kittson is so far behind on process size it's not funny.
Wait for it.
.32
Next year.
It's dead Jim.

 

[t0mat0]

Geforce Now for Mac gaming, for when Apple won't give your Mac a decent gaming GPU?

 

[fuchsdh]

Geforce Now for Mac gaming, for when Apple won't give your Mac a decent gaming GPU?

Macs have never had gaming-focused GPUs, so yeah. If you've got the connection for it, this stuff does seem like an interesting option.

 

[G-News]

Not true. In 1999 the smurf G3s were the first to come with Rage Pro graphics and SJ claimed he was going to make the Mac the best gaming platform. That never happened after the Bungie debacle.

The real Problem with Ryzen is that it lacks Thunderbolt support, so if even possible, Apple would have to add that on with extra dies, which drives up cost and real estate and potentially lowers performance.

 

[goMac]

Not true. In 1999 the smurf G3s were the first to come with Rage Pro graphics and SJ claimed he was going to make the Mac the best gaming platform. That never happened after the Bungie debacle.

Apple seemed to care about games in a real way until around 10.5 or 10.6. But after the Bungie thing it all went downhill. Jobs was so annoyed at how that went he just kind of gave up on Mac gaming.

Heck, Apple used to keep Mac gaming companies alive by buying out their games and including them with really old school Power Macs. I remember every time I got one it came with at least a few AAA games and a few second tier games. Those guaranteed licenses kept a lot of Mac gaming companies alive, and Apple had a lot to do with those companies sticking around.

But times are different now.

 

[Aldaris]

Bugdom anyone

 

[goMac]

The real Problem with Ryzen is that it lacks Thunderbolt support, so if even possible, Apple would have to add that on with extra dies, which drives up cost and real estate and potentially lowers performance.

If AMD ever starts talking Thunderbolt support, that will be the first big sign Apple is a possibility. On a machine with a few ports, adding the additional custom chipsets for Thunderbolt wouldn't be too bad, but on the Mac Pro that would be a big deal.

 

[t0mat0]

Any thoughts having read a bit on the Vega preview? Seems AMD's approach with HBM2, being able to have an SSD hang off a GPU with a large amount of data seems up Apple's street.

"By far the most interesting information released today is the move to include external memory options for the GPU other than simply the on-board memory, now referred to High Bandwidth Cache (HBC). The potential for this kind of memory system is substantial though I would wager the impact on enthusiast gaming will be minimal out of the gate and for a couple of generations. For professional and enterprise use cases though, having access to a cohesive memory system that includes HBM2, flash, system and network storage could create a massive disruption in the development cycle."
https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graph...w-Redesigned-Memory-Architecture/Primitive-Sh

 

[goMac]

Any thoughts having read a bit on the Vega preview?

Seemed like everything is on course, but just... late...

I don't think the Mac Pro will end up with a fully clocked Vega. But even down clocked it should be a very nice GPU.

Vega's HBC could be an interesting justification for Apple to hang the Mac Pro's SSDs on the GPU, but I have my doubts Apple would take advantage of that.

 

[Stacc]

Vega's HBC could be an interesting justification for Apple to hang the Mac Pro's SSDs on the GPU, but I have my doubts Apple would take advantage of that.

This seems like the perfect place for Apple to leverage the computing appliance aspect of the mac pro. They have all those PCI express lanes for shuttling around data between the CPU, GPUs, SSD and thunderbolt, why not adopt this type of architecture. They have already artificially limited themselves to AMD GPUs, so they don't have to worry about excluding Nvidia GPUs. Additionally, this is something you can leverage that a single desktop can do, and not something thats connecting to some other computing resource like the cloud or a cluster. Besides, nothing would make apple happier then giving people more reasons to choose those expensive SSD BTO options.

 

[koyoot]

Nope. 16C/32T, 24C/48T, 32C/64T configs, made from number of 8C/16T CPUs connected through MCM.

If 32C/64T setup has 128 PCIe lanes, that means that 8C/16T has available 32 lanes. Sufficient CPU for Mac Pro would have therefore quad channel memory setup and 64 PCIe lanes. Both 16 and 24 core setups are 150W designs.

They can also be "cut down" in core counts.

I have to correct this. 8C/16T has 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes. Sorry for this.

 

[filmak]

Apple seemed to care about games in a real way until around 10.5 or 10.6. But after the Bungie thing it all went downhill. Jobs was so annoyed at how that went he just kind of gave up on Mac gaming.

Heck, Apple used to keep Mac gaming companies alive by buying out their games and including them with really old school Power Macs. I remember every time I got one it came with at least a few AAA games and a few second tier games. Those guaranteed licenses kept a lot of Mac gaming companies alive, and Apple had a lot to do with those companies sticking around.

But times are different now.

Yes, times are different, indeed.
iThings for gaming...
Macs for museums...

 

[Joe The Dragon]

Apple seemed to care about games in a real way until around 10.5 or 10.6. But after the Bungie thing it all went downhill. Jobs was so annoyed at how that went he just kind of gave up on Mac gaming.

Heck, Apple used to keep Mac gaming companies alive by buying out their games and including them with really old school Power Macs. I remember every time I got one it came with at least a few AAA games and a few second tier games. Those guaranteed licenses kept a lot of Mac gaming companies alive, and Apple had a lot to do with those companies sticking around.

But times are different now.

Not really that big on gaming as the mac pro started at $2000+ with 1-2 GB ram and an low end video card.

They should of had an $1000-$1200 (starting range) tower with 1 desktop CPU + an X16 pci-e dual wide + pci-e X4 and at least 2 HDD slots. For gaming with a big choice video cards or very open to put in any ati / nvidia card. Yes higher cost then most gaming pc's but willing to take in the alienware people who want gaming that an imac can't do.

Even high end pricing at $1500-$2000 would of worked for high end games who did not want to deal with windows. Back then and some what to day games do not make full use of multi core and 2-4 core high end cpu is better then slower 2-4 per cpu dual cpu systems.

But not be at workstation levels.

 

[filmak]

So, Apple's iOS focus is making a real damage to Macs.
This was a very interesting part, from this post (bold added)
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/01/03/macos-sierra-users-avoid-broken-preview-edit-pdfs/.

"It pains me to say this, speaking as the co-author of "Take Control of Preview," but I have to recommend that Sierra users avoid using Preview to edit PDF documents until Apple fixes these bugs. If editing a PDF in Preview in unavoidable, be sure to work only on a copy of the file and retain the original in case editing introduces corruption of any sort. As to why issues have arisen in Apple's native Preview application, Engst quotes approvingly the DEVONthink developer Christian Grunenberg, who characterizes the rewritten version of PDFKit in Sierra as a "work in progress":
Apple wants to use a common foundation for both iOS and macOS. However, it was released way too early, and for the first time (at least in my experience) Apple deprecated several features without caring about compatibility. And to make things worse, lots of former features are now broken or not implemented at all, meaning that we had to add lots of workarounds or implement stuff on our own. And there’s still work left to be done.

10.12.2 introduces new issues (it seems that Apple wants to fix at least the broken compatibility now) and of course fixed almost none of the other issues. It’s not only DEVONthink — a lot of other applications (such as EndNote, Skim, Bookends, and EagleFiler) are also affected." ...

 

[ManuelGomes]

Bubba, I know all that about Itanium (the Itanic reference is nice by the way ) but what I was saying (or hoping) was that Intel would pick it up again (the architecture that is) and be done with x86 for good.
Bring it down to workstation and desktop.
Not gonna happen of course but since they are somewhat forced to move on, why not take the work already done and start fresh in these areas?!
Can't squeeze much out of x86 anymore.
Apple could license it (or buy) from Intel and port macOS for Itanium, bring it down to 10nm and tweak it like they did with the ARM cores for the iDevices.
And then I woke up...
[doublepost=1483646260][/doublepost]I was hoping for more details on Vega but this particular card is only geared towards gaming it seems.
This could be the 490 in fact.
Which makes me wonder about the "Pro" cards and the rest of the lineup.
It seems AMD is only doing a smoke and mirrors show right now, with few details, but nothing that will let us know what's to come.
I can see a few more months until we see some Radeon Pro cards, the ones that will fit the nMP anyway.
I see some saying the card has 8GB others 16GB (2 stacks of 8GB). Maybe the confusion comes from the 16GB on the MI25. Dual 16GB cards on the nMP would be sweet, D910 of course.

 

[goMac]

Not really that big on gaming as the mac pro started at $2000+ with 1-2 GB ram and an low end video card.

They should of had an $1000-$1200 (starting range) tower with 1 desktop CPU + an X16 pci-e dual wide + pci-e X4 and at least 2 HDD slots. For gaming with a big choice video cards or very open to put in any ati / nvidia card. Yes higher cost then most gaming pc's but willing to take in the alienware people who want gaming that an imac can't do.

Even high end pricing at $1500-$2000 would of worked for high end games who did not want to deal with windows. Back then and some what to day games do not make full use of multi core and 2-4 core high end cpu is better then slower 2-4 per cpu dual cpu systems.

But not be at workstation levels.

Nono, we're really talking before the Mac Pro. During the PowerPC days, maaaaybe very early Intel but not really. Even the lowest end Mac Mini came with a discrete GPU back then, and Apple would advertise it with gaming benchmarks.

A Power Mac G4 with a decent GPU back then was not a bad deal either. The Power Mac started at what... I think I remember them going as low as $1300?

Basically when the iPhone shipped Apple really stopped caring, and that was around the same time Intel happened.

Edit: And for the record, I don't think the Mac Pro was a bad choice either up until something like the 3,1. It was still cheaper than a comparable PC, and gaming PCs were a lot more expensive than they are today. The GPU PSU situation wasn't a problem yet. But Apple's software focus had already started to move away.

 

[shab]

Apple has an new Mac OS every year, but not an updated Mac desktop.
The software, and hardware's divisions in Apple are out of sync!
I can't update my 4,1 to latest Mac OS, but there is no desktop to justify buying either.

 

[fuchsdh]

Nono, we're really talking before the Mac Pro. During the PowerPC days, maaaaybe very early Intel but not really. Even the lowest end Mac Mini came with a discrete GPU back then, and Apple would advertise it with gaming benchmarks.

A Power Mac G4 with a decent GPU back then was not a bad deal either. The Power Mac started at what... I think I remember them going as low as $1300?

Basically when the iPhone shipped Apple really stopped caring, and that was around the same time Intel happened.

Edit: And for the record, I don't think the Mac Pro was a bad choice either up until something like the 3,1. It was still cheaper than a comparable PC, and gaming PCs were a lot more expensive than they are today. The GPU PSU situation wasn't a problem yet. But Apple's software focus had already started to move away.

Apple was price-competitive up to the 4,1 Mac Pro, but it was a bit late with that revision... and we saw how they slipped after that. But they were always price-competing with workstations. Even the 6,1 was price-competitive when it hit, but with the caveat that if you absolutely needed something more beefy or expandable, it simply couldn't compete in those areas. The problem with Apple has never really been that they can't put something out that's close, it's that they don't modulate their prices over time, compounded by erratic release schedules. The G4s and G5s all stomped comparable Intel offerings when they were initially released, too... and then that advantage quickly disappeared.

The reality is Apple has *never* had someone who really cares about games, and probably actually plays them a lot. The whole idea of "green felt and lawn games = gaming" that hit with Game Center, and the fact that Game Center could have been awesome but languished, is point enough. Even on iOS Apple mostly just seems interested in games in that they're the app category that makes real sustainable money. They had their chance to start challenging the big three game console makers with the Apple TV, but they didn't.

Especially now, I don't see Apple ever being able to leverage gaming to grow their business. You can get more power for cheaper, and always have been, the only difference now is there's more of a price differential than historically. People have been asking for the xMac for years, and it's never come, and now that desktops are an ever-shrinking part of their lineup I don't see that changing, even if they could cheap it by, say, making a Mac Pro enclosure with a single MXM-style GPU and an i7 instead of a Xeon.

I definitely wish Apple had one or two guys over there in a position they could make the relatively small changes that would at least make Mac gaming more pleasant, especially now with eGPUs (in other words offloading a lot of the stuff they don't want to deal with in relation to games.) But they just don't.

 

[kennyisalive]

Yes, that would be ideal for us but not for a company who is looking to get the best sales result when a new product is launched. Mac Pro is not a product to be updated the same way the iMac or the Macbook are. They are more powerful computers and more expensive with such a longer life cycle so they aim to hold for more meaningful updates and sell as much as possible. As soon as Apple release the Mac Pro 7.1 I will be one of the buyers and believe me, I won't update it at least until 7 or 8 years after purchased cause it is not necessary. If I would have bought the Mac Pro 6.1 three years ago, I would still use it for another 3 or 4 years. But I don't have one.

If Apple would have reduced the price of the nMP considerably, I would have bought one by now. At this point, the best I can do is to wait sadly another 6 months until 7.1 is released.

They could at least lower the damn price on these machines... I don't get why they haven't. It's like they WANT to kill the Mac Pro on purpose...

In any case, there has been massive speculation on Tim Cook returning the production of the Mac Pros back to China. This is all indicative of them trying to can the Mac Pro line in favor of a pseudo-Pro machine like the rumored AIO iMac Pro (which would be monumentally retarded).

 

[BB8]

If we're really waiting for a Q2 Vega release they might as well just kill off the Mac Pro now.

 

[ventricle]

I can't update my 4,1 to latest Mac OS, but there is no desktop to justify buying either

Apple was price-competitive up to the 4,1 Mac Pro, but it was a bit late with that revision

Geeze but my 3-y.o. tropical holiday iMacs are so slow compared to my 5,1. If they were more flexible, I’d get them more memory, fat SSDs, and an improved graphics card. Instead, I’m now thinking of giving them away and getting something else. Problem is I fear the ‘something else' is even more constrained.