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

But even if Zen is just about to reach the performance level of Broadwell-E on some test and is behind on others, remember that it could be +50% cheaper than Intel's' VERY expensive Xeons. So if performance difference is 5-10% and price is less than half... Tim Cook could see a lot of green on his spreadsheet.

And with the same price they'd achieve HSA 1.1 capabilities. Although, HSA could be on Apples' roadmap next year, not this year.
 
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Zarniwoop said:
But even if Zen is just reaching the performance level of Broadwell-E on some test, remember that it could be 50% cheaper than Intel's' VERY expensive Xeons.
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No chances. AMD is not going to be chap'o company anymore. If they will have competitive product, they will price it. They have learnt their lessons in the past.

For example, If small Vega is GTX 1080 competitor in performance it will be priced slightly lower to counter what Nvidia offers, with best possible value for customers AND the company. Same will happen with Zen.

Everything here will depend on performance of the silicon, and position they place it. If 4 core, 65W will counter 65W quad core CPUs from Intel - expect according pricing. If 95W 8 core CPU will counter with 140W Intel CPUs - expect accurate pricing.

And to put this into perspective: 8 core i7-6900K costs 1100$.

P.S. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/amd-zen.1988652/ This is the thread about Zen. Lets go and discuss it there.
 
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Roykor said:
VR is huge
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that's an understatement:

HTC_Vive_(16).jpg

...too bad for apple that HTC got there first and now everybody is using these things under a competitor's brand.. apple would've made a killing on this headset had they not missed the boat already.
:rolleyes:

-----
(in case the point isn't coming through---> VR hasn't even happened yet.. will apple miss the boat?
possibly.. doubtful yet possible.. but the boat hasn't even docked yet much less sailed away)
 
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koyoot said:
No chances. AMD is not going to be chap'o company anymore. If they will have competitive product, they will price it. They have learnt their lessons in the past.

For example, If small Vega is GTX 1080 competitor in performance it will be priced slightly lower to counter what Nvidia offers, with best possible value for customers AND the company. Same will happen with Zen.

Everything here will depend on performance of the silicon, and position they place it. If 4 core, 65W will counter 65W quad core CPUs from Intel - expect according pricing. If 95W 8 core CPU will counter with 140W Intel CPUs - expect accurate pricing.

And to put this into perspective: 8 core i7-6900K costs 1100$.

P.S. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/amd-zen.1988652/ This is the thread about Zen. Lets go and discuss it there.
Click to expand...

AMD has lost so much mindshare on the processor front that they'll have to aggressively price or people won't even consider them.
 
amd has claimed "value" time after time on their zen announcements. Set expectations at this time are low power competitive performance, multicore CPUs, priced competitively.
 
Details starting to leak out on Vega. Seems like it could time well with a high end Mac Pro config. No firm TDP yet that I can tell, but Apple could improve the Mac Pro on that front.

I wonder if Vega is what Apple is waiting on right now.
 
goMac said:
Details starting to leak out on Vega. Seems like it could time well with a high end Mac Pro config. No firm TDP yet that I can tell, but Apple could improve the Mac Pro on that front.

I wonder if Vega is what Apple is waiting on right now.
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What I find incredible here is the amount of people ready to dig for excuses for Apple not having updated the Mac Pro long ago. "Maybe they're waiting for xx, maybe for xx, noooo they are waiting for xxx!"

They're not waiting for anything. They're not giving much attention to the Mac Pro and therefore rarely - if ever again - updating it. Following the trend they started in 2009 or so.

Why is that so hard to accept compared to all the far fetched excuses?

To quote a famous song... "they don't really care about us".
 
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goMac said:
Details starting to leak out on Vega. Seems like it could time well with a high end Mac Pro config. No firm TDP yet that I can tell, but Apple could improve the Mac Pro on that front.

I wonder if Vega is what Apple is waiting on right now.
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Any links?
 
Yeah, what new info is there?
Simon, you could even be right, but if so, why bother posting that rant? You're welcome to of course but if you really don't believe it will come, you still visit the forum. I guess there 's still hope, right? :)

I believe Apple wasn't considering all the delays in the new tech to come and that's why there wasn't a new model yet. Just slapping a new CPU, which required overall redesign, wasn't enough to warrant a new model.
Now, with the AMD full ecosystem coming up I'm starting to believe the cards are set. Might be wrong though.
But that could mean a few more months in the works, which is meh...
Zen server parts might be good if indeed they go up to 64 PCIe lanes, and also have 4 DDR4 channels. With coherent fabric and all the HSA goodies the nMP would look awesome with full integration. I do believe this is what the new nMP will look like, now or in the near future.
But ditching Intel would be a bold move, unless the full lineup gets AMD. And Zen being highly customizable maybe even Apple will request a custom CPU and APU from AMD.
Regarding the benchmarks presented, again the marketing people are doing their work, so let's wait a bit more and see. I don't believe in power consumptions miracles, as with Polaris. And we should probably compare -E/-EP with the server parts, not mainstream. -E is a lot more like Xeons than desktop parts, that's the fact. We have to wait for the server Zen to be out, or at least the full specs and benchmarks.
I'd say Apple might already have these babies in testing on their labs, be it A0, A1 or A2 silicon.
Maybe some leaks start to come out soon enough :)
[doublepost=1471604676][/doublepost]thanx Zarni. Good info there, I was just reading that also.

Too late for the nMP then, I guess.
It seems it might do away with Promontory, which is good, no love for AMD chipsets. And this one also seems to have issues. But it's hard to believe the CPU packs all the IO stuff.
 
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ManuelGomes said:
Yeah, what new info is there?
Simon, you could even be right, but if so, why bother posting that rant? You're welcome to of course but if you really don't believe it will come, you still visit the forum. I guess there 's still hope, right? :)

I believe Apple wasn't considering all the delays in the new tech to come and that's why there wasn't a new model yet. Just slapping a new CPU, which required overall redesign, wasn't enough to warrant a new model.
Now, with the AMD full ecosystem coming up I'm starting to believe the cards are set. Might be wrong though.
But that could mean a few more months in the works, which is meh...
Zen server parts might be good if indeed they go up to 64 PCIe lanes, and also have 4 DDR4 channels. With coherent fabric and all the HSA goodies the nMP would look awesome with full integration. I do believe this is what the new nMP will look like, now or in the near future.
But ditching Intel would be a bold move, unless the full lineup gets AMD. And Zen being highly customizable maybe even Apple will request a custom CPU and APU from AMD.
Regarding the benchmarks presented, again the marketing people are doing their work, so let's wait a bit more and see. I don't believe in power consumptions miracles, as with Polaris. And we should probably compare -E/-EP with the server parts, not mainstream. -E is a lot more like Xeons than desktop parts, that's the fact. We have to wait for the server Zen to be out, or at least the full specs and benchmarks.
I'd say Apple might already have these babies in testing on their labs, be it A0, A1 or A2 silicon.
Maybe some leaks start to come out soon enough :)
[doublepost=1471604676][/doublepost]thanx Zarni. Good info there, I was just reading that also.

Too late for the nMP then, I guess.
It seems it might do away with Promontory, which is good, no love for AMD chipsets. And this one also seems to have issues. But it's hard to believe the CPU packs all the IO stuff.
Click to expand...
Intel has not allowed 3rd parties to build chipsets for their CPUs for years. With AMD, Apple could design their own chipset, incorporating all the goodies they want. And all running under the shadow of HSA, as they like.
 
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And that's where Intel used to shine. Not that they don't right now.
But AMD has sucked for years, and others have done nothing better.
Don't think Apple will do chipsets though.
If Naples has it all integrated, no need anyway.
 
APFS will have a support for hardware encryption, so I think Apple has something in their mind in this regard. A new chip/co-processor to take care of that? It could be included in the new chipset. Or APU. I think Apple wants a separate security chip / TPM in the motherboard or SoC that could handle all the external IO, touch ID and encryption.

At least this is how I read their plan for APFS. But it could be iOS only feature.
 
I just really want them to go back to dual processors. Is there really much point to a Xeon if you only have one? Might as well have a powerful i7.
 
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JesterJJZ said:
I just really want them to go back to dual processors. Is there really much point to a Xeon if you only have one? Might as well have a powerful i7.
Click to expand...

Well, if you use a Xeon Phi you can have up to 72 cores. A Xeon E5 has up to 22 cores. The i7 lacks ECC support, and maxes out at 10 cores.
 
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koyoot said:
Any links?
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LOL, last thing that I expected from you.

Most of the time the forum is asking you to post links....
[doublepost=1471651628][/doublepost]
mathpunk said:
Xeon Phi workstations are starting to appear now, for example:

https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/tower/5038/SYS-5038K-I.cfm.

There is also a development workstation with with 96GB memory and a 64-core Xeon Phi for under $5000. That would be an awesome MacPro 7,1.
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If you can get by with a tiny memory system...
[doublepost=1471651816][/doublepost]
JesterJJZ said:
I just really want them to go back to dual processors. Is there really much point to a Xeon if you only have one? Might as well have a powerful i7.
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For most people, the advantage to dual Xeons is twice as many PCIe lanes - since the MP6,1 sends 16 lanes to the compute GPU that most apps can't exploit.

The new chipsets seem to have lots of extra lanes for NVMe disks - a really big thing.
 
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Simon R. said:
What I find incredible here is the amount of people ready to dig for excuses for Apple not having updated the Mac Pro long ago. "Maybe they're waiting for xx, maybe for xx, noooo they are waiting for xxx!"

They're not waiting for anything. They're not giving much attention to the Mac Pro and therefore rarely - if ever again - updating it. Following the trend they started in 2009 or so.

Why is that so hard to accept compared to all the far fetched excuses?

To quote a famous song... "they don't really care about us".
Click to expand...

It's not like there's been jack for CPU or GPU improvements (except mobile) since the trashcan came out. Both AMD and NV have their first node shrink in 5 years in the past few months, and AMD still doesn't have a high end part out of it. Intel has given us 5% IPC improvements generation over generation.

I'm in the pack that's waiting for a refresh to buy, but honestly it's been slim pickings for upgrades. I'm still riding an upgraded 2010 model and it's hanging in there just fine. I bounce between that and my current PC and there just isn't that much difference.
 
It's more than 5%, plus new GPUs, plus new I/O and the insulting fact that Apple is charging absurd three year old prices for three year old junk. Defending the indefensible, while amusingly Quixotic, is unfortunately a waste of your time.
 
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Bubba Satori said:
It's more than 5%, plus new GPUs, plus new I/O and the insulting fact that Apple is charging absurd three year old prices for three year old junk. Defending the indefensible, while amusingly Quixotic, is unfortunately a waste of your time.
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Anandtech measured it at 6% for Ivy-E to Haswell-E, and 3-5% for Haswell-E to Broadwell-E. So yes, it's about 5% generation over generation. It can be found in each of his E series review.

The big I/O leap will come with Intel's Optane, which is just around the corner yet. Apple's done just fine with their own PCIE storage implementations. But in general I agree that the biggest advancements will come from the motherboard chipset feature set, Thunderbolt 3, and the 16nm FinFET GPU advancements. Anything prior to this would be extremely minor. It could be interesting in terms of increased CPU cores, if Apple can increase the TDP from the 2013 model, but we'll have to see.

The GPU makers only achieved continued performance increases at 28nm by making the chips massive in size, with associated high TDP. That wasn't going to be an option in the trashcan format.
 
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brentsg said:
Anandtech measured it at 6% for Ivy-E to Haswell-E, and 3-5% for Haswell-E to Broadwell-E. So yes, it's about 5% generation over generation. It can be found in each of his E series review.
Click to expand...

that's not accurate, while it its true for some benchmarks, specially single threaded, those benchmarks doesn't test New features as AVX 2.0 which in some processes implies an improvement near 2.7X from haswell-e to broadwell-e, of couse few optimiezed apps can use AVX 2, but the improvements are there.
 
Mago said:
that's not accurate, while it its true for some benchmarks, specially single threaded, those benchmarks doesn't test New features as AVX 2.0 which in some processes implies an improvement near 2.7X from haswell-e to broadwell-e, of couse few optimiezed apps can use AVX 2, but the improvements are there.
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More apps "can" use AVX than "do" use it.

For developers it is a pain to ship products that exploit new instruction set features - if you want to run old previous generation systems you need to include code that uses the new features, and code that doesn't, and select which to use at run time or load time.

They usually don't bother unless there's a big benefit. (For example, most codes doing encryption/decryption see a big speed increase if the AES instructions are used, so they'll use them if present.)
 
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