Will Intel provide Apple the core i9 tech? When? It is Apple interested in use it in a new Pro?

[phoenixsan]

Hello and good night Apple Hardware experts: Too many questions, is not? And please be respectful and don´t call me names. I suppose my questions are valid and not moronic or senseless gibberish. Having said the latter, please free to contribute, speculate, dream....

 

[h9826790]

I think it may be used in the normal iMac later, but not any Pro series (desktop). Up to this moment, both Mac Pro and iMac Pro only use Xeon which provide ECC memory support.

 

[William_si]

Exactly - no ECC = no Mac Pro.

There is nothing to provide either - 2066 CPUs up to the i9-7680XE are readily available as are chipsets and RDKs for manufacturers.

i9 is generally also expensive over Xeon Silver/Gold which lack overclocking (in trade for ECC and some other things like 2 AVX512 pipelines in highend) that Apple will not use/allow to use anyway.

Most reasonable to expect, by single socket iMac Pro, is the new W Xeon series that replaces essentially E5-16xx and the 1366 W3xxx we saw in single socket 4,1/5,1. As Apple announced 18 cores AND ECC the only 2 possibilities are Xeon W or Xeon Gold+.

Dual socket - if any and 7,1 is not single - the only logical choice on Intel side is again socket 2066 with Xeon Silver/Gold/Platinum.

 

[kennyman]

@William_si

iMac Pro - is W Xeon Processors (with lower TDP than the retail counterparts)

No Intel Xeon W-2145 @ 3.7GHz
Apple will use Intel Xeon W-2140B @ 3.2GHz ( 8 cores / 16 threads, CPUID 0x050654)

No Intel Xeon W-2155 @ 3.3GHz
Apple will use Intel Xeon W-2150B @ 3.0GHz (10 cores / 20 threads, CPUID 0x050654)

(Maybe no Intel Xeon W-2195 @ 2.3GHz, another OEM SKU for Apple for the 18 Cores)

Credit to PIKERALPHA for the findings.

No Xeon Gold+ for iMac Pro, it makes sense as Xeon W is for mainstream single socket work station. Xeon Silver/Gold are for dual socket boards/systems. Unfortunately there is no updates yet from Apple on Mac Pro 7,1.

 

[CodeJoy]

I don't think Apple is very likely to use the Core i9 tech (X299 platform). Certainly not in the Mac Pro, but probably not in the iMac line either. They didn't build anything based on X99, which is the predecessor to X299. But maybe more importantly, I can't see where it would fit in Apple's product line. Technically they could drop it into iMac, and have a high end "consumer" iMac with non-ECC memory, and then the iMac PRO with workstation grade components. But I don't see it happening, mostly because it's such a niche market and it doesn't really add anything meaningful for Apple to have multiple similar products in that space.

I would imagine the Mac Pro would be based on something like dual Xeon and dual GPU.

 

[bsbeamer]

Doubt we'll see these in official Mac machines this year. After yesterday's rumor, I'm just hopeful Apple continues to use Intel chips in their laptops and desktops moving forward. May force me (and many others) to abandon ship.

 

[pl1984]

Who knows what Apple is doing. All I can say is if I my livelihood relied on Apple I would have, or begun planning, migrating off the platform. It's a joke that the 6,1 Mac Pro hasn't even seen a single change since its debut almost five years ago. For professionals this level of stagnation is unacceptable.