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Will there be a new Mac Pro in 2015?

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That's what I thought, and am afraid of with a 4K TBD. Retina FHD should look amazing but a waste of res, UHD could very well look too small.
Maybe Apple's right with 5K, current TBD looks good, Retina that and you get a great display.
 
VirtualRain said:
4K native offers the maximum desktop real-estate but text can be very uncomfortable to read (on a 27" display). Retina (2x) scaling offers maximum sharpness with a desktop equivalent to 1920x1080 which (on a 27" display) renders things way to large.
Click to expand...
Thats why 4k on a 24" display does make sense: With Retina (2x) scaling you get perfectly fine 1920x1080, which is good for many everyday tasks, while a 24" monitor still allows the more demanding user to have a multi-monitor setup even on an average desk.
 
ManuelGomes said:
That's what I thought, and am afraid of with a 4K TBD. Retina FHD should look amazing but a waste of res, UHD could very well look too small.
Maybe Apple's right with 5K, current TBD looks good, Retina that and you get a great display.
Click to expand...
What if they will show two Displays? 21.5 or 23.8 inch 4K display, and 27 inch 5K?
 
Apple has been targeting 105-110 pixels per inch (PPI) on their macs. They have tried to maintain this when moving to retina. Thats why the retina iMac is 220 PPI (2x110). This is also why the 4k-ish rumors of a 21.5 iMac also make sense.

It is a valid debate to question how much resolution, or PPI is necessary for something to be retina. A big piece of this is Apple's treatment of retina, in that there is 2x scaling. 1080p on a 27" display makes for large interface elements, and this holds true for a 4k 2x scaling display as well. You can scale things, i.e. 1.5x or 2.5x scaling, but there is some loss in image quality.
 
koyoot said:
What if they will show two Displays? 21.5 or 23.8 inch 4K display, and 27 inch 5K?
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Its certainly possible that Apple could release a standalone version of a 4k-ish 21.5" screen. They use to have multiple monitor offerings. I would bet against it though. They have stuck with 1 standalone display (27") for a long time.
 
I think that right now the variety of offerings if you have two different standards, 4K and 5K is better option regardless of what they offered in the past.
 
Stacc said:
Its certainly possible that Apple could release a standalone version of a 4k-ish 21.5" screen. They use to have multiple monitor offerings. I would bet against it though. They have stuck with 1 standalone display (27") for a long time.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure there are any display panel manufacturers making a 4K 21.5" panel though, at least not according to the sites like PanelLook and TFTCentral that track these things. Apple could definitely have a manufacturer making a panel exclusively for them, but the LG 5K panel appeared on those sites long before it showed up in either the Dell UP2715K or the 5K iMac. OTOH, there was the discovery of the 4096x2304 retina display in El Capitan, but there's no display with that resolution either.
 
Apple could probably convince someone to make a panel that size. Especially now that there are panels of that density at larger sizes. They were able to do it for the 15" MacBook Pro retina when it debuted. If they needed more volume to make it feasible they could always release a standalone display.
 
ManuelGomes said:
That's what I thought, and am afraid of with a 4K TBD. Retina FHD should look amazing but a waste of res, UHD could very well look too small.
Maybe Apple's right with 5K, current TBD looks good, Retina that and you get a great display.
Click to expand...

Yeah.

If anyone's interested, I took some shots of my 27" Apple (non retina) display as well as 2560x1440 rendered on my 4K display here... the difference in sharpness is stunning.

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...4k-ips-displays.1816805/page-19#post-20580872

And here's what my preferred setting of 3008x1692 looks rendered on a 4K display... (it's plenty sharp unless you put your nose to the screen).

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...4k-ips-displays.1816805/page-19#post-20580922

The bottom line is that 5K is nice, but completely unnecessary for a sharp desktop experience. However, it is a convenient x2 multiple of Apple's 27" display so that's what they will stick to I'm sure.
 
ManuelGomes said:
That's what I thought, and am afraid of with a 4K TBD. Retina FHD should look amazing but a waste of res, UHD could very well look too small.
Maybe Apple's right with 5K, current TBD looks good, Retina that and you get a great display.
Click to expand...
Sorry if I'm misunderstanding you, but just to clarify, there is no waste of resolution... that's the whole point of scaling. The DPI (sharpness) of the screen remains the same, it's just what scale (size) you want to make the desktop for comfortable viewing. And if you open a 4K photo or watch a 4K video, you're still seeing the image at the screen's "native resolution" even if your scaled resolution is only 1440 or 1080.
 
I must confess I'm not much of a fan of scaling, much as it looks good there's always something...
The 21.5" and 24" at 4K make sense, and considering the arguments presented here so does the 27" 5K in fact. I'm starting to think that's the one I want now :-(
And it will probably be the one Apple will do for sure.
They could make the 24" 4K also, but I find it hard to believe, since they seem to be focused on larger panels. Surely no 21.5" 4K I'd say, although it could come to the iMac.
The current TBD looks really nice at 2560x1440, going Retina would make it gorgeous.
The fundamental problem is the card driving it. It would be like driving 2 panels, and we all know the problem AMD has with multi-monitors, power draw goes up considerably. It seems better with Fury but still nowhere near NVidia.
ixxx69, indeed a waste was not a good way to put it. What I was trying to say is that you still need to pump out 4K worth of pixels, and you either get a desktop that looks like 1080p (with big UI elements on that size, but very sharp) or use the full resolution, which is great, but things start to get very small.
Any option seems ok with me actually, but something in the middle would also be nice. And that actually might be Retina 2560x1440 or 5K.

Come on Apple, tell us something...
Leaks, anyone? Apple seems to have all very well contained. Or have nothing at all in the works...
 
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AMD confirmed, without naming fab or process node, that will transition next year to FinFET several products.
Scrapped 20nm altogether to move on to either 14nm or 16nm FinFET.
Artic Islands (if that is the final name) and Greenland will be out on 2016 on FinFET with HMB2 and double performance/watt. Better performance or lower power consumption? Probably both, we hope.
Will they push it hard to come early next year, even if it's just to beat Pascal? So soon after Fiji? Very much doubt it.
But Apple could be waiting for this for the nMP...
Possibly GCN 1.3, let's hope outputs are updated to the latest standards.
 
ManuelGomes said:
Samsung launched 2TB 850 V-NAND SSDs. Maybe higher capacity OEM 951 drives will come in higher capacities as well soon. Wouldn't hold my breath just yet though.
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Samsung is stacking 'taller' dies packages to make this work. 32 layers per package according to http://anandtech.com/show/9420/samsung-launches-new-2tb-ssd-850-evo-and-850-pro-models

I'm not sure that is going to work so well for the PCIe and "blade" implementations. There is relatively lots of extra room in a standard SATA III 2.5" enclosure. The volume that the flash chips take up is smaller than the disk platters, motor, and spindle. The layered dies are sharing connections so 951 class speeds are problematical since there is less parallelism to the dies due to all that sharing. With the SATA III bottleneck the pragmatic drop is parallelism has less impact since already bandwidth saturated.
 
Plain Fury looks really good... performance compared to the X is not that lower.
Let's see what drivers optimization will bring.

Anyone tried the El Cap beta yet? Any thoughts?
 
There is a whole thread for El Cap. However, I can say that I already use it as main OS. It is really good.

Fiji GPUs are extremely flexible in terms of power consumption. Asus Strix Fury uses much less power than reference model of Fury X.
 
I have to say, there is a possibility, that Fury can be squeezed to 125W at just 900 MHz. Highest in normal circumstances power consumption for that GPU is around 230W, max in case of power virus is 270. That is based on Asus Strix GPU. 7970 from which is derived D700 had higher power consumption.

Mac Pro with dual Fury GPUs would be an amazing machine, for every purpose, IMO. Maybe apart from DP performance :p. And H.265 encoding ;).
 
koyoot said:
http://www.bitsandchips.it/50-enter...x-ep-scompaiono-dalle-ultime-roadmap-di-intel

Intel Xeon Broadwell EP cancelled. Next gen is Skylake. That tells why Apple waited so long for update for MP. And tells why they experiment with Fury frame buffers linked with Mac Pro in OS X El Cap. It will be soon from now.
Click to expand...

Interesting. This is the first time I have seen it mentioned explicitly. There was a leaked roadmap a couple months ago that did not include broadwell-e, but I didn't see any sites focus on that. Here is a link. If that roadmap is true, skylake-e won't be out until mid 2016.

That leaves us to guess when new mac pro's are coming. My guess is that Apple is waiting on thunderbolt 3. Its anyones guess as to whether they would also wait until mid 2016 to update to skylake-e as well. That would put the current Mac Pro at 2.5 years old, which is a bit long, even for the long refresh times that are typical of the mac pro.
 
No, it looks like there will be no Skylake-E/EP/EX CPUs.

Intel will bring Haswell - EP CPUs, which are available today, or Skylake CPUs in early 2017. I don't believe Apple will wait to 2017 for Skylake update. They will update Mac Pro this year.
 
Especially if the only thing it would be logical to wait: AMD GPUs with HBM2 are due for... Q3 2016. Nope, they will update MP this year. Possibly at the conference when they will officially launch final version of El Cap.
 
This is getting a little messy on Intel's side.
They started off well with the Tick-Tock strategy but it seems they weren't expecting these issues with the smaller nodes.
It's difficult for the average user to know the different processor families currently in use.

Regarding Broadwell EP doesn't seem definitive, since Intel hasn't announced it yet, although it's pretty obvious that is what's gonna happen really. Most roadmaps already hint that much.
Seems we'll be stuck with Haswell for a long, long time.
It wasn't much of a jump really, but still...
Maybe they push Skylake to launch earlier.
I guess Apple knew already of this, that's why there was no word on the nMP. I don't think they'll wait all the way till 2017 for an update though. We'll get Haswell with TB3 next year, my guess.
koyoot, what's that with Fury and El Cap?
 
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