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Will there be a new Mac Pro in 2015?

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Seen the Quad Fury vs 980Ti/Titan? Great scaling there.
I guess AMD will speed up development of the HBM2 products to get an edge over NVidia.
They are in advantage right now, they should cash on it.
 
Nothing else to add other than IBMs new announcement is good news and hope intel might feel some heat.

So far seems like new mac pro needs

- Thunderbolt 3 / USB-C
- 5k display support in elegant manner
- New generation Intel processors. Like Skylake given timing
- Dramatically better ATI graphics card
- No change to architecture. Meaning it will continue to look like a trashcan.

possible toss ups are
- SATA express support
- Having 2 available SDD sites

I think Jan 2016 as well.
 
Haswell EP Xeon CPU's.
Higher amounts of RAM DDR4.
Dual GPUs - 3 tiers, all with HBM memory.
2 GB/s SSD.
The same enclosure.

October 2015 ;).

My dream machine:
6 Core 3.5 GHz, 32 GB DDR4, 768 GB SSD, Dual Fire Pro GPUs based on AMD Fury GPU with 4 GB of HBM, each.

Hell of a computer for my needs.
 
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Possibly at the same time as Mac Pro. We've already seen that there are complete names of AMD GPUs in El Cap linked to the iMac.

And no. I don't believe we will see Nvidia in Apple computers at any level, including drivers for some time now. There is a lot of reasons why. Both technical and... political.
 
Asynchronous compute is the first technical thing that is most apparent. Nvidia Maxwell GPUs simply does not have any capability(Maxwell 1.0) or very limited(Maxwell 2.0) in comparison to AMD GPUs.

About political reasons. I think it will become more apparent in future. So right now its not the best time to debate it.
 
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VirtualRain said:
I'm curious what some of these issues are... Can you elaborate?
Click to expand...

Same here. AMDs offerings for GPUs is hot garbage. After I got burned badly by the AMD 6750 from my old MacBook Pro in 2011 fizzling out, I have no desire to go back to AMD. Furthermore, the Nvidia cards are a LOT more powerful per watt. AMDs draw so much more power, its nuts.
 
bladerunner2000 said:
Same here. AMDs offerings for GPUs is hot garbage. After I got burned badly by the AMD 6750 from my old MacBook Pro in 2011 fizzling out, I have no desire to go back to AMD. Furthermore, the Nvidia cards are a LOT more powerful per watt. AMDs draw so much more power, its nuts.
Click to expand...

One card and you're calling it all garbage? A little harsh, no? Maxwell has no FP64 compute, completely not at all what Apple wants for a Pro machine. Until Pascal comes out, we at least won't be seeing Nvidia in a Mac Pro. The W9100 is currently the most powerful FP64 compute card you can buy, I have a feeling a version of that will be the next top-spec card available. The only card you can buy that has more compute performance for HPC and scientific/financial/mathematical applications is a $5k Tesla K80.
 
Im reading the specs of Thunderbolt 3, and... Im missing something? It says plainly Display Port 1.2, which means, it does not support 5K display on single cable. So what would be the point of Thunderbolt 3 apart from twice the bandwidth, if it cannot support 5K display on single cable, but Dual Link one, anyway? The same thing can be done on current versions of TB and Display Port.

Am I missing something here?
 
I'm pretty sure SATA Express will not come to the Mac, not Apple's game.
Don't think 2 SSDs will be supported as well, higher capacity drives maybe, up to 2GB possibly.
RAID would be nice for some, but won't be coming I say.
Too few lanes to make it happen, at least in a decent way.

We'll get Haswell starting with 16GB instead of 12GB (come on Apple, why 12GB in the first place?!), same number of cores to choose from, although Haswell can go as high as 18 cores. I don't think Apple will go that far, even as BTO.
An 8 core would be fine for me, even overkill. Not sure if I should max out the RAM already, or just stick to 32GB, don't feel like upgrading later although 32GB should suffice for the lifetime of the machine I guess.
AMD Fury based cards would be sweet, clocked down the should fit perfectly within the power envelope. The current thermal dissipation system should be more than enough to keep it cool and without throttling. Something Nano-like...
I also believe NVidia GPUs won't be coming to Apple anytime soon now. You can always use their own drivers.
NVidia does beat AMD in a lot of metrics, the option at least would be nice, but forget about it for now.
The best option right now for the Pro guys would in fact be based on Grenada still, although Fury would be nicer although people forget this is not a gaming machine :)

Yes, TB3 unfortunately is not DP1.3 compliant as far as I know. Too bad. I do believe you can do some magic with both streams of DP1.2 to get 5K@60 on "a single cable" though. Or you can have 2 4K@60.
 
Fury yields seem to be a problem for AMD, there's no GPUs to supply to partners, I'd say a lot less should be available for FirePro cards and possibly even less for Apple. Not sure we'll get Fury on the next gen nMP cards.
Memory limit and amount lock (no differentiation) is another reason. Unless they release only one model, BTO maybe.
 
Stars of the next nMP update could be the FIJI-based AMD GPU's. nMP V2 could be released same time with El Capitan. And AMD would be happy to sell low yielding Fiji-chips FirePro branded.

MP v2:
Haswell EP Xeons 4,6,8 cores
DDR4-2133
pci x4 SSD drives
USB-c
D310, D710 (Tonga) and D800 (Fiji)

New external displays wouldn't be a surprise either. They could run 5k DP 1.3 through USB type-c port. With Freesync.

Possible versions:
21.5" retina 4k
27" low res thunderbolt upgraded to usb type-c
27" retina 5k
all with FreeSync.
 
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I don't think Apple goes for low yields or capped chips on Fiji. They'd rather lower speed to keep power low enough.
Now there's a problem with the 4 core CPU: will they use the 1620 v3 at "only" 3.5GHz or the 1630 v3 at 3.7GHz? Remember that Ivy was 1630 v2 at 3.7GHz, at the price point of now the 1620 v3, with power speed. This is something that will look bad for buyers. But the 1630 v3 is almost a 100USD more expensive. Even with the increase of performance, it's a tough situation to explain.

Having Tonga on D710, what will D510 be based on? Tonga should be the lower tier, Hawaii the higher ones, and eventually Fiji.

Thunderbolt display is still a mistery, it will eventually come but when? Your guess is as good as mine.
 
Manuel, Don't believe everything there is on internet. Sites are biased between companies. GTX 970 and 980 was in poor quantities at start, and what? it was due to low yield or they were selling out everywhere? Double standards. When Nvidia sells out, its due to great performance and popularity. When AMD sells out its due to poor yields.

One more thing. Have you ever seen poor yields on CUT DOWN part? The part that is cut down due the POOR YIELD of full chip? I didn't. I hope this will open your eyes a bit, what is in the internet about Nvidia vs. AMD.
 
ManuelGomes said:
Having Tonga on D710, what will D510 be based on? Tonga should be the lower tier, Hawaii the higher ones, and eventually Fiji.
Click to expand...

I scrapped D510 (because D500's advantage to D300 was small) and put D310 instead. Coupled with 3.5GHz Haswell EP 4 core, they could drop entry price couple of hundred USD's. D310 would be just little better version of the current D300. Entry level needs to be crappy enough to tempt buyer to go to the more expensive model.

Tonga chips are actually quite good with power/perf ratio.. that's why it is there.
 
koyoot, I really don't believe everything I read, and I don't favor NVidia at all. At the beginning there is always the issue of either yields or low supply. That's normal. Thing is, indeed it seems that there were few chips to supply to partners, and there is still a lack of cards out there, as far as I can tell. You don't see a massive amount of cards being sold, X or not. Defective chips or poor yields usually go to the cut down parts, which should be the case of Fury here. But still there are not many around.

Z, forget Apple dropping prices, more easily they'd use the 1630 v3 and add a couple more 100USD instead :)
Remember they'll also up the mem to 16GB, so the entry level machine will be probably even more expensive than what it is right now.
I also find Tonga pretty good, I'd be glad if they did D310 based on Tonga XT: 2048 cores, 256b and 4GB - that would be great. Couple that with a 4core HSW CPU with 16GB would be a great entry level nMP. Throw in a faster NVMe SSD and TB3 and you're ready to go. The cherry on top of the cake would be the TB3 5K display.
 
30 000 Fury X sold out in 4 hours all over the internet in the first day. We don't know the exact number for Fury Supplies but the number was bigger. Adding both up, we can get even to 6 digit amount of cards sold out in first few days of the sales. Is that limited supply? I don't think so.

Manuel, Apple did not add more $ to the price when they went from 370 dollar CPUs to 460$ with Haswell with eDRAM ones.
 
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