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Apple tried that with the G5 PowerMac. It didn't go so well.

powermac-g5-coolant-leak.jpg

Haha oh wow... that does not look good. That's really interesting that they tried this before, didn't know!
 
I offloaded my 2012 mac pro that still had apple care for another 3 months to some post production guy out in holly wood.. Gave me $2800 for a 2 x 3.46, MVC 980 24gb of ram.

Wanted to sell it while i still could get back the money i put in and still had warranty so the buyer felt good buying an insured machine. Even tho having applecare on these old cmp is pretty much worthless because every apple store is clueless on how the machine works. And i also wouldn't trust them working on my machine.

Now using my once in home server single cpu 4.1 as my daily driver.

Im giving apple a year to release a game changing mac pro or for egpus to take off.
 
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Rumors have the Fury Nano NDA expiring on the 27th or 28th. It will be interesting to see what this little card can do in roughly the power envelope suitable for the mac pro. If it can manage more performance/watt than the nvidia 980 gtx that should be a win for AMD. At the very least, I bet it will have better compute performance. I am expecting this to be a costly card though, probably >= $550. Not that it matters to Apple, should they use it.
 
Dell and HP own around 30-40% of the workstation market each ... already sell a substantial number of systems into this "creative" market even before the Mac Pro changes. It is Apple that has a problem of being a smaller player and possibly getting even smaller with respect to the workstation market.

I absolutely agree with your analysis and am depressed at the inevitable conclusions.

The Dell creative push has already begun to encompass me - a long time buyer of Apple (just how long I'll hint at in a moment) - when I recently bought a Dell UP2715K 27-inch "retina" display for my Mac Pro:

51upHHo.jpg


This is an absolutely brilliant monitor in every respect. Connected to the Mac Pro, it is as near as spit to an iMac with Retina 5K Display, even the Mac's sound comes through the display's Harman Kardon speakers. The panel even has better specs - 100% Adobe RGB vs 99% for the iMac, etc.

The Dell is also very "Apple" in its design - minimalist bezel, controls hidden on the side, understated mirrored logo that fades into the black. Slap an aluminum case on it and you'd swear Apple made it.

Except they didn't...

Instead Apple released the 5K retina iMac a year ago and let the higher-end creative market languish with the positively ancient "sandpaper to my eyes" Thunderbolt Display.

Yes, the 5K iMac is a reasonable substitute, but it has shortcomings: a laptop class GPU prone to overheating, limited core count, and a complete lack of modularity - in a year or two the iMac will be effectively obsolete for higher end software, whereas the above monitor can simply plug into the next workstation and will be viable in 5 years time.

Now, Apple may redeem themselves later this year or early next with an Apple Retina 5K Display but for a company that once prided itself on innovations like these - the long heritage of excellent Apple Cinema Displays and the first-to-market bragging rights of a 30-inch monitor back in 2004 - they are very late to the game with a 4K or 5K monitor.

Just one piece of the jigsaw that Apple is allowing to get broken apart.
 
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Rumors have the Fury Nano NDA expiring on the 27th or 28th. It will be interesting to see what this little card can do in roughly the power envelope suitable for the mac pro. If it can manage more performance/watt than the nvidia 980 gtx that should be a win for AMD. At the very least, I bet it will have better compute performance. I am expecting this to be a costly card though, probably >= $550. Not that it matters to Apple, should they use it.

Probably will have good compute performance but for all other needs Radeon driver development on the Mac is sad and rarely updated. At least Nvidia puts some effort.
 
At work I take care of I run 3 x 2010 hex core Mac Pro's similar to your spec and also one 2014 cylinder nMP.

Heavy load music / film score work, 32gb RAM per system, 5 hard drives per system (10tb), 2 x 27" (2560 x 1440) screens along with one 1280 x 720 screen per workstation.

The new Mac Pro is not that much better in perceivable performance, the older machines are still great. I have no plan to upgrade them at this point.

Thank you for the info. Do you run the 2010's in a separate machine room?
 
Weirdest thing I have ever seen. Fury Nano is rumored to have HDMI 2.0 o_O.

Fury X will need a dongle to do this o_O. Why they did this?
 
Apple tried that with the G5 PowerMac. It didn't go so well.

powermac-g5-coolant-leak.jpg

Ahh! You let out the Magic Liquid! (This magic liquid is what makes G5's work.) Most electronic components work via Magic Smoke -hence the phrase after a short or overload; "Uh oh, man. I think I let the smoke out of my tube-pre..." :eek:
 

Will know tomorrow but shouldn't put stock into Windows benchmarks unless one really does use that OS. It's gonna take a while to get this card working on El Cap, if ever.
 
The Dell is also very "Apple" in its design - minimalist bezel, controls hidden on the side, understated mirrored logo that fades into the black. Slap an aluminum case on it and you'd swear Apple made it.

Except they didn't...

Instead Apple released the 5K retina iMac a year ago and let the higher-end creative market languish with the positively ancient "sandpaper to my eyes" Thunderbolt Display.

Yes, the 5K iMac is a reasonable substitute, but it has shortcomings: a laptop class GPU prone to overheating, limited core count, and a complete lack of modularity - in a year or two the iMac will be effectively obsolete for higher end software, whereas the above monitor can simply plug into the next workstation and will be viable in 5 years time.

Perhaps you are unaware the iMac can be used as a monitor only to another Mac? The reason Apple hasn't released a 5K monitor is because they already have—for less money.

The Dell 5K monitors is $2,200. The 5K iMac is $1,999.

It's cheaper to use an iMac as a 5K monitor on your Mac Pro—and you get a entire second computer for free!
 
Perhaps you are unaware the iMac can be used as a monitor only to another Mac? The reason Apple hasn't released a 5K monitor is because they already have—for less money.

The Dell 5K monitors is $2,200. The 5K iMac is $1,999.

It's cheaper to use an iMac as a 5K monitor on your Mac Pro—and you get a entire second computer for free!
Unforunately, by design, 5k iMacs cannot be used as standalone monitors.
 
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I'd take those benchmarks with a grain of salt. These look like AMD slides and there were similar slides showing that Fury X beat Nvidia's GTX 980Ti in every benchmark when Fury X launched. Obviously that was not the same thing the reviews found.
 
Yes, the iMac cannot be used an external display.
Still, I'd expect the next 5K TBD to be SST and not MST.
But that will cost a ton of money I guess. If the current TBD is already high enough on the price tag, doubling that will make it mostly a show stopper.

Curious details those on Nano. Soon enough we'll know.
 
I agree with that. Benchmarks possibly show best possible scenario.

To be honest I did not cared that much about the benchmarks, but I cared about the core config in the design. Hawaii and Fury X and Fury has 8 Asynchronous Compute engines with IIRC one Hardware Scheduler.

Fury Nano is supposed to have 4 ACE's with two HS. If we look at the rumored characteristics of core clock behaviour on Nano we can assume that that is what brings efficiency to this GPU. But its strange that they designed completely new SKU(which in fact it is, if the slides are true) only for one GPU.

I know I may be going too far with this idea, but only logical thing that explains this is that AMD has orders for this SKU from other sources, not only declining PC desktop market.
 
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I agree with that. Benchmarks possibly show best possible scenario.

To be honest I did not cared that much about the benchmarks, but I cared about the core config in the design. Hawaii and Fury X and Fury has 8 Asynchronous Compute engines with IIRC one Hardware Scheduler.

Fury Nano is supposed to have 4 ACE's with two HS. If we look at the rumored characteristics of core clock behaviour on Nano we can assume that that is what brings efficiency to this GPU. But its strange that they designed completely new SKU(which in fact it is, if the slides are true) only for one GPU.

I know I may be going to far with this idea, but only logical thing that explains this is that AMD has orders for this SKU from other sources, not only declining PC desktop market.
I think expecting anything other than a downclocked Fiji XT that is identical to the Fury X is wishful thinking. AMD is not one to produce small variations of their GPUs. Each new generation of chip just bumps down the previous top of the line across the lineup. Most likely AMD makes heavy use of the power management features they added in Tonga/Fiji and the rumored clock speeds are more of a maximum that can't be sustained for any length of time.
 
Strange indeed this different configuration.
Unless none of them is the full die and ACE and HS parts can be also fused out to accommodate different SKUs.
that would be something.
 
Perhaps the next update, probably this fall, will fix that, it's very useful for many people.:)

This will not be "fixed" until Displayport 1.3 enters the market. There is currently no single cable external monitor interface capable of 5K. I wouldn't except to see 5K iMacs that can accept input signals until late 2016 at the earliest. I wouldn't expect that Apple would support 5K input ever on current 5K iMacs.
 
Stacc, did you actually looked at the anandtech forum links I provided? The are AMD slides that compare Core config on Nano and on Fury X.

In theory they are the same, but the design of ACE, and HWS are different.
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=37656052&postcount=196
On the bottom of the post. The slides are from AMD themselves.
To be honest, these architectural details are beyond my understanding. It does appear the slides are different, but it would still surprise me if there were any differences in the GPU based on what AMD has released in the past.
 
This will not be "fixed" until Displayport 1.3 enters the market. There is currently no single cable external monitor interface capable of 5K. I wouldn't except to see 5K iMacs that can accept input signals until late 2016 at the earliest. I wouldn't expect that Apple would support 5K input ever on current 5K iMacs.
Apple could also adopt MST over Thunderbolt 3 via streaming 2 displayport 1.2 streams over a single cable. Supporting evidence for this is the increased yosemite support for MST and the dell 5k display. It wouldn't surprise me to see an external display and refreshed iMac this fall that worked in such a way.
 
Stacc, the core is the same. 4096 GCN cores, with the same memory controller, and everything around it.

The difference is on top of the GPU. Asynchronous Compute Engines with Graphics Command processor.
Fury X has 8 ACEs with one GCP.
Fury Nano looks to have 4 ACEs with one GCP and Two HSW(Hardware Scheduler). AMD possibly used this in the Nano design to allow the best utilization of the GPU. Add to that the Clock Gating on the GPU and we end up with max efficiency possible sucked from GPU.

In fact it is a new SKU based on similar design.
 
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