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Will there be a new Mac Pro in 2015?

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Was everyone so distracted with the iPhone and iPad that an El Cap no show was missed?
dec, I believe you're right on regarding the release date.
The iMac is the only new "confirmed" Mac at the moment. MBPs must be in motion with Skylake, also MB and hopefully nMP. But all of these should be out only next year indeed. Probably why El Cap was MIA in yesterday's event.
 
The new iMac is rumored to be in production.
Curious fact, DP1.2 supports that resolution at 8bpc but not at 10bpc, according to my math.
Anyway, the integrated panel shouldn't be 10b anyway.
 
I really wish that MP could have, once in 2-3 years, not every year, this kind of Apple's attention, evolution, innovation as the iThings do. To show they care to built something really good/better for their loyal MP customers.

We MP users want/need more attention. Even on the rumors side of things, everybody knows that in September, every year now, there will be new iPhones and most of the times a lot of details about them.

About the MacPro nobody knows nothing, even after a period of two years, not even a single hint. Let alone intel's frustrating schedule. What a mess!

---Please you 're advised to not take seriously the following, they 're just great expectations / rants, probably out of the present time:).--- Be warned.

The iDevices are not getting only new design but also new techs continuously and now new peripherals. Aren't we jealous?

Apple could also built a lot of peripherals for the nMP, like eGPUs, monitors, expansion cases, design and provide modular expansions matching the nMP, etc. They could do a lot of things, in general, so they can show that they still have an interest about their own product and that is supported by a reassuring wealthy ecosystem. More happy/loyal users are a really good thing for the whole mac platform.

They do design and sell docking stations for the iThings but not for any of their systems/laptops, we all know that the TBD is ancient by now, in addition, I could also say that an Apple "docking station" of some form is even needed for iMacs and nMP. Look at the third party TB dock solutions from Belkin, Akitio, OWC, etc wouldn't be nice to have one designed by Apple, with better integration - design?

Yes, I know that times have changed and this particular workstation / MP market is shrinking (or it's not?) etc, but was it so much more larger in the days of the PowerPC towers, and early intel days, when we really had almost every option available? We even had Apple printers, CRT/LCD/LED monitors and several other H/W options made by Apple.

Of course, on the other hand, I fully understand that is a real good thing, for such a big company to have as little number of products to maintain as possible for a lot of management / financial reasons.

Anyway imho it's reasonable to expect, or better dreaming, for more...

This post consists of :(:mad:;):confused::cool::p:D:eek::oops::rolleyes:o_O:) and :apple:.

P.S. By the way this new iPad pro is really nice...:)
 
The new iMac is not really 4K, any of the 4K standards that is.
It's a bit more, possibly to maintain the aspect ratio and keep the same Retina pixel density as the 27".
That chart says it all, iMac's resolution @30bpp@60Hz is not possible with DP1.2 like I said. By a small margin but still out of spec. iMAc will be 4096x2304, not any of the 4K standards.
 
Last year iPhones were released in Septembers' event and iMac 5k and iPad Air 2 on Octobers'. Why would this year be any different?

Octobers' event is still going to happen very likely. Maybe you noticed that iPad Pro has "Freesync", and I'll bet that we'll see this feature in all new Mac's. Apple said they're using similar controller for the iPad Pro as for iMac 5k, so "Freesync" should be compatible with 5k. Oh yeah, and Intel has promised to support Freesync in their drivers.. so there.

And some other guesses and just for fun predictions for Octobers' event: all products are retina-ized. 13" MBA and 13" rMBP are merged in to a new product. It looks like Air, but will be renamed Powerbook. :apple: :D. So, 15" is the only MBP and comes with Xeon processor, DDR4 ECC, x4 PCI SSD and Firepro mobile GPU, New external display(s) are introduced for pro users. Then they promo iPad Pro how to use it with Mac Pro. Bye bye Wacom. And they'll introduce next version of nMP with updated hw and it will be available "next month" (early December) with new displays.
 
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Magic Keyboard, iMac 4K, new Mac Pro. There is still a lot to be shown, and deserves its own piece of attention of the crowd.

P.S. I would rather predict that Macbook Air is killed and rMBP and rMB are the only lineups of Apple laptops for quite a while ;).
 
Zarni, dream on... :)
I'd say MBA will go and MB takes it's place. MBA has had no Retina so far, guess it won't come anymore.
Since all models should become Retina, MBA will disappear.
MBP won't have WS features.
 
ManuelGomes said:
Zarni, dream on... :)
I'd say MBA will go and MB takes it's place. MBA has had no Retina so far, guess it won't come anymore.
Since all models should become Retina, MBA will disappear.
MBP won't have WS features.
Click to expand...
As long as there are dreams... :rolleyes:

MBP as WS would be consistent with MP. Intel just introduced 45W mobile Xeons. Apple could replace the current 45W Haswell Core processors with them. And we know that Firepro is just a pro tag on AMD GPU. 370X could become D300M. It's not that impossible.
 
Yeah, but do you really think they will? I very much doubt so, although I think that would be great.
But dreaming is good :)

Just had a day dream that D510 could be a Nano (more like a Pico, Nano underclocked) and D710 would be Dual-Nano (2 Nano GPUs heavily underclocked!!).
That would make the needed mem differentiation at 4GB and 8GB.
But to fit 2 GPUs in the available power would be a major undertaking!!
Bur imagine 4 GPUs on a nMP :) even if slower - what a beast!!
Of course, those who think that 2 is too much, 4 would be overkill.
But wouldn't that be a radical design?
Maybe D310 could be a Tonga Pro, or even XT.
 
From what I have heard, AMD tested Tonga XT GPU with 2048 GCN cores, and 384 Bit bus. It was supposed to be slightly slower than R9 290. Was supposed to compete with GTX 960 Ti if the latter was going to launch, but so far there are no words about this. Nothing more I have heard.
 
The nano looks fairly close to the perfect card for the mac pro. However, due to power/thermal constraints dual Fiji's in a mac pro probably can't clock as high during dual GPU workloads. Putting 4 Fiji's in a mac pro is wishful thinking and surpasses the point of diminishing returns without increasing the power and thermal limits. A pretty solid lineup would be:

D310: Tonga XT with 384 bit bus
D510: Fiji Pro
D710: Fiji XT

This would make the D310 roughly equivalent to the current D700 (Tahiti XT).
 
Don't take my word for this, guys, its only a small rumor that I have heard ;).

More probable is Tonga Pro with 1792 GCN cores, and 256 Bit bus as a D310.
 
koyoot said:
Don't take my word for this, guys, its only a small rumor that I have heard ;).

More probable is Tonga Pro with 1792 GCN cores, and 256 Bit bus as a D310.
Click to expand...

Could be, but Apple is the only company using Tonga XT (as far as I know), why not throw that in the Mac Pro in addition to the retina iMac.
 
It is not exactly Tonga XT (M295X). The device id is similar, if I remember correctly, but the name of the chip is different(IIRC).
 
What is the consensus that we can swap out our current video cards for the new nano's?? Anyone want to buy my d700 video cards :p
 
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ManuelGomes said:
The new iMac is not really 4K, any of the 4K standards that is.
It's a bit more, possibly to maintain the aspect ratio and keep the same Retina pixel density as the 27".
That chart says it all, iMac's resolution @30bpp@60Hz is not possible with DP1.2 like I said. By a small margin but still out of spec. iMAc will be 4096x2304, not any of the 4K standards.
Click to expand...

The iMacs use two DP1.2 cables internally to double the bandwidth.

Incidentally, you can send two DP1.2 streams over the same TB3 cable. Hm.

But Apple isn't cheating, they don't have some magic GPU with a new protocol that's custom.
 
The problem with Fiji as D710 would be the lower mem pool, going from 6GB on D700 to 4GB. That might not be a big problem, but will "look" as a downgrade.
Apple seems to clearly define the different steps in GPUs.
 
goMac, they do it in the 5K but that's because there was no other way.
They have a custom TCON.
For this resolution there's no need, since they should stick to 8bpp, and that's within the spec. Only if they went with 10bpp it would not be enough.
Let's see if the iMac will be the first TB3 implementation, doubt it. Apple wouldn't use a TB3 controller just for that.

BB, don't get your hopes up, will not happen for the current nMP, doubt Apple would update the firmware for it. Besides, probably the cards will be different, at least I hope they remove the SSD and make both cards equal.
 
ManuelGomes said:
The problem with Fiji as D710 would be the lower mem pool, going from 6GB on D700 to 4GB. That might not be a big problem, but will "look" as a downgrade.
Apple seems to clearly define the different steps in GPUs.
Click to expand...

Thats true about the VRAM size limitation, it just seems that there options are very limited if they don't use Fiji. They could:

1. Use Fiji, and use some Apple marketing magic to say that 4 GB HBM is better
2. Wait for the new generation of AMD cards (codename arctic islands), which use higher capacity HBM2 and are likely due the second half of 2016.
3. Use Hawaii, which takes double the power/heat to achieve slightly worse performance than the nano
4. Switch to Nvidia and use Maxwell or Pascal

My money is on option 1. I don't think Apple wants to wait another year to update and I doubt they jump to Nvidia with all the AMD cards they have been using recently.
 
Although I'd like to see the latest tech (Fiji) to the nMP, somethings are hard to justify, even for the great marketing machine at Apple.
Nano looks (almost) great for the nMP, but it lacks scalability. Artic Islands and HBM2 is still too far away in time, they'll hardly wait for it. Hope not at least, but it would be great to have 4/8/16GB cards or even 8/16/32GB.
NVidia doesn't seems an option right now, we'd have seen it in El Cap by now I guess.
In fact, Hawaii seems to be the reasonable choice for a couple of reasons: since it's "old" tech 8even considering the rebrand), Apple should get it from AMD at reasonable prices. Also, you can carve out models based on cores and mem config, or depending on yields. 28nm is a mature process so this might not even be an issue.
Fiji is still on 28nm but it's a new die and apparently still with supply constrains, which can be a problem.
But with the Fiji info on El Cap it could in fact be a hint of what's to come.
 
Manuel, Hawaii is not produced anymore. Whats more, Hawaii made on new process would not work. Grenada XT and Pro are slightly modded versions of Hawaii, and made on new process. Thats why with 5% higher core clocks, much higher memory clocks and double the amount of VRAM the Grenada GPUs use slightly less power than Hawaii GPUs.

What do you mean by: "Nano lacks scalability"?
 
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