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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

5k Retina iMac

We really need to support TB advancement and put a stake through the heart of USB as the dumb vampire interface that sucjs all the air out of the room it always was. It was a mistake from the beginning we need a simple convergence interface that is logical protocol independent at its lowest level, so that you can specify wire to wire, route, plus error correction, compression or security as chosen per connection (if supported). This means anybody can build new error, compression or security on a direct or routed connection, or even to put a new routing protocol over a direct connection to compatible hardware. Total flexibility just using the wires. This advancement also means the best hard wired protocols for speed and doing stuff like MHL. A TV would use a direct wire interface with maybe error, security and compression interface to reduce the cost of the interface, but could he made to be the last link or first with split. I forgot sync, async, DMA and split (splits the stream into multiple varying sized channels, so one can be a basic direct and another a routed protocols etc) modes on top of this. We are far from this Paradise because of greed.
 
The bad news here is this probably means Skylake for the iMac and Macbook Pro is probably 8+ months away at this point, most likely a full year. These are reasonable refreshes based on what is available out there now. I know this is the iMac thread, but I'm hoping to see 32GB RAM ability with the Skylake Macbook Pro update. And for that matter, 64GB ability for the next iMac revision. That's what's killing us here is not the systems themselves, but notebooks in general are losing their effectiveness due to 16GB RAM limitations. And that goes for all manufacturers as it's a platform limitation. We can step into "mobile workstation" laptops, but at that point we may as well go all the way and build a full desktop-class system into a Pelican case and have real GPUs and storage too.
 
Jeff, as someone with a Scarlet and not likely to upgrade any time soon, would this be a good time to buy? I want to replace my Hackintosh. My Hack has more power, but it sure would be nice to clean out my home office a bit. If the new one comes out and it's substantial, I could always sell and take a small hit to upgrade...

Thanks!
 
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both iMac and macbook updates were a letdown. Been hoping for the last couple years now that they'd finally up the amount of ram.
 
Chris Lowe said:
both iMac and macbook updates were a letdown. Been hoping for the last couple years now that they'd finally up the amount of ram.
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Wasn't going to happen. Can't happen. Won't happen until at least Skylake launches. This is an Intel restriction, or rather a limitation of the current platforms, not an Apple problem. But yeah, 16GB just isn't enough in any system these days being used for pro graphics work. Laptop or otherwise.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Wasn't going to happen. Can't happen. Won't happen until at least Skylake launches. This is an Intel restriction, or rather a limitation of the current platforms, not an Apple problem. But yeah, 16GB just isn't enough in any system these days being used for pro graphics work. Laptop or otherwise.
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All of the CPU's offered in the Macbook Pro support 32GB.
 
DJ Meyer said:
All of the CPU's offered in the Macbook Pro support 32GB.
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USB 3 supports 5Gb/s, but how many implementations actually eclipse 4Gb/s in real world performance? The capability of specific CPUs to utilize "X" amount of RAM is not the same as the ability of a particular mobo/RAM slots/power envelope/etc combination to also support that amount.

Cheers - #19
 
Blair S. Paulsen said:
The capability of specific CPUs to utilize "X" amount of RAM is not the same as the ability of a particular mobo/RAM slots/power envelope/etc combination to also support that amount.
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That's right, they are not the same.

But Apple develops the "mobo/RAM slots/power envelope/etc combination".

It is possible to put 32GB in pro laptop, as others have.
 
It is possible to put 32GB in a laptop if the CPU and chipset combination support it. The Macbook Pro does not, not directly. It can use a secondary chipset extension to move from 16GB to 32GB, but this comes at a pretty steep performance penalty along with extra unnecessary hardware to go along with it. In a nutshell, all the notebooks that offer 32GB are using desktop-class CPUs and / or chipsets, or are doing it by way of dual-chipset bus extension. To double the addressable memory sets and sockets.

So, yeah. Apple *could* do it. But this is not how they work. You want 32GB of RAM, it's going to have to come from direct CPU+chipset support via Intel. That is supposedly arriving with Skylake. Probably early next year.

The iMac is a different problem. Actually it's the same problem or limitation, but it doesn't have to be this way. No reason why Apple couldn't step up the iMac chipset and CPU offerings to make a bigger model supporting 64GB RAM and a 6-core CPU. But the next chipset/CPU combo up the line to allow this directly would no doubt alter the system's thin profile or cooling design as the TDP increases quite a bit. The HP Z1 is 4X as thick with turbo fans for a reason. Apple could have kept the same 2011~2012 iMac design that is much thicker and accommodated this. They chose thin.
 
Intel is currently hammering out firmware updates with system makers for recent and older chipsets to allow the high-density DDR3 memory modules that are now shipping. Recent chipsets like the X79 have been successfully updated to use these modules and Intel's Broadwell U chipsets work fine with the SODIMMs. No word on when (or if) Apple plans to update it's firmware with the new memory reference codes, but I would expect something next year since only one company is really producing those modules at this time.
 
What ever happened to the high speed cube 3D memory? I thought I heard that AMD had product coming that supported it.

Shame Apple has lost it's way, delivering glib small products with some really good features rather then all really good features, time to unleash some new blood who can feel more what consumers feel about, particularly power enthusiast users, let a lot of the rest have Air, rather than make pro products like air at the expense of every good feature :). They need to bring back flagship products with every feature, and 4k bluray, TV recorders etc. A square block "power base" for the back pro with the drives and recorders in it and for slot/clip stackable 5 1/4 rack mount (through tb/USB) to put the pro (or mini) on top of.
 
Wayne Morellini said:
What ever happened to the high speed cube 3D memory? I thought I heard that AMD had product coming that supported it.
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You're thinking of Hybrid Cubed Memory, which is a type of stacked memory currently in development for Enterprise/Professional uses, though it is said that it can be adapted for consumer purposes down the line. AMD developed HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), another different form of stacked memory, for GPUs and it will be used in the next gen Nvidia and AMD GPUs, as well as AMD's APU and Nvidia's Tegra SOC chips and likely the next generation of Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft consoles.
 
Tyson Perkins said:
things are boding well for that mystery AMD card in the new Macbook Pro (if we believe this guy...)

http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/36u07m/retina_macbook_pro_2015_15_gpu_benchmark/
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Looks good! Jeff, what do you think? A good upgrade from the original 2012 one? My right side USB and SD port both got fried with a bad USB Blu Ray recorder, and am looking at upgrading. Should i hold or is this a big improvement to the one I have? I currently am editing with the Rocket X 6K material. It handles it but struggles with 2 tracks of video on editing.
 
L. Langer said:
You're thinking of Hybrid Cubed Memory, which is a type of stacked memory currently in development for Enterprise/Professional uses, though it is said that it can be adapted for consumer purposes down the line. AMD developed HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), another different form of stacked memory, for GPUs and it will be used in the next gen Nvidia and AMD GPUs, as well as AMD's APU and Nvidia's Tegra SOC chips and likely the next generation of Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft consoles.
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Yeah, I looked it up afterwards. Stupid demylination I can't remember things except for concepts sometimes, walk around in circles forgetting things. Luckily I'm very good on concepts.

Cubed memory is supposed to be a replacement for high end DDR isn't it? I wonder which high end memory is ahead at the moment? Memory issues are a bane of processing development, don't matter how fast you can make a processor, when it hits memory it is an issue. We try to solve it with so many layers of different memory systems but even on chip L1 memory can be slow, even register could be an issue, and that is before you get into random access latency issues. For us this high speed memory types are going to be very important for our computer systems shortly. I know people in the industry that could go past 10 GHz on low energy technology but the moment you go offchip to memory grind. I insgimagineine they could do 20Ghz (they used to be able to do 10x speedup over the competition at the same process, but I doubt 50-100Ghz is possible now days, but you could fit in many times the processors in the tech). I would love to get hold of magnetic quantum dot cellular automata fpga's or something based on spintronics.
 
Here is an interesting power user question. Is there any device that you can attach through thunderbolt and/or USB 3.0 with gpu's slots and processors that the host system can use for processing?
 
Wayne Morellini said:
Here is an interesting power user question. Is there any device that you can attach through thunderbolt and/or USB 3.0 with gpu's slots and processors that the host system can use for processing?
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Yes. You can use a current GPU, GeForce, Titan, AMD R9, etc.. via a Thunderbolt expansion box. With one HUGE caveat. It works under Windows. It does not work via OS X or Linux. This is in part due to how OS X and Linux handle their PCIe abstraction layer and video driver interface. It is also an issue with both OS's simply not providing the right support to make it work. Apple has publicly addressed the issue to say that they are aware people want this. That is it. No statement as to when or if they will ever work on it or even consider it. Just that they are "aware."

USB 3.0 can't really do this, nor does it supply enough bandwidth nor transactions with low enough latency to provide anything meaningful here anyway. Perhaps with USB 3.5/ 4.0, we may see other such ability.

Some of the video I/O solutions from BMD, AJA, Matrox, etc.. come in Thunderbolt and/ or USB3.0 form or can be installed as PCIe cards into Thunderbolt enclosures and fully function. While these are not powerful GPU computational units, several of them provide hardware acceleration for H.264 and/ or MJPEG decoding and encoding.

Having played around with a GTX 980 and an original Titan via Thunderbolt, I can say that it's pretty much a waste of time. The 14Gbps or so real-world bandwidth for data I/O we get via a dedicated Thunderbolt 2 connection these days is just too crippling for current GPU hardware. You want more GPU power? Build a bigger PC box with more slots and put some GPUs in there. Done.
 
Thanks Jeff. I suppose what I am really getting at is like a networked parralel computing array on a IMac as the front end, where the OS uses the networked CPU to run programs on and report back resukts., but using USB or TB as a higher speed interface. This would not require ba constant stream of GPU data. Could help with video processing jobs just to have a low profile xenon box with GPU to.the side and the mac is to split jobs over to it. No hardrives or bells and whistles, just a slab to service your needs, something Intel or amd could make as integrated solution. I thought they had capability like this from memory.
 
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