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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 :)

New MacPro predictions? Hopes? Fears?

i'd guess at about the same odds as never seeing a new macpro..
 
As costs have been exploding trying to design chips with smaller feature size, there was concern that only an handful of big players would be able to sit at the ‘10nm table.

Something interesting is happening at the next node down (7nm). Holistic (Cadence) design Tools are finally materialising that may make it cost effective again. IOT companies think they can make a mint putting everything on one piece of silicon (rather than interconnecting electronic Lego).

~2018Q3 - we are going to see:
+) TSMC showing CCIX (with PCIE3/4 connectivity)
+) Coherent mesh networks working at 1 Tbit (courtesy of ARM CMN)
+) With accelerators able to connect 128 core ‘data server’ chips. (ARM will be demoing one on 7nm).

If VR mandates low latency, and Apple are expending a lot of effort on external GPU accelerators - I wonder if CCIX & a mesh network would be preferable? Could this be the year that Apple’s seismic GPU Team create a desktop component?

Apple have been laying the foundation to be able to run iOS Apps on the Mac (it was supposed to roll-out later this year, but Craig F may have applied some digital breaks on that one - perhaps until 2019).

And so ... I’m guessing 2019 Q1 earliest for a MMP. I don’t think the technology they need to differentiate it from an iMacPro is available yet.

AJ
 
Great notes Antony. What would it take for the in development mMacPro to crush a loaded iMacPro using available (near term) components? Would it require a big case, 1100W PSU and north of $15K at retail? I don't think even Steve Jobs could sell many of those, Tim Cook... pleeease. Once 7nm chip fabs, coherent mesh and some other technologies are accessible... then a mMP that starts around $4K and ramps up toward $15K as you add higher end components/modules could be the OSX based 8K shredder of my dreams.

FWIW, I still have 4 of the old MacPro "space towers" (the trashcan value proposition was weak sauce) and the cases are still in great shape after roughly a decade. The rack mount resistant form factor was unfortunate, but the materials/tool-less access/ventilation/etc has held up. Why the digression? Because I'd love to see Apple go to a truly modular system that could be reconfigured/upgraded like adding and removing Legos to extend its useful life. Swappable components is a good thing, just make the interface more robust and user friendly than traditional PCIe slots. Why must one have disassemble a case, carefully guide the contacts into the zero-insertion-force (ZIF) slots, avoid static electricity, etc just to swap a component? Perhaps many of the technologies that Antony mentioned will change the architectural paradigm, or AWS will change what we expect from local resources, etc. In any case, no offense to the OP, but I really hope that Apple (and other vendors) are thinking beyond just iterating the PCIe bus.

Cheers - #19
 
I am very late to this conversation, but this is my current opinion. What I observe with 10.13.3, and the new iMac Pro, is that Apple is not really interested in supporting or helping third party companies. Period. Updating from 10.12.6
to 10.13.x has huge issues with hardware from Sonnet, Areca, and sometimes Promise. And of course, there is no cooperation with Nvidia. The entire point of purchasing a new "Mac Pro" is that you can install whatever you want in there, without issue. But with the advent of SIP (System Integrity Protection) which is a pain to disable, and even when you do, not all drivers will load in 10.13 - and of course, all the aggravation that so many of us have gone thru trying to get an Nvidia GPU card to work (if at all) - I just don't see Apple saying "ok - here is our new wonderful Mac Pro, and it's totally open source, so you can plug in a whole variety of GPU cards, RAM, 10G and 40G cards, I/O cards from Blackmagic and AJA" - etc. Today, it's like they DONT want this to happen, and are making it very difficult for all the third party manufacturers (but if you buy a nice new iMac Pro loaded up, it comes with all the RAM you need, the Vega 64, the 10G port, and when it breaks, well, you just bring it to the Apple store). This is NOT the reason that "we" look forward to a new Mac Pro - we want to put in OUR stuff, from third party companies (like Nvidia, AJA, Blackmagic, Sonnet, Promise, Akitio, etc.) that build cool stuff, and the "Pro App" people at Apple should be cooperative with these third party developers. In my opinion, with the current Apple mindset - that's not going to happen.
But hey - I've been wrong before !

Bob Zelin
 
When I read that Puget Systems uses DDR4-2666 CL19 for Ryzen and Threadripper it was the moment I couldn't take them serious anymore (but kept reading). Then they did a test with .R3D and where surprised that extra GPU's brought no extra speed. They didn't tell that their test was CPU limited, "Watson" has a lot of work to do with those "Sherlocks".

Where is Philips Garage on youtube when you need him? I'll stick to Slashcam for this kind of info(just a pitty they don't do a lot of high-end reviews).
 
Let's have a look what is possible.

Extreme possibilities:

Taking my proposal for a 1kw Mac mini (current form factor) as a basis, and windows and Linux x86 machine code translation capability availability.

Stacks of riscv cores.

Stacks of Arm cores

Stacks of next generation Intel processor cores

Maybe the next gen AMD supercomputer cores.

+

Stacks of gpu and other coprocessing.

Each module equivalent of a high end system. Tens to hundreds of modules stackable together, each module a mini blade system.

Two+ levels of modules. One level meant for desktop, one Jean for cooling towers. Next generation high speed interconnect between modules. My own interconnect designs for my modules can run at thousands of terabytes per second.

Anything less than this is not really trying.
 
The ventilation system, I'm keeping some advanced aspects to myself. But a multi blade system is an issue. It is harder to vent heat than my Mac Mini design. Thus limits what you can do, including the capacity of each blade. For a home system aseekk, you can't draw more than the circuitry, which is likely home circuit, restricting the amount of drain before the house circuits overheats and causes fires (as with those old induction cookers). So, this restricts the number of modules, and the system needs an auto detection system to always ensure the power draw is choked to close to available capacityty. This means your top line hone system will slow down if somebody puts the microwave on the same circuit. It also helps with system protection.

The ventilation system, 1kw or expelled heat is enough to cause fires. Basically a hot plate. You have to endure that proportionally the right amount is drawn past each circuit component. St its simplest, you draw air through one end and out the other along the complete edge, like in the mac pro. But due to handling do much expanding due, it may pay to balance out the intskeyo exhaust of expanded gass, so the expanded gas does not restrict the fliw8f incoming air. So, this is all looking like restricting the thermal envelope. Heat pipes to.the outside of the building is possible, but also a proposal I had decades ago they now use, is to thermo generate (recycle) some heat to electricity. Now, liquid baths are best at advanced cooling. With external heat pipes this is a good idea, plus you could use that year in winter for the house.

Now, more advanced, you supply air directly to various parts of the circuit, and expelled it. You could literally have one can over a whole board expelling heat too (the main components with local feeds). But I either case, it does not make further much of a blade system if you are expelling towards the next blade. So sisces, or at least soscing between blades to handle air flow are needed. So, limitations on the desktop.

I suspect that small desktop bladeight normally be 200 watts or less for safety, but upto 500 watts might be doable. Bigger blades can handle more. If you stack cools blades inbetween hot ones, with hot ones one the end, or exposed above smaller blades, them the heat can be.sga4sf with the cooling of the cool blade. It is unlikely their engineers have considered all this.
 
Let me ask you a question. If the "new Mac Pro" will NOT allow you to install an NVidia GTX-1080ti or Titan that you purchased yourself - will you be happy ?
If you can't install your own SATA, SSD or M.2 SATA drives that you find on a mail order site, will you be happy ?
If you can't install 10G cards from Intel, ASUS, ATTO and Sonnet - will you be happy ?
If you can't install 40G cards from Mellanox, will you be happy ?
If you can't install AJA and Blackmagic I/O cards, will you be happy ?
What if this "expandable" Mac Pro is "locked out", and things like System Integrity Protection (as appears in macOS 10.13.3) make it difficult or impossible to install third party products.
If that is true - are you ready to spend $6000 - $8000 for a new Mac Pro, before "Apple only" options ?

Bob Zelin
 
If you mean me, depends on the deal. Ungradabilitu and above market priced options are a reason to not buy Apple for sure. I
But companies name money selling third party products through distributors before hit retail, and they hopefully make a profit ateach stage. So, then, why can't Apple make an even better profit margin selling the same product, given they can get bigger bulk discount, can supply user or retail direct collecting more extra profit over PC retail? Nobody asks these questions usually. Apple can also get special better hardware, and they have their own arm etc technogy to make solutions with a lot more power per dollar. They can make money making the best value quality performance systems, something that matches or beats what you can buy down the computer shop fur the same price, plus it's quality, plus it's better, plus it has MAC OS, plus it has Apple on it. That's what Apple should have been. A leader.

Sure third party upgradabllity is a very good desirable thing. Without it, it makes it a lot less desirable to buy. But I think that third party cards are probably on the table. More to do with other cards, as I presume they will have preferred GPU solutions the software is tailored to.
 
Jarek Zabczynski said:
It’s gonna be a hard sell if it doesn’t have at least 2 standard pcie slots in it.
Click to expand...

If the modular design is anything like I'm imagining, there likely won't be PCIe slots in the "brain" module. Modules that host one or more PCIe cards would be available for anyone needing them for specific use cases.

Cheers - #19
 
Bob Zelin said:
Let me ask you a question. If the "new Mac Pro" will NOT allow you to install an NVidia GTX-1080ti or Titan that you purchased yourself - will you be happy ?
If you can't install your own SATA, SSD or M.2 SATA drives that you find on a mail order site, will you be happy ?
If you can't install 10G cards from Intel, ASUS, ATTO and Sonnet - will you be happy ?
If you can't install 40G cards from Mellanox, will you be happy ?
If you can't install AJA and Blackmagic I/O cards, will you be happy ?
What if this "expandable" Mac Pro is "locked out", and things like System Integrity Protection (as appears in macOS 10.13.3) make it difficult or impossible to install third party products.
If that is true - are you ready to spend $6000 - $8000 for a new Mac Pro, before "Apple only" options ?

Bob Zelin
Click to expand...

Great questions. As we have experienced with the 6,1 nMP trashcans, what the system is theoretically capable of - vs - what Apple actually supports, is two different things. The professional content creation ecosystem requires a certain level of interoperability with industry standard S/W and H/W tools for any workstation to be viable. Will Apple devote the engineering resources necessary to optimize their code for key tools?

BTW, if Bob or anyone else knows the dealio, could Apple make a leaner "pro" version of OSX sans extraneous features that would be easier to port code to?

Cheers - #19
 
Bob Zelin said:
Let me ask you a few questions...
Click to expand...

I'm sure there are enough people who want Apple to build a "PC that runs MacOS". It's essentially what my 5.1 Mac Pro is, but with a beautiful design.

But I do feel that such a computer from Apple in 2018 would feel pretty "plain". Still, it's what most envision as the most flexible and cost effective Mac. Many would be very happy with "plain".

If the new Mac Pro's expandability is completely locked in to what Apple offers from their own store, such as a 'Mac Nvidia 1080 Ti' or 'Mac SSD hard drives' that use a proprietary interface... well, that would be a mistake on Apple's part.

I try to not concentrate on the details. In stead I hope that Apple truly rejuvenates their Mac Pro line, including new HDR capable monitors.
 
Blair S. Paulsen said:
If the modular design is anything like I'm imagining, there likely won't be PCIe slots in the "brain" module. Modules that host one or more PCIe cards would be available for anyone needing them for specific use cases.

Cheers - #19
Click to expand...

That's what they said about the trashcan, that there would be a PCIe add on module from Apple. That never happened. All Thunderbolt PCIe boxes were third party and came with their own problems and compatibility issues. An all Apple solution would put many at ease.
 
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