New Mac Pro rumor – is this a joke?

[Craig Seeman]

[Charlie Austin] “My guess is that’s the origin of the rumor…”

Likely because the ubergizmo article mentions no sources beyond “rumor” but Facebook claims it has two credible sources.

[Jeremy Garchow]

And one of those is ubergizmo?

🙂

[James Daugherty]

Apple is a cell phone company. We are lucky they don’t cancel the entire MacOS. It looks like I will be making another Hacintosh system. If this is so then I will be king of the Hacintoshes in San Diego.

Thunderbolt I/O is externalized PCI at 4X. All the PC motherboards I am using (ASUS, Gigabyte) are using multiple 4 PCI slots at 16X. With the vanguard of the 4K and lossless compression (RED, Black Magic, etc) for everyone the problem will be to get the RAID data rates up to over 800 mbps (megabytes per second) at RAID 5 or Raid 6 not to mention connection to LTO tape. This is going to mean connection to a really good SAS card (ATTO or ?) running at 16X PCI. No slots no SAS. No SAS no 4K. Not to mention where do I put the Red Rocket Card’s.

Solid state drives are an expensive alternative that can be used to get to the needed data rates but I think that reliability and cost is still the big question question.

If they build a crippled box with no expansion I will be advising my customers to dump the MACPro’s (ALL the MacPro’s) and Start going with dual boot Hacintoshes for half the price. I am not going to put up with this crap anymore.

https://www.tonymacx86.com/

James Daugherty
President SDMVPUG.com
San Diego Mac Video Production User Group

[Helge Tjelta]

Wait till next week. This is just a rumour.

Calm down!

/Helge, Norway

Helge

[Erik Lindahl]

Rumor rage! Let’s sack something?! ^^

I think the sadest part of this would be come WWDC and Apple doesn’t even mention the MacPro. It’s not to far fetched. I think IvyBride-E is aimed at a September 2013 release. Possibly some lower-end chips are available now (E3) but a MacPro-class system would use the more powerful E5 processor.

[Dennis Radeke]

Hate to rain on your parade, but I did not read dual proc, and I’m betting you won’t see it…

[Brandon Cordy]

I figured a new Mac Pro would be something like a smaller box wit ha bunch of Thunderbolt ports around it.

That being said, however, it at least needs to permit the swapping of RAM or it’s not going to sell well at all.

[Erik Lindahl]

I’d say the minimum for a “MacPro” replacement is

– Dual CPU options (sadly this means Xeon)
– Up to 64 GB RAM or 128GB (128GB means Xeon)
– At least 3 PCI slots
– User upgradeable HDD (2 slots minimum, I’d say at least 4)
– User upgradeable RAM

As side from that, we’d need “the usual modern I/O:

– 2-4 thunderbolt slots
– 4-6 USB-3
– 1-2 gigabith ethernet
– Wifi + BT as standard

If we as users can live with 1 CPU (6-core) and 64GB of RAM at the high-end we can stick with desktop class CPUs. This would lover the cost of the machine a lot for the end consumer compared to what we’ve had before. But, if we want dual CPU, more than 64GB RAM and a lot of i/o… Xeon’s are what we need and the new E5’s are months away (September is the rumor). These systems also generate a lot more heat that an i5 / i7 found in the iMac hence a larger enclosure is recommended or even required.

[Craig Seeman]

There are two issues I’d have with the lack of internal expansion.

Unlike a box with very limited maximum RAM, such as rMBP, a “pro’s” desktop RAM needs can grow over time. Today one might need 32GB RAM but a year down the road with new programs and greater system demands, one might need to move to 64GB and beyond. Given that even the MacMini and the top iMac have user expandable RAM, I don’t believe “lack of internal expansion” in this case.

GPU needs change over time as well. Perhaps one moves to more advanced Resolve grading or CUDA based applications or newer GPUs come to market better attuned to one’s tasks. Changes in GPU can be much more radical than the speed bumps in CPU upgrades. I can’t imagine a professional box that doesn’t allow for at least if not two GPUs to be replaceable. That has been my thinking on why they’d have one GPU on the mother board (needed for Thunderbolt) and one or two additional 16x PCIe slots.

I had wondered about internal hard drive expansion and while I think there’s significant value to multiple internal hard drives, I would at least understand why Apple would consider this be done by Thunderbolt.

Personally my thinking has been if it can be done by Thunderbolt, Apple will force you to do it. What can’t be done by Thunderbolt, at this point, is GPU and any card requiring more that 4x speeds. In a market that’s already niche, as MacPros are, narrowing that niche further is not a good decision. I just can’t see the lack of GPU or RAM upgrades by the professional user as realistic.

I do believe Apple’s move to “commodization” would be introducing a design that would push the user into more frequent machine replacement. My thinking is that would be pushed by advancement in Thunderbolt technology though.

Even if Apple dropped the price of this box (or boxes) into the price range of an iMac (making it a bit more financially viable to replace every couple of years), one’s GPU needs can change very suddenly so even upgrade cycles can’t account for that.

[Craig Seeman]

[Erik Lindahl] “If we as users can live with 1 CPU (6-core) and 64GB of RAM at the high-end we can stick with desktop class CPUs. This would lover the cost of the machine a lot for the end consumer compared to what we’ve had before. “

I’d imagine Apple might have a 6 core Ivy Bridge base model and that such model might be available sooner than the Dual Core Xeon based model.

[Erik Lindahl] “- At least 3 PCI slots”

Just a personal quibble with that. Since I suspect there must be a GPU on the motherboard, if there were two 16x PCIe slots available, they’d both be free for additional GPUs or other cards that require more than 4x.