[Andrew Richards]

The new Xeons are officially launched.

Of particular interest from that article:

“In conjunction with the processor, Intel also announced the Ethernet Controller X540, a separate chip for 10Gbps networking. Intel projects that the chip will help make the faster networking an ordinary rather than premium feature.”

Keep your eyes peeled…

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[David Lawrence] “Curious, what’s your take on why this mysterious icon is still in the package after two updates?”

I doubt anyone in Pro Apps is attuned to our Show Package Contents augury. My inner Occam’s Razor tells me it is the software equivalent of a drywaller’s coffee cup sealed in the wall and forgotten about. That is why I came to the conclusion it is part of an evolution, that they didn’t start over with a new codebase, they carried forward an existing one with different UI concepts sketched out.

Or maybe it is an easter egg put there by an insubordinate developer who disagrees with the direction they ultimately went. It is certainly a puzzling artifact.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

Same hints everyone else has. Drivers for AMD Tahiti GPUs in 10.7.3, E5 Xeons are reportedly “in the channel” and that means they will launch any day now. That is the chip Apple would be building a new Mac Pro around, if there is to be one.

There may not be one, and that would be a shame. So let me rephrase:

I would not be shocked if there is on-board 10GbE on the new Mac Pro, assuming Apple is making a new Mac Pro now that the new Xeons are imminent.

At any rate, we’ll know well before NAB if there is going to be a new Mac Pro assuming the reports of E5 Xeons in the channel are true.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Phil Hoppes] “Your obviously a Unix wizard. I love it too. In my previous life as a chip designer I lived on Slowaris ( 😉 ) and RedHat. I have to agree that OSX is simply the best OS (unix) with a wonderful GUI.”

The irony for me is I came to UNIX via OS X. Now I find myself ill at ease with Apple’s apparent retreat from anything using the GPL. I love the best-of-both-worlds UNIXness of OS X, but it worries me that Apple seems to be backing away form that.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Phil Hoppes] “On the drivers, where pray tell, since every driver package I’ve ever gotten from AMD or nVidia are all bundled inside of installers, do I get the magic files that I need to replace?”

InstallEase (among other things) can take an installer .pkg as input and generates an uninstaller .pkg for everything the installer places. It isn’t the centrally OS-managed uninstaller that Windows has, but it is just about as easy to work with if you need to roll back a .pkg installation.

[Phil Hoppes] “You like MacPro’s and you feel a need to defend your position. I’ve moved on from MacPro’s and could not be happier.”

I tolerate Mac Pros because I love OS X. If I could build my own Mac from parts without it being a hack that breaks with every little update, I would. As it is, I have to root for the Mac Pro to soldier on so that there is still a truck in the Apple garage.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Christian Schumacher] “Absolutely, but thinking in overall strategy HP, Dell and Lenovo are developing and releasing towers in a constant fashion, as opposed to Apple, which only puts effort into those portables. That’s evidence that contradicts what you have stated in this sub-threat, regarding Dell/HP. Perhaps these are considering to add more portables to their portfolio, and not to drop their entire desktop computer lines. That’s likely Apple’s goal instead.”

HP, Dell, and Lenovo (and Acer) ship a box with just about every single iteration of Intel’s and AMD’s product offerings. This is the only way they can drive sales since there is little else to differentiate them from each other or their previous offerings. They all sell boxes with the same OS made of parts from the same OEMs. Apple does mostly sell to consumers, and consumers are overwhelmingly shifting their general purpose computing to portables. I agree the Mac Pro is a bone thrown to pro users and not the centerpiece of Apple’s product portfolio like the G3 and G4 once were. This is why they don’t bake a box out of every range of components Intel produces and limit their tower offering to 5000 series Xeons. They have been consistently following this limited tower strategy since before there even was an iPhone.

[Christian Schumacher] “Yes, for now. Look at HDD replacement, the iMac’s hard drive has had further restrictions at its last iteration.”

That’s what RAM installation was like on the iMac G5. Now there is a little panel with captive screws. The original Mac mini required a putty knife to get at the RAM, now it requires only opposable thumbs.

[Christian Schumacher] “So which one of these major companies are NOT betting on the enterprise? The mobile one, yep that’s Apple. And It’s very telling that they haven’t considered that intermediate market for midrange workstations.”

Apple hasn’t sold an entry-level workstation (that’s how Intel describes E3 Xeons, as “entry workstation”) since switching to Intel. Apple has also never done more than flirt with “enterprise” products (I’m including the Xserve and Xserve RAID in that characterization). Apple has had a very consistently limited good/better/best single-range tower PC product since Jobs returned, so what is so telling that they haven’t changed course? The only thing that would be telling of Apple walking away from the workstation business would be a conspicuous absence of a new Mac Pro once HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Acer start shipping E5 Xeon boxes.

What is telling is that IBM sold their PC business to Lenovo. HP was on the verge of walking away from the PC business altogether, fired its new CEO because of it, and may yet find the PC business is fading to the point that it isn’t a viable business any more. Dell is now telling everyone “We’re no longer a PC company, we’re an IT company.” Microsoft is taking Windows 8 in a very touch-centric tablet direction, even more than Apple is marrying iOS to OS X. Herb Sevush made a good point elsewhere, and I agree with it: the days of mass market PC workstations are probably numbered, and heavy duty NLE work in a few years may all be taking place on server hardware. And who knows what the OS landscape will be like. If I were Adobe and Avid, I’d be looking very hard at porting my products to Linux. Now that would change things!

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Phil Hoppes] “I don’t care who’s fault it is. I simply need to have the choice that if I want a Quadro 6000 card I can use it and know it is supported. Apple’s squabbles with either AMD or nVidia are not my problem.”

Your previous post laid the lack of GPU support at Apple’s feet, and you do so again here. GPU OEMs choosing not to support EFI with their firmware is hardly a squabble with Apple. It is market forces at work where Apple is not using the legacy BIOS that the rest of the x86 world used exclusively until Intel’s Sandy Bridge chipsets came along with EFI as standard. I get that it boils down to a pragmatic decision (which I agree with, by the way), but your language indicts Apple.

[Phil Hoppes] “I’ve neither the time nor the patience to use hacks to uninstall drivers in pieces. Takes me 2 minutes to do that task on a Windows machine and I 100% know what I did was done correctly as far as the OS is concerned.”

Removing files is not a hack, it is how you uninstall something on UNIX. There is no registry to edit. If you use the utility I linked to, it would also take you two minutes.

[Phil Hoppes] “your trying to defend the lousy job they have done with their architecture WRT high end workstations and there is nothing worth defending. It’s plain to see that they throw no resources at it.”

Again, I’m only pointing out what is actually going on. Apple’s Mac Pro rev cycle has been in lockstep with Intel’s Xeon 5000 series roadmap since the switch from PowerPC in 2006. I agree it would be great for video pros if Apple made an entry-level tower with a stack of PCIe slots and if the GPU OEMs made cards that were EFI-friendly. Your previous posts framed Apple as the lone bad guy when their sins are limited to ignoring the entry-level tower market. Intel is guilty of taking forever shipping a 5000 series Xeon successor and the GPU OEMs are guilty of nothing more than building a product for the mass market. I guess Apple could throw a bunch of money at the GPU OEMs to subsidize a range of EFI-friendly GPUs for Mac Pros, but then Mac Pros would need to cost even more and we’d be hearing even more complaints about the Apple tax on pro customers.

[Phil Hoppes] “Should they grace the market with a MacPro upgrade, which I seriously doubt, I’m completely positive I’ll be able to build an equivalent machine for 50% less and it will perform 20% better.”

That’s a bold claim. Let’s price components for a DIY dual proc Sandy Bridge E5 Xeon workstation vs whatever becomes of the Mac Pro, should Apple grace us with one. If history is any guide, 50% less cost and 20% better performance will be extremely optimistic. The reason you are able to do that today is because Sandy Bridge is such a leap beyond Nehalem that the E3-1200 even outperforms the 5000 series Xeons. When you’re building from the same parts bin, I don’t think you’ll get near that kind of a price/performance delta. Are you able to build your DIY workstation for 50% less than an spec-similar HP and bench it 20% faster?

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Paul mitchell] “Also the rumors of a possible new Mac pro are interesting ,The new XeonE5 chips and new video cards, make this a possibility, if they do release them, they will most likely have thunderbolt, so that changes everything “

I wouldn’t be shocked to see on-board 10GbE in a new E5 Xeon Mac Pro. Now there’s a USP for you!

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Steve Connor] “I’m betting they will, even if it’s in the same case design, although I wouldn’t expect any news this week as it’s the iPad 3 that will be stepping into the spotlight”

I’d say they will just appear on Apple’s site with no fanfare and they will launch as soon as inventory is in the channel. The iPad 3 is the media darling, but since Apple no longer does big reveals for Macs, there isn’t a reason to hold it back just because the headliner is also launching that week.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Phil Hoppes] “It will never be anywhere close to parity until I can uninstall a video driver on OSX and install a new one of a previous version WITHOUT doing a clean install of the entire OS.”

This can be done, either by tracking down the files installed with something like pkgutil on the command line and then deleting them, or by making your own uninstaller .pkg using InstallEase. I agree though that OS X is long overdue for a built-in uninstaller based on package receipts and registered dependencies.

[Phil Hoppes] “This, and their paltry lack of support for high end graphic cards is why my desktop workstation is and will continue to be Windows.”

Is this Apple’s fault or AMD and NVIDIA’s fault? Or more accurately, is it the GPU OEMs just doing what makes sense for the mass market? The GPU OEMs have thus far only been shipping PC market cards that work on BIOS while Macs are all EFI. Many Sandy Bridge boards run EFI with a BIOS emulation and Windows 7 64-bit (and Windows 8 64-bit) supports installation on EFI. This should mean the GPU OEMs will not be able to ignore EFI like they have been. When they ship cards with EFI-capable firmware, they should be able to work on Macs without Mac-specific GPU firmware. I can’t find anything about the Radeon HD 7000 series being EFI-friendly and the GTX600 series isn’t out yet.

Best,
Andy