Andrew Richards
Forum Replies Created
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Sure, just keep that old hardware running. New Macs tend to require the version of OS X they shipped with.
Best,
Andy -
Parts of QuickTime had been deprecated prior to this, but this is the first time Apple has declared the whole of the legacy APIs deprecated. That doesn’t guarantee support will drop next rev, but it is pretty plausible given Apple’s aggressive push lately to she’d legacy cruft. We’ve been warned.
Best,
Andy -
[Mark Beazley] “First, the new MacPro uses PCIe 3.0, which is 985MB/sec per lane. Not sure how mane lanes they dedicated to each TB controller, but TB2 is only 20Gb/sec which is only 2.5 GB/sec. So in theory they only need 3-4 PCIe 3.0 lanes to handle the data rate.”
If you read the articles I linked to AnandTech carefully, they say that the new TB2 controllers are still a PCIe 2.0 x4 device. Now maybe they are stating that with incomplete info from Intel’s press releases, but I trust them to be technically accurate. The E5 Xeons do indeed have PCIe 3.0 baked in, but the chipset they socket into also provides PCIe 2.0 lanes and this is what the TB2 controllers could be hanging off. We don’t know till we can take one of these new tubes apart.
[Mark Beazley] “That could be were the confusion is. GB = gigabytes , Gb = gigabits”
I accounted for bits vs bytes in my math.
[Mark Beazley] “Not exactly sure how may PCIe lanes the new Haswell chip has, but I have seen the number 40 mentioned.”
I’m not concerned with how many lanes Ivy Bridge E5 Xeons will support (the new Mac Pro will have these, not a Haswell CPU), I only want to understand how TB2 is delivering its claimed bandwidth. It is not adequately explained anywhere I have been able to find.
Best,
Andy -
[Bob Zelin] “it appears that there are SIX independent Thunderbolt 2 ports, that each can control 6 devices on their chain. “
Per Phil Schiller’s WWDC preso, there are three TB2 controllers, each of which is driving two of the six ports. As best we can tell, TB2 doesn’t get more bandwidth at the controller, it just combines the formerly segregated twin 10Gbps lanes (one for data, the other for DisplayPort) into a single 20Gbps lane.
Given all that, I don’t understand how they can claim 20Gbps on something being fed by a bus (PCIe 2.0 x4) that is only capable of doing around 12Gbps. Clearly I’m not understanding something about how Thunderbolt really works…
[Bob Zelin] “no 10gig ports. I am surprised, but not that surprised.”
That made me sad when they listed the specs. Intel has this nice, inexpensive X540 chipset just begging to be used and they ignored it.
[Bob Zelin] “And I wonder if OS X 10.9 will still run FCP 7.”
It should, the QuickTime C APIs are still there in 10.9, although they are now fully deprecated with the advent of the new AV Kit API (if you have an Apple Developer account, go watch the Moving to AV Kit Session from WWDC2013). 10.9 may be the last OS X that can run FCP7, QT Player Pro 7, and any other legacy QuickTime app.
Best,
Andy -
[Michael Gissing] “To argue that a MacPro was rarely updated to NVIDIA cards is hardly proof that internal upgradable GPU is a non stater.”
Or newer Radeon cards, like the Sapphire card I linked to. If someone is not a Mac user, the new Mac Pro is hardly relevant regardless of its hardware.
Best,
Andy -
[Michael Gissing] “Over the years I have upgraded GPU and RAM and system drives in my MacPros. This time I just jumped ship.”
Kind of my point. My hunch is not very many Mac Pro owners took advantage of their slotted GPU’s upgradability, even if there only ever were a small handful of upgrade options out there.
Best,
Andy -
[Andrew Kimery] “What no love for the people that have upgraded their 1,1 Mac Pros?”
None of the modern cards I linked work in a 1,1. Hence the distinction. If you upgraded your 1,1 what did you go from and what do you use now?
Best,
Andy -
[Bobby Mosca] “Andy, you snuck in while I was replying, but you sort of answered my question. They’re not pushing it all the way, but dang. I don’t expect to be filming 4K in the near future, but even so. What else do you think they can throw at it to get a really good test?”
The thing about GPGPU is it doesn’t need all the bandwidth the card can push all the time. If someone were so inclined, I don’t see any reason someone couldn’t built a compute-only Thunderbolt GPU box that does what that demo shows is possible, but doesn’t have any monitor connections. A little bit goes a long way, eh?
[Bobby Mosca] “And someone mentioned 3D on another thread, and how they really wanted 24 cores. Aren’t they doing a workshop with Pixar tomorrow? If Sully’s hair isn’t taxing enough, I don’t know what is.”
Pixar isn’t going to be walking away from their custom Linux stuff for their real work, but there is considerable muscle in the new Mac Pro. It isn’t my ideal box (can I still call it a box?), but it will be very powerful, and the idea of hanging a GPU off of it’s TB ports seems awfully superfluous given the GPU muscle inside.
Best,
Andy -
[Rich Rubasch] “With current prices for PCI SSD storage and that fast RAM, plus a brand new processor…it’s gonna be expensive.”
The new MacBook Air shipping today also uses PCIe SSD and it costs the same as last year’s model. The CPU and RAM are nothing custom, just low-end server components. Single 12 core Ivy Bridge E5 will cost less than two of the old Westmere Xeons they are selling today. I think it will be in line with today’s Mac Pro single CPU configurations’ prices, probably something like $2,999 and up.
Best,
Andy -
It just isn’t pushing the GPU to the limits. Even at partial utilization, they got those results.
Best,
Andy