You guys seem to run with these assertions without any data. The only reason I might be able to see Apple carrying a certain amount of volume is that NVidia typically dominates that segment. Even then I wouldn't read so far into what this might be or its impact on retail pricing.
Well if apple moves 30,000 a quarter that is 60,000 GPUs. Not bad really and frankly I don't know what other manufactures move a quarter but it is likely spread across at least 4 manufactures. That would be 240,000 Workstation GPUs a year from one manufacture.
Even if Apple gave them an average of $150 profit per GPU and managed to sell 250k units per quarter with 2 GPUs each, that's $75m profit per quarter. AMD recently had to sell their HQ:
In 2012, they made $5.4b revenue, which is split $4b for CPUs and APUs and $1.4b standalone GPUs. Operating income was a loss of $231m from CPUs and profit of $105m from GPUs.
That's not just the case in 2012, their entire net revenue for GPUs for the last 3 years is about $1.5b/year. If you assume an average dedicated GPU retails for about $200, that's 7.5m units across all manufacturers in a year where 350m units are sold. If the average price is higher, the volumes are very low. If Apple can cover 1 million Mac Pros a year with 2 GPUs each with each GPU no less than $400, Apple alone can increase their revenue by 50% and have a much larger impact on profits.
Even if Apple gave them an average of $150 profit per GPU and managed to sell 250k units per quarter with 2 GPUs each, that's $75m profit per quarter. AMD recently had to sell their HQ:
Is 250K Mac Pros a quarter realistic? If it is that is 500K GPUs a quarter which is far more than I would guess at given the dismal nature of Mac Pro sales. Given that I believe the Mac Pro can bump sales a bit when it hits the market.
I'm going out on a limb here and will suggest that the FirePro cards don't cost AMD that much more to physically build than the top end desktop cards. By that measure I'm really of the opinion that Apple could put these cards into Apples hands for somewhere between $450 and $500 each. That with your $150 profit for each card for AMD. That would be huge for AMD and frankly I don't see any other single vendor offer such an opportunity to AMD.
For me reading annual reports is a lot like self flicked torture. So I will take your word for it.
In 2012, they made $5.4b revenue, which is split $4b for CPUs and APUs and $1.4b standalone GPUs. Operating income was a loss of $231m from CPUs and profit of $105m from GPUs.
That's not just the case in 2012, their entire net revenue for GPUs for the last 3 years is about $1.5b/year. If you assume an average dedicated GPU retails for about $200, that's 7.5m units across all manufacturers in a year where 350m units are sold. If the average price is higher, the volumes are very low. If Apple can cover 1 million Mac Pros a year with 2 GPUs each with each GPU no less than $400, Apple alone can increase their revenue by 50% and have a much larger impact on profits.
The real question is can Apple sell that many units per year. Even if they don't they will still impact AMD very positively. For AMD this will also become a bit of a halo effect for one they are now associated with Apples top of the line Mac. Second people will be writing lots of code with these GPUs as targets. OpenCL should make that code portable to other systems so AMDs GPUs could also become associated with hi performance OpenCL in a way that no other GPU is. This project will bring positive notice upon AMD and the capabilities of their GPUs.
In the end I don't have real numbers because I don't know how many Mac Pros move a quarter now, nor do I know what the future holds for the New Mac Pro. If the customer base is open minded I could see Apple having a very positive upside in sales. 250K seems like a lot though. If the number is realistic there must be accountants at AMD with big smiles on their faces. AMD will win with this even if the discount is stiff due to volume. I could see the equivalent of $750 retail FirePro cards going to Apple for as little as $250 wholesale, these being put into the "entry" level machine.
In any event I don't think it is even possible to guess at Apple marketing strategy here. I still think it is possible for them to have a low end entry that hits the $2000 mark if they wanted too.
Honestly I'm expecting something like this. It would need a larger SSD in the base model but I don't think that is a problem given that Apple has the option available for the AIRs. It is actually cheap for the BTO option on the Airs (well cheap given Apples history with upgrades).
Frankly this is more machine than I wanted in the XMac, but it is affordable at this price. As to that $2000 mark Apple should be able to either hit or come in below with this hardware configuration and still make their profit.
Second people will be writing lots of code with these GPUs as targets. OpenCL should make that code portable to other systems so AMDs GPUs could also become associated with hi performance OpenCL in a way that no other GPU is. This project will bring positive notice upon AMD and the capabilities of their GPUs.
OpenCL is also available on Nvidia GPU's. Nvidia supports CUDA as well so you have more of a choice with their cards. Not saying AMD doesn't make great cards, they do but you can't associate OpenCL with just one vendor.
This is also interesting;
AMD thinks most programmers will not use CUDA or OpenCL
CHIP DESIGNER AMD believes that most software developers won't use CUDA or OpenCL to create code that runs on the GPU.
AMD has spent a lot of effort promoting OpenCL in the hope that developers will make use of the GPGPU in the firm's accelerated processing units (APUs). However the firm thinks most developers will shun GPGPU specific languages such as CUDA and OpenCL and stick with what they already know.
Margaret Lewis, director of software for AMD's server business unit, said that while OpenCL abstracted the GPU architecture to a degree, developers still require knowledge of how the GPU works.
"When you look at a world when people were graphics programmers to begin with, they understood the make-up of the GPU, they could use CUDA and OpenCL because they were familiar with it," she said. "Even though OpenCL abstracted it a bit, it still required you to have some fundamental knowledge of the GPU end for you to do a good job with either CUDA or OpenCL."
AMD believes that only a relatively small subset of developers that work on operating systems and produce libraries will use CUDA or OpenCL. Lewis said OpenCL is a good tool for them and that is part of the reason behind why AMD and other vendors such as Intel and Apple have been pushing the language.
"What we're trying to do is go a level higher, but for those people that need to do OpenCL, there are many different companies supporting OpenCL," Lewis said. "This is a good tool, but we're using that tool with tool developers, OS developers and library developers so that the majority of the programmers in the world will use whatever they are using today to do their code and their code will then be able to address CPUs or GPUs depending on what's in their system."
Effectively what Lewis is saying is that neither AMD nor Nvidia can get away with prescribing a programming language to developers and expect widespread adoption. While AMD has worked hard to drive OpenCL, as Nvidia has with CUDA, both companies are now looking at delivering the performance advantages of using those two languages and incorporating them into languages such as Java, Python and R. µ
As a programmer myself I also prefer using the already awesome Python OpenCL/CUDA libraries instead of writing them myself.
OpenCL is also now available for Android, AMD is going to release a SDK for their Tegra 4 CPU/GPU. I think I just might have to grab one of these, you know for my son;
Is 250K Mac Pros a quarter realistic? If it is that is 500K GPUs a quarter which is far more than I would guess at given the dismal nature of Mac Pro sales.
There was a stats breakdown of the workstation market here for 2011:
That showed Apple at 22% and the workstation market is 1 million units per quarter so 250k for a new model is entirely realistic. Apple's total Macs per quarter are about 4-5 million and 25-35% are desktops so around 1.25 million desktops. The iMac makes up the bulk of those so perhaps 250k for the Pros is on the high side but it'll still have a noticeable impact on AMD and this is an entirely new Mac Pro after 10 years of the same design.
I'm going out on a limb here and will suggest that the FirePro cards don't cost AMD that much more to physically build than the top end desktop cards. By that measure I'm really of the opinion that Apple could put these cards into Apples hands for somewhere between $450 and $500 each. That with your $150 profit for each card for AMD. That would be huge for AMD and frankly I don't see any other single vendor offer such an opportunity to AMD.
The good thing Apple does is that they pick just a few options. Other workstation vendors offer choices of about 10 different GPUs in single/dual configs including no GPUs at all so they can't guarantee what profits they'll pass onto a company like AMD. Apple can say to AMD 'here's how many Mac Pros we sell and every single one will ship with two AMD GPUs so what's the best price you'll give us for these?'. That will allow them to offer these GPUs at prices nobody else can match. I don't think they need to match desktop GPU prices but at the same time, there's no need to come close to the $3k retail prices.
If they even managed to get sort of a 2-for-1 deal, they might even manage to get the 12-core dual-W9000 out for under $7k, which is really competitive.
If it starts at $2,000 it should sell well. Lots of the Pro buyers (including myself) usually buy the minimum config and upgrade over time.
A four-core Xeon should outpace the top-end iMac handily right? Print may move back to the Pro after all.
Though buying RAM through Apple is insane, it may be worth it to upgrade the Flash RAM SSD, given that Apple sometimes gets prices on these things that are quite competitive.
I am going to go ahead and assume you are taking this from that 'netcast' video he had up the week of the new Mac Pro being announced…
This would be the same netcast where neither he, nor any of the three other people in the room, nor the guy that was also 'there' via video chat ; could be bothered to correct themselves when one of them stated that the new Mac Pro had a bunch of USB & FireWire ports for expansion…
Yeah, they could not recognize that Phil made a verbal mistake in the keynote…
Laporte then went on to denigrate the machine due to its compact size, and then suggest that it would be nothing more than a stylish HTPC, but overpriced…
Apple is not going to go thru the effort of R&D-ing this thing just to overprice the entry point and lose more pro customers to linux or windows…
GOOD
Xeon E5 v2 4-core CPU
16GB DDR3 ECC RAM
256GB PCIe Flash SSD
Dual ATI FirePro W5000 GPUs w/2GB GDDR5 RAM
US$2,000.00
BETTER
Xeon E5 v2 6-core CPU
32GB DDR3 RAM
512GB PCIe Flash SSD
Dual ATI FirePro W7000 GPUs w/4GB GDDR5 RAM
US$3,500.00
BEST
Xeon E5 v2 8-core CPU
64GB DDR3 ECC RAM
768GB PCIe Flash SDD
Dual ATI FirePro W8000 GPUs w/4GB GDDR5 RAM
US$5,000.00
ULTIMATE
Xeon E5 v2 12-core CPU
128GB DDR3 ECC RAM
1TB PCIe Flash SSD
Dual ATI FirePro W9000 GPUs w/6GB GDDR5 RAM
US$7,500.00
Mac Ronin, you've done a good job of configuring the 4 models there. Well done. Good effort.
I'm intrigued by the entry model of course. But I wonder if it could have a hex core in it... Still, for the $2000 price...you get a machine that puts the Pro back in the 'X Mac' class fight. A machine we've not really seen...since...well, the G3 Blue and White days.
1292.99 (at $2000) would be a cracking entry model. (By the time you take off the 27 inch monitor off the iMac that seems like a reasonable entry price.) Will Apple do it? History says they can. You get an extra GPU, a modest SSD instead of the iMac's monitor. (And the pro is still £200 higher...for the entry.)
but then...you leap to the £2,262.74 price..! That's quite a gap from the Quad to the HEx? vO.o
But the four models seem nicely worked out in principal. I can't see Apple offering the entry for £1300 (even though I think they should!) £1695 for the Hex..? £2195 for the 8 core (they've sold dual quads below £2k before now...in fact, didn't they once have two(!) dual quads below £2k back in the day? Closer to £3k for the 12 core.
A sane priced line up to get them back in the game in the Pro market? Surely they've got to offer compelling value to the Pro market? If they offer the same old prices...maybe it won't be enough to tempt previous defectors, switchers or even current owners to upgrade. Will the extra GPU and SSD speed be worth it? This isn't the old dark PPC days. Apple can no command much greater scale of economy and buying power.
£1295 Quad.
£1695 Hex.
£2195 Octo.
£2995 Twelve Core.
That would be an aggressive line up with SSD standard and dual GPUs. Apple would still make gravy on the 4k £999(?) monitor they bring to the market?
I think Apple will offer four choices for each 'slot' in the performance areas of this new workstation…
They've done that in the past but I think they can just have a single configuration page and let people choose. I don't think anyone buying these machines fits into easily defined categories. It wouldn't make sense for them to force dual W9000s on people who are buying for CPU performance.
If they want a separate server model, they'd just have two and spec them separately but I think OS X Server can be BTO in every machine and selecting it would mean OS X server came preinstalled.
(I do not think Apple will have speed differentials in the CPUs, just the number of cores will be the variable)
They'd probably be best picking the best value CPUs at each core count but definitely keep the options to a minimum for inventory. There will be 10-core CPUs so possibly 4,6,8,10,12.
RAM will top out at 64GB as there are only 4 RAM slots. They will be able to offer 128GB with DDR4 in future but that amount of RAM is about $1500 3rd party - Apple charges $1950 for 64GB, so they'd charge at least $3900 for 128GB.
OpenCL is also available on Nvidia GPU's. Nvidia supports CUDA as well so you have more of a choice with their cards. Not saying AMD doesn't make great cards, they do but you can't associate OpenCL with just one vendor.
That isn't what I was implying at all. The point I was trying to make is that AMD will get a lot of recognition for the compute ability of its GPUs by being widely deployed on the new Mac Pro. This is especially so due to apps and libraries written to leverage OpenCL and the AMD GPUs. In a nut shell this is a huge win for AMD and will highlight their hardware
This is also interesting;
<div>
<p style="padding-top:10px;line-height:1.32em;">CHIP DESIGNER AMD believes that most software developers won't use CUDA or OpenCL to create code that runs on the GPU.</p>
It depends upon the programmer and the app if OpenCL is used directly. Of course if you are using a library built with OpenCL you are using OpenCL even if you avoid writing the low level code yourself.
<p style="padding-top:10px;line-height:1.32em;">AMD has spent a lot of effort promoting OpenCL in the hope that developers will make use of the GPGPU in the firm's accelerated processing units (APUs). However the firm thinks most developers will shun GPGPU specific languages such as CUDA and OpenCL and stick with what they already know.</p>
<p style="padding-top:10px;line-height:1.32em;">Margaret Lewis, director of software for AMD's server business unit, said that while OpenCL abstracted the GPU architecture to a degree, developers still require knowledge of how the GPU works.</p>
<p style="padding-top:10px;line-height:1.32em;">"When you look at a world when people were graphics programmers to begin with, they understood the make-up of the GPU, they could use CUDA and OpenCL because they were familiar with it," she said. "Even though OpenCL abstracted it a bit, it still required you to have some fundamental knowledge of the GPU end for you to do a good job with either CUDA or OpenCL."</p>
<p style="padding-top:10px;line-height:1.32em;">AMD believes that only a relatively small subset of developers that work on operating systems and produce libraries will use CUDA or OpenCL. Lewis said OpenCL is a good tool for them and that is part of the reason behind why AMD and other vendors such as Intel and Apple have been pushing the language.</p>
<p style="padding-top:10px;line-height:1.32em;">"What we're trying to do is go a level higher, but for those people that need to do OpenCL, there are many different companies supporting OpenCL," Lewis said. "This is a good tool, but we're using that tool with tool developers, OS developers and library developers so that the majority of the programmers in the world will use whatever they are using today to do their code and their code will then be able to address CPUs or GPUs depending on what's in their system."</p>
<p style="padding-top:10px;line-height:1.32em;">Effectively what Lewis is saying is that neither AMD nor Nvidia can get away with prescribing a programming language to developers and expect widespread adoption. While AMD has worked hard to drive OpenCL, as Nvidia has with CUDA, both companies are now looking at delivering the performance advantages of using those two languages and incorporating them into languages such as Java, Python and R. µ</p>
<p style="padding-top:10px;line-height:1.32em;">As a programmer myself I also prefer using the already awesome Python OpenCL/CUDA libraries instead of writing them myself.</p>
Which is fine, however you are still using OpenCL and GPU compute to accelerate your apps even if that is abstracted away with a Python lib. This goes to support my point though, Apple is giving programmer a strong reason to use OpenCL by having this hardware in the Mac. The AMD hardware should perform in an outstanding manor thus the comment about this being a big positive for AMD.
<p style="padding-top:10px;line-height:1.32em;">OpenCL is also now available for Android, AMD is going to release a SDK for their Tegra 4 CPU/GPU. I think I just might have to grab one of these, you know for my son;</p>
That showed Apple at 22% and the workstation market is 1 million units per quarter so 250k for a new model is entirely realistic. Apple's total Macs per quarter are about 4-5 million and 25-35% are desktops so around 1.25 million desktops. The iMac makes up the bulk of those so perhaps 250k for the Pros is on the high side but it'll still have a noticeable impact on AMD and this is an entirely new Mac Pro after 10 years of the same design.
The good thing Apple does is that they pick just a few options. Other workstation vendors offer choices of about 10 different GPUs in single/dual configs including no GPUs at all so they can't guarantee what profits they'll pass onto a company like AMD. Apple can say to AMD 'here's how many Mac Pros we sell and every single one will ship with two AMD GPUs so what's the best price you'll give us for these?'. That will allow them to offer these GPUs at prices nobody else can match. I don't think they need to match desktop GPU prices but at the same time, there's no need to come close to the $3k retail prices.
If they even managed to get sort of a 2-for-1 deal, they might even manage to get the 12-core dual-W9000 out for under $7k, which is really competitive.
Well, here's another more recent breakdown of the workstation market from the same source:
Apple is not in the top four, but somewhere down amongst the 11% of "others", and a long way behind hp, Dell and Lenovo. Don't know where the 22% came from - maybe someone went mad while drawing that piechart. The later breakdown is much more believable, and suggests that 250k per quarter for the MacPro is not at all realistic.
Apple is not in the top four, but somewhere down amongst the 11% of "others", and a long way behind hp, Dell and Lenovo. Don't know where the 22% came from - maybe someone went mad while drawing that piechart. The later breakdown is much more believable, and suggests that 250k per quarter for the MacPro is not at all realistic.
It's not clear if they are including Apple there as some of their graphs exclude them, one of the diagrams in their report is titled "Table 4 Historical share of Windows and Linux in x86 based workstations (Apple platforms not included)". I think they skip IBM sometimes too. Here, they mention excluding Apple in 2012 reports:
"Apple bristles at the notion of comparing Mac Pros to generic workstations and doesn't provide shipment numbers for the product, Herrera said. JPR (Jon Peddie Research) this week issued workstation shipment numbers for last year's fourth quarter, but did not include Apple's numbers. Herrera estimated that Mac Pro shipments are likely in the ballpark of workstations shipped by HP, which had a 41.3 percent market share in the fourth quarter, and Dell, which held a 33.4 percent share."
Still, the shipment units won't stay the same throughout the refresh cycle. The above site even mentioned that Apple's share was higher than 22% the year before in 2010. The last real update to the Mac Pro was in 2010. The 2012 update used the same 2010 hardware so the current Mac Pro is about 3 years old. Apple also stopped selling the Mac Pro in Europe mid-Q1 2013.
FCPX came out mid-2011 and caused some migration to other platforms, which Dell and HP have taken advantage of:
Some Mac Pro owners will just be holding onto the ones they have and not buying new ones because they are so outdated now. 250k per quarter may be on the high side but it's the first major design change in 10 years and has had a lot of publicity. We'll probably never find out the actual numbers but it might be possible to work it out from AMD's financial reports and Apple's Mac shipment figures.
I think 16GB RAM will indeed be the default. If there really are four slots they'll probably insert 4GB sticks. So, useless if you want to upgrade.
Flash storage and GPU? Sounds really acceptable.
$4,000? No idea. Completely blank in my head.
Doubling all specs for $2k more...hmm, sounds cheap, yet I think you might be right. Not on the price, since I have no idea on the price for the lower end, but the difference, percentage-wise, yes.
I think 16GB RAM will indeed be the default. If there really are four slots they'll probably insert 4GB sticks. So, useless if you want to upgrade.
Flash storage and GPU? Sounds really acceptable.
$4,000? No idea. Completely blank in my head.
Doubling all specs for $2k more...hmm, sounds cheap, yet I think you might be right. Not on the price, since I have no idea on the price for the lower end, but the difference, percentage-wise, yes.
Yep it will be tough for upgraders but I think it is a quad-channel memory architecture so it has to be 4 modules to get full performance...
Apple seem to like having only 2 default configs for each Mac these days (counting different notebook screen sizes as different Macs).
Also I don't think there will be a quad core Mac Pro as quad is the new normal, it would be like the current gen. having a dual core. Guesses:
Low end:
- 6-core Xeon
- 16GB RAM
- 512GB Flash
- 2 x 3GB video cards
$4,000
High end:
- 12-core Xeon
- 32GB RAM
- 1TB Flash
- 2 x 6GB video cards
$6,000
CTO options with more RAM, more Flash, and 4K Cinema Display.
That low end is not low enough…
I prefer the older 4 config Apple… GOOD, BETTER, BEST & ULTIMATE…
And I know I have listed these before, but I am going to do it again!
With a change though, I think it was wizard69 who said there could be 10-core CPUs, so I am moving my low end (GOOD) config up to 6-core CPUs & adjusting up from there… I am also adjusting my boot volume/primary storage options…
This would also differentiate the Pro line, as (hopefully) Apple will keep the consumer models of Macs to 4-core CPUs…
Of course, a 6-core mobile CPU could be in the MacBook Pro, because it is also a Pro unit…
I think that Apple could bring in a solid low end entry level workstation for US$2,000.00…
GOOD CONFIGURATION
Xeon E5 v2 6-core CPU
16GB DDR3 ECC RAM
512GB PCIe Flash RAM SSD
(2) ATI (AMD) FirePro W5000 GPUs w/2GB GDDR5 RAM
US$2,000.00
BETTER CONFIGURATION
Xeon E5 v2 8-core CPU
32GB DDR3 ECC RAM
768GB PCIe Flash RAM SSD
(2) ATI (AMD) FirePro W7000 GPUs w/4GB GDDR5 RAM
US$3,500.00
BEST CONFIGURATION
Xeon E5 v2 10-core CPU
64GB DDR3 ECC RAM
1TB PCIe Flash RAM SSD
(2) ATI (AMD) FirePro W8000 GPUs w/4GB GDDR5 ECC RAM
US$5,000.00
ULTIMATE CONFIGURATION
Xeon E5 v2 12-core CPU
128GB DDR3 ECC RAM
1.5TB PCIe Flash RAM SSD
(2) ATI (AMD) FirePro W9000 GPUs w/6GB GDDR5 ECC RAM
US$7,500.00
I feel these are SOLID configurations, at a decent price point; one that gives the Pro users a good value for the dollar yet still allows Apple a margin for profit…
EDITED TO ADD: Of course, these are base-line configurations. Apple should make each section BTO, meaning one can either just order a pre-configured unit (READY TO SHIP!) or pick & choose from the four different performance categories…
Comments
Even if Apple gave them an average of $150 profit per GPU and managed to sell 250k units per quarter with 2 GPUs each, that's $75m profit per quarter. AMD recently had to sell their HQ:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/03/amd-sells-its-austin-hq-for-164-million-to-raise-some-quick-cash/
so they could have a deal with Apple that benefits both of them. AMD's 10K filing shows how much money they make from GPUs:
http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=irol-reportsannual
In 2012, they made $5.4b revenue, which is split $4b for CPUs and APUs and $1.4b standalone GPUs. Operating income was a loss of $231m from CPUs and profit of $105m from GPUs.
That's not just the case in 2012, their entire net revenue for GPUs for the last 3 years is about $1.5b/year. If you assume an average dedicated GPU retails for about $200, that's 7.5m units across all manufacturers in a year where 350m units are sold. If the average price is higher, the volumes are very low. If Apple can cover 1 million Mac Pros a year with 2 GPUs each with each GPU no less than $400, Apple alone can increase their revenue by 50% and have a much larger impact on profits.
Is 250K Mac Pros a quarter realistic? If it is that is 500K GPUs a quarter which is far more than I would guess at given the dismal nature of Mac Pro sales. Given that I believe the Mac Pro can bump sales a bit when it hits the market.
I'm going out on a limb here and will suggest that the FirePro cards don't cost AMD that much more to physically build than the top end desktop cards. By that measure I'm really of the opinion that Apple could put these cards into Apples hands for somewhere between $450 and $500 each. That with your $150 profit for each card for AMD. That would be huge for AMD and frankly I don't see any other single vendor offer such an opportunity to AMD. For me reading annual reports is a lot like self flicked torture. So I will take your word for it.
The real question is can Apple sell that many units per year. Even if they don't they will still impact AMD very positively. For AMD this will also become a bit of a halo effect for one they are now associated with Apples top of the line Mac. Second people will be writing lots of code with these GPUs as targets. OpenCL should make that code portable to other systems so AMDs GPUs could also become associated with hi performance OpenCL in a way that no other GPU is. This project will bring positive notice upon AMD and the capabilities of their GPUs.
In the end I don't have real numbers because I don't know how many Mac Pros move a quarter now, nor do I know what the future holds for the New Mac Pro. If the customer base is open minded I could see Apple having a very positive upside in sales. 250K seems like a lot though. If the number is realistic there must be accountants at AMD with big smiles on their faces. AMD will win with this even if the discount is stiff due to volume. I could see the equivalent of $750 retail FirePro cards going to Apple for as little as $250 wholesale, these being put into the "entry" level machine.
In any event I don't think it is even possible to guess at Apple marketing strategy here. I still think it is possible for them to have a low end entry that hits the $2000 mark if they wanted too.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
…low end entry that hits the $2000 mark…
Xeon E5 v2 4-core CPU
16GB ECC DDR3 RAM
256GB PCIe Flash SSD
(2) ATI W5000 FirePro GPUs w/2GB GDDR5 RAM
;^p
Honestly I'm expecting something like this. It would need a larger SSD in the base model but I don't think that is a problem given that Apple has the option available for the AIRs. It is actually cheap for the BTO option on the Airs (well cheap given Apples history with upgrades).
Frankly this is more machine than I wanted in the XMac, but it is affordable at this price. As to that $2000 mark Apple should be able to either hit or come in below with this hardware configuration and still make their profit.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
Second people will be writing lots of code with these GPUs as targets. OpenCL should make that code portable to other systems so AMDs GPUs could also become associated with hi performance OpenCL in a way that no other GPU is. This project will bring positive notice upon AMD and the capabilities of their GPUs.
OpenCL is also available on Nvidia GPU's. Nvidia supports CUDA as well so you have more of a choice with their cards. Not saying AMD doesn't make great cards, they do but you can't associate OpenCL with just one vendor.
This is also interesting;
AMD thinks most programmers will not use CUDA or OpenCL
Familiarity breeds aversion
By Lawrence Latif
Mon Mar 25 2013, 10:27
CHIP DESIGNER AMD believes that most software developers won't use CUDA or OpenCL to create code that runs on the GPU.
AMD has spent a lot of effort promoting OpenCL in the hope that developers will make use of the GPGPU in the firm's accelerated processing units (APUs). However the firm thinks most developers will shun GPGPU specific languages such as CUDA and OpenCL and stick with what they already know.
Margaret Lewis, director of software for AMD's server business unit, said that while OpenCL abstracted the GPU architecture to a degree, developers still require knowledge of how the GPU works.
"When you look at a world when people were graphics programmers to begin with, they understood the make-up of the GPU, they could use CUDA and OpenCL because they were familiar with it," she said. "Even though OpenCL abstracted it a bit, it still required you to have some fundamental knowledge of the GPU end for you to do a good job with either CUDA or OpenCL."
AMD believes that only a relatively small subset of developers that work on operating systems and produce libraries will use CUDA or OpenCL. Lewis said OpenCL is a good tool for them and that is part of the reason behind why AMD and other vendors such as Intel and Apple have been pushing the language.
"What we're trying to do is go a level higher, but for those people that need to do OpenCL, there are many different companies supporting OpenCL," Lewis said. "This is a good tool, but we're using that tool with tool developers, OS developers and library developers so that the majority of the programmers in the world will use whatever they are using today to do their code and their code will then be able to address CPUs or GPUs depending on what's in their system."
Effectively what Lewis is saying is that neither AMD nor Nvidia can get away with prescribing a programming language to developers and expect widespread adoption. While AMD has worked hard to drive OpenCL, as Nvidia has with CUDA, both companies are now looking at delivering the performance advantages of using those two languages and incorporating them into languages such as Java, Python and R. µ
As a programmer myself I also prefer using the already awesome Python OpenCL/CUDA libraries instead of writing them myself.
http://enja.org/2011/02/22/adventures-in-pyopencl-part-1-getting-started-with-python/
http://srossross.github.io/oclpb/
OpenCL is also now available for Android, AMD is going to release a SDK for their Tegra 4 CPU/GPU. I think I just might have to grab one of these, you know for my son;
There was a stats breakdown of the workstation market here for 2011:
http://www.deskeng.com/virtual_desktop/?p=5233
That showed Apple at 22% and the workstation market is 1 million units per quarter so 250k for a new model is entirely realistic. Apple's total Macs per quarter are about 4-5 million and 25-35% are desktops so around 1.25 million desktops. The iMac makes up the bulk of those so perhaps 250k for the Pros is on the high side but it'll still have a noticeable impact on AMD and this is an entirely new Mac Pro after 10 years of the same design.
The good thing Apple does is that they pick just a few options. Other workstation vendors offer choices of about 10 different GPUs in single/dual configs including no GPUs at all so they can't guarantee what profits they'll pass onto a company like AMD. Apple can say to AMD 'here's how many Mac Pros we sell and every single one will ship with two AMD GPUs so what's the best price you'll give us for these?'. That will allow them to offer these GPUs at prices nobody else can match. I don't think they need to match desktop GPU prices but at the same time, there's no need to come close to the $3k retail prices.
If they even managed to get sort of a 2-for-1 deal, they might even manage to get the 12-core dual-W9000 out for under $7k, which is really competitive.
I think Apple will offer four choices for each 'slot' in the performance areas of this new workstation…
CPUs will (obviously) be Xeon E5 v2 units, with the number of cores differentiating them:
4-core
6-core
8-core
12-core
(I do not think Apple will have speed differentials in the CPUs, just the number of cores will be the variable)
RAM will be quad-channel DDR3 1866MHz EEC:
16GB
32GB
64GB
128GB
Boot volume/primary storage will be a single PCIe Flash RAM SSD, in four sizes:
256GB
512GB
768GB
1TB
(many are hoping for that second 'socket' to be made available, but maybe there are not enough PCIe lanes available to support it?)
And the big chunk of the paradigm shift in these units, the GPUs, will all be from the ATI (AMD) FirePro W-series of GPUs:
(2) FirePro W5000 GPUs w/2GB GDDR5 RAM
(2) FirePro W7000 GPUs w/4GB GDDR5 RAM
(2) FirePro W8000 GPUs w/4GB GDDR5 ECC RAM
(2) FirePro W9000 GPUs w/6GB GDDR5 ECC RAM
So, four standard configurations:
GOOD
US$2,000.00
BETTER
US$3,500.00
BEST
US$5,000.00
ULTIMATE
US$7,500.00
But, BTO should allow some variables in the end-user choice of configuration…
If it starts at $2,000 it should sell well. Lots of the Pro buyers (including myself) usually buy the minimum config and upgrade over time.
A four-core Xeon should outpace the top-end iMac handily right? Print may move back to the Pro after all.
Though buying RAM through Apple is insane, it may be worth it to upgrade the Flash RAM SSD, given that Apple sometimes gets prices on these things that are quite competitive.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MacRonin
I am going to go ahead and assume you are taking this from that 'netcast' video he had up the week of the new Mac Pro being announced…
This would be the same netcast where neither he, nor any of the three other people in the room, nor the guy that was also 'there' via video chat ; could be bothered to correct themselves when one of them stated that the new Mac Pro had a bunch of USB & FireWire ports for expansion…
Yeah, they could not recognize that Phil made a verbal mistake in the keynote…
Laporte then went on to denigrate the machine due to its compact size, and then suggest that it would be nothing more than a stylish HTPC, but overpriced…
Apple is not going to go thru the effort of R&D-ing this thing just to overprice the entry point and lose more pro customers to linux or windows…
GOOD
Xeon E5 v2 4-core CPU
16GB DDR3 ECC RAM
256GB PCIe Flash SSD
Dual ATI FirePro W5000 GPUs w/2GB GDDR5 RAM
US$2,000.00
BETTER
Xeon E5 v2 6-core CPU
32GB DDR3 RAM
512GB PCIe Flash SSD
Dual ATI FirePro W7000 GPUs w/4GB GDDR5 RAM
US$3,500.00
BEST
Xeon E5 v2 8-core CPU
64GB DDR3 ECC RAM
768GB PCIe Flash SDD
Dual ATI FirePro W8000 GPUs w/4GB GDDR5 RAM
US$5,000.00
ULTIMATE
Xeon E5 v2 12-core CPU
128GB DDR3 ECC RAM
1TB PCIe Flash SSD
Dual ATI FirePro W9000 GPUs w/6GB GDDR5 RAM
US$7,500.00
Mac Ronin, you've done a good job of configuring the 4 models there. Well done. Good effort.
I'm intrigued by the entry model of course. But I wonder if it could have a hex core in it... Still, for the $2000 price...you get a machine that puts the Pro back in the 'X Mac' class fight. A machine we've not really seen...since...well, the G3 Blue and White days.
1292.99 (at $2000) would be a cracking entry model. (By the time you take off the 27 inch monitor off the iMac that seems like a reasonable entry price.) Will Apple do it? History says they can. You get an extra GPU, a modest SSD instead of the iMac's monitor. (And the pro is still £200 higher...for the entry.)
but then...you leap to the £2,262.74 price..! That's quite a gap from the Quad to the HEx? vO.o
But the four models seem nicely worked out in principal. I can't see Apple offering the entry for £1300 (even though I think they should!) £1695 for the Hex..? £2195 for the 8 core (they've sold dual quads below £2k before now...in fact, didn't they once have two(!) dual quads below £2k back in the day? Closer to £3k for the 12 core.
A sane priced line up to get them back in the game in the Pro market? Surely they've got to offer compelling value to the Pro market? If they offer the same old prices...maybe it won't be enough to tempt previous defectors, switchers or even current owners to upgrade. Will the extra GPU and SSD speed be worth it? This isn't the old dark PPC days. Apple can no command much greater scale of economy and buying power.
£1295 Quad.
£1695 Hex.
£2195 Octo.
£2995 Twelve Core.
That would be an aggressive line up with SSD standard and dual GPUs. Apple would still make gravy on the 4k £999(?) monitor they bring to the market?
Lemon Bon Bon.
Quote:
A four-core Xeon should outpace the top-end iMac handily right? Print may move back to the Pro after all.
That remains to be seen. The current iMac more than competitive for the old Hexcore Pro.
Let's see those benches on the quads to the 12 core...
Lemon Bon Bon.
They've done that in the past but I think they can just have a single configuration page and let people choose. I don't think anyone buying these machines fits into easily defined categories. It wouldn't make sense for them to force dual W9000s on people who are buying for CPU performance.
If they want a separate server model, they'd just have two and spec them separately but I think OS X Server can be BTO in every machine and selecting it would mean OS X server came preinstalled.
They'd probably be best picking the best value CPUs at each core count but definitely keep the options to a minimum for inventory. There will be 10-core CPUs so possibly 4,6,8,10,12.
RAM will top out at 64GB as there are only 4 RAM slots. They will be able to offer 128GB with DDR4 in future but that amount of RAM is about $1500 3rd party - Apple charges $1950 for 64GB, so they'd charge at least $3900 for 128GB.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
There was a stats breakdown of the workstation market here for 2011:
http://www.deskeng.com/virtual_desktop/?p=5233
That showed Apple at 22% and the workstation market is 1 million units per quarter so 250k for a new model is entirely realistic. Apple's total Macs per quarter are about 4-5 million and 25-35% are desktops so around 1.25 million desktops. The iMac makes up the bulk of those so perhaps 250k for the Pros is on the high side but it'll still have a noticeable impact on AMD and this is an entirely new Mac Pro after 10 years of the same design.
The good thing Apple does is that they pick just a few options. Other workstation vendors offer choices of about 10 different GPUs in single/dual configs including no GPUs at all so they can't guarantee what profits they'll pass onto a company like AMD. Apple can say to AMD 'here's how many Mac Pros we sell and every single one will ship with two AMD GPUs so what's the best price you'll give us for these?'. That will allow them to offer these GPUs at prices nobody else can match. I don't think they need to match desktop GPU prices but at the same time, there's no need to come close to the $3k retail prices.
If they even managed to get sort of a 2-for-1 deal, they might even manage to get the 12-core dual-W9000 out for under $7k, which is really competitive.
Well, here's another more recent breakdown of the workstation market from the same source:
http://jonpeddie.com/publications/workstation_report/
Apple is not in the top four, but somewhere down amongst the 11% of "others", and a long way behind hp, Dell and Lenovo. Don't know where the 22% came from - maybe someone went mad while drawing that piechart. The later breakdown is much more believable, and suggests that 250k per quarter for the MacPro is not at all realistic.
It's not clear if they are including Apple there as some of their graphs exclude them, one of the diagrams in their report is titled "Table 4 Historical share of Windows and Linux in x86 based workstations (Apple platforms not included)". I think they skip IBM sometimes too. Here, they mention excluding Apple in 2012 reports:
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/418526/apple_mac_pro_users_clamor_hardware_upgrade/
"Apple bristles at the notion of comparing Mac Pros to generic workstations and doesn't provide shipment numbers for the product, Herrera said. JPR (Jon Peddie Research) this week issued workstation shipment numbers for last year's fourth quarter, but did not include Apple's numbers. Herrera estimated that Mac Pro shipments are likely in the ballpark of workstations shipped by HP, which had a 41.3 percent market share in the fourth quarter, and Dell, which held a 33.4 percent share."
Still, the shipment units won't stay the same throughout the refresh cycle. The above site even mentioned that Apple's share was higher than 22% the year before in 2010. The last real update to the Mac Pro was in 2010. The 2012 update used the same 2010 hardware so the current Mac Pro is about 3 years old. Apple also stopped selling the Mac Pro in Europe mid-Q1 2013.
FCPX came out mid-2011 and caused some migration to other platforms, which Dell and HP have taken advantage of:
http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/direct2dell/b/direct2dell/archive/2012/12/27/mac-users-continue-to-switch-to-dell-precision-workstations-for-professional-video-editing.aspx
[VIDEO]
[VIDEO]
Some Mac Pro owners will just be holding onto the ones they have and not buying new ones because they are so outdated now. 250k per quarter may be on the high side but it's the first major design change in 10 years and has had a lot of publicity. We'll probably never find out the actual numbers but it might be possible to work it out from AMD's financial reports and Apple's Mac shipment figures.
Apple seem to like having only 2 default configs for each Mac these days (counting different notebook screen sizes as different Macs).
Also I don't think there will be a quad core Mac Pro as quad is the new normal, it would be like the current gen. having a dual core. Guesses:
Low end:
- 6-core Xeon
- 16GB RAM
- 512GB Flash
- 2 x 3GB video cards
$4,000
High end:
- 12-core Xeon
- 32GB RAM
- 1TB Flash
- 2 x 6GB video cards
$6,000
CTO options with more RAM, more Flash, and 4K Cinema Display.
I... would temper that thought.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
I... would temper that thought.
That was one of the things I was surer of... even the Macbook Pro has a 16GB RAM default config now (admittedly the high end one).
Flash storage and GPU? Sounds really acceptable.
$4,000? No idea. Completely blank in my head.
Doubling all specs for $2k more...hmm, sounds cheap, yet I think you might be right. Not on the price, since I have no idea on the price for the lower end, but the difference, percentage-wise, yes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PhilBoogie
I think 16GB RAM will indeed be the default. If there really are four slots they'll probably insert 4GB sticks. So, useless if you want to upgrade.
Flash storage and GPU? Sounds really acceptable.
$4,000? No idea. Completely blank in my head.
Doubling all specs for $2k more...hmm, sounds cheap, yet I think you might be right. Not on the price, since I have no idea on the price for the lower end, but the difference, percentage-wise, yes.
Yep it will be tough for upgraders but I think it is a quad-channel memory architecture so it has to be 4 modules to get full performance...
Quote:
Originally Posted by ascii
Apple seem to like having only 2 default configs for each Mac these days (counting different notebook screen sizes as different Macs).
Also I don't think there will be a quad core Mac Pro as quad is the new normal, it would be like the current gen. having a dual core. Guesses:
Low end:
- 6-core Xeon
- 16GB RAM
- 512GB Flash
- 2 x 3GB video cards
$4,000
High end:
- 12-core Xeon
- 32GB RAM
- 1TB Flash
- 2 x 6GB video cards
$6,000
CTO options with more RAM, more Flash, and 4K Cinema Display.
That low end is not low enough…
I prefer the older 4 config Apple… GOOD, BETTER, BEST & ULTIMATE…
And I know I have listed these before, but I am going to do it again!
With a change though, I think it was wizard69 who said there could be 10-core CPUs, so I am moving my low end (GOOD) config up to 6-core CPUs & adjusting up from there… I am also adjusting my boot volume/primary storage options…
This would also differentiate the Pro line, as (hopefully) Apple will keep the consumer models of Macs to 4-core CPUs…
Of course, a 6-core mobile CPU could be in the MacBook Pro, because it is also a Pro unit…
I think that Apple could bring in a solid low end entry level workstation for US$2,000.00…
GOOD CONFIGURATION
Xeon E5 v2 6-core CPU
16GB DDR3 ECC RAM
512GB PCIe Flash RAM SSD
(2) ATI (AMD) FirePro W5000 GPUs w/2GB GDDR5 RAM
US$2,000.00
BETTER CONFIGURATION
Xeon E5 v2 8-core CPU
32GB DDR3 ECC RAM
768GB PCIe Flash RAM SSD
(2) ATI (AMD) FirePro W7000 GPUs w/4GB GDDR5 RAM
US$3,500.00
BEST CONFIGURATION
Xeon E5 v2 10-core CPU
64GB DDR3 ECC RAM
1TB PCIe Flash RAM SSD
(2) ATI (AMD) FirePro W8000 GPUs w/4GB GDDR5 ECC RAM
US$5,000.00
ULTIMATE CONFIGURATION
Xeon E5 v2 12-core CPU
128GB DDR3 ECC RAM
1.5TB PCIe Flash RAM SSD
(2) ATI (AMD) FirePro W9000 GPUs w/6GB GDDR5 ECC RAM
US$7,500.00
I feel these are SOLID configurations, at a decent price point; one that gives the Pro users a good value for the dollar yet still allows Apple a margin for profit…
EDITED TO ADD: Of course, these are base-line configurations. Apple should make each section BTO, meaning one can either just order a pre-configured unit (READY TO SHIP!) or pick & choose from the four different performance categories…