There's no evidence so far to suggest that Ivy Bridge will have the same delays Sandy Bridge did (VT-d bug) so assuming that, which would you prefer: Sandy Bridge in March or Ivy Bridge in June/July?
Also, what reason would Apple have for waiting for a Sandy Bridge update when the CPUs have been available for over 9 months?
How well do you think people would receive 9 month old hardware in it after this long a wait?
For an IB update, it would likely use E5-2600v2 as you say. They won't use dual 10-core as they cost too much so at best it'll be a 16-core. Still no evidence they'll have USB 3, SATA 6G or PCIe 3 yet either. Imagine how disappointing it would be to have an entry quad-core Sandy Bridge at $2500 with USB 2, SATA 3G and PCIe 2 after all this time.
I'm not sure about SATA and PCIe 3. USB 3 was added by the oems I checked (Dell, HP, Lenovo).
I see no reason Apple couldn't implement it aside from refusal to allocate a small number of extra engineering hours. They probably wish to include at least 1 usb3 when they update the thunderbolt display, which would necessitate testing third party chipsets anyway. Do you disagree? Yeah including 10 core options would be a complete departure from their past trends. I suspect we could see one more round of quad versions at $2500, which is pretty weak, but I'm not totally sure. I don't see a price drop as likely, but they could go a little more aggressive in the base configuration and just ship the hex core. It would leave a bigger gap in price points, but you'd immediately hit the 12 core machines after that. $2500 for a quad core was never a good value, and yet people assigned a lot of reasons to it with a poor understNew Postsanding (must be Xeons, must be due to the need to support dual configurations, more fud). I'm still impressed you remembered my screwup on the X79 quote. That was pretty awesome.
Regarding the wait, I suspect they don't have even a couple engineers dedicated specifically to the mac pro. It may have been up for cancellation or an extremely low priority. They could have been uncertain about intel schedule. I know about the SATA problems that caused the Sandy Bridge recall early on and subsequent problems, but I'm still hesitant to believe that intel will have anything in the hands of oems in the June/July timeframe. Intel officially launched Sandy Bridge EP around February or March. Workstations weren't shipping in quantity until roughly early July. Early shipments seem to have been earmarked for supercomputer vendors. If Ivy is in fact available in sufficient quantities by July, I suspect they'd tack on an announcement for the mac pros when they refresh the notebooks, possibly with extended shipping dates. Apple may have a far better outlook of intel's schedule than me, so I suspect it factors into their decisions.
I wonder just a bit if a continuation of the mac pro also influenced the imac and what they felt needed to be included there. They must be counting on further adoption of the imac in work environments as a portion of its sales. I don't think consumer sales alone would keep it healthy. Most of the people who own computer desks for personal use are those that have a number of other peripheral devices. Otherwise in my opinion they're unlikely to assign dedicated space to their computing devices.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
Tell me about it. The one I linked? Says it's supported. Total lies. And no help whatsoever when you call! The management utility is in Flash, if that tells you anything, too.
I know from experience how many things are supported in name only. That detail about the management utility is extremely funny.
Do you guys think there's any chance that Apple will declare that regular disk drives are obsolete, and allow multiple SSDs to be plugged in as desired and reconfigured Drobo-style as a single Fusion Drive?
Just thinking outside the box here. It's Apple with a new form factor, they've got to obsolete something.
Just thinking outside the box here. It's Apple with a new form factor, they've got to obsolete something.
That is indeed something I have thought about. I do think however that they know their MP market uses insane amounts of data, and therefore could point users to remote (RAID) Rack solutions. They used to make that themselves, but once killed they pointed us to a 3rd party solution also.
And if they are going to kill the HDD (good for them, it's an old invention from 1954 and the sooner it's killed the better) the cooling requirements would drop significantly. And that could result in a smaller chassis, obviously. Hey, that rhymes.
Do you guys think there's any chance that Apple will declare that regular disk drives are obsolete, and allow multiple SSDs to be plugged in as desired and reconfigured Drobo-style as a single Fusion Drive?
Just thinking outside the box here. It's Apple with a new form factor, they've got to obsolete something.
I'm not quite sure what you're asking. Drobo is an external RAIDed NAS. You can use SSDs if you want. There are 3.5" SSDs just as there are PCIe SSDs and the SSD cards that Apple uses in most of their systems.
I do think Apple (and everyone else) will stop using spinning drives but that time isn't now. If you want a good deal of storage you still have to use an HDD. This is where Fusion Drive comes into play. It pairs at least one SSD with at least one HDD and knows which is the SSD and move files to the faster drive if it's used often or can benefit from the increased performance.
I full expect the new Mac Pro to have 3.5" slots for HDDs but I also expect it to have an SSD card viz Fusion Drive, at least as an option.
He might be talking about Drobos new portable storage solution that makes use of notebook drives to store datammmm the cool thing here is that the "drives" plug into the front of the unit.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SolipsismX
I'm not quite sure what you're asking. Drobo is an external RAIDed NAS. You can use SSDs if you want. There are 3.5" SSDs just as there are PCIe SSDs and the SSD cards that Apple uses in most of their systems.
I do think Apple (and everyone else) will stop using spinning drives but that time isn't now. If you want a good deal of storage you still have to use an HDD. This is where Fusion Drive comes into play. It pairs at least one SSD with at least one HDD and knows which is the SSD and move files to the faster drive if it's used often or can benefit from the increased performance.
I full expect the new Mac Pro to have 3.5" slots for HDDs but I also expect it to have an SSD card viz Fusion Drive, at least as an option.
If they don't have a high speed SSD solution I can only think that Apple has lost it. In fact SSDs should be the preferred and primary storage solution for a 2013 Mac Pro.
If they don't have a high speed SSD solution I can only think that Apple has lost it. In fact SSDs should be the preferred and primary storage solution for a 2013 Mac Pro.
So you think that the default build will come with an SSD? I'm thinking that could happen but with an SSD card. Any bays will have the option for HDDs. I would like them to include sleds that allow 2.5" drives in their Mac Pros so that you can use SSDs if you wish. I assume they don't offer any such thing now.
So you think that the default build will come with an SSD? I'm thinking that could happen but with an SSD card. Any bays will have the option for HDDs. I would like them to include sleds that allow 2.5" drives in their Mac Pros so that you can use SSDs if you wish. I assume they don't offer any such thing now.
You can buy a MP now and configure it with SSD's. Up to 4, and they're placed in an 'adapter' so they go into the 3.5" bays. OWC sells them:
But maybe the next MP will need to be ordered with either HDD or SSD. With the latter, many more can fit in, and will require way less cooling, so a smaller chassis is possible. But the OS itself should be put on SSD, possible simply soldered to the MB.
You can buy a MP now and configure it with SSD's. Up to 4, and they're placed in an 'adapter' so they go into the 3.5" bays. OWC sells them:
Somewhere else sells dual-drive single bays. It's a drive carrier that looks just like Apple's existing ones, but you can put two SSDs into each. I'll try to find it.
Ah, they must have taken it down. They still have this option, though:
I'm still hesitant to believe that intel will have anything in the hands of oems in the June/July timeframe.
But assuming it was the case, would it be your preferred option or Sandy Bridge in March? Even if it was as late as August, I'd still say it's a better option than Sandy Bridge in March. Potentially they could launch Sandy Bridge in early March and drop in Ivy Bridge late November or something like that.
I still don't see why they'd delay it when Sandy Bridge is available right now. Why bother with last year's refresh unless they decided to skip it?
If Ivy is in fact available in sufficient quantities by July, I suspect they'd tack on an announcement for the mac pros when they refresh the notebooks, possibly with extended shipping dates. Apple may have a far better outlook of intel's schedule than me, so I suspect it factors into their decisions.
The quantities are really low, I find it hard to believe they can have supply issues when they only have to make 3 million units per quarter for everyone. Obviously chips with high core count have worse yields but it's still a fraction of the lower-end chip volume.
T Desktops are designed to be used at a desk or some station and have battery or built-in accessories that allow them to be portable.
And as such a desktop computer does not need to be pencil thin and exclude things that people need and use just so that some designer can brag how thin it is, in a dimension that doesn't really matter.
And as such a desktop computer does not need to be pencil thin and exclude things that people need and use just so that some designer can brag how thin it is, in a dimension that doesn't really matter.
I'm not sure of your point. It sounds like you're changing the conversation to complain that the new iMac design serves no purpose. If so, that is axiomatically incorrect.
Once the supply problems are dealt with in the iMacs, they'll probably update the Cinema Displays.
I figured they'd update the thunderbolt display after supply constraints clear up. iMacs still show extended shipping dates, and the other components with the exception of the 680mx have been out much longer. I also suspect if supply problems drag on, they might launch the updated thunderbolt display concurrent with new macbook pros, assuming Haswell doesn't slide too far out. I didn't know what parts were used there. I was looking more at the tendency to reuse parts whenever possible and that they'd have to do some third party chip validation if they wanted it in the thunderbolt display. It seems like a reasonable priority if things like hard drives are to be chained off it.
Quote:
But assuming it was the case, would it be your preferred option or Sandy Bridge in March? Even if it was as late as August, I'd still say it's a better option than Sandy Bridge in March. Potentially they could launch Sandy Bridge in early March and drop in Ivy Bridge late November or something like that.
Once we're inside of 6 months or so, it probably doesn't make financial sense. Logic boards and things are unlikely to really change between the two, and AMD 7xxx drivers have shown up multiple times in ML builds, so it may not be a huge amount of extra effort. My initial presumption was that if they stated 2013 and wished to use Sandy, it would have shown up by now even if no one was allocated to the mac pro previously. Assuming they intended to carry the prior design forward, I do not really think it would take years to bring a new model to market. The current case has a significant amount of extra room and some of the recent NVidia GTX gpus have a minimal level of preexisting support in OSX. It's difficult for me to picture this as an overwhelming project for a small team.
Quote:
I still don't see why they'd delay it when Sandy Bridge is available right now. Why bother with last year's refresh unless they decided to skip it?
The quantities are really low, I find it hard to believe they can have supply issues when they only have to make 3 million units per quarter for everyone. Obviously chips with high core count have worse yields but it's still a fraction of the lower-end chip volume.
It could have just been a screwup. Perhaps they were initially going to cancel it and really had nothing to ship? They may have a large engineering staff, but if they're all allocated to other projects, that means very little. Given the potential to reuse parts over two generations with Sandy to Ivy, it's hard to speculate that it would have made complete financial sense to skip one. What they offer right now is pretty terrible. It starts at $2500 for sort of low end specs in terms of a Xeon workstation. The drop in specs from prior years must have had some influence on how long buyers held onto their old ones. Old software catching up on core scaling was likely another hit for the higher end models. I assume they've had quite a slump. The reason I disagree with some of the others here that they'll reverse the pricing strategy is that it conflicts with their other actions. Even in the 2012 reshuffling, pricing still went up on the base dual model. It went from 8 core westmere to 12 core westmere with a $300 price increase. Those cpus still retail for less than those used in the mac pro 1,1, which was priced $1300 lower. It's not coming from the base gpu option. I just see it as a pricing strategy rather than driven by cost to manufacture. If people will pay it, they can continue to charge it. Otherwise they're more likely to cut the line.
And as such a desktop computer does not need to be pencil thin and exclude things that people need and use just so that some designer can brag how thin it is, in a dimension that doesn't really matter.
Aha, someone who misses the DVD drive. Apple was early with dropping the floppy, too. Many people seemed to like that change. Just like many liked it when Apple was an early adopter to add USB to their Macs. Perhaps you need to let go of the old notion, and embrace the new?
If Apple was to releases a Mac Pro without consideration for solid sate storage I will have lost all faith in them. All one has to do is look towards Apples laptops to see the benefits of solid state storage. The trick with the Mac Pro is to make that storage large enough that it is viable as some users only storage for more demanding users the SSD can be used in conjunction with fusion drive. Pro users though need a far bigger SSD than the 256Gb sizes.
The other way to look at this is this: does it make sense to introduce a new desktop platform without support for solid state secondary storage? I'd say it is suicide to not consider solid state tech for any new desktop platform, especially a platform that is suppose to be a high performance workstation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SolipsismX
So you think that the default build will come with an SSD? I'm thinking that could happen but with an SSD card. Any bays will have the option for HDDs. I would like them to include sleds that allow 2.5" drives in their Mac Pros so that you can use SSDs if you wish. I assume they don't offer any such thing now.
Obviously the Pro needs a way to support magnetic technology for those that need it. That would be internally though I don't see the machine having disk array technology in 2013. apple needs to find the right mix of technologies to support the Mac Pro for the next decade.
If Apple was to releases a Mac Pro without consideration for solid sate storage I will have lost all faith in them. All one has to do is look towards Apples laptops to see the benefits of solid state storage. The trick with the Mac Pro is to make that storage large enough that it is viable as some users only storage for more demanding users the SSD can be used in conjunction with fusion drive. Pro users though need a far bigger SSD than the 256Gb sizes.
I would agree with that, but if we're talking about large storage volumes, HDDs still make sense. A frequent problem under OSX is finding stable well supported raid hardware, unless your budget is fairly elastic. I've been through the Apple Store's reviews on the Promise RAID. I know Promise makes a fair amount of enterprise grade hardware, but the Apple Store has a number of complaints regarding doa drives with that unit. Buying bulk drives off newegg I might expect that, but it worries me me with something like a pre-configured raid. These things should show up and work. SSDs are still extremely expensive at Apple's markups. Right now if you spec the mac pro with 512GB ssds, the first is $850 and the rest are $1000 each. Hard drives are trivial to install in a mac pro, and I have received flaky hard drives in new Macs on two occasions (one was also extremely noisy), so I don't particularly value the extra QA there. Amazon has Samsung 840 512GB ssds for $500 or less depending on model. That is a third party vendor as I couldn't get it to link correctly, but you can see Amazon as one of the buying options listed on the right. Pricing is the same. Apple really does apply a high markup there, which is harder to do on machines that aren't sealed off black boxes.
Quote:
The other way to look at this is this: does it make sense to introduce a new desktop platform without support for solid state secondary storage? I'd say it is suicide to not consider solid state tech for any new desktop platform, especially a platform that is suppose to be a high performance workstation.
Obviously the Pro needs a way to support magnetic technology for those that need it. That would be internally though I don't see the machine having disk array technology in 2013. apple needs to find the right mix of technologies to support the Mac Pro for the next decade.
I completely agree with that. Large storage volumes are likely to remain raid dependent, especially when many terabytes are needed. In some cases I'd say still tape dependent, although I don't personally use it as a backup solution.
Apple has never been a cheap solution, if you want cheap it's white box or hackintosh. Apple has said many times they are not about making cheap things. Honestly my one concern is they will state oh Thunder Bolt will address all our concerns with break out boxes. Where that is somewhat true you do not get full bandwidth 16x or what ever the top PCIE speed is via Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt goes a long way but for cards I'd rather just have the native slots, too much crap that can cause issues in environments that require stability and silence above all else.
It would be nice to have a desktop, but that would probably mean the Mac Pro Workstation will cease to exist. For my customers running server and heavily loads that would be a lost.
Yes there is a real need among Mac Pro users for magnetic storage to handle bulk needs. However that isn't everybody. Further it should be fairly easy to implement a rather large SSD in a Mac Pro given the pricing structure of the machine. Many Pro users would be very happy with a 512 GB or 1 TB SSD sitting on the PCI Express bus.
Now some have most likely thrown up their hands in disgust saying Apple could never do that, they like to charge far to much for SSD's. This isn't really the case though, you look at the AIRs at introduction and you will have seen a very interestingly priced machine. If Apple builds in the flash it can be very competitive.
As a side note, like you I've had my share of hard drive issues. In this regard I don't think it would hurt Apple one bit to introduce some new technology to make high capacity flash on the Mac Pro a reality. They have the technology of Anobit, PA Semi and a bunch of other silicon companies to build the custom hardware to pull this off and control costs.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hmm
I would agree with that, but if we're talking about large storage volumes, HDDs still make sense. A frequent problem under OSX is finding stable well supported raid hardware, unless your budget is fairly elastic. I've been through the Apple Store's reviews on the Promise RAID. I know Promise makes a fair amount of enterprise grade hardware, but the Apple Store has a number of complaints regarding doa drives with that unit. Buying bulk drives off newegg I might expect that, but it worries me me with something like a pre-configured raid. These things should show up and work. SSDs are still extremely expensive at Apple's markups. Right now if you spec the mac pro with 512GB ssds, the first is $850 and the rest are $1000 each. Hard drives are trivial to install in a mac pro, and I have received flaky hard drives in new Macs on two occasions (one was also extremely noisy), so I don't particularly value the extra QA there. Amazon has Samsung 840 512GB ssds for $500 or less depending on model. That is a third party vendor as I couldn't get it to link correctly, but you can see Amazon as one of the buying options listed on the right. Pricing is the same. Apple really does apply a high markup there, which is harder to do on machines that aren't sealed off black boxes.
I completely agree with that. Large storage volumes are likely to remain raid dependent, especially when many terabytes are needed. In some cases I'd say still tape dependent, although I don't personally use it as a backup solution.
My interest is to see Apple introduce a powerful but yet competitively priced machine. I believe the way to success is putting value into things outside of bulk storage which is better solved with an external box. So the goal should be fast secondary storage, strong OpenCL support and any other new tech they can dream up to make the Pro an attractive machine again.
Why is it every single time we talk about a more cost effective replacement for the Mac Pro we get these idiotic posts???? Wake up and smell the coffee, the Mac Pro is on skid row, it sales have dropped like a rock. Why? Simple it offers no value what so ever at the low end as such the market can not sustain strong sales of the Mac Pro as a whole.
As to slots I agree 100%, however you don't need a box the size of the Mac Pro to support a few PCI Express cards. A good portion of the space in the current Mac Pro is totally wasted, so even if you deliver today capabilities you can go with a much smaller box. Refactor the machine a bit and the space the Mac Pro takes up can be trimmed even more.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Elderloc
Apple has never been a cheap solution, if you want cheap it's white box or hackintosh. Apple has said many times they are not about making cheap things. Honestly my one concern is they will state oh Thunder Bolt will address all our concerns with break out boxes. Where that is somewhat true you do not get full bandwidth 16x or what ever the top PCIE speed is via Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt goes a long way but for cards I'd rather just have the native slots, too much crap that can cause issues in environments that require stability and silence above all else.
It would be nice to have a desktop, but that would probably mean the Mac Pro Workstation will cease to exist. For my customers running server and heavily loads that would be a lost.
Why? Why do you need a huge box for a workstation class machine. Nobody has come up with a rational response to this question. To put it simply you don't. A Mac Pro can get by find on a single socket these days when combined with a modern GPU card. Add a bit of super computing networking and you can have as many sockets as you could rationally want. A strong clustering technology would do far more for high end computing than the current Mac Pro, especially if Apple can get the nodes into the $1500 range.
It is time for Apple to think different when it comes to what a Pro computer should be. I'm not sure why people can't grasp that the current solution is dead in the water. No amount of updating will address the primary issue which is that there simply isn't enough demand at the lower end to keep the Mac Pro viable. Boys, sales are in the gutter, throwing a new chip in the same old Mac Pro box and slapping a fat sticker on it will not spur sales one bit. Like it or not Apple needs a refactored machine that totally re-imagines what a Pro desktop machine should be. It has to be a machine that can cover development costs and shore up declining sales. Plugging a new motherboard in the Mac Pro won't do the job at the current prices.
In the end it comes down to this: if you want a Pro machine from Apple you need to let the current Mac Pro die. Let Apple refactor the machine into a more cost effective device that will generate the sales to pay for itself. If you don't let it go we may end up with nothing or a machine nobody wants.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
There's no evidence so far to suggest that Ivy Bridge will have the same delays Sandy Bridge did (VT-d bug) so assuming that, which would you prefer: Sandy Bridge in March or Ivy Bridge in June/July?
Also, what reason would Apple have for waiting for a Sandy Bridge update when the CPUs have been available for over 9 months?
How well do you think people would receive 9 month old hardware in it after this long a wait?
For an IB update, it would likely use E5-2600v2 as you say. They won't use dual 10-core as they cost too much so at best it'll be a 16-core. Still no evidence they'll have USB 3, SATA 6G or PCIe 3 yet either. Imagine how disappointing it would be to have an entry quad-core Sandy Bridge at $2500 with USB 2, SATA 3G and PCIe 2 after all this time.
I'm not sure about SATA and PCIe 3. USB 3 was added by the oems I checked (Dell, HP, Lenovo).
http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/tech-specs/workstation/d30/
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5769/dell-precision-t3600-review-dells-new-enterprise
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06a/12454-12454-296719-307907-4231338-5225033.html?dnr=1
I see no reason Apple couldn't implement it aside from refusal to allocate a small number of extra engineering hours. They probably wish to include at least 1 usb3 when they update the thunderbolt display, which would necessitate testing third party chipsets anyway. Do you disagree? Yeah including 10 core options would be a complete departure from their past trends. I suspect we could see one more round of quad versions at $2500, which is pretty weak, but I'm not totally sure. I don't see a price drop as likely, but they could go a little more aggressive in the base configuration and just ship the hex core. It would leave a bigger gap in price points, but you'd immediately hit the 12 core machines after that. $2500 for a quad core was never a good value, and yet people assigned a lot of reasons to it with a poor understNew Postsanding (must be Xeons, must be due to the need to support dual configurations, more fud). I'm still impressed you remembered my screwup on the X79 quote. That was pretty awesome.
Regarding the wait, I suspect they don't have even a couple engineers dedicated specifically to the mac pro. It may have been up for cancellation or an extremely low priority. They could have been uncertain about intel schedule. I know about the SATA problems that caused the Sandy Bridge recall early on and subsequent problems, but I'm still hesitant to believe that intel will have anything in the hands of oems in the June/July timeframe. Intel officially launched Sandy Bridge EP around February or March. Workstations weren't shipping in quantity until roughly early July. Early shipments seem to have been earmarked for supercomputer vendors. If Ivy is in fact available in sufficient quantities by July, I suspect they'd tack on an announcement for the mac pros when they refresh the notebooks, possibly with extended shipping dates. Apple may have a far better outlook of intel's schedule than me, so I suspect it factors into their decisions.
I wonder just a bit if a continuation of the mac pro also influenced the imac and what they felt needed to be included there. They must be counting on further adoption of the imac in work environments as a portion of its sales. I don't think consumer sales alone would keep it healthy. Most of the people who own computer desks for personal use are those that have a number of other peripheral devices. Otherwise in my opinion they're unlikely to assign dedicated space to their computing devices.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
Tell me about it. The one I linked? Says it's supported. Total lies. And no help whatsoever when you call! The management utility is in Flash, if that tells you anything, too.
I know from experience how many things are supported in name only
SSDs are 2.5" aren't they?
Do you guys think there's any chance that Apple will declare that regular disk drives are obsolete, and allow multiple SSDs to be plugged in as desired and reconfigured Drobo-style as a single Fusion Drive?
Just thinking outside the box here. It's Apple with a new form factor, they've got to obsolete something.
That is indeed something I have thought about. I do think however that they know their MP market uses insane amounts of data, and therefore could point users to remote (RAID) Rack solutions. They used to make that themselves, but once killed they pointed us to a 3rd party solution also.
And if they are going to kill the HDD (good for them, it's an old invention from 1954 and the sooner it's killed the better) the cooling requirements would drop significantly. And that could result in a smaller chassis, obviously. Hey, that rhymes.
edit: 20x4TB 3.5"HDD:
I'm not quite sure what you're asking. Drobo is an external RAIDed NAS. You can use SSDs if you want. There are 3.5" SSDs just as there are PCIe SSDs and the SSD cards that Apple uses in most of their systems.
I do think Apple (and everyone else) will stop using spinning drives but that time isn't now. If you want a good deal of storage you still have to use an HDD. This is where Fusion Drive comes into play. It pairs at least one SSD with at least one HDD and knows which is the SSD and move files to the faster drive if it's used often or can benefit from the increased performance.
I full expect the new Mac Pro to have 3.5" slots for HDDs but I also expect it to have an SSD card viz Fusion Drive, at least as an option.
He might be talking about Drobos new portable storage solution that makes use of notebook drives to store datammmm the cool thing here is that the "drives" plug into the front of the unit.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SolipsismX
I'm not quite sure what you're asking. Drobo is an external RAIDed NAS. You can use SSDs if you want. There are 3.5" SSDs just as there are PCIe SSDs and the SSD cards that Apple uses in most of their systems.
I do think Apple (and everyone else) will stop using spinning drives but that time isn't now. If you want a good deal of storage you still have to use an HDD. This is where Fusion Drive comes into play. It pairs at least one SSD with at least one HDD and knows which is the SSD and move files to the faster drive if it's used often or can benefit from the increased performance.
I full expect the new Mac Pro to have 3.5" slots for HDDs but I also expect it to have an SSD card viz Fusion Drive, at least as an option.
If they don't have a high speed SSD solution I can only think that Apple has lost it. In fact SSDs should be the preferred and primary storage solution for a 2013 Mac Pro.
Storage, I don't think so. OS, yes, Perhaps some applications as well, though some use very large templates, like FCS. Yes, still in use.
So you think that the default build will come with an SSD? I'm thinking that could happen but with an SSD card. Any bays will have the option for HDDs. I would like them to include sleds that allow 2.5" drives in their Mac Pros so that you can use SSDs if you wish. I assume they don't offer any such thing now.
You can buy a MP now and configure it with SSD's. Up to 4, and they're placed in an 'adapter' so they go into the 3.5" bays. OWC sells them:
But maybe the next MP will need to be ordered with either HDD or SSD. With the latter, many more can fit in, and will require way less cooling, so a smaller chassis is possible. But the OS itself should be put on SSD, possible simply soldered to the MB.
Originally Posted by PhilBoogie
You can buy a MP now and configure it with SSD's. Up to 4, and they're placed in an 'adapter' so they go into the 3.5" bays. OWC sells them:
Somewhere else sells dual-drive single bays. It's a drive carrier that looks just like Apple's existing ones, but you can put two SSDs into each. I'll try to find it.
Ah, they must have taken it down. They still have this option, though:
They use Pericom PCI to USB bridges for the current displays and they have USB 3 support now so that's an option:
http://www.pericom.com/protocols/usb-technology/
Once the supply problems are dealt with in the iMacs, they'll probably update the Cinema Displays.
But assuming it was the case, would it be your preferred option or Sandy Bridge in March? Even if it was as late as August, I'd still say it's a better option than Sandy Bridge in March. Potentially they could launch Sandy Bridge in early March and drop in Ivy Bridge late November or something like that.
I still don't see why they'd delay it when Sandy Bridge is available right now. Why bother with last year's refresh unless they decided to skip it?
The quantities are really low, I find it hard to believe they can have supply issues when they only have to make 3 million units per quarter for everyone. Obviously chips with high core count have worse yields but it's still a fraction of the lower-end chip volume.
Cool!
That even happened in the old day, with the G5:
Quote:
Originally Posted by SolipsismX
T Desktops are designed to be used at a desk or some station and have battery or built-in accessories that allow them to be portable.
And as such a desktop computer does not need to be pencil thin and exclude things that people need and use just so that some designer can brag how thin it is, in a dimension that doesn't really matter.
I'm not sure of your point. It sounds like you're changing the conversation to complain that the new iMac design serves no purpose. If so, that is axiomatically incorrect.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
They use Pericom PCI to USB bridges for the current displays and they have USB 3 support now so that's an option:
http://www.pericom.com/protocols/usb-technology/
Once the supply problems are dealt with in the iMacs, they'll probably update the Cinema Displays.
I figured they'd update the thunderbolt display after supply constraints clear up. iMacs still show extended shipping dates, and the other components with the exception of the 680mx have been out much longer. I also suspect if supply problems drag on, they might launch the updated thunderbolt display concurrent with new macbook pros, assuming Haswell doesn't slide too far out. I didn't know what parts were used there. I was looking more at the tendency to reuse parts whenever possible and that they'd have to do some third party chip validation if they wanted it in the thunderbolt display. It seems like a reasonable priority if things like hard drives are to be chained off it.
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But assuming it was the case, would it be your preferred option or Sandy Bridge in March? Even if it was as late as August, I'd still say it's a better option than Sandy Bridge in March. Potentially they could launch Sandy Bridge in early March and drop in Ivy Bridge late November or something like that.
Once we're inside of 6 months or so, it probably doesn't make financial sense. Logic boards and things are unlikely to really change between the two, and AMD 7xxx drivers have shown up multiple times in ML builds, so it may not be a huge amount of extra effort. My initial presumption was that if they stated 2013 and wished to use Sandy, it would have shown up by now even if no one was allocated to the mac pro previously. Assuming they intended to carry the prior design forward, I do not really think it would take years to bring a new model to market. The current case has a significant amount of extra room and some of the recent NVidia GTX gpus have a minimal level of preexisting support in OSX. It's difficult for me to picture this as an overwhelming project for a small team.
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I still don't see why they'd delay it when Sandy Bridge is available right now. Why bother with last year's refresh unless they decided to skip it?
The quantities are really low, I find it hard to believe they can have supply issues when they only have to make 3 million units per quarter for everyone. Obviously chips with high core count have worse yields but it's still a fraction of the lower-end chip volume.
It could have just been a screwup. Perhaps they were initially going to cancel it and really had nothing to ship? They may have a large engineering staff, but if they're all allocated to other projects, that means very little. Given the potential to reuse parts over two generations with Sandy to Ivy, it's hard to speculate that it would have made complete financial sense to skip one. What they offer right now is pretty terrible. It starts at $2500 for sort of low end specs in terms of a Xeon workstation. The drop in specs from prior years must have had some influence on how long buyers held onto their old ones. Old software catching up on core scaling was likely another hit for the higher end models. I assume they've had quite a slump. The reason I disagree with some of the others here that they'll reverse the pricing strategy is that it conflicts with their other actions. Even in the 2012 reshuffling, pricing still went up on the base dual model. It went from 8 core westmere to 12 core westmere with a $300 price increase. Those cpus still retail for less than those used in the mac pro 1,1, which was priced $1300 lower. It's not coming from the base gpu option. I just see it as a pricing strategy rather than driven by cost to manufacture. If people will pay it, they can continue to charge it. Otherwise they're more likely to cut the line.
Aha, someone who misses the DVD drive. Apple was early with dropping the floppy, too. Many people seemed to like that change. Just like many liked it when Apple was an early adopter to add USB to their Macs. Perhaps you need to let go of the old notion, and embrace the new?
If Apple was to releases a Mac Pro without consideration for solid sate storage I will have lost all faith in them. All one has to do is look towards Apples laptops to see the benefits of solid state storage. The trick with the Mac Pro is to make that storage large enough that it is viable as some users only storage for more demanding users the SSD can be used in conjunction with fusion drive. Pro users though need a far bigger SSD than the 256Gb sizes.
The other way to look at this is this: does it make sense to introduce a new desktop platform without support for solid state secondary storage? I'd say it is suicide to not consider solid state tech for any new desktop platform, especially a platform that is suppose to be a high performance workstation.
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Originally Posted by SolipsismX
So you think that the default build will come with an SSD? I'm thinking that could happen but with an SSD card. Any bays will have the option for HDDs. I would like them to include sleds that allow 2.5" drives in their Mac Pros so that you can use SSDs if you wish. I assume they don't offer any such thing now.
Obviously the Pro needs a way to support magnetic technology for those that need it. That would be internally though I don't see the machine having disk array technology in 2013. apple needs to find the right mix of technologies to support the Mac Pro for the next decade.
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Originally Posted by wizard69
If Apple was to releases a Mac Pro without consideration for solid sate storage I will have lost all faith in them. All one has to do is look towards Apples laptops to see the benefits of solid state storage. The trick with the Mac Pro is to make that storage large enough that it is viable as some users only storage for more demanding users the SSD can be used in conjunction with fusion drive. Pro users though need a far bigger SSD than the 256Gb sizes.
I would agree with that, but if we're talking about large storage volumes, HDDs still make sense. A frequent problem under OSX is finding stable well supported raid hardware, unless your budget is fairly elastic. I've been through the Apple Store's reviews on the Promise RAID. I know Promise makes a fair amount of enterprise grade hardware, but the Apple Store has a number of complaints regarding doa drives with that unit. Buying bulk drives off newegg I might expect that, but it worries me me with something like a pre-configured raid. These things should show up and work. SSDs are still extremely expensive at Apple's markups. Right now if you spec the mac pro with 512GB ssds, the first is $850 and the rest are $1000 each. Hard drives are trivial to install in a mac pro, and I have received flaky hard drives in new Macs on two occasions (one was also extremely noisy), so I don't particularly value the extra QA there. Amazon has Samsung 840 512GB ssds for $500 or less depending on model. That is a third party vendor as I couldn't get it to link correctly, but you can see Amazon as one of the buying options listed on the right. Pricing is the same. Apple really does apply a high markup there, which is harder to do on machines that aren't sealed off black boxes.
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The other way to look at this is this: does it make sense to introduce a new desktop platform without support for solid state secondary storage? I'd say it is suicide to not consider solid state tech for any new desktop platform, especially a platform that is suppose to be a high performance workstation.
Obviously the Pro needs a way to support magnetic technology for those that need it. That would be internally though I don't see the machine having disk array technology in 2013. apple needs to find the right mix of technologies to support the Mac Pro for the next decade.
I completely agree with that. Large storage volumes are likely to remain raid dependent, especially when many terabytes are needed. In some cases I'd say still tape dependent, although I don't personally use it as a backup solution.
Apple has never been a cheap solution, if you want cheap it's white box or hackintosh. Apple has said many times they are not about making cheap things. Honestly my one concern is they will state oh Thunder Bolt will address all our concerns with break out boxes. Where that is somewhat true you do not get full bandwidth 16x or what ever the top PCIE speed is via Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt goes a long way but for cards I'd rather just have the native slots, too much crap that can cause issues in environments that require stability and silence above all else.
It would be nice to have a desktop, but that would probably mean the Mac Pro Workstation will cease to exist. For my customers running server and heavily loads that would be a lost.
Yes there is a real need among Mac Pro users for magnetic storage to handle bulk needs. However that isn't everybody. Further it should be fairly easy to implement a rather large SSD in a Mac Pro given the pricing structure of the machine. Many Pro users would be very happy with a 512 GB or 1 TB SSD sitting on the PCI Express bus.
Now some have most likely thrown up their hands in disgust saying Apple could never do that, they like to charge far to much for SSD's. This isn't really the case though, you look at the AIRs at introduction and you will have seen a very interestingly priced machine. If Apple builds in the flash it can be very competitive.
As a side note, like you I've had my share of hard drive issues. In this regard I don't think it would hurt Apple one bit to introduce some new technology to make high capacity flash on the Mac Pro a reality. They have the technology of Anobit, PA Semi and a bunch of other silicon companies to build the custom hardware to pull this off and control costs.
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Originally Posted by hmm
I would agree with that, but if we're talking about large storage volumes, HDDs still make sense. A frequent problem under OSX is finding stable well supported raid hardware, unless your budget is fairly elastic. I've been through the Apple Store's reviews on the Promise RAID. I know Promise makes a fair amount of enterprise grade hardware, but the Apple Store has a number of complaints regarding doa drives with that unit. Buying bulk drives off newegg I might expect that, but it worries me me with something like a pre-configured raid. These things should show up and work. SSDs are still extremely expensive at Apple's markups. Right now if you spec the mac pro with 512GB ssds, the first is $850 and the rest are $1000 each. Hard drives are trivial to install in a mac pro, and I have received flaky hard drives in new Macs on two occasions (one was also extremely noisy), so I don't particularly value the extra QA there. Amazon has Samsung 840 512GB ssds for $500 or less depending on model. That is a third party vendor as I couldn't get it to link correctly, but you can see Amazon as one of the buying options listed on the right. Pricing is the same. Apple really does apply a high markup there, which is harder to do on machines that aren't sealed off black boxes.
I completely agree with that. Large storage volumes are likely to remain raid dependent, especially when many terabytes are needed. In some cases I'd say still tape dependent, although I don't personally use it as a backup solution.
My interest is to see Apple introduce a powerful but yet competitively priced machine. I believe the way to success is putting value into things outside of bulk storage which is better solved with an external box. So the goal should be fast secondary storage, strong OpenCL support and any other new tech they can dream up to make the Pro an attractive machine again.
Why is it every single time we talk about a more cost effective replacement for the Mac Pro we get these idiotic posts???? Wake up and smell the coffee, the Mac Pro is on skid row, it sales have dropped like a rock. Why? Simple it offers no value what so ever at the low end as such the market can not sustain strong sales of the Mac Pro as a whole.
As to slots I agree 100%, however you don't need a box the size of the Mac Pro to support a few PCI Express cards. A good portion of the space in the current Mac Pro is totally wasted, so even if you deliver today capabilities you can go with a much smaller box. Refactor the machine a bit and the space the Mac Pro takes up can be trimmed even more.
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Originally Posted by Elderloc
Apple has never been a cheap solution, if you want cheap it's white box or hackintosh. Apple has said many times they are not about making cheap things. Honestly my one concern is they will state oh Thunder Bolt will address all our concerns with break out boxes. Where that is somewhat true you do not get full bandwidth 16x or what ever the top PCIE speed is via Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt goes a long way but for cards I'd rather just have the native slots, too much crap that can cause issues in environments that require stability and silence above all else.
It would be nice to have a desktop, but that would probably mean the Mac Pro Workstation will cease to exist. For my customers running server and heavily loads that would be a lost.
Why? Why do you need a huge box for a workstation class machine. Nobody has come up with a rational response to this question. To put it simply you don't. A Mac Pro can get by find on a single socket these days when combined with a modern GPU card. Add a bit of super computing networking and you can have as many sockets as you could rationally want. A strong clustering technology would do far more for high end computing than the current Mac Pro, especially if Apple can get the nodes into the $1500 range.
It is time for Apple to think different when it comes to what a Pro computer should be. I'm not sure why people can't grasp that the current solution is dead in the water. No amount of updating will address the primary issue which is that there simply isn't enough demand at the lower end to keep the Mac Pro viable. Boys, sales are in the gutter, throwing a new chip in the same old Mac Pro box and slapping a fat sticker on it will not spur sales one bit. Like it or not Apple needs a refactored machine that totally re-imagines what a Pro desktop machine should be. It has to be a machine that can cover development costs and shore up declining sales. Plugging a new motherboard in the Mac Pro won't do the job at the current prices.
In the end it comes down to this: if you want a Pro machine from Apple you need to let the current Mac Pro die. Let Apple refactor the machine into a more cost effective device that will generate the sales to pay for itself. If you don't let it go we may end up with nothing or a machine nobody wants.