3 Alpine Ridge controllers instead of the 3 Falcon Ridge controllers found in the current Mac Pro.
Alpine Ridge controller provides 2 ports; each of the likely Type-C ports can support USB 3.1 gen 2 and Thunderbolt 3, for a total of 6 ports, just like the current Mac Pro.
Additional 4 USB 3.0 ports (USB 3.1 gen1 ;-) ) from the Xenon processor, makes for a total of 10 USB ports.
I don't expect we will see anything until 2016.
Note well: Lenovo and Dell computers are shipping with Skylake processors and Alpine Ridge for the USB 3.1/Thunderbolt3 Type-C ports
3 Alpine Ridge controllers instead of the 3 Falcon Ridge controllers found in the current Mac Pro.
Why not 4. It is my understanding that the next rev to the Xeons will have support for more PCI Express lines to feed the controllers. Of course those PCI Express lines could be used for an additional internal SSD port and make a lot of people happy.
Alpine Ridge controller provides 2 ports; each of the likely Type-C ports can support USB 3.1 gen 2 and Thunderbolt 3, for a total of 6 ports, just like the current Mac Pro.
Additional 4 USB 3.0 ports (USB 3.1 gen1 ;-) ) from the Xenon processor, makes for a total of 10 USB ports.
Honestly I do hope that Apple keeps the legacy USB ports around for awhile on all upgraded machines. The need to make easy use of legacy hardware is very important.
I don't expect we will see anything until 2016.
Apple can ship the Mac Pro anytime they want. I wouldn't be surprised to find that they are waiting on GPU upgrades for the platform.
Note well: Lenovo and Dell computers are shipping with Skylake processors and Alpine Ridge for the USB 3.1/Thunderbolt3 Type-C ports
The Mac Pro is my dream computer but when I come close to buying it I always chicken out and get a Mac laptop instead (half the price).
I wonder what new things it will have? The Radeon R9 Fury Nano seems like a good fit for an OpenCL box, it is small, air cooled, and yet still has the full 4096 stream processors. The one weakness is only having 4GB VRAM. Another thing that would be great is if you could have 2 SSD blades inside this time, I suspect the reason the 2013 model didn't have this was that they ran out of PCIe lanes.
The Mac Pro is not a pro desktop machine. It is a great machine, and for some people enough power.
But a pro machine ought to have top of the line options, or at least allow top of the line options to be installed. The Mac Pro does not support standard GPU cards, nVidia cards (which CUDA and customers developers need), nor nVidia Tesla cards which are needed for scientific and engineering applications.
I would love a real pro Mac again. For so long Apple cared about educators, researchers and professionals who needed maximum power. But no longer.
From my understanding is that NVIDA is based on software...and this AMD is more of hardware based....so..i'm thinking it will be a badass pro machine.
Dude, you can't joke like that in front of a collector. You really have a IIfx available?
Sorry OT a bit but it was a Mac Pro!
Yep. It was working but seems to have died of late sadly. I think it's the HD. I bought it myself, fully loaded with RAM at a cost of well over $12,000. I was CEO of a Mac software company that sold a color separation system to high end scanner makers as an OEM product. This II FX was used with a Barco monitor and Leaf Scanner at demonstrations all over the world. It was an awesome machine. It's been in a cupboard for the last 20 something years.
Yep. It was working but seems to have died of late sadly. I think it's the HD. I bought it myself, fully loaded with RAM at a cost of well over $12,000.
I had one too. It was a day one release. I had ordered it perhaps a month earlier. The sales guy at the computer store called me and said it had arrived. I went down to the store to pick it up and he said, "I have some bad news, we only had the one machine and the boss took it home." I was so mad, I demanded that he bring it back and turn it over. I had already paid something like $17,000 for the the monitor, RAM, HD etc. Anyway the next day to my surprise the boss returned it unopened. Around System 8-9 maybe 1995 it started running too slow. I eventually gave to my housekeeper's son and he took it Mexico and gave to his sister. That is the last I heard, but it was pretty much useless at that point. I was using a PPC 9500 at that time.
Even though the new Mac Pro is the fastest Mac ever, I still like the previous tower case better just for looks. Everything could go inside. With the new one, by the time you add all the power user accessories, you have cables and breakout boxes all over the place.
I had one too. It was a day one release. I had ordered it perhaps a month earlier. The sales guy at the computer store called me and said it had arrived. I went down to the store to pick it up and he said, "I have some bad news, we only had the one machine and the boss took it home." I was so mad, I demanded that he bring it back and turn it over. I had already paid something like $17,000 for the the monitor, RAM, HD etc. Anyway the next day to my surprise the boss returned it unopened. Around System 8-9 maybe 1995 it started running too slow. I eventually gave to my housekeeper's son and he took it Mexico and gave to his sister. That is the last I heard, but it was pretty much useless at that point. I was using a PPC 9500 at that time.
Even though the new Mac Pro is the fastest Mac ever, I still like the previous tower case better just for looks. Everything could go inside. With the new one, by the time you add all the power user accessories, you have cables and breakout boxes all over the place.
I was on the opposite side off the IIfx. At my first real job using a Mac for creative work, it was the 'old' workstation that had been replaced by 9500's. Since I was the young punk new guy, I ended up with the IIfx and I constantly complained about how slow it was. The old timers would tell me what a powerhouse this machine had been a few years earlier.
I'm looking forward to my first Trashcan. With 1TB internally (hopefully more in the new one) There are few other things I can imagine needing that aren't removable by design—portable SSD, calibration devices, displays. I have a NAS for near-line storage of inactive projects. I guess in my work the hardware has finally caught up to the point I don't have much need of breakout boxes.
I had one too. It was a day one release. I had ordered it perhaps a month earlier. The sales guy at the computer store called me and said it had arrived. I went down to the store to pick it up and he said, "I have some bad news, we only had the one machine and the boss took it home." I was so mad, I demanded that he bring it back and turn it over. I had already paid something like $17,000 for the the monitor, RAM, HD etc. Anyway the next day to my surprise the boss returned it unopened. Around System 8-9 maybe 1995 it started running too slow. I eventually gave to my housekeeper's son and he took it Mexico and gave to his sister. That is the last I heard, but it was pretty much useless at that point. I was using a PPC 9500 at that time.
Even though the new Mac Pro is the fastest Mac ever, I still like the previous tower case better just for looks. Everything could go inside. With the new one, by the time you add all the power user accessories, you have cables and breakout boxes all over the place.
The costs back then were something else weren't they? I seem to recall that the total package cost with monitor,and SCSI external drives was around $25K for insuring for transit to shows. That doesn't even include $12,000 Leaf Scanner or the X-Rite color calibration equipment. Those monitors back then were real back breakers too.
I enjoy chatting to Pixeldoc about those days too.
I was on the opposite side off the IIfx. At my first real job using a Mac for creative work, it was the 'old' workstation that had been replaced by 9500's. Since I was the young punk new guy, I ended up with the IIfx and I constantly complained about how slow it was. The old timers would tell me what a powerhouse this machine had been a few years earlier.
I'm looking forward to my first Trashcan. With 1TB internally (hopefully more in the new one) There are few other things I can imagine needing that aren't removable by design—portable SSD, calibration devices, displays. I have a NAS for near-line storage of inactive projects. I guess in my work the hardware has finally caught up to the point I don't have much need of breakout boxes.
The reign of the IIfx was pretty short lived I guess. The towers came in a while after that and it was a new age of speed.
I have loved my new model 6 Core Mac pro, it is a gorgeous Mac. The internal SSD size and cost of upgrade is my only complaint but I have 6TB of RAID 0 on Thunderbolt with the same again as a mirror, so it hasn't been that big of a problem. Although I did have to make many folders in the Libraries run on the external to save space using symbolic links such as Logic Pro X's data etc.
You could probably plug in 6 for compute. The reason for Apple to go with AMD is the price. Dual D700 is a $1000 upgrade. You'd pay a lot more to get that performance from NVidia Quadro cards. If Apple did offer an NVidia option, people would just say they are overpriced and they could buy a GTX Titan or 780Ti that was 'just as good, if not better'.
If developers actually used OpenCL instead of CUDA then it wouldn't be a problem. CUDA doesn't run on the CPU but OpenCL does.
They'd use one controller per pair of ports for 6 TB ports. They will be double the bandwidth than before, which would be 6x 4K displays or 3x 5K displays.
The top model Apple uses might not go up to 22-core but higher than the 12-core just now, possibly 18-core. Apple hasn't dropped their SSD prices much in the rest of the lineup, still $800 for 1TB in machines that have 256GB in the base model. This is just under double the price of similar quality SSDs at retail. Even if they could stretch to 1.5TB for $800, that would be a decent improvement and put 768GB in between.
I expect the GPUs will be 12-16GB AMD R9 Fury with no NVidia options. If AMD went under financially, that would cause a few problems in the industry. Console makers all use AMD GPUs for the lower price too.
I agree with Nevermark. The mac pro is not pro. Is just pro for the programs made by apple. After a long time I have to switch to pc for the first time. I need nvidia graphic card, a bunch of program I use (like octane) are running just on cuda. Yes, the mac pro has got a pcie but I don't want to spend on a chassis to connect just one gpu. I cannot even use the sli feature from these cards and this is a lot of pain.
Dude, you can't joke like that in front of a collector. You really have a IIfx available?
Sorry OT a bit but it was a Mac Pro!
Yep. It was working but seems to have died of late sadly. I think it's the HD. I bought it myself, fully loaded with RAM at a cost of well over $12,000. I was CEO of a Mac software company that sold a color separation system to high end scanner makers as an OEM product. This II FX was used with a Barco monitor and Leaf Scanner at demonstrations all over the world. It was an awesome machine. It's been in a cupboard for the last 20 something years.
Maybe the collector is trying to make a II FX version of one of these?
I agree with Nevermark. The mac pro is not pro. Is just pro for the programs made by apple.
After a long time I have to switch to pc for the first time.
I need nvidia graphic card, a bunch of program I use (like octane) are running just on cuda.
Yes, the mac pro has got a pcie but I don't want to spend on a chassis to connect just one gpu.
I cannot even use the sli feature from these cards and this is a lot of pain.
Bye bye apple (for now, I hope).
Your problem is pro apps made solely for NVidia, that's not Apple's fault. Octane 3 will support OpenCL:
"OpenCL support: OctaneRender 3 will support the broadest range of processors possible using OpenCL to run on Intel CPUs with support for out-of-core geometry, OpenCL FPGAs and ASICs, and AMD GPUs."
"Redshift currently only supports CUDA-compatible cards with compute capability 2.0 or higher. OpenCL support is planned for a future release."
Developers making a choice to limit their software to a single vendor is their fault. NVidia pushing support of their own proprietary software isn't commendable. The whole point of OpenCL is that it runs everywhere, including the CPU, that's why Apple pushed OpenCL forward because they obviously saw this situation arising. If you have a server array of CPUs, CUDA won't run at all.
The SDKs needed to mature to let developers do what they want with them and having a proprietary solution can move faster because you don't have the baggage of compliance with multiple competing vendors but in the long term, compute frameworks are best to be hardware-transparent.
If AMD doesn't turn to making a profit, maybe NVidia will buy them out and Apple won't have much choice but to use NVidia cards but the price will go up. Two comparable NVidia cards at the top end would be at least $600-1000 more than the AMD option and far more for a Tesla or Quadro option. With no GPU competition from AMD, they'd be free to price their GPUs however high they wanted.
Thanks for your great news marvin, but I work with these software so I know just a little bit about it....
First of all octane 3 is still in development... This august I've been at the siggraph in los angeles, I had a talk with the otoy guys and they said that opencl support is still far away... even if on the website they said that is going to be released with version 3. I was a big fan of opencl but developers (i know is open source) forgot about it.
I know that is nvidia's fault to make this brutal shit technology to work just on their video card's, but if i'm going to buy a $$$ macpro I want be able to customize it as I want. stop.
All the apple product line just got stupid and with no sense for people that work with it.
Trust me, I am (by now I was) an apple "evangelist" but after many years of suffer I thought that apple was going to reconsider the choices made for the people that work seriously with it.
what if they were 10 usb-c, and that was all? and on HDMI, or no HDMI, no Thunderbolt, no Power. 3 Video and 1 Power would be 4? That leaves 6 ports, just a thought...
what if they were 10 usb-c, and that was all? and on HDMI, or no HDMI, no Thunderbolt, no Power. 3 Video and 1 Power would be 4? That leaves 6 ports, just a thought...
Comments
3 Alpine Ridge controllers instead of the 3 Falcon Ridge controllers found in the current Mac Pro.
Alpine Ridge controller provides 2 ports; each of the likely Type-C ports can support USB 3.1 gen 2 and Thunderbolt 3, for a total of 6 ports, just like the current Mac Pro.
Additional 4 USB 3.0 ports (USB 3.1 gen1 ;-) ) from the Xenon processor, makes for a total of 10 USB ports.
I don't expect we will see anything until 2016.
Note well: Lenovo and Dell computers are shipping with Skylake processors and Alpine Ridge for the USB 3.1/Thunderbolt3 Type-C ports
I wonder why each new Mac refresh doesn't include at least one USB-C port.
They've been saving USB-C plugs so they can put 10 in the new MacPro!
Wacka, wacka, wacka, heeeeeey!
Hear that sound? That is the sound of a million d!cks getting hard!
One the one hand, we have the Faithful, waiting patiently for the refresh so they can snap it up.
On the other hand, we have the Trolls, drooling at the prospect of sh!tting all over a new Apple product.
Fun time ahead!!
The Mac Pro is my dream computer but when I come close to buying it I always chicken out and get a Mac laptop instead (half the price).
I wonder what new things it will have? The Radeon R9 Fury Nano seems like a good fit for an OpenCL box, it is small, air cooled, and yet still has the full 4096 stream processors. The one weakness is only having 4GB VRAM. Another thing that would be great is if you could have 2 SSD blades inside this time, I suspect the reason the 2013 model didn't have this was that they ran out of PCIe lanes.
The Mac Pro is not a pro desktop machine. It is a great machine, and for some people enough power.
But a pro machine ought to have top of the line options, or at least allow top of the line options to be installed. The Mac Pro does not support standard GPU cards, nVidia cards (which CUDA and customers developers need), nor nVidia Tesla cards which are needed for scientific and engineering applications.
I would love a real pro Mac again. For so long Apple cared about educators, researchers and professionals who needed maximum power. But no longer.
From my understanding is that NVIDA is based on software...and this AMD is more of hardware based....so..i'm thinking it will be a badass pro machine.
Sorry OT a bit but it was a Mac Pro!
Yep. It was working but seems to have died of late sadly. I think it's the HD. I bought it myself, fully loaded with RAM at a cost of well over $12,000. I was CEO of a Mac software company that sold a color separation system to high end scanner makers as an OEM product. This II FX was used with a Barco monitor and Leaf Scanner at demonstrations all over the world. It was an awesome machine. It's been in a cupboard for the last 20 something years.
Yep. It was working but seems to have died of late sadly. I think it's the HD. I bought it myself, fully loaded with RAM at a cost of well over $12,000.
I had one too. It was a day one release. I had ordered it perhaps a month earlier. The sales guy at the computer store called me and said it had arrived. I went down to the store to pick it up and he said, "I have some bad news, we only had the one machine and the boss took it home." I was so mad, I demanded that he bring it back and turn it over. I had already paid something like $17,000 for the the monitor, RAM, HD etc. Anyway the next day to my surprise the boss returned it unopened. Around System 8-9 maybe 1995 it started running too slow. I eventually gave to my housekeeper's son and he took it Mexico and gave to his sister. That is the last I heard, but it was pretty much useless at that point. I was using a PPC 9500 at that time.
Even though the new Mac Pro is the fastest Mac ever, I still like the previous tower case better just for looks. Everything could go inside. With the new one, by the time you add all the power user accessories, you have cables and breakout boxes all over the place.
I had one too. It was a day one release. I had ordered it perhaps a month earlier. The sales guy at the computer store called me and said it had arrived. I went down to the store to pick it up and he said, "I have some bad news, we only had the one machine and the boss took it home." I was so mad, I demanded that he bring it back and turn it over. I had already paid something like $17,000 for the the monitor, RAM, HD etc. Anyway the next day to my surprise the boss returned it unopened. Around System 8-9 maybe 1995 it started running too slow. I eventually gave to my housekeeper's son and he took it Mexico and gave to his sister. That is the last I heard, but it was pretty much useless at that point. I was using a PPC 9500 at that time.
Even though the new Mac Pro is the fastest Mac ever, I still like the previous tower case better just for looks. Everything could go inside. With the new one, by the time you add all the power user accessories, you have cables and breakout boxes all over the place.
I was on the opposite side off the IIfx. At my first real job using a Mac for creative work, it was the 'old' workstation that had been replaced by 9500's. Since I was the young punk new guy, I ended up with the IIfx and I constantly complained about how slow it was. The old timers would tell me what a powerhouse this machine had been a few years earlier.
I'm looking forward to my first Trashcan. With 1TB internally (hopefully more in the new one) There are few other things I can imagine needing that aren't removable by design—portable SSD, calibration devices, displays. I have a NAS for near-line storage of inactive projects. I guess in my work the hardware has finally caught up to the point I don't have much need of breakout boxes.
The costs back then were something else weren't they? I seem to recall that the total package cost with monitor,and SCSI external drives was around $25K for insuring for transit to shows. That doesn't even include $12,000 Leaf Scanner or the X-Rite color calibration equipment. Those monitors back then were real back breakers too.
I enjoy chatting to Pixeldoc about those days too.
The reign of the IIfx was pretty short lived I guess. The towers came in a while after that and it was a new age of speed.
I have loved my new model 6 Core Mac pro, it is a gorgeous Mac. The internal SSD size and cost of upgrade is my only complaint but I have 6TB of RAID 0 on Thunderbolt with the same again as a mirror, so it hasn't been that big of a problem. Although I did have to make many folders in the Libraries run on the external to save space using symbolic links such as Logic Pro X's data etc.
To an extent you can plug in NVidia GPUs :
[VIDEO]
but the boxes aren't cheap at $589 without the GPU:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/-/151701291455
You could probably plug in 6 for compute. The reason for Apple to go with AMD is the price. Dual D700 is a $1000 upgrade. You'd pay a lot more to get that performance from NVidia Quadro cards. If Apple did offer an NVidia option, people would just say they are overpriced and they could buy a GTX Titan or 780Ti that was 'just as good, if not better'.
If developers actually used OpenCL instead of CUDA then it wouldn't be a problem. CUDA doesn't run on the CPU but OpenCL does.
They'd use one controller per pair of ports for 6 TB ports. They will be double the bandwidth than before, which would be 6x 4K displays or 3x 5K displays.
The CPU to expect would be Broadwell EP:
http://wccftech.com/intel-assures-broadwell-ep-xeon-e52600-v4-processors-q4-15-feature-22-cores-44-threads/
The top model Apple uses might not go up to 22-core but higher than the 12-core just now, possibly 18-core. Apple hasn't dropped their SSD prices much in the rest of the lineup, still $800 for 1TB in machines that have 256GB in the base model. This is just under double the price of similar quality SSDs at retail. Even if they could stretch to 1.5TB for $800, that would be a decent improvement and put 768GB in between.
I expect the GPUs will be 12-16GB AMD R9 Fury with no NVidia options. If AMD went under financially, that would cause a few problems in the industry. Console makers all use AMD GPUs for the lower price too.
Great.....and now I can shell out another $100+ on yet another new set of adaptors!
Still no new Thunderbolt Display rumours though.
It would be nice to see a Pro event held at the end of the month with the Mac Pro + Thunderbolt 3 Display, alongside new MacBook Pros.
After a long time I have to switch to pc for the first time.
I need nvidia graphic card, a bunch of program I use (like octane) are running just on cuda.
Yes, the mac pro has got a pcie but I don't want to spend on a chassis to connect just one gpu.
I cannot even use the sli feature from these cards and this is a lot of pain.
Bye bye apple (for now, I hope).
Dude, you can't joke like that in front of a collector. You really have a IIfx available?
Sorry OT a bit but it was a Mac Pro!
Yep. It was working but seems to have died of late sadly. I think it's the HD. I bought it myself, fully loaded with RAM at a cost of well over $12,000. I was CEO of a Mac software company that sold a color separation system to high end scanner makers as an OEM product. This II FX was used with a Barco monitor and Leaf Scanner at demonstrations all over the world. It was an awesome machine. It's been in a cupboard for the last 20 something years.
Maybe the collector is trying to make a II FX version of one of these?
Your problem is pro apps made solely for NVidia, that's not Apple's fault. Octane 3 will support OpenCL:
https://home.otoy.com/otoy-unveils-octanerender-3-worlds-best-gpu-renderer/
"OpenCL support: OctaneRender 3 will support the broadest range of processors possible using OpenCL to run on Intel CPUs with support for out-of-core geometry, OpenCL FPGAs and ASICs, and AMD GPUs."
https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=46238
https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=50956
OpenCL has always run faster on AMD than NVidia.
Other software is still going to be CUDA-only like RedShift but again:
https://www.redshift3d.com/support/faq#question5
"Redshift currently only supports CUDA-compatible cards with compute capability 2.0 or higher. OpenCL support is planned for a future release."
Developers making a choice to limit their software to a single vendor is their fault. NVidia pushing support of their own proprietary software isn't commendable. The whole point of OpenCL is that it runs everywhere, including the CPU, that's why Apple pushed OpenCL forward because they obviously saw this situation arising. If you have a server array of CPUs, CUDA won't run at all.
The SDKs needed to mature to let developers do what they want with them and having a proprietary solution can move faster because you don't have the baggage of compliance with multiple competing vendors but in the long term, compute frameworks are best to be hardware-transparent.
If AMD doesn't turn to making a profit, maybe NVidia will buy them out and Apple won't have much choice but to use NVidia cards but the price will go up. Two comparable NVidia cards at the top end would be at least $600-1000 more than the AMD option and far more for a Tesla or Quadro option. With no GPU competition from AMD, they'd be free to price their GPUs however high they wanted.
Thanks for your great news marvin, but I work with these software so I know just a little bit about it....
First of all octane 3 is still in development... This august I've been at the siggraph in los angeles, I had a talk with the otoy guys and they said that opencl support is still far away... even if on the website they said that is going to be released with version 3. I was a big fan of opencl but developers (i know is open source) forgot about it.
I know that is nvidia's fault to make this brutal shit technology to work just on their video card's, but if i'm going to buy a $$$ macpro I want be able to customize it as I want. stop.
All the apple product line just got stupid and with no sense for people that work with it.
Trust me, I am (by now I was) an apple "evangelist" but after many years of suffer I thought that apple was going to reconsider the choices made for the people that work seriously with it.
what if they were 10 usb-c, and that was all? and on HDMI, or no HDMI, no Thunderbolt, no Power. 3 Video and 1 Power would be 4? That leaves 6 ports, just a thought...
Just an insane thought.....