macronin

Hopefully we get some advance notice about Navi at WWDC, while Tim is previewing the modular Mac Pro...!

So, why has Apple taken so long to replace the Mac Pro...?

Some may say the Mac Pro was slated fade away into the distance, with the iMac Pro as its successor...

Many ask as to WHY it is taking so long, a mini-tower workstation with a few PCIe slots should be easy...

My idea of the backplane with daughtercards modular Mac Pro cube still stands, but backplanes & daughtercards have been done by Apple before...

But then when one thinks of the smaller chassis size and the TDPs of current CPUs/GPUs, it seems like it would be another thermal corner for Apple to paint itself into...

UNLESS...!!!

Unless it IS a small cube with a backplane & daughtercard system...

But imagine if there were daughtercards that all had the same thing on them, and the more you added (say, up to four daughtercards...?) the more powerful the system became...!?!

Let me introduce you to the new ARM-powered modular Mac Pro...!!!

Still the same SG Mac mini style PSU (same horizontal footprint, but the full height of the chassis), with all I/O to the lower portion of the rear panel (eight TB3 / USB-C ports, dual 10Gb Ethernet. & 3.5mm headphone jack), as well as the power input...

Each daughtercard has the following:

Four A13X Bionic APUs
64GB RAM
2TB SSD

As one adds a new daughtercard, the system integrates the cards resources into one large homogenized pool...

A fully loaded system would consist of sixteen ARM APUs, 256GB RAM, & 8TB SSD... 

The hardware engineering & (especially) the software (both for the homogenized pool of resources AND for the transition from x64 to ARM) would take a few years, I would figure... 

So yeah, we just may be looking at the first ARM Mac with the forthcoming modular Mac Pro...!?!

Discuss...! ;^p

Processors: 7nm Zen 2 Ryzen Threadripper 3

• 3990WX 64C/128T, 3.5GHZ/4.2GHz, 250W
• 3970WX 48C/96T, 3.5GHZ/4.2GHz, 250W
• 3950X 32C/64T, 3.7GHz/4.4GHz, 180W
• 3920X 24C/48T, 3.7GHz/4.4GHz, 180W

Memory: Quad-channel, ECC DDR4, eight DIMM slots, maximum 256GB BTO, 64GB standard (4 @ 16GB DIMMs), user serviceable

Samsung A-die DIMMS, high-speed, low-latency, high-density, up to 32GB sticks

Storage: T2 (T3?) with dual Apple-proprietary SSDs in RAID, ~4GB/s read and write, 2 TB standard, up to 8 TB BTO

Graphics: PCIe 4.0, two triple-width slots (x16, x16), one double-width slot (x8)

• AMD Radeon VII, 7nm Vega 20, 60CU, 16GB HBM2
• AMD Radeon 5900, 7nm Navi 20, 64CU, 8GB GDDR6 (available Q2 2020)
• AMD Radeon 5800, 7nm Navi 10, 56CU, 8GB GDDR6
• AMD Radeon 5700, 7nm Navi 10, 48CU, 8GB GDDR6

Triple-width slots give dual-width GPUs room to breathe
x8 dual-width slot for the 12G SDI 8K video I/O folks, or a wicked fast NVMe-based RAID card

Ports: four TB3 / USB-C, four USB-A, dual 10Gb Ethernet, one 3.5mm headphone jack