anonconformist

9secondkox2 said:

Interesting that there is no space grey option for the studio or display. Ye ol’ silver is to be the sole “pro” color? Interesting. 

The ultra chip is pretty awesome. Can’t wait for future versions to come in other form factors. 

One bummer is it seems like Apple’s aesthetics sort of nosedived on this design. The Porte on the front look a bit haphazard like on a PC. ID HAVE EXPECTED apple to dial them into a cohesive look, like one long pill engraving housing the cdxc slot and TB4/USB-C slots (mounted horizontally) together. Seems like a kind of strange look now. It works, but doesn’t necessarily have that apple attention to aesthetics. 

At least Apple did the right thing and put the power supply where it belongs - inside. That’s awesome. In that one move, apple reduced clutter. So at least apple is getting back to some of its attention to detail. 

Still hoping for an iMac Pro - even up to 32 inches. The studio display is 5k which we’ve had for 12 years in iMacs already and the pro display is rumored to move to 7k, which opens up a slot for the iMac Pro to go 6k. Pack in the ultra, and that would be a true dream machine. 

rob53 said:

anonconformist said:

rob53 said:

anonconformist said:

rob53 said:

Here's my idea for a Mac Pro replacement that's user modifiable. Unfortunately for many people, I believe the only replaceable parts will come from Apple but they would (might) allow the Mac Pro to be actually upgradeable where it counts.

...

The number of connections and the tiny scale of everything involved including the maximum signal length makes the backplane idea very improbable at best.  If there’s anything resembling a backplane, it would be something factory-assembled.  Remember the mention on the video of over 10,000 signals and connections?

I totally understand the amount of connections. I have to wonder whether Apple could build a vertical stack of M1 Maxes to sell as a pluggable stack into the motherboard. What connections actually come out of the SoC? How many?

I watched this video earlier today that goes into both that and what they’ve already done: https://youtu.be/8Yz1pqX_eC0  “Apple’s M2 Ultra DUO Mac Pro will be LEGENDARY! (Leaks).

I have no connection with that other than being a viewer.  As explained on the video, how the “interposer” is done is the simplest possible way during manufacturing  to join two dies: never cut them to start with!

In theory, Apple could have a single socketed SoC on the main board that has the relatively few other chips that are required, but in practice, it may lock them down too much in designing where pins go versus where they’re at on the die making it limited to a single chip generation design, so it’d make it slightly less expensive for repairs, but soldered down chips tend to be more reliable in systems, so it’s a tradeoff.

If all the system RAM and GPU and all the other things now on the M1 series remains on that die, that greatly reduces the number of pins needed for other than ground and power; a large portion of pins on such BGA sockets tend to be either one of those, as electrical needs for impedance dictates where they’re needed, and you can’t provide all the power the chip needs through too small of a number.

I would guess all the Apple Silicon SoCs have a rather small number (relatively speaking) of pins because of their integration, and lower power requirements than AMD/Intel chips on average.  Keep in mind AMD/Intel BGA chips have sockets for over 1000 pins for many of their sockets historically.

I’m not persuaded Apple will make their boards with sockets, as I’m expecting they’ve already got final board yields high enough that adding sockets into the mix just adds expense.

My reason for putting the SoCs into sockets is so the SoC can be upgraded without upgrading everything else. This keeps the new Mac Pro user configurable, something many current Mac Pro users complain about. The typically need to keep them longer than consumers to pay off their obscenely high cost. Keep it upgradeable and the SoC can be switched out gaining additional power without buying everything again. Of course, the SoC has just about everything in it so you're buying a new computer anyway.

rob53 said:

anonconformist said:

rob53 said:

Here's my idea for a Mac Pro replacement that's user modifiable. Unfortunately for many people, I believe the only replaceable parts will come from Apple but they would (might) allow the Mac Pro to be actually upgradeable where it counts.

...

The number of connections and the tiny scale of everything involved including the maximum signal length makes the backplane idea very improbable at best.  If there’s anything resembling a backplane, it would be something factory-assembled.  Remember the mention on the video of over 10,000 signals and connections?

I totally understand the amount of connections. I have to wonder whether Apple could build a vertical stack of M1 Maxes to sell as a pluggable stack into the motherboard. What connections actually come out of the SoC? How many?

rob53 said:

Here's my idea for a Mac Pro replacement that's user modifiable. Unfortunately for many people, I believe the only replaceable parts will come from Apple but they would (might) allow the Mac Pro to be actually upgradeable where it counts.

Here's my idea for the replacement Mac Pro.
1. Stays modular with an UltraFusion backplane.
2. Uses socketed M1 Ultra SoC cards to allow replacement of SoC when things like video encode/decode requirements change. No reason to re-purchase everything, just the things that have major updates.
3. High capacity memory cards, allowing Unified Memory over UltraFusion backplane, built by Apple, not OTS RAM (which is a waste of space and speed)
4. High capacity GPU cards built by Apple, not third-party.
5. PCIe ver4/5/? slots for specialized I/O cards. Might be sold as a separate, matching enclosure with very high-speed interconnect.
6. Maybe high capacity storage cards using same storage chips but possibly with RAID controller front-end. Could be only Apple built but also 3rd party NVMe cards although these cards will definitely need additional cooling.
7. Enclosure could match old G4 cube style instead of taller, all aluminum Studio case, so user can change cards but pulling rack out of enclosure. I don't think Apple would need a huge enclosure like the current Mac Pro. If Apple wants to allow third-party GPU cards, they'd need to create a very high speed interface between the M-Mac Pro and an eGPU enclosure that works with Apple Silicon.

Of course I don't think all of this will happen but I do believe to get anything more powerful than the Studio Mac, Apple will need to develop an UltraFusion backplane to keep from having to splice even more chips together. Adding UltraFusion connections on more than the one end might be more complex than slipping an M1 Max/Ultra chip into a vertical backplane. If the M1 Ultra is doubled (or more) the required footprint starts to get rather large. Using a backplane construction, Apple could provide equivalent Studio Mac power in the base Mac Pro along with another 10 SoC card slots allowing for a Cray level type of computing system.

My plan would be to start the Mac Pro with a bunch of backplane slots at $10K, $2K (or is it $4K for an M1 Ultra?) for each Ultra SoC card, and whatever memory and storage cards would cost. In some ways I think putting all of this in one enclosure is insane but after the Studio Mac, Apple is designing insane computers and I wouldn't put it past them to come out with an absolutely incredible Mac Pro. We're talking about the M1 Ultra providing 21 Tflops. If Apple really want to blow away not only the consumer market but the supercomputing marketplace they'd need as fast of an interconnect capability as they could design along with software that's capable of controlling many Mac Pros together without using something slow like ethernet.

The current 500th fastest supercomputer runs at ~2000 Tflops using 57K cores. Put 100 M1 Ultras together and the Mac Pro would be back in the Top500 list for a whole lot less cost than anything above it. The fastest runs at 442 Pflops using 7,630,848 cores and 5,087,232 GB memory. It also takes 29,899.23 kW of power and it's using an ARM A64FX 48C 2.2GHz CPU. I have no idea how many millions of dollars (or billions of ¥) it cost but it would be interesting if Apple were able to connect maybe 10 Mac Pros together over an UltraFusion link.

Hreb said:

Even ignoring configurability, it's striking how much more RAM the 2019 Mac Pro allows vs. the Mac Studio.  It seems unlikely to me that Apple will scale their "unified" memory up to those capacities on any Apple Silicon chip.  I bet when the Apple Silicon Mac Pro rolls around we see something analogous to Intel's 3D XPoint to allow memory capacities to scale and hopefully keep prices sub-stratospheric.