therunningvm

entropys said:

therunningvm said:

Upgrading to these new PCIE standards doesn't make much sense, since most devices you'd use are not bandwidth limited.

For most people sure, and I only care for one reason. 
These are not volume products, but priced at the level you need to exchange your first born to obtain.  It should want for nothing, be a test bed for extreme capabilities that may eventually trickle down to products most people use. A Mac Pro should be like formula one is for the car industry, or space technology is for, well everything.

The people buying these machines aren't looking for the latest and greatest, they're looking for compatibility.

Adopting this new standard should in theory allow you to do more with less lanes, but you would need to invest in new hardware that uses the standard. That's not really practical if all you care about is being able to reuse your current cards without running into the issue of lane availability. Right now, switching to these new standards is more expensive than its really worth, which is why they'll mostly be used by servers or supercomputers.

elijahg said:

rob53 said:

sflocal said:

Dr.MORO said:

Hi all,
Just an amateur question.
Thunderbolt 3/4 is compatible to carry PCIe of what specification or lower at this moment?
…

The current Thunderbolt spec provides 40gb/s bandwidth.  While fast, it's still far below PCIe 3.0 max of 32GB/s.  I don't see a time where Thunderbolt will be at the same speed as the native PCIe bus.  

The PCIe 6.0 specification I think will be geared more for servers than for consumer PC's.  It involves some pretty expensive tech, and motherboard fabrication to handle those high speeds which is why it will be limited to servers, render-farms, etc..

In other words, there’s nothing really wrong with the version Apple used in the 2019 Mac Pro. Apple didn’t put any devices in the Mac Pro that would economically benefit from PCIe 4/5/6 so author is complaining about nothing. 

The point is Apple is still touting this machine as top-of-the-line when it's not anymore, and they're still charging prices like it's cutting edge, which it's not. They *always* repeat the same cycle with their "pro" stuff:

Apple announces something new with much fanfare, which will be cutting edge, probably niche, "courageous", and almost a tech demo, for a high price which people here try to justify as "not for the masses" whilst claiming Apple doesn't cater to niche markets so they won't release an "xMac". The product isn't really what customers wanted, and doesn't fit with anyone's budget because they don't want to pay through the nose for a computer which will be the fastest available for about 6 months. So Apple is then disappointed that their huge investment didn't reach some astronomically overestimated sales figure, therefore it languishes at the introductory price for years. Eventually parts become obsolete so Apple is forced to update just to claim they are listening to "pros" and aren't iPhone only. And then repeat. HomePod was similar. Great hardware, way overpriced, crap interface. HomePod mini should have been first, then HomePod Pro.

Using this same logic, the current iPhone isn't top of the line because new android flagships are coming in to months. Case and point, processor performance in the mobile space.

netrox said:

That's why I cannot use M1 Macs for work. I must have Intel compatibility to run VMs at near native speed. Unfortunately, I will have to buy Intel laptop.