Monday, June 10th 2013
Apple Unveils New Mac Pro
During the Worldwide Developer Convention (WWDC) this Monday, Apple presented its radically redesigned Mac Pro which represents a complete and long overdue departure from the shapes, sizes and general design language of its workstations. Personally I can not decide which is the most striking visual aspect of the new Mac Pro, the truly tiny size of this multi-GPU powerhouse, or its curiously cylindrical shape. Alas, my true curiosity lies with the cooling solutions employed by the designers to address the inevitable heat issues associated with densely packing such potent hardware. The monolithic appearance of the Mac Pro is interrupted only by a cutout in the cover that allows access to the back panel, where the entire I/O interface is located. Apart from the usual suspects (USB, RJ45, etc), the user is presented with no less than six Thunderbolt 2 ports, which some might find problematic considering they constitute the entire expansion potential of the new Mac Pro.
The Mac Pro will be launched in Q3 and will make use of the new 12 core Ivy Bridge-EP processors launching in Q3 as well. Two AMD workstation GPUs will be accompanying the Ivy Bridge Xeon E5 processor. Storage will be Flash based and will employ the PCIe bus, doing away with the usual storage bottlenecks. The device comes with 4K display support and also Bluetooth 4.0 and Wi-Fi 802.11ac connectivity. Pricing for the new workstation was not mentioned, however it was pointed out that it will be built in the US.
Source:
The Verge
101 Comments on Apple Unveils New Mac Pro
Also, will this have single or dual CPUs? This looks like a single CPU model and I don't know how they would fit another CPU in there without a taller tower.
recognized the cray - 2 reference!
I will probably purchase one of these, i have entertained the thought of a real life cray in the shed.. but not practical. i also see more than a little bang & Olufsen when i look at a PS3
I mean, the mechanics of how to put this together.. to engineer separate motherboard portions and then hook them together, is one thing.
But to cool all of that with, assumingly, a heatsink in the middle and a fan that draws air in from the top and pushes it out the bottom (or vice-versa), seems absolutely ridiculous. Not to mention.. if you place anything on that device and block the fan.. it's literally toast.
Back to heat, just imagine if you took all the hot components in your case and arranged them in a circular pattern using large heatsinks. Then stick a large (at least 140mm) fan at the bottom to drive air up and out through that column (heat naturally rises so no sense of going against nature). Even ridiculous GPU(s) and CPU(s) could be adequately cooled in that space so long as the air pressure is high enough through it. However, under 100% CPU and GPU load, I think it would have to be loud in order to produce enough airflow to drive out 500+ watts of heat. Of course, they could counter that by using lower clockspeeds than the parts found in PC-compatible workstation computers.LGA 2011 do have backplates (pic).They can be removed (you can faintly see the four posts) giving you rectangular holes to mount a third-party HSF.
It could be the GPUs too. It's impossible to be certain because this is all built-to-order stuff. One thing for sure is that, by the layout of the VRMs and other circuits, the same thing is pictured in both.
1) Apple said that there are two GPUs in every model at their press conference. The innards are triangular, so it would be reasonable to expect two GPU boards and one CPU board.
2) There are 4 upgradable DIMM slots shown in one of the pictures rather than the 8 needed for dual CPU usage. The other 4 could be hidden inside but that would make no sense from a design perspective to have only half of the slots easily accessible.
3) Apple stated that the device has 12 cores and 60GB/s of memory bandwidth. This can all work with one CPU with quad channel DDR3-1600. Don't you think that if they had a dual CPU model they would tout 24 cores and 120GB/s at the press conference instead?
Maybe a dual CPU model will come in the future. But due to the lack of any information about it at the press conference I think that it will be single CPU at launch.
The dual GPUs are what I wonder about though. I don't know of many applications other than games that can make use of two GPUs, and Macs certainly aren't known for games. Modern video editors can use GPUs to apply filters, but with the way they are currently implemented the GPU is ancillary and and the bottleneck is still the CPU. I bet that before this is released Apple announces a new version of Final Cut with a huge emphasis on GPU encoding to make use of the two GPUs.
I'm very certain Crossfire and SLI can increase render speed. When I was looking at Quadros, that was one of the things that was advertised.
Will it blend? :)
Well it's certainly a radical design, but is it built by Apple or for 1yen a day in a sweat shop?
Sigh...Mac users must be getting dumber and dumber if they're willing to buy crap like this.:banghead:
The proper laptops are the ones that have a dedicated cooler and thermal plate for the CPU and the GPU. This just has fire written all over it.
it's AC power port, I believe the psu is internal.