Sure but that's something that could be said about almost any for-profit company. It's not a meaningful addition to the conversation, and it detracts from conversation about what companies tend to do to accomplish the goal of getting money out of you.
People don't update cause of OS or Security updates... look to the number of people still using windows 7, or previous versions of Android. The main reason people update is cause of hardware.
Apple is not interest in upgrades, why would they make it possible for someone to spend $1000 and bring the Mac Pro up to standards or even worst make it compatible with PCI-E when they get way more money on a complete machine change. And since Apple users value the form no one will want to keep this old Mac Pro anymore when the new one will look very different.
Agreed. id rather see them address the price instead of "heat issues". This machine is absurdly overpriced, underpowered and a total nightmare of a dongle mess. fail fail fail. There just isn't an upside to this machine, or really even a niche use case. Far more can be accomplished with far less money, it's just that simple.
I don't think it's far off. They chose a design concept which required a lot of R&D and have been doggedly recouping their costs, rather than writing off a flawed design and investing in something better.
I think it is the exact opposite. "We figured out that we are losing sales and there need better and more sustainable way of milking money out of them".
I think that's part of it. Take a look at the hardware you can get right now. I can put together a Ryzen 7 1700, 32GB of RAM, an SSD or two, and a GTX 1070 for easily under $1000 USD and the performance would wind up pretty comparable to one of the moderately spec'd M-Pros at 1/4 the cost.
No, it won't look like a little circular pencil holder on my desk, but I can do quite a lot with the extra cash.
You can at least nominally be in the pro workstation market if your machine is reasonably upgradeable (at least for the GPU) or if you at least update it every year, but if you do neither? Not so much.
Agreed. I think they underestimated the work it would take to churn out new custom video cards periodically. I'm not convinced by the "we were thermally constrained" argument. As stated in the article, Fiji (175W) was capable of running within their thermal envelope (200W). A Fury Nano level of graphics card or two would have been a pretty nice upgrade over the 850MHz not-quite-7970 equivalent with a little more memory as well. Want even more graphics memory? Polaris 10 gives you more memory and still gives a performance improvement over what they had with and even lower TDP than the Fury Nano (~150W). They've got at least a year before the next Mac Pro is supposed to come out. If they were really serious about the Mac Pro, they could still release an RX480 equivalent.
The trash can Mac Pro was a stupid idea to begin with, serving no purpose. They should built a real Pro device, with plenty of ports and room for expansion (hard drives, add-in cards). Also, not every "Pro" needs a discrete GPU and it should be optional.
When "Pro" means 6-24 core Xeon, then yes you do need a discrete GPU; unless you want it headless. Only the mainstream 4 core consumer chips have an integrated GPU. The trash can had a purpose: moderate compute ability in a very quiet package. You're not going to reach those low decibel levels with a blower on a GPU.
Don't get me wrong, I want dual GTX 1080 Ti's in a Mac that blow the exhaust out the back, but my purpose is not compute inside a quiet sound studio. Perhaps this will bring Nvidia back to the table to make Pascal drivers for Mac.
Well if you want quiet and small they should go with water cooling. They could even then ship it with one of these external and huge passive radiators in a custom Apple design. I bet Apple fan boys would be all over this.
@Eidigean: "Perhaps this will bring Nvidia back to the table to make Pascal drivers for Mac."
That would be nice, but they don't even need to go that far. Just updating to a Fury Nano or RX480 equivalent would be a big improvement. Both of these fit into the desired thermal envelope and represent an upgrade in both performance and features. I have to assume the problem lies less with the thermal envelope and more with Apple not wanting to spend money on designing another custom card for a small (relative to their other product lines) market of Mac Pro users.
Apple's main design goal over the last decade has been to move as many things as possible to non-upgradeable hardware, then spruce it up with design flare to cover up that shortcoming. It's one thing for a portable device to be so compact that it can't be easily upgraded, but it's nonsense for a fixed appliance style computer to be designed the same way.
Balance is key when you are sharing a heat sink. Speaking from experience with power transistors and MOSFETS, instead of cooling your device you can actually send other unrelated but thermally coupled devices into thermal runaway.
Seems weird to me they couldn't at least use a pair of Polaris 10s. The RX 480 is way more powerful than the D700s in the Mac Pro and pull like ~150 watts per card.
I get Apple going back to the drawing board on the mac pro, but they definitely could have done more to stem the bleeding over the years.
They must have decided that it wasn't worth designing their own boards for those new GPUs to update the existing system (with an old CPU) if they just plan on going back to a tower that can take standard PCIe cards. The tower will save a lot on R&D costs, no longer will they have to bother with GPUs, they can just take an off-the-shelf GPU and stick it in, or they could request that AMD or NVIDIA design something semi-custom but still a standard PCIe card and slot it in.
OR what the 2018 timeline means is that that is the year we see the ARM Macs launched, together with custom Apple GPU?
All this theorizing about Apple incompetence/Apple's determination to screw over individual members of the AnandTech readership ignores various basic facts of business life, like "you don't know the future till it happens". Apple has probably had a roadmap for a while now for moving to an ARM Mac. Who knows what the GPU part of that roadmap was, but maybe it assumed parts that AMD or nV promised but could not deliver? Or maybe it assumed IMG would deliver something that they then dropped? Point is, for all we know, there may well have been a fine plan in place for an update in, say, mid 2016 based on x86 and a CPU that AMD could not ship. Or a plan for ARM Macs this year plus an IMG GPU that IMG dropped six months ago.
A delay this long strikes me as not planned but the result of a pre-existing plan going horribly wrong. The consequences likely include (a) perhaps a year's delay in shipping the ARM Macs (b) Apple's concluding that they HAVE to do their own GPU because every partner company they work with is too scared to aim for the stretch targets that Apple has in mind, or too concerned with making a PoS GPU that can be crippled for the mass market, rather than something that's innately expensive but also no compromise.
In other words the sequence is likely something like - early 2016 AMD and/or IMG tell Apple they can't deliver - Apple starts negotiating with IMG for a purchase - purchase attempt fails because IMG CEO has bloated unrealistic sense of how valuable his company is - Apple goes off to continue down their own path - IMG (unexpectedly to Apple) releases their anti-Apple "we will bury you in court" rant yesterday - Apple reckons they have nothing to lose at this point by exposing some of these issues to the public, including the expected ship date. I'm guessing this last step would not have happened if IMG's rant had not happened.
I think the long delay had more to do with lack of sales in the first place. Custom parts like the card and the CPU needing their own board types and power envelopes cost money. Lots of money. Even for a company like Apple. You displace that with volume.
My guess is workstation numbers have been going down for a while as mac purchases seem to have shifted even more to a hipster lifestyle choice than some perceived app or platform superiority. So in typical fashion Apple made the workstation into a lifestyle product. That probably had a near zero or even negative result on sales. So while it would be one thing develop the product in the first place with the hope of growing sales, if the volume doesn't look large enough to support the development of further Proprietary parts it would be stupid to forge ahead.
Looking at that core, I'm surprised that it's able to handle 2x200W GPUs but can't handle 1x250W GPU. It would seem like just re-arranging those fins to just be coming out of one of those sides would be enough if no second GPU was installed. Guess not though.
Two widely spaced smaller thermal loads are not the same thing as one larger thermal load.
The mistake Apple made was not simply ignoring the critics who went on and on about the cheese grater Mac Pro design being too long in the tooth in the first place.
Just because Apple mention ONE problem doesn't mean that is THE problem that kept them going forward. Thermals is, I agree, a minor issue that could have been worked around. There's no rule that says that, even if you retain the same basic shape as the current Pro, you can't make it larger or whatever.
The real issue is likely something like Apple wanted a substantially better GPU (better along some metric they'd rather keep secret --- more neuro-targeted? better HSA? support for larger higher bandwidth HBM?) and the partner they expected to deliver this did not do so.
The whole point of this article is to discuss the fact that it's THE problem, and I don't see anything else mentioned. Absolutely everything else you suggested has already been delivered by and to other partners in commercial GPUs today. Pascal. Polaris. Vega. All heavily neuro-targeted. Strong HSA. 32GB HBM(2). Hundreds of custom PCBs all over.
Talk to any pro-user who routinely keeps their D700' rendering for 8+ hours a day, and you will find that they have all gone through 2-4 warranty replacements. D500's are the maximum that can safely continuously operate in a nMP. I am somewhat surprised there has not been a class action lawsuit. That makes Apple's decisions to automatically "upgrade" their second option into D700's a bit of a poisoned apple.
Well, I guess another 7 years or so and we’ll get the next Cube out of Cupertino. I bet _one day_ they’ll hit a home run with a tiny, on-your-desk, "Pro" machine. In 2035 or some such.
They just need to go back to the old Power Mac G5/Mac Pro case, update it to use IBM POWER8 chips with Nvidia NVLink and 1080 Ti GPUs in SLI, and create the Power Mac G6.
Power8 is a beast, but I'm not sure it would work as well for even pro use. Its instructions per clock rates are well beyond what most software scales to. You can use its 8 way SMT to address that, but again, that would require prosumer software using maybe 8*8=64 threads well. It's made from the ground up for high throughput server/supercomputer use.
It's also not compatible with the PowerPC series they were using before, let alone with x86.
This was always a headscratcher of a product. No professional demanding powerful hardware wants this. Sure, it has some appeal in the consumer market - Corsair ONE seems like the best evolution of this idea. But why on Earth would a pro want this? A pro looking for performance wants a powerful, upgradable, configurable machine, end of story. I don't think anyone bought this apart from Apple fanboys and apologists, granted there are many of them.
Silence. Many audio studio pros found the old tower style mac pros (with half a dozen fans) too noisy.
Aesthetics. Believe it or not, professional artists and designers like to have equipment that looks pretty.
Size. Speaking from personal experience, once you've experienced the joy of having a small computer that can sit on a corner of your desk instead of a giant computer that has to go under your desk, it's hard to go back.
Remember, to people like trane, "professional" means "engineer". They are unwilling to admit that artists of any sort count as professionals. So they look at the Mac Pro and wonder "this makes no sense as an engineering workstation or a server. Therefore it makes no sense as a product"...
Simple answer, "Pro" was always just marketing and the truth is that it was never intended towards actual professionals, same story as with the iPad "Pro". Real professionals who need high-end graphics buy either HPs or Dells.
I work in a corporate multimedia studio, and once the trash can Mac came out, our IT department rushed to "upgrade" us. We were pretty psyched when they delivered the adorable shiny trash cans downstairs. Nothing but issues since. Obviously if we'd hashed out a rational discussion over our needs and looked at the benchmarks, we would have gone for custom Windows machines.
Apple is still coasting on their reputation as creative-friendly from the aughts. And it's not just fanboys -- many IT departments and managers still assume creatives prefer Macs. In reality, Apple has been tossing creative professionals under the bus for many years, starting with the Final Cut X debacle, and they just don't have any interest in producing quality professional workstations or laptops anymore. They like selling iMacs and MacBooks (with one port) to regular consumers, and that's the future of OSX.
It is astonishing that the worlds most valuable company admits that they can’t design and bring to market a new computer in the eight months left in 2017. Truly remarkable.
It is the Apple haters that have been choking on hubris, and will for the foreseeable future. The company is doing exceptionally well, and will continue to do so, until a competitor adopts similar philosophies and put the same level of detail and care into the design and marketing of their products.
iOS is Apple's most popular operating system. By far.
What exactly should the Linux and PC world be choking on and then adopting? Apple's staggering 9% marketshare?
It sounds like you like pretty things, which is completely fair, but there do exist some people who prefer function (or price) over form. It turns out they are about 91% of the desktop market.
III-V. Apple is doing exceptionally well? Every product category they sell saw a drop in sales last quarter, adjusted for the extra week. iPad units sold last quarter were down 50% on the sales of 3 years ago. Apple is a mature business milking its loyal user base. Once it makes a misstep on iPhone, that customer base will fall dramatically
Early 2018 ushers in Ryzen 2 and Vega 2 already available for custom ASIC designs. No, Apple was waiting for AMD to become ready so they can drop Intel.
I really like the trash can Mac. Part of me thinks that's how a computer _should_ look, all custom components like a 1980s Cray. I liked the Cube too. But the G3 and G5 Power Macs were specifically designed to be upgradable and were much better designs. It's amazing that Apple made the Cube mistake twice.
Blaming heat is a red herring. As Anandtech's basic maths showed, the design could handle the heat rejection. The cost was redesigning those complex, custom mechanical designs after they'd misjudged the direction of software development. They didn't want to write off their costs or risk the same mistake twice, so they've just sat on it.
Also, from the Daring Fireball article, 'Ternus put it plainly: “Some of our most talented folks are working on [the Mac]. I mean, quite frankly, a lot of this company, if not most of this company, runs on Macs. This is a company full of pro Mac users.' -- Er, so, Macs aren't good enough for some or *most* of Apple's workforce? That says a lot about the adequacy of Windows today...
To little to late apple, good luck getting those customers back. why would they trust you again and go above and beyond to change workflows when Microsoft is working great?
As someone mentioned already, it is not because of thermals or anything technical. It is because they can't justify the time and cost to design custom parts for such a low volume product compared to their cash cow, iPhones. Now, they are hoping for a design that can take off the shelf PC parts and hope it won't require re-design for the next 4 to 6 years.
I knew that without any easy path for upgrading GPUs this product was dead in the water. That's where performance evolves today and is why plenty of people are still using tower Mac Pros happily that perform as well as or better than the trash cans for compute-intensive tasks.
That's really interesting that there's a thermal limit...and one just below what it needs to be.
I still wish they'd release a "consumer" version with...well using this design, lets say normal consumer CPUs + high end GPUs...as much as you can cram in 200 watts, and bring the prices down $1000 for all configurations for them...
Do we have any other cooling solution to fit within that space for a 50% increase in heat. ( 300W ) Would a bigger fan have done it? or Apple think the noise is too loud? Would Pro still have complain if the design could fit two 300W GPU inside?
And finally, none of these, GPU Thermals, or Modular Design, has ANY reason to do with Mac Pro still on 22nm! Ivy Bridge, DDR3 Memory, and OLD FireGL GPU. The latest top end Radeon Pro is only 175W.
Talk to any nMP user who routinely keeps their GPUs rendering for 8+ hours per day. You will find that many of them have blown through 2-4 warranty replacements by now.
The D700's heat output is categorically too much for the nMP when used continuously over long spans of time. D500's are the true maximum for heavy usage.
There's a rumour that AMD is preparing an HEDT platform which will be shared with their Entry workstation/server platform. Quad Channel Memory, 12~16 Cores ( 24~32 Threads ), more PCIe lanes, 140W~180W TDP
I actually like the design of the MacPro, and I would have been OK with something similar but with a choice (Nvidia or AMD etc).
GPUs modularity would have been a must : - Some kind of PCI connector on the side or bottom - Radiator part of the GPU module - And the size and specs available to third parties makers so GPUs upgrades would have been offered. Opening also the GPU Driver side of macOS.
Another issue is the fact that it took software to be updated for both GPUs to be used properly, I think this machines would have been great if Heterogeneous System Architecture had been a reality. Unfortunately we seem still far from it.
The CPU are still great, there is no beating Xeon even more when you need all the RAM you can get. Intel hasn't been evolving them as fast (USB3, Thunderbolt 3) as one could hope either, and Apple has been too stubborn in their choice not to used third party controllers for ports.
I'll happily call it. 250W TDP is absurd. 75W TDP is pretty much over the top too. We're in 2017 and have 14/16nm transistors. There's no good reason for computer components to require cooling fans to move air over huge heatsinks for consumer workloads. The fact that GPUs have become the hottest-running, most bloated component in a computer in modern times says a lot about how inefficient we've gotten over the years.
Wut. GPUs are inherently parallel devices and so can make better use of as much thermal headroom as you throw at them and scale up, to the degree something else doesn't limit them. Keeping GPUs under 75 watts would by far limit their capabilities. If you need a silent GPU, cool, others want a high end part and that needs wattage.
It's not inefficiency either, in work done per unit energy we have more efficient GPUs than ever in history, they simply scale up to high wattages because they can and people want them to.
Can the existing thermal core be reworked for cooling dual CPUs and a single, more powerful GPU? That may work and require only a redesigned motherboard and daughterboards. Something like dual 8-Core Ryzen + Polaris 10, with the CPUs being cooled by the GPU portion of the existing thermal solution and the GPU cooled by the CPU portion.
What a shame. The Mac Pro is a thing of beauty - not just the form-factor, but the way the innards are designed. I hope that Apple can still provide an attractive, innovative product with the new Mac Pro, and not just a plain tower.
As exciting as the SFF developments in the PC space have been, they've also been severely hampered by the need to house standard components. A company selling an end product can afford to go for a custom design.
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TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
This all smells like "we finally milked our consumer base enough that they were not buying the mac pro, so we are begrudgingly, finally upgrading it"invinciblegod - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Bad speculation with disregard for previous evidence. For instance, the tower mac pros were updated regularly because it was easy.damianrobertjones - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
This is Apple. they knew what they were doing.Plus, since the latest update to iOS, games now run that little bit slower on my mini 4.
xype - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Yes. Apple is out to get you.Hrel - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Maybe not "get him" but certainly his money. They're not interested in providing a good value, just getting as much money out of you as possible.lazarpandar - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Sure but that's something that could be said about almost any for-profit company. It's not a meaningful addition to the conversation, and it detracts from conversation about what companies tend to do to accomplish the goal of getting money out of you.BillBear - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
If Apple were out to force users to upgrade their devices, they would simply do what Android vendors do and refuse to provide OS and security updates.Strunf - Thursday, April 6, 2017 - link
People don't update cause of OS or Security updates... look to the number of people still using windows 7, or previous versions of Android. The main reason people update is cause of hardware.Apple is not interest in upgrades, why would they make it possible for someone to spend $1000 and bring the Mac Pro up to standards or even worst make it compatible with PCI-E when they get way more money on a complete machine change. And since Apple users value the form no one will want to keep this old Mac Pro anymore when the new one will look very different.
Sarah Terra - Friday, April 7, 2017 - link
Agreed. id rather see them address the price instead of "heat issues". This machine is absurdly overpriced, underpowered and a total nightmare of a dongle mess. fail fail fail. There just isn't an upside to this machine, or really even a niche use case. Far more can be accomplished with far less money, it's just that simple.Meteor2 - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
I don't think it's far off. They chose a design concept which required a lot of R&D and have been doggedly recouping their costs, rather than writing off a flawed design and investing in something better.zepi - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
I think it is the exact opposite. "We figured out that we are losing sales and there need better and more sustainable way of milking money out of them".bill.rookard - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
I think that's part of it. Take a look at the hardware you can get right now. I can put together a Ryzen 7 1700, 32GB of RAM, an SSD or two, and a GTX 1070 for easily under $1000 USD and the performance would wind up pretty comparable to one of the moderately spec'd M-Pros at 1/4 the cost.No, it won't look like a little circular pencil holder on my desk, but I can do quite a lot with the extra cash.
cocochanel - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
+1!!!osxandwindows - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
no thunderbolt?WinterCharm - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
> but I can do quite a lot with the extra cash.like a nice pair of 4K monitors...
Strunf - Thursday, April 6, 2017 - link
The thing is that the Mac Pro is sold to artists and "trendy" people ... your PC could be 10x better it would still look like crap for them.For sure no one is buying the Mac Pro for it's value or performance.
drothgery - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
You can at least nominally be in the pro workstation market if your machine is reasonably upgradeable (at least for the GPU) or if you at least update it every year, but if you do neither? Not so much.BurntMyBacon - Thursday, April 6, 2017 - link
Agreed. I think they underestimated the work it would take to churn out new custom video cards periodically. I'm not convinced by the "we were thermally constrained" argument. As stated in the article, Fiji (175W) was capable of running within their thermal envelope (200W). A Fury Nano level of graphics card or two would have been a pretty nice upgrade over the 850MHz not-quite-7970 equivalent with a little more memory as well. Want even more graphics memory? Polaris 10 gives you more memory and still gives a performance improvement over what they had with and even lower TDP than the Fury Nano (~150W). They've got at least a year before the next Mac Pro is supposed to come out. If they were really serious about the Mac Pro, they could still release an RX480 equivalent.fred666 - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
The trash can Mac Pro was a stupid idea to begin with, serving no purpose.They should built a real Pro device, with plenty of ports and room for expansion (hard drives, add-in cards).
Also, not every "Pro" needs a discrete GPU and it should be optional.
Eidigean - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
When "Pro" means 6-24 core Xeon, then yes you do need a discrete GPU; unless you want it headless. Only the mainstream 4 core consumer chips have an integrated GPU. The trash can had a purpose: moderate compute ability in a very quiet package. You're not going to reach those low decibel levels with a blower on a GPU.Don't get me wrong, I want dual GTX 1080 Ti's in a Mac that blow the exhaust out the back, but my purpose is not compute inside a quiet sound studio. Perhaps this will bring Nvidia back to the table to make Pascal drivers for Mac.
beginner99 - Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - link
Well if you want quiet and small they should go with water cooling. They could even then ship it with one of these external and huge passive radiators in a custom Apple design. I bet Apple fan boys would be all over this.BurntMyBacon - Thursday, April 6, 2017 - link
@Eidigean: "Perhaps this will bring Nvidia back to the table to make Pascal drivers for Mac."That would be nice, but they don't even need to go that far. Just updating to a Fury Nano or RX480 equivalent would be a big improvement. Both of these fit into the desired thermal envelope and represent an upgrade in both performance and features. I have to assume the problem lies less with the thermal envelope and more with Apple not wanting to spend money on designing another custom card for a small (relative to their other product lines) market of Mac Pro users.
helvete - Thursday, June 15, 2017 - link
They could have integrated the GPU to the motherboard as it was propritetary anyway. Like on server mobos or back in the old days:-)pixelstuff - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Apple's main design goal over the last decade has been to move as many things as possible to non-upgradeable hardware, then spruce it up with design flare to cover up that shortcoming. It's one thing for a portable device to be so compact that it can't be easily upgraded, but it's nonsense for a fixed appliance style computer to be designed the same way.sor - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Balance is key when you are sharing a heat sink. Speaking from experience with power transistors and MOSFETS, instead of cooling your device you can actually send other unrelated but thermally coupled devices into thermal runaway.gsalkin - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Seems weird to me they couldn't at least use a pair of Polaris 10s. The RX 480 is way more powerful than the D700s in the Mac Pro and pull like ~150 watts per card.I get Apple going back to the drawing board on the mac pro, but they definitely could have done more to stem the bleeding over the years.
peterfares - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
They must have decided that it wasn't worth designing their own boards for those new GPUs to update the existing system (with an old CPU) if they just plan on going back to a tower that can take standard PCIe cards. The tower will save a lot on R&D costs, no longer will they have to bother with GPUs, they can just take an off-the-shelf GPU and stick it in, or they could request that AMD or NVIDIA design something semi-custom but still a standard PCIe card and slot it in.zodiacfml - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Damn, you beat me to this comment.eatrains - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
What PCIe cards have Thunderbolt 3 output?Eden-K121D - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Those with a Thunderbolt 3 Controller https://ark.intel.com/products/87401/Intel-DSL6340...name99 - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
OR what the 2018 timeline means is that that is the year we see the ARM Macs launched, together with custom Apple GPU?All this theorizing about Apple incompetence/Apple's determination to screw over individual members of the AnandTech readership ignores various basic facts of business life, like "you don't know the future till it happens".
Apple has probably had a roadmap for a while now for moving to an ARM Mac. Who knows what the GPU part of that roadmap was, but maybe it assumed parts that AMD or nV promised but could not deliver? Or maybe it assumed IMG would deliver something that they then dropped? Point is, for all we know, there may well have been a fine plan in place for an update in, say, mid 2016 based on x86 and a CPU that AMD could not ship. Or a plan for ARM Macs this year plus an IMG GPU that IMG dropped six months ago.
A delay this long strikes me as not planned but the result of a pre-existing plan going horribly wrong. The consequences likely include
(a) perhaps a year's delay in shipping the ARM Macs
(b) Apple's concluding that they HAVE to do their own GPU because every partner company they work with is too scared to aim for the stretch targets that Apple has in mind, or too concerned with making a PoS GPU that can be crippled for the mass market, rather than something that's innately expensive but also no compromise.
In other words the sequence is likely something like
- early 2016 AMD and/or IMG tell Apple they can't deliver
- Apple starts negotiating with IMG for a purchase
- purchase attempt fails because IMG CEO has bloated unrealistic sense of how valuable his company is
- Apple goes off to continue down their own path
- IMG (unexpectedly to Apple) releases their anti-Apple "we will bury you in court" rant yesterday
- Apple reckons they have nothing to lose at this point by exposing some of these issues to the public, including the expected ship date.
I'm guessing this last step would not have happened if IMG's rant had not happened.
vladx - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
I can guarantee you 100% there won't be any ARM Mac in the near future.qasdfdsaq - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
I can guarantee you 100% Apple won't be releasing a GPU that outperforms AMD or NVidia's top chips anytime soon either.In fact I can also guarantee you 100% pretty much everything in name99's pro Apple rant is incorrect.
Maleorderbride - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
I think the simplest explanation is that they are waiting for Skylake-EP/big Ryzen, plus whatever GPU option, plus development time.Would Apple love to move to their own CPUs? Sure, but they don't have a product that can outcompete 32 Intel cores (or AMD ones).
Meteor2 - Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - link
'I'm guessing this last step would not have happened if IMG's rant had not happened.' -- except 'this last step' happened last week.Topweasel - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
I think the long delay had more to do with lack of sales in the first place. Custom parts like the card and the CPU needing their own board types and power envelopes cost money. Lots of money. Even for a company like Apple. You displace that with volume.My guess is workstation numbers have been going down for a while as mac purchases seem to have shifted even more to a hipster lifestyle choice than some perceived app or platform superiority. So in typical fashion Apple made the workstation into a lifestyle product. That probably had a near zero or even negative result on sales. So while it would be one thing develop the product in the first place with the hope of growing sales, if the volume doesn't look large enough to support the development of further Proprietary parts it would be stupid to forge ahead.
peterfares - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Looking at that core, I'm surprised that it's able to handle 2x200W GPUs but can't handle 1x250W GPU. It would seem like just re-arranging those fins to just be coming out of one of those sides would be enough if no second GPU was installed. Guess not though.BillBear - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Two widely spaced smaller thermal loads are not the same thing as one larger thermal load.The mistake Apple made was not simply ignoring the critics who went on and on about the cheese grater Mac Pro design being too long in the tooth in the first place.
name99 - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Just because Apple mention ONE problem doesn't mean that is THE problem that kept them going forward. Thermals is, I agree, a minor issue that could have been worked around. There's no rule that says that, even if you retain the same basic shape as the current Pro, you can't make it larger or whatever.The real issue is likely something like Apple wanted a substantially better GPU (better along some metric they'd rather keep secret --- more neuro-targeted? better HSA? support for larger higher bandwidth HBM?) and the partner they expected to deliver this did not do so.
qasdfdsaq - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
The whole point of this article is to discuss the fact that it's THE problem, and I don't see anything else mentioned. Absolutely everything else you suggested has already been delivered by and to other partners in commercial GPUs today. Pascal. Polaris. Vega. All heavily neuro-targeted. Strong HSA. 32GB HBM(2). Hundreds of custom PCBs all over.Maleorderbride - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
It can't handle 2x200W GPUs.Talk to any pro-user who routinely keeps their D700' rendering for 8+ hours a day, and you will find that they have all gone through 2-4 warranty replacements. D500's are the maximum that can safely continuously operate in a nMP. I am somewhat surprised there has not been a class action lawsuit. That makes Apple's decisions to automatically "upgrade" their second option into D700's a bit of a poisoned apple.
xype - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Well, I guess another 7 years or so and we’ll get the next Cube out of Cupertino. I bet _one day_ they’ll hit a home run with a tiny, on-your-desk, "Pro" machine. In 2035 or some such.Meteor2 - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
:)name99 - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
The mac mini sells well enough...Do you make these same silly cracks about the NUC?
Meteor2 - Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - link
Mac Minis are not pro machines.takeshi7 - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
They just need to go back to the old Power Mac G5/Mac Pro case, update it to use IBM POWER8 chips with Nvidia NVLink and 1080 Ti GPUs in SLI, and create the Power Mac G6.tipoo - Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - link
Power8 is a beast, but I'm not sure it would work as well for even pro use. Its instructions per clock rates are well beyond what most software scales to. You can use its 8 way SMT to address that, but again, that would require prosumer software using maybe 8*8=64 threads well. It's made from the ground up for high throughput server/supercomputer use.It's also not compatible with the PowerPC series they were using before, let alone with x86.
trane - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
This was always a headscratcher of a product. No professional demanding powerful hardware wants this. Sure, it has some appeal in the consumer market - Corsair ONE seems like the best evolution of this idea. But why on Earth would a pro want this? A pro looking for performance wants a powerful, upgradable, configurable machine, end of story. I don't think anyone bought this apart from Apple fanboys and apologists, granted there are many of them.Glaurung - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
"But why on Earth would a pro want this?"Silence. Many audio studio pros found the old tower style mac pros (with half a dozen fans) too noisy.
Aesthetics. Believe it or not, professional artists and designers like to have equipment that looks pretty.
Size. Speaking from personal experience, once you've experienced the joy of having a small computer that can sit on a corner of your desk instead of a giant computer that has to go under your desk, it's hard to go back.
name99 - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Remember, to people like trane, "professional" means "engineer".They are unwilling to admit that artists of any sort count as professionals. So they look at the Mac Pro and wonder "this makes no sense as an engineering workstation or a server. Therefore it makes no sense as a product"...
III-V - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
It never ceases to amaze me how many mentally deficient tech fanboys completely fail to understand why Apple succeeds as a company.vladx - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Simple answer, "Pro" was always just marketing and the truth is that it was never intended towards actual professionals, same story as with the iPad "Pro". Real professionals who need high-end graphics buy either HPs or Dells.gerz1219 - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
I work in a corporate multimedia studio, and once the trash can Mac came out, our IT department rushed to "upgrade" us. We were pretty psyched when they delivered the adorable shiny trash cans downstairs. Nothing but issues since. Obviously if we'd hashed out a rational discussion over our needs and looked at the benchmarks, we would have gone for custom Windows machines.Apple is still coasting on their reputation as creative-friendly from the aughts. And it's not just fanboys -- many IT departments and managers still assume creatives prefer Macs. In reality, Apple has been tossing creative professionals under the bus for many years, starting with the Final Cut X debacle, and they just don't have any interest in producing quality professional workstations or laptops anymore. They like selling iMacs and MacBooks (with one port) to regular consumers, and that's the future of OSX.
daniel1926 - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
It is astonishing that the worlds most valuable company admits that they can’t design and bring to market a new computer in the eight months left in 2017. Truly remarkable.bji - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Agreed. I like many Apple products, but that company is going to choke on its hubris someday.III-V - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
It is the Apple haters that have been choking on hubris, and will for the foreseeable future. The company is doing exceptionally well, and will continue to do so, until a competitor adopts similar philosophies and put the same level of detail and care into the design and marketing of their products.Maleorderbride - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
iOS is Apple's most popular operating system. By far.What exactly should the Linux and PC world be choking on and then adopting? Apple's staggering 9% marketshare?
It sounds like you like pretty things, which is completely fair, but there do exist some people who prefer function (or price) over form. It turns out they are about 91% of the desktop market.
Speedfriend - Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - link
III-V. Apple is doing exceptionally well?Every product category they sell saw a drop in sales last quarter, adjusted for the extra week. iPad units sold last quarter were down 50% on the sales of 3 years ago. Apple is a mature business milking its loyal user base. Once it makes a misstep on iPhone, that customer base will fall dramatically
zodiacfml - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
No, it wasn't that. Actually, they have a poor excuse to hide the true reasonmdriftmeyer - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Early 2018 ushers in Ryzen 2 and Vega 2 already available for custom ASIC designs. No, Apple was waiting for AMD to become ready so they can drop Intel.Meteor2 - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
I really like the trash can Mac. Part of me thinks that's how a computer _should_ look, all custom components like a 1980s Cray. I liked the Cube too. But the G3 and G5 Power Macs were specifically designed to be upgradable and were much better designs. It's amazing that Apple made the Cube mistake twice.Blaming heat is a red herring. As Anandtech's basic maths showed, the design could handle the heat rejection. The cost was redesigning those complex, custom mechanical designs after they'd misjudged the direction of software development. They didn't want to write off their costs or risk the same mistake twice, so they've just sat on it.
Also, from the Daring Fireball article, 'Ternus put it plainly: “Some of our most talented folks are working on [the Mac]. I mean, quite frankly, a lot of this company, if not most of this company, runs on Macs. This is a company full of pro Mac users.' -- Er, so, Macs aren't good enough for some or *most* of Apple's workforce? That says a lot about the adequacy of Windows today...
Morawka - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
To little to late apple, good luck getting those customers back. why would they trust you again and go above and beyond to change workflows when Microsoft is working great?osxandwindows - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
You sure they didn't remove windows and install linux on it?TEAMSWITCHER - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Because Microsoft isn't the end all and be all anymore. I simply can't do my job anymore without a Mac. You can blame iPad and iPhone for that.Meteor2 - Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - link
That suggests to me that you're doing it wrong...zodiacfml - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
As someone mentioned already, it is not because of thermals or anything technical. It is because they can't justify the time and cost to design custom parts for such a low volume product compared to their cash cow, iPhones.Now, they are hoping for a design that can take off the shelf PC parts and hope it won't require re-design for the next 4 to 6 years.
ABR - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
I knew that without any easy path for upgrading GPUs this product was dead in the water. That's where performance evolves today and is why plenty of people are still using tower Mac Pros happily that perform as well as or better than the trash cans for compute-intensive tasks.Wolfpup - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
That's really interesting that there's a thermal limit...and one just below what it needs to be.I still wish they'd release a "consumer" version with...well using this design, lets say normal consumer CPUs + high end GPUs...as much as you can cram in 200 watts, and bring the prices down $1000 for all configurations for them...
iwod - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Do we have any other cooling solution to fit within that space for a 50% increase in heat. ( 300W )Would a bigger fan have done it? or Apple think the noise is too loud?
Would Pro still have complain if the design could fit two 300W GPU inside?
And finally, none of these, GPU Thermals, or Modular Design, has ANY reason to do with Mac Pro still on 22nm! Ivy Bridge, DDR3 Memory, and OLD FireGL GPU. The latest top end Radeon Pro is only 175W.
cbm80 - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Apple should do a Kickstarter compaign to raise funds for a new case design.Maleorderbride - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
It can't handle 2x200W GPUs.Talk to any nMP user who routinely keeps their GPUs rendering for 8+ hours per day. You will find that many of them have blown through 2-4 warranty replacements by now.
The D700's heat output is categorically too much for the nMP when used continuously over long spans of time. D500's are the true maximum for heavy usage.
Xajel - Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - link
Maybe they're waiting for Ryzen's HEDT platform for their Mac Pro, and looking that it's still not available. they need sometime for R&D.Meteor2 - Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - link
Hmmm? What do you think Ryzen 7 is, if not HEDT?Xajel - Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - link
There's a rumour that AMD is preparing an HEDT platform which will be shared with their Entry workstation/server platform. Quad Channel Memory, 12~16 Cores ( 24~32 Threads ), more PCIe lanes, 140W~180W TDPTorrijos - Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - link
I actually like the design of the MacPro, and I would have been OK with something similar but with a choice (Nvidia or AMD etc).GPUs modularity would have been a must :
- Some kind of PCI connector on the side or bottom
- Radiator part of the GPU module
- And the size and specs available to third parties makers so GPUs upgrades would have been offered. Opening also the GPU Driver side of macOS.
Another issue is the fact that it took software to be updated for both GPUs to be used properly, I think this machines would have been great if Heterogeneous System Architecture had been a reality.
Unfortunately we seem still far from it.
The CPU are still great, there is no beating Xeon even more when you need all the RAM you can get.
Intel hasn't been evolving them as fast (USB3, Thunderbolt 3) as one could hope either, and Apple has been too stubborn in their choice not to used third party controllers for ports.
BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - link
I'll happily call it. 250W TDP is absurd. 75W TDP is pretty much over the top too. We're in 2017 and have 14/16nm transistors. There's no good reason for computer components to require cooling fans to move air over huge heatsinks for consumer workloads. The fact that GPUs have become the hottest-running, most bloated component in a computer in modern times says a lot about how inefficient we've gotten over the years.tipoo - Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - link
Wut. GPUs are inherently parallel devices and so can make better use of as much thermal headroom as you throw at them and scale up, to the degree something else doesn't limit them. Keeping GPUs under 75 watts would by far limit their capabilities. If you need a silent GPU, cool, others want a high end part and that needs wattage.
tipoo - Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - link
It's not inefficiency either, in work done per unit energy we have more efficient GPUs than ever in history, they simply scale up to high wattages because they can and people want them to.
BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - link
The trouble is that they don't scale down very well as demonstrated by a lack of lower end products released in the last couple of generations.gorbag - Saturday, April 8, 2017 - link
The "lower end products" are going to the embedded market. E.g., see here:https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/jetson-...
Sadist - Thursday, April 6, 2017 - link
Can the existing thermal core be reworked for cooling dual CPUs and a single, more powerful GPU? That may work and require only a redesigned motherboard and daughterboards. Something like dual 8-Core Ryzen + Polaris 10, with the CPUs being cooled by the GPU portion of the existing thermal solution and the GPU cooled by the CPU portion.littlebitstrouds - Thursday, April 6, 2017 - link
Legit why do yo have click bait advertising on this website?yhselp - Thursday, April 6, 2017 - link
What a shame. The Mac Pro is a thing of beauty - not just the form-factor, but the way the innards are designed. I hope that Apple can still provide an attractive, innovative product with the new Mac Pro, and not just a plain tower.As exciting as the SFF developments in the PC space have been, they've also been severely hampered by the need to house standard components. A company selling an end product can afford to go for a custom design.
Zak - Friday, April 7, 2017 - link
In 2018?!?!?