2012 Mac Pro Specs: Xeon E5, Thunderbolt, USB3, PCIE3

[philz]

I have to say, if they are decent (and worthy of a multi-year wait) I'll probably get one in the fall. It's getting close to my 100% Upgrade time soon, so maybe a Dual-E5 would suffice for a long, long time. Reason I didn't get the previous gen was lack of monitor (and I got the iMac 27" which I sold a year later ), and just the chips were old at release... Not the case this time!

 

[eosman]

I don't think so. Just without integrated graphics you can't use the TB port as Displayport.

See that is what I find interesting. If the Mac Pro gets thunderbolt without integrated graphics users will have to use a non-thunderbolt Apple cinema displaying assuming they want an Apple Cinema display...

 

[Gordo74]

Gordo, why do you say the 6XX cards are gimped?

Alot of good discussion here

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1681514

Benchmarks were putting the GTX 680 at the same "computing levels" as the GTX 570. The 6xx series is very fast in gaming, but nVidia cut their new cards off at the knees for computing to force "high end" players to buy the quattro cards and not save $$ by buying the gaming cards (like they did with the 5xx).

 

[stratmaster458]

Frm my experience, any Xeon processor is terrible as a high performance machine, at least in terms of speed. Stability, yes.

You got a bad one. Xeons are the same piece of silicon as the i7 they are just higher binned as in they are the best manufactured silicon there is, that translates to the best all around performance.

Gordo, why do you say the 6XX cards are gimped?

With the 6xxx series Nvidia didn't put as many FPUs in so OpenCl performance has been greatly reduced, however AMD has put more FPUs than they ever had before hence why the 7970 is top dog.

Could someone tell me if integrated graphics are required to have thunderbolt? I'm asking this because someone posted this as a requirement to have the display run over thunderbolt port.

As a side thought if we see the Mac Pros with thunderbolt this summer do you think we will see motherboard manufacturers like gigabyte and asus integrate it as well for the 2011 socket?

In december Intel is releasing an updated Chipset for 2011 that will include native USB 3.0 and thunderbolt. I will be building a socket 2011 rig in January.

 

[moodogg7]

does this mean we're all gonna ( trade in our hacks and run out )and buy mac-pros now,, when the rumor turns to fact..

 

[Solidww]

Gordo, that was an excellent read. Thank you very much.

 

[valkeriefire]

Good points Gordo. I am only concerned about gaming performance under windows, but the fact that Mac Pros are for producing content, makes the 670/680 less likely since the card is not the ideal for content production.

I wonder what the card will be.

 

[tonymacx86]

Nice in depth article explaining some of the rumored specs of the rumored new 2012 Mac Pro.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/06/wh ... ok-like/2/

 

[chorner]

The only thing that is a bit 'bogus' about this ArsTechnica article is that Apple "needs" to pipe a connection from the internal graphics to the Thunderbolt chipset.

That's just wrong. You don't need to connect a display output to attach storage or any other device. Thunderbolt is simply an externally available connection to PCIe ports, and ALSO has the capability of transferring graphics via the DisplayPort protocol.

There is no way in hell you're required to saturate your Thunderbolt bus with a display signal. Stupid, and Intel engineers aren't that stupid either.

 

[valkeriefire]

Yeah, it shouldn't be a problem. Anandtech was able to output video to a thunderbolt display using a dedicated GPU by using Virtu software in windows. No reason OS X can't do the same thing natively.

See here.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5829/a-fi ... z77agd80/2