Mac Pro x79 and Thunderbolt?

[harrold.t]

I'm no expert by any means, but what I've gathered is Thunderbolt generally requires integrated graphics. How is it that the new Mac Pro will run E5 Xeons and still have Thunderbolt 2.0? Is TB2.0 allowing other means of accessing graphics? Are the new E5 Xeons going to have integrated graphics?

More importantly, and what I think I am obviously getting at.. When will we see a x79 thunderbolt MOBO for a hackintosh?! Don't get me wrong, the 4770k is great, but it's still lower on the high end CPU spectrum than a lot of the Xeons and x87 boards are limited in RAM.

Somebody please enlighten me on the specifics and tell me we will have this capability soon!

 

[urgze]

Redwood Ridge (TB 2.0) controller can route displayport signals from the built in AMD FirePros.
Also on other TB machines coming out, displayport support will be optional from what I recall hearing at a recent tradeshow. So some machines will be PCIe only, no DP. But this is just a rumor right now, take it for what it's worth. The first part isn't though; the "new mac pro" will pipe it's DP signals out the redwood ridge TB 2.0 controller from the AMD GPUs.

 

[Octavean]

Well you can take a look at this:

http://www.techpowerup.com/194538/i...ady-upgrade-program-for-motherboards-pcs.html

Again its a Thunderbolt add in card solution this time know as the ASUS ThunderboltEX II not to be confused with the defunct Asus ThunderboltEX. It may be Haswell LGA1150 only though.

For what its worth, at this late stage of the game, I don't think we will ever see Thunderbolt on X79 boards. I just think if this were going to happen then we would have seen some leaks prior to this late stage (just like if there was going to be a new chipset to replace X79 we should have seen leaks of it and we didn't because there was no such beast). Also why would manufactures bother releasing some new X79 boards, as they have, if they had plans to release Thunderbolt / Thunderbolt II X79 boards shortly after.

For a high-end solution, maybe Haswell-E / LGA2011-3 / X99 would be a better bet. That should be out some time late next year,........2014.

 

[Octavean]

Looking at a teardown of the new Mac Pro:

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Mac+Pro+Late+2013+Teardown/20778

I would have to say that it is a very cleverly put together system. However, I don't really see anything specifically that suggests that it is greater then the sum of its parts.

The only thing that is truly unique about it IMO (something that can't be replicated generally) is that it is an LGA2011 based platform with Thunderbolt / Thunderbolt 2 support.

At this point, without any definitive answers from Intel or Apple on the subject, I suspect that Intel and Apple simply came to an agreement resulting in in this unique hardware configuration with exclusivity,....either for the short term or the long term. At this point I think its a bit late for the LGA2011 platform to gain Thunderbolt support given the age of the platform and with Haswell-E / EP coming later this year (~Q3).

So simply put, like the introduction of Thunderbolt, there was an Apple exclusive deal. While we are seeing Thunderbolt 2 on a few new LGA1150 motherboards I still question if we will see it on LGA2011 retail boards.

I would hope to see Thunderbolt on LGA2011 boards and future Haswell-E LGA2011-3 boards but its wait and see,.....

 

[shilohh]

Why would you want thunderbolt? Overpriced cables. Overpriced enclosures. If you want a thunderbolt drive, you'll get the same or better throughput connecting a cheep bare drive to a SATA, E-SATA or PCI-E card. If you want a portable external drive, only the fastest SSDs can saturate USB3 and USB3 is a lot cheaper. If you want a raid box, your better off with a PCI-E raid card. Why anyone would want to connect a GPU through thunderbolt (4 lane PCI speed) is beyond me. To me, thunderbolt is just a crippled PCI-E connection with really expensive cables and components. If you offered to trade me one of my 8x PCI-E slots for 4 thunderbolt ports, I'd say NO.

 

[Banichi]

I work in the film industry and I'd like thunderbolt on a lga2011 board for a couple of reasons:

1) I would like a board small enough that I can build it in to a portable case (pelican).

2) That means that I likely will only have about 4 full size PCIe slots and if I want to be transcoding video I would like to have at least 2 GPUs which in all likelihood will knock out 1 of my 1x PCIe slots leaving me with maybe 1 other.

3) in addition to the 2 GPUs I might want to also have a red rocket card to help specifically with red footage. This takes up at least 1 other 16x slot and possibly covering the other 1x slot or the last full size slot.

4) So now that all of my PCIe slots are likely occupied I still need to add an expresscard reader for sony and Alexa camera media. Also it would be nice to have an SDI i/o card. Both of which have PCIe options but even if I could fit the 1 I likely wouldn't be able to fit both.

5) This leads to me having to open up the case and swap cards based on what job I'm doing. This likely means that the red rocket will go when not on a job with a red camera and the expresscard reader will go when working with red footage. This is problematic because the red rocket can be rather easy to damage so pulling and installing all the time seems risky.

So if I did have t-bolt 2 on the machine I would be able to have the 3 GPUs (rocket being 1) I could have both the expresscard reader and the SDI i/o attached via tbolt and fit into the case so that nothing needs to move. Oh of course I also didn't even address a wifi card, which while not critical, would be nice.

With that said it is clearly possible as exemplified by the current mac pro. Granted that mobo is highly customized for that case. It seems clear that the chipsets and buses needed exist. So why not create it in what to me would seem to be a more simple implementation: a traditional mobo?