Spec the Mac Pro 2013: What Will the Hardware Be?

[tonymacx86]

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Thought this might be a good question to ask the forum- what will the rumored "Spring 2013" Mac Pro consist of hardware-wise? Will it be a complete redesign or a simple spec bump to Ivy Bridge EP Xeon CPUs with a mid-range GPU?

CPU(s): Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge (successor to the MacPro5,1 Xeon Sandy Bridge)
Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 7770/7870 (rumors point to 7xxx support in 10.8.3)
Design: Same as current
Price tag: Same as current

What do you think?

 

[hardtac0]

Dual socket 2011 motherboard
Sandybridge-E - due to delays of Ivy Bridge-E, this is the only realistic option
16 DIMM slots and supports DDR3 1600 Mhz ECC protected memory. Supports up to 256 GB of memory using registered ECC memory
C606 chipset
10 hard drive bays - eight 3.5" bays and two 2.5" bays. The 3.5" bays are 3 Gbit SAS compatible where as the 2.5" bays are 6 Gbit SATA.
120 GB SSD + 1 TB SATA HD as stock in a Fusion drive configuration.
Four PCI-e 16x slots. With two socket 2011 chips, full 16x PCI-e 3.0 bandwidth is provided to all slots.
Geforce GTX 650 Ti - Default video card includes PLX bridge chip and Thunderbolt controller for 2 TB ports and dual link DVI-I. This card will take up two slots for cooling but not require auxiliary PCI-e power. Mac version will be clocked lower than the PC version due to power requirements for TB.
New chassis design

The options:
Geforce GTX 680 graphics with 2 GB of RAM - includes PLX bridge chip and Thunderbolt controller for 2 TB ports and dual link DVI-I.
Radeon HD 8900 graphics with 3 GB of RAM- AMD is set to launch new GCN based cards in March, Apple would utilize these since the driver architecture is similar to the Radeon HD 7000 series. A Thunderbolt controller and PLX bridge chip will be on the card to provide two Thunderbolt ports. Dual link DVI-I will also be provided for legacy displays.
nVidia GK110 based graphics with 3 GB of RAM - includes PLX bridge chip and two Thunderbolt controllers (four TB ports). Expect the price to be $1000 though.
Xeon Phi option - Apple will likely leverage this for OpenCL and Grand Central. Nothing like 60 cores and 240 threads at once.
Dual 10 Gbit Ethernet - likely just a PCI-e card though
IPMI daughter card - this is going to be bundled with the server variant and has its own Ethernet port for out of band management
SuperDrive - Apple won't ship the system with a DVD burner but it will be available as an option. This will be a slim notebook style DVD burner to save space with the case design.
Up to 32 TB RAID5 via C606 chipset. Uses the chipsets SAS and RAID functionality to provide ~25 TB formatted capacity.

 

[atriozef]

weee!! that means there will be a power management for 2011 socket soon....

 

[Solidww]

View attachment 45876​

Thought this might be a good question to ask the forum- what will the rumored "Spring 2013" Mac Pro consist of hardware-wise? Will it be a complete redesign or a simple spec bump to Ivy Bridge EP Xeon CPUs with a mid-range GPU?

CPU(s): Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge EP (successor to the MacPro5,1 Sandy Bridge EP)
Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 7770/7870 (rumors point to 7xxx support in 10.8.3)
Design: Same as current
Price tag: Same as current

What do you think?

Tony, first off the picture of the redesign is very modern and keeps the Mac Pro's classic design cues. I hope Apple would go with something like that.

Hopefully, they will go with Ivy Bridge-E.
Support for both AMD and nVidia GPUs would be preferred but that hasn't always been the case with the Mac Pro.
Price Tag will probably go up a little bit and then settle as the company makes a little bit of money off the redesign.

We all know it's long over due and a price jump probably won't hurt since professionals will be itching for the newer hardware.

 

[solarduan2010]

Hi hardtac0，
your idea is too excellent,especically in the TB port! use the pcie direct way of graphic card to carry the TB ports,it can solve the issue of the unsupport TB by the native X79 serises motherboard controller chipset.If some graphic cards manufactoried companies made the card like your idea for PC,I will buy it!

best regards!

 

[Solidww]

Hi hardtac0，
your idea is too excellent,especically in the TB port! use the pcie direct way of graphic card to carry the TB ports,it can solve the issue of the unsupport TB by the native X79 serises motherboard controller chipset.If some graphic cards manufactoried companies made the card like your idea for PC,I will buy it!

best regards!

and

 

[ashman70]

How will eight drive bays work the way the four drive bays currently work? Apple will not go from the elegant drive bay solution that have now to something that requires cables that can be seen. Its a great idea, just how will they do it inside the case and on the motherboard?

 

[Supermulti]

Well, thats way too soon for haswell & ivy-e , so Sandybridge-EP is the only viable option.
Maybe the 3770 for the "low end", ´cause it wouldn´t hurt sales to move closer to the 1000$ price point.

I don´t think there are many surprises to expect. just the usual stuff..
A great workstation for the engineers and designers, who have to/want to work with OS X.

The only thing i really care about is support for AMD Graphics.
I´m dying to get my hands on 7850 cards in Crossfire or maybe it´s in time for the 8XXX series (not talking about that renamed OEM stuff).

Edit: I read that some of you, believe it won´t get an optical drive. I´m pretty sure it will, because a dvd-drive is like 10$ and shipping a workstation for several thousand dollars w/o would be ridiculous. Most people wouldn´t miss it though, i am w/o an odd since 2010 and still happy.

 

[hardtac0]

How will eight drive bays work the way the four drive bays currently work? Apple will not go from the elegant drive bay solution that have now to something that requires cables that can be seen. Its a great idea, just how will they do it inside the case and on the motherboard?

I suspect that there will be a major case redesign. The hard drives will use a backplane akin to what rack mount servers use. Why not go all the way and offer hot swap bays on the front?

Even with the current drive bay configuration, all that's necessary to support 8 drives is to add another row above the current configuration and extend that backplane. It'd increase the system height under the current schema by ~1.5" (~ 3.8 cm) and that's assuming they keep both optical bays.

 

[onebranch]

My guess is it would be a radical redesign. In keeping with their current trend, it would "thinner" but expandable (making more use of thunderbolt ports for expandability). Or another direction for them is make the MacPro a desktop extension of their Macbook Pros. Would basically be just a dock for the laptops, that has a GPU component, additional hard drives etc. Thus, pros would still need to buy laptops. Greedy Apple.