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Cheesegrater mac is back!

I would have loved to see a Dual-Socket MOBO allowing Xeon-SP, but that would certainly get extremely expensive -- simply do to the pricing of these CPUs. That is the true high-end of the workstation market. As a single socket workstation, this thing is as capable as anything else out there. It's not revolutionary per-say, but it is quite capable as a base for the next 5 years at least. The form factor is what everyone wanted more or less, so great.

I wonder if they allow overclocking of the CPU base clocks since they claim their heatsink can dissipate 300 watts and the top standard Xeons only reach 205watts at the moment. That would be interesting. If they can overclock such as

https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/ROG-Dominus-Extreme/

..then it could be quite interesting even in comparison to dual socket workstations.

The MPX format is semi interesting. I suppose it exists mostly to avoid cables and to have a proprietary format to "assist" pricing justifications. But it is very cool of them that they also included standard power cables on the MOBO to use standard high end GPUs if desired. Now where are the Nvidia options? It will be interesting to see how 3rd parties use the MPX format for non-GPU things, like the Promise RAID expansion.

The pricing for the base specs are as others have already commented. The case, mobo, fans, PSU, heatsink, and general engineering of all of this into an impeccably designed coherent package with the ability to run OSX without risk/headache has definite non-trivial value though. I'd almost like to see a barebones option WITHOUT CPU, RAM, SSD, GPU etc since none of that is Apple-made anyway. Just give the Apple parts and let customers put in exactly what they want, since it is commodity anyway. It'd be interesting to see the pricing of such a barebones option. I think it would be quite fair to charge a premium for such a thing, the question is how much of a premium.

If you are buying this, you should put the 28-core CPU in it IMHO. (It has a $4500 retail cost -- will be interesting to see the Apple upgrade price.) A machine like this is NOT meant for 8-cores... It's silly to even offer it IMHO.

As a software developer, and as the first audio company to offer AVX-512 optimization, I am quite pleased to see Intel Xeons at the center of the Apple Pro machines for what I must assume must be at least a 5-10 year plan. Thank god there was not a switch to ARM! This generation of Intel CPUs are ridiculously fast! (I have the old cheesegrater, the trashcan, a Wintel 7980xe i9 machine, and a dual Xeon SP machine for comparison. There is no comparison whatsoever to the earlier Mac Pros, the 18-core 7980xe is almost 4x as fast as the 12-core Mac Pro trashcan -- to say nothing of 28 cores, or even dual 28-cores as is possible with Xeon-SP. Intel Skylake and later CPUs are insanely great! So a Mac Pro based around them is certainly VERY great news! Exciting times to be able to write software for such power!)
 
Do note that there are definitive limitations in the performance of those Xeons considering their base clocks and meager turbo boost capabilities, compared to something like i9-9980XE which can be pushed closer to 5 GHz on all cores with proper OC (whereas Xeon's turbo boost of 4.4 GHz is valid for a single core only).
 
Do note that there are definitive limitations in the performance of those Xeons considering their base clocks and meager turbo boost capabilities, compared to something like i9-9980XE which can be pushed closer to 5 GHz on all cores with proper OC (whereas Xeon's turbo boost of 4.4 GHz is valid for a single core only).

Can you do that 24/24 7/7 for a year keeping good reliability ?
It is a real question, not polemic, i am a software guy and not familiar with the different CPUs :->
 
Absolutely, all that's needed is a (very) decent cooling solution. Yes, OC will raise the temperatures, but I see people have managed to do a 4.9 GHz OC on 9980XE, so... it's definitely possible.
 
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Do note that there are definitive limitations in the performance of those Xeons considering their base clocks and meager turbo boost capabilities, compared to something like i9-9980XE which can be pushed closer to 5 GHz on all cores with proper OC (whereas Xeon's turbo boost of 4.4 GHz is valid for a single core only).

on Xeon SP, yes.

The single-socket Xeon W-3175X (shown last summer, released in January), is overclockable though meant for extreme overclocked, water-cooled systems designed around a mobo like the ROG Dominus Extreme above. But it draws quite a lot of power as I have read. This is the part Intel ran at 5Ghz on all 28-cores last summer (using a huge water chiller).

It is not clear yet AFAIK, if the new Cascade Lake Xeon-W version is a direct descendant of that and is overclockable also, or if it is locked. And/or if Apple has a custom part. If it was unlocked and Apple allowed it to use say 300 watts, and somehow kept it cool semi-passively, that would indeed be rather cool (pun intended) and novel.

The i9-9980XE is indeed the best bang for the buck though, agree, and is crazy powerful already. Whatever will come next replacing that this fall will be quite interesting too. It's great to have competition in CPUs once again!

I am always curious though what the best performance is period, regardless of economics too, as I like to explore extreme DSP algorithms that can use whatever they can get. (though we also make reasonable options too of course.) Extreme performance on things like Xeon-SP systems trickles down and can be used to guesstimate what might be possible on consumer machines in a few years.
 
anyone who says they have never had a problem with windows in 20 years is lying...haha that's hilarious. If you remember to ghost your machine before every change...sure..I eventually figured out to to do that. Never had to worry about it on mac. That is the truth. Let's just be honest there are pros and cons both ways. Windows wins in compatibility and hardware options..it loses badly in the way we are talking about now and OSX is very much victoriously wonderful.
Can I give you a double Like!?
 
The single-socket Xeon W-3175X (shown last summer, released in January), is overclockable though meant for extreme overclocked, water-cooled systems designed around a mobo like the ROG Dominus Extreme above. But it draws quite a lot of power as I have read.

Yeah, 1400W thermal solution was required... Quite frankly ridiculous and impractical. Also, I am pretty sure running that CPU at those freqs dramatically shortens its lifespan.

Now if they finally get their ducks in the row and make 10 nm work for them, maybe there could be some improvements in their thermals as well...
 
I am sure they will not stop making progress on whatever path they decide. I am sure Apple has Intel Roadmap info and probably samples the rest of use don't have too, and for one reason or another they stuck with Intel instead of say, AMD Rome etc. (which seems to be quite a beast on paper) or something even more extreme like a switch to ARM. I take this as another strong win for Intel. I am sure they will get over their 10nm hurdle. I hear they are working already on accelerating their 7nm process as well. (And Intel 10nm ~= AMD/TMSC/Samsung 7nm in terms of real-world units of measuring these things, and Intel 7nm is more like 5nm for the rest if we measure in scientific terms, not marketing numbers.) I'm sure they have learned from whatever it was that caused the delay to their 10nm process. And for the record, I'm not bashing AMD here -- as I said their latest gen looks quite nice too. It's great to have competition in CPU hardware! Especially if you are software developer or power user like most everyone here.

Anyway 2013 Mac Pro users, and earlier Mac Pro users are in for a real treat on these CPUs in the 2019 Mac Pros. They are crazy fast. If you are in, and only in the Mac Universe, and didn't already have the 18-core iMac Pro, this is a very big jump in performance.
 
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Oh don't worry, ARM switch is going to happen. They may have just delayed it by a year. But it's very much happening.

And Intel 10nm ~= AMD/TMSC/Samsung 7nm in terms of real-world units of measuring these things

Not really after seeing what AMD showed at Computex, matching performance of 9900K at half the price and much lower TDP... but we'll see benchmarks when they're out, in July. I think doing such generalized comparisons between process nodes is not really valid in any case. Intel is severely struggling with 10nm still, plus they have all those security issues as well that definitely didn't help them along the way. They're on their way down, from the look of things.

There are rumours that Zen 3 cores will have 3 threads per core (so hyper-hyperthreading?). I can see this very likely happening. Let that soak in a bit.
 
We'll see... IMHO, it would seem odd to introduce a machine like this and then immediately switch the CPU platform... If anything I might guess such a hypothetical switch might start with low power laptops, where the iPadPro becomes more and more like a laptop anyway... but who knows, none of us here work at Apple AFAIK...
 
nobody knows what Apple is going to do, they keep surprising me, and not usually for the better. I think Apple makes a *LOT* more money on their consumer gear....iphones, iPads, iMacs and MBP's. I think they want to go to ARM for those platforms for sure. The new MacPro they designed around Intel and I don't think they are going to change that, which is good news for hackintosh aficionados and for continuing intel support in the future. The new MacPro definitely will be a powerful machine and I'm happy they went back to PCI slots and for certain they are attempting to come up with a big and powerful system..but the price is simply stratosphere for most people. Relatively few will be buying that thing.

Apple has released other interesting things in the past that looked great on paper at first and then never sold much and died on the vine. We can speculate all day long, but the truth is that Apple's main consumer base and source of revenue simply does not need that much power. And power users are fully capable to build PC beasts with any configuration they want. I personally think there are very few that can and will pay that much money just to have the biggest and baddest OSX machine ever (excluding a hackintosh possibility). There is an army of 5,1 users out there that are now feeling like they have a limited lifespan left on their cheesegrater, but as one of them I can say with conviction that I can't afford or justify the new MacPro. Not even close.

A lot of us will continue to milk our 5,1 along regardless of what Apple does even if means we're stuck on LogicPro 10.6 for years in the future. Some will pickup mini's and ImacPros, but I think relatively few will buy the intel MacPro.

In order to acquire affordable refurbished 7,1 macs in the future, first you need a groundswell of people that actually buy that thing new and use it for a few years and then sell it off, in order to create buying opportunities for the rest of us peasants that can't afford it now. But will that groundswell happen with it priced the way it is now? I'm not sure it will. The 5,1 was much more of an obvious choice for a lot of prosumers. The 7,1 is not. So we shall see what happens with that thing, we won't know anything until the next few years goes by.
 
IMHO, it would seem odd to introduce a machine like this and then immediately switch the CPU platform...

Well, not for Mac Pro straight away, but I can easily see ARM in Minis, MacBooks and iMacs...

The next generation of Mac Pro could also very well be ARM, in some 4-5 years.


BTW, slightly off-topic. Can somebody explain to me what's the reasoning behind that 4, 1; 5, 1 etc. numbering?
 
BTW, slightly off-topic. Can somebody explain to me what's the reasoning behind that 4, 1; 5, 1 etc. numbering?

It's the "model identifier." A MacPro5,1 would be the "fifth generation" Mac Pro. The second number indicates a variant of some kind, and is more commonly seen on the laptops where there can be different sizes.
 
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