In 2010, Apple released a new Mac Pro built on Intel’s then-new quad-core Gulftown CPU. In 2012, it bumped that system up one grade, offering hexa-core processors. Both systems were based on Intel’s 32nm Westmere architecture, which means they lacked all the features introduced since Sandy Bridge, including AES-NI, AVX, and PCIe 3.0. Mac users were rather unhappy with this non-update a year ago, prompting Tim Cook to reassure everyone that a new system was coming in 2013.
Now we’ve seen that system and it’s dramatically different than anything Apple â€" or anyone â€" has done before in this space.
Hardware Specifications
Apple is playing coy with exact specifications, but we can infer quite a bit from the figures the company has announced to date. The current top-end chip in the Mac Pro is the X5675. According to Intel, the new Mac Pro offers “up to 2x†the FLOPs performance of its predecessor. The Westmere chips currently used in the Mac Pro are capable of eight single-precision and four double-precision FLOPs per cycle. Sandy and Ivy Bridge, in contrast, can perform 16 SP and eight DP. Haswell doubled that again, up to 32 SP and 16 DP per cycle. If the new Mac Pro was using Haswell, in other words, Apple could claim a 4x increase rather than a 2x jump.
The other clue is in the chipset identification. Apple’s website states that the system uses “the new-generation Xeon E5 chipset.†There’s no such thing as the “E5 chipset,†but there is a C600 chipset that supports the E5 family. It’s not a perfect match, given that Apple is advertising PCI-Express 3.0, while the C600 only officially offers 2.0, but Intel’s messaging is unclear on this point. Diagrams for the C222 â€" C226 chipsets point to PCIe 3.0 capability, even though the official Intel database shows those products as limited to PCIe 3.0.
Based on what we know right now, however, it looks as though the new MP is Ivy Bridge, not Haswell.
Other features are more current. The move to PCIe-based Flash storage will boost storage performance well above what even SATA 6G offers and memory bandwidth is up to 60GB/s across four channels. Twin graphics cards from AMD anchor the GPU side of the equation. Based on the quoted specs (7TFLOP total GPU power, 6GB of VRAM), it’s not clear which cards these are. If that 6GB of VRAM is per-GPU, AMD’s top-end W9000 is the best candidate, though it would normally offer 8TFLOP of performance, rather than six. If the VRAM is being quoted in total, it implies AMD has done a custom design for Apple. None of AMD’s current FirePro’s offer 3.5TFLOP of single-precision floating point and just 3GB of RAM per card. Regardless, that’s more than enough GPU power to handle heavy rendering tasks.
System Design
The case’s exterior is, in a word, interesting. It’s by far the smallest workstation we’ve ever seen. It’s 9.9 inches tall, 6.6 inches wide and, as Apple notes, is more than small enough to sit on your desk. The entire system is cooled by a single impeller and each of the major components makes direct contact with a large, triangular heatsink Apple calls the “thermal core.†It’s an interesting design and I don’t doubt the company’s claims that it’s quie t and easy to cool.
The Mac Pro’s thermal core interior
It also looks like a trashcan.
I don’t mean that as a nasty dig at Apple. From the diagrams and discussion of the product, it’s clear that they’ve poured a great deal of time and effort into building a sophisticated cooling system and taken a new approach to system integration. It’s absolutely possible that the new Mac Pro will be a mind-blowing experience with great thermals and a ton of horsepower.
But it still looks like a trashcan.
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