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Comment by mbell | Hacker News Reader

Personally I couldn't care less about the design, it would be sitting behind several large screens anyway and the thermal ideas sound interesting....

That said....

4 ram slots???? Really? 12 cores, 2 GPUs and I get 32GB of ram? Maybe 64GB if 16GB dimms in standard sizes become a thing? That kills it completely in my book.

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That paucity of slots is what got me to thinking...

I was wondering if the idea would be to daisy chain these together via TB 2 and see one workstation with... say ...36 cores or whatever.

I'm trying to determine if that would be a possibility. In essence, is the Mac Pro a Thunderbolt 2 "processing" device? Or could it be made to be one?

If it were...

Man...

put me down for a couple of them. I mean you could potentially get a 48 core "workstation" in 1/2 the volume of the current Mac Pro.

Since they run on different boards, technically you'd set up two or three nodes and run them in a parallel supercomputing setup.

Would be expensive as hell, I'd reckon.

I was thinking about this as well. It would make sense to cluster these with a front-end node. The improvements to the scheduler, among other things over the past few years, would indicate a simpler way to build the equivalent of a VAXCluster.

Why not 32gb dimms?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226...

The linked dimms have 43% lower bandwidth than what Apple has specced (PC1866 vs PC1066) and are over twice the $ per GB.

wait a few months.

I can't think of a single app that's RAM-speed-bound.

Pretty much everything is CPU- or GPU- or disk-bound.

Memory performance is a big problem. http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2158184/intel-memor...

(this is possibly why they opted to go for a chipset that supports 4 channels and only include 4 slots; 1 slot per channel)

If that were the case, we wouldn't have multi-level CPU caches and we really wouldn't care about misses stalling the processor.

Everything is RAM speed bound when it comes to CPU and GPU.

The 12 cores are going to be in 1 CPU BTW. It's a limitation of the chipset and probably thermal capacity as well (check out http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/... ).

As far as 16GB dimms in standard sizes; that's already a thing: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=...

There are also a handful of 32GB DIMMs out already. Example: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820326...

I would expect that you'll be able to run 64 or 128GB of RAM max.

Unless you're actively thrashing through all 32GB (maybe you are), wouldn't installing a large SSD for swap space will help you out just as much?

Not really; bandwidth, latency, etc.

That does kill it.. for everyone who requires more than 64GB of RAM..

128GB with 32GB DIMMS. Also, it's possible there is some amount soldered on the board.

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