Intel's 12-Core Xeon With 30 MB Of L3: The New Mac Pro's CPU? | Hacker News Reader

Intel's 12-Core Xeon With 30 MB Of L3: The New Mac Pro's CPU?

tomshardware.com

30 pointsyapcguy34 comments

No, this is not the new Mac Pro's CPU. This is an Ivy Bridge part. The new Mac Pro will be using a Haswell CPU.

Apple have already mentioned that the new Mac Pro will ship with Thunderbolt 2. Intel have stated that the Falcon Ridge controllers that drive Thunderbolt 2 will be part of Haswell.

Additionally, Apple have never used the "E" series for their CPUs and there's no indication to think they'll start with the new Mac Pro.

I think the new Mac Pro is going to ship in late 2013.

The Xeon Haswell refresh isn't due for another year, and is expected to feature DDR4. The Ivy Bridge refresh in this article isn't even out yet.

You could be right, but it would involve one hell of a bold move on Apple's part. They'd be getting Haswell Xeons a year before everyone else, to mildly improve a product they didn't even bother to upgrade to Sandy Bridge. In which case, why isn't it the 15 core version?

More than likely, they've instead figured out some way of supporting Thunderbolt 2 in the Ivy refresh.

By the way, this CPU is an EP, not an E (there is no 12 core E), which seems in line with the current specs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Pro#Specifications http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haswell_(microarchitecture)#Con...

What the fuck is up with the desktop wait by the way?

> Apple have already mentioned that the new Mac Pro will ship with Thunderbolt 2. Intel have stated that the Falcon Ridge controllers that drive Thunderbolt 2 will be part of Haswell.

However, Thunderbolt 2 controllers will presumably be available as a separate part, too; Thunderbolt 1 controllers were, and that's what the first Thunderbolt Macs used.

It seems unlikely that the Mac Pro will use a Haswell Xeon, as that would delay its release until at _least_ early next year; the Xeon is typically an architecture behind the consumer stuff.

The new Mac Pro will not use a Haswell CPU.

What I get from this is that the new Mac Pro is going to be expensive - the older generation Sandy Bridge Intel Xeon E5-2687W still costs > $1900.

That's the retail price. Apple would probably get a relatively good discount.

Consider a current generation Mac Pro matched spec-for-spec with BYOC prices. Which costs more for YOU (not Apple)?

I recently bought a PC, rediscovered the joys of being paralysed by the possibility that every bloody program I could download probably contained some sort of malware, nagware, searchware, spyware or crapware, and then sold my PC and paid the goddamn markup like I should have done in the first place.

The two or three occasions on which I played computer games did not cover the time lost to trying to do work on a platform which doesn't have the tools I needed.

What would stop vendors creating such programs for Mac too?

I don't really give a hot damn why. The difference is that with a Mac it's a hypothetical and with Windows it happened to me twice in the first week.

So put linux on there. Then again, if you are so bad with computers that you are "paralysed by the possibility of nagware" then maybe you should be on ChromeOS or something.

OS X works fine thanks. Leave Windows and Linux to people who want to worry about their computer.

Nice FUD attempt there.

I run all my computers on Linux (servers and desktops), I don't worry about them.

Do you ever have to break out a shell to maintain them?

Personally, I run a Debian Wheezy desktop, and after the first week I haven't needed to touch a shell. (And most "regular users" wouldn't need to touch the shell that first week.)

Updates happen near-automatically, I get a dialog pop up when they happen that asks me to enter the root password and confirm that I'd like packages X, Y and Z to be updated. Those updates have never broken my system.

When I upgrade my system from Wheezy to... I think it's Jessie, next, I probably will have to drop down to the shell, however the instructions are listed quite cleanly on the Debian website and elsewhere. Ubuntu, otoh, goes the whole way and provides a GUI tool for upgrading the system.

Break out a shell, I live in the shell?

Servers don't have a GUI and I do about 90% of administration from the command line on the Desktops/Laptops (the only time I use a GUI for configuration is to configure the GUI..meta).

Linux isn't Windows or Mac, The command line is expected to be used for administration (and this approach has lots of benefits, script-ability, reproducibility, the ability to send the same command to 50 identical servers to name a few).

The unix (linux/freeBSD) command line is one of it's stand-out features (others been stability, cost and ease of deployment.

I've yet to find a GUI that allows me to manipulate files and data in a general way that matches the linux command line, take this for example.

    #!/bin/bash

    php artisan routes | grep -i $1 |sort -k 4 | cut -d '|' -f 3 | sed 's/ GET //' | while read ln; 
    do 
	
    	filename=${ln//[\/]/_}.png; 
    	echo $filename;
    	cutycapt --url=http://metaflow.co.uk"$ln" --out=/home/dev/screenshots/$filename --min-width=1280 --min-height=1280; 
    done

(not this script is a hack job, bash-aficionados can wince now) That dumps out a list of all the routes in my currently developed webapp then loops over them converting the url to a sensible filename (/add/customer becomes _add_customer.png etc) then it uses a command line utility to visit that URL and grap an image of the page at 1280x1280 (using the webkit engine) and saves them in a folder in my home folder.

With a single command I can dump 50 mock screens to png and name them with the URL and I can do this every time I change them automatically.

This is what my home desktop looks like on a typical day http://i.imgur.com/vLMVAI8.png

I tried 6 distributions. 3 versions of Ubuntu, Arch, Red Hat and Mint.

They all either ran slow, were buggy, had incomplete software repos or didn't support my hardware.

(Arch was my favourite, FWIW.)

99% of the time those sorts of problems are due to what could be summarized as bad marketing. If you are not familiar with the key phrases (and we don't go out of our way to tell people these phrases), you'll miss out on crucial stuff.

If you'd like to have another go at making a perfect Arch system, drop me a line.

I have a Macbook pro at work and at home. But I use Linux on all servers. I suggest you consider standardizing on one so you can build up your skillset and be aware of the quirks. E.g. I now understand I'd better do an apt-get update periodically or before I want to install new software. The ubuntu desktop installs with sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop ... etc. You are right that it is easier to pay the OSX tax and I did. But the Ubuntu/Linux desktop is almost there ... such that I probably would be okay if my next laptop just ran Linux.

I use ubuntu on servers, so the relative poorness of the desktop version was a rude surprise. I've been using Linux on and off long enough that my first distro was Red Hat Linux 4.

twice? You must be doing something very much wrong then :]

nagware, searchware, spyware or crapware

Considering that even the Java installer for Windows tries to install the Ask.com toolbar, I'd say it's nearly inevitable.

In other contexts this is called "blaming the victim".

It's clear from the example of Linux and OS X that in the general case, I should not need to exercise constant vigilance and faultless scrutiny of every damn thing I install or use.

A theory: http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/broken_windows

shrug.

I got a new work PC on Friday and was up and running within 30 minutes, although I did need to upgrade the kernel via deb (which took around 2 minutes) as I'm running a Haswell CPU.

I run Ubuntu with LXDE, simple case of copying over my old home directory (at impressive speeds), then resuming work.

If you're afraid of the choice that Windows offers you, maybe you should just stick with Mac, as they have their own store which has a good selection of garden-wall-approved apps. Windows is a great operating system, and there is a reason why it has sold as many copies as it has.

A substantial fraction of the work is at a terminal, actually. My original plan was to run Linux. After 6 different distros I gave up and used Windows, after 2 months of that hell I threw it in and did what I ought to have done in the first place and paid OS X tax.

Xubuntu works quite well. I recommend you try XFCE for the desktop.

A _current_ Mac Pro, today? You'd be significantly cheaper to build your own, as the Xeons it uses are now two generations out of date (there was never a Sandy Bridge Mac Pro; the current one is Nehalem/Westmere). However, when it came out, it was a different story; unless you went for the lowest end model (which pretty much nobody did, because why bother), a very substantial part of what you were paying was for Xeons.

It's faster than my old computer and a seamless upgrade.

In retrospect I realised that's what I wanted.

I charge enough per hour that I can quantify the value of the time I spent pissfarting around with Linux and Windows in order to "save" money. It came out as a loss.

If I was playing brand-new computer games, or doing heavy duty simulations, or running complex renders etc -- sure. I'd bite the bullet and buy a current PC, the hardware is much better.

But that's not my work. I don't like paying more for older stuff, but frankly it's not enough of a bother to waste so much time on in future.

Oh, sure, not saying people shouldn't buy them. Just commenting on the pricing from the point of view of cost added by Xeon.

Of course it's going to be expensive but it will be the last computer you ever need to buy, right? :-)

30MB would fit in nice for scientific computing. Does it mean that Haswell Xeons will have 60MB?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com