New MacPro predictions? Hopes? Fears?

[Antony Newman]

The classic MacPro was pretty perfect. Go back to that, add Thunderbolt 3 and USBC, paint it black (space grey), done.

(Missed this earlier) It would have made an excellent April 1st video with Ive pouring over every nuance of the new cheese-grater design ;-)

"<snip> a pioneer called Dragon Dictate <snip>

'Speaking of Nuance - this is the 'basic tech that underpins Siri. The algorithm is (IMO) a brute force CPU algorithm that needs hefty hand tuning to increase phoneme separation.

To do more correlation and covariance & without (human) deterministic (algorithm) intervention requires considerably more real time data manipulation than state of the art desktop GPUs can currently muster. This summary view is from the white papers that Google have made available on the subject. These souls admit they are at the starting point in trying to guess the underlying way that this new system should work - but even with TPU chips optimised to perform 65536 MAC (multiply and accumulate) on 6 year old chip fabs - their chips out-performs GPUs by one to two orders of magnitude. Googles white papers on reducing speech error rate are also available.

Wcctech article : Not an insightful piece IMO.

NextPlatform piece : Excellent & Informative. It will be fascinating to see if China will move from 256 mini-monster core chips for their prototype Exascale, or if they'll wait until they get access to a modern fab. In terms of a 'real' super (i.e. One that scales) - that will most likely pop up in Japan. As with Googles view on TPU efficacy, Bandwidth looks to be a key limit ... something that the Fujitsu engineers are no doubt 'chewing on (ie Tofu!).

AJ

Edit : Just seen the following that helps illustrate the efficacy of the TPU for 'that type' of load.

[Wayne Morellini]

WPU Bro, WPU. I was meaning back them 20 or so years soon basic hardware. I am surprised they haven't advanced the art enough to gets mid range phone to do this in the cpu's. Notice I didn't say advance the technology, because it is the art to get the technology to do more with less. Of course that is the problem all around, rather than figure out how to do it better minimally, they just brute force primitively. Like when
I learned 3D modeling on some of the most advanced hardware and software around, I got in there wondering where all the good stuff was. It they only had the most basic concepts as state of the art (the cloth module had only just come out), took ten many years to catch up. Just keep overestimating people's abilities.

Anyway, somewhere you were saying if only a small transistor count CPU for arrays. Try 4k transistors (plus memory) at atomic level. Can somebody tell me what volume that could fit in in 3D. I'll to get that design as close to 1000 transistors as practical and eliminate a few things. This is the sort of figures a reverse polish notation stack processing architecture can aim for. My own design target hosts a number of improvements to implement normal features on the small count. With such systems you get into the realm of implementing ten on very fast hardware. It is small enough to attempt a regular photonic implementation, it is so small you could implement either implementation in an optical fiber. Imagine, a whole network of fibre with end points to displays control and IO devices and no other processing needed. If course I just made that up, not what I'm really aiming for but doable, but not the best way to use it. I'm approaching different angles of optical, magnetic, fpga, state machine and model description instead of programs, a number of regular IC and architectural improvements, etc, and something better. If anybody (good) wants to start up a new processing technology company (is chip company), seriously, a hybrid high end platform could be made. The platform would use a mixture of what is practical in different paertrs of the circuit at he time. For starters,one part might be high speed silicon, enhanced by photonics off chip likely, the rest could be low energy silicon still services by the photonic part if needed, even magnetic processing array, and some of my improvements. Now, these technologies allow a number of options in combination, but leaving that behind, we can outperform the mundane commodity orientated silicon they are forcing on the workstation market, holding onto the consumer scale of production processes world rather than performance. Because they still have to shorter run customise the silicon in the commodity factory, they still incur a markup in costs. The aim to sell them the workstation for double, but with at least 10x the performance. The workstation itself largely costs the same, the rest of the price is made up of margin and the extra cost of the processing unit, allowing the processing unit to cost much more than double. If you sold it like normal chips the price of he third party workstation would likely skyrocket and reduce sales. Once new technology is developed internally, the optical and magnetic sections should expand with stepping through 100x to a thousand times speed increases, before getting onto the really big numbers these technologies offer, ten, the really big one using a new technique I've come up with, which is doable now, but is brand new research costly. The figures I'm trying to conservatively quote are based in the real potential of these types of technologies already calculated in the scientific and engineering realms, it is just a matter of how you get there. Now, you notice what I am doing, is taking advantage of the relative isolation of the workstation market (and whatever other fits, maybe com's sector) to generate funds for advanced parts and run numbers to start to push those new parts into lower markets. Tell me you smnart guys, wat sort if processing solution are you going to use when they have 50nm or less pixels (real quantum level digital cinema sensor technology figures) for recording holographic images (real camera technology under development) at nearly 800k squared in surround vr environment?? So, see the future cometh, and not just 8k definition at 96k holographic. So, we could potentially offer the processing card that gets the most resolution on the ramp up to 96k, which I expect will start at 24k and 48k (4k definition by what I have read.). Real old fashion development, not just minor changes. Sure everything is super expensive to R&D now, and setup manufacture, but there still is simpler things to develop I keep my eye on, and strategies to get enough profit margin to do something new.

Sorry about the typos, this new device's keyboard is difficult.

Thanks L for that TPU information, I want to look tat up.

[Nicholas Croft]

This design concept is pretty slick.

http://www.pascaleggert.de/macpro.html

You can cut off one of the 'cylinders', and lay it on its side: Closer (conceptually) to this:

https://www.dan-cases.com/

Cpu(s?) on top, gpu's underneath.

Apple will still go for most compact, even with (2) removable GPU's.

[Jarek Zabczynski]

Well Jarred still has love and hope for the Mac!

https://www.facebook.com/jarred.land...54583869195415

[Wayne Morellini]

You can cut off one of the 'cylinders', and lay it on its side: Closer (conceptually) to this:

https://www.dan-cases.com/

Cpu(s?) on top, gpu's underneath.

Apple will still go for most compact, even with (2) removable GPU's.

Put them side by side, maximise straight venting to the atmosphere?

[Jarek Zabczynski]

Jarred likes what he knows so far it seems...

Though some sources still suggest no pci slots or dual processors...

[Bob Gundu]

Jarred likes what he knows so far it seems...

Though some sources still suggest no pci slots or dual processors...

I was assuming this was in reference to the updated MacBook Pros coming in June.

[Eric Santiago]

Jarred likes what he knows so far it seems...

Though some sources still suggest no pci slots or dual processors...

For myself, I have no use for one.

Maybe a poll is in order?

[Jarek Zabczynski]

Ok, so with the iMac Pro revealed...what do we think is in store for the MacPro? You'd think it would need to be substantially more powerful than the iMac Pro to even make sense right?

I think my biggest questions are if we'll have a dual processor option or PCI slots, and if so, how many?

[Antony Newman]

I think it's a great question - partly because throwing lots of state-of-the-art technology isn't going to make system magically perform N times faster.

CPU cores - AMDAHLs law

+) (hypothetically) Lets say the iMac Pro had an Intel chip with 16 cores : And those cores were able to work absolutely flat out.
---> What would we expected if 32, 64 or 128 core CPU was used in its place (also able to work flat out)?

In the graph below we could expect the speed could jump from:
+) 16 cores : 'x9'
+) 32 cores : 'x13'
+) 64 cores : 'x15'
+) 128 cores : 'x17'

Or to put it another way, if there were no other bottlenecks, moving from a 16 core machine to a 128 core machine would likely only DOUBLE the speed of CPU code (ie 95% of the code was parallelizable) .




CPU Frequency

When an Intel CPU reduces its base frequency from 4 GHz to 2 GHz (eg due to 'overheating') -> the performance of each core halves.

Very (very) roughly this could mean - that for average code whose ability to be parallelised was in the 95% mark:

+) A 16 core CPU running at 4 GHz - would run the code about the same speed ast a 128 core machine running at 2 GHz.

AJ