There’s a new regulation for electronic equipment on European Union, and Apple claimed that’s the reason it stop selling Mac Pro on EU. There’s a problem on Mac Pro with the new regulation, fan needs a protection, and electric connectors needs to be revised, and seems it’s too much for an Apple computer sold at as a base price of $3500 in European Union (and up to $15000+). Unprecedented requirement, that Apple could not cope, it’s too expensive or too hard to put a protection on a fan or adds electric safety. Too much burden on such a low-cost equipement! The funny thing and the lie of Apple, is that the regulation will only apply to new equipment, not on already certified equipment, such as the actuel Mac Pro (you know the 2010 computer that have seen it’s cpu upgraded on 2012 with 2011 CPU! lol). Apple is just pulling the plug on Mac Pro, so you’d better not rely on another Mac Pro iteration, maybe on a quad-core hyper-threading boosted Mac Mini, but nothing more!
Macintosh
WWDC 2012 – Mac Pro is agonizing!
Some will speak of a refresh, I am speaking of a slow agony, without any new signifiant features, using years-old components: Design still unchanged, that date back to the PowerMac G5! No Thunderbolt. No Thunderbolt, not even as an upgrade PCI-Express 4x cards. No USB 3.0, but contrary to Thunderbolt you could add one or two PCI-Express USB3.0 cards, if you wish. No Serial ATA 6Gb/s, they are here since years on the MacBook Pro and iMac, so you will need an expansion card just to be able to use a modern SSD at full speed! Even Apple own SSD is only SATA 3Gb/s, while 2X more expensive than current market price for SATA 6Gb/s SSD! 2009 Quad-core CPU on the $2499 model. Quad-Core CPU? a CPU from 2009? $2499? 2010 2 x Six-Core CPU on the $3799 model. 12-Core only, when Intel offers 16-core on the actual CPU line? a CPU that is more than 2 years old? $3799? Radeon HD5770, a 2009 mid-level GPU on the $2499 model, and the $3790 model too! Notice that Radeon HD5770 and HD5870 use the VLIW-5 AMD Architecture, that is 2 generations older than actual AMD GCN architecture (easily 2X to 4X
Fake MacBook Pro label
This is clearly a fake, there won’t be a MacBook Pro with 2.6Ghz Core i7 with 8MB cache, 4 USB 3.0 ports and 16GB RAM! Apple will put 1 or 2 USB 3.0 ports (maybe 3, but I guess they will have 1 USB 3.0 port and 1 or 2 USB 2.0 ports), not 4. Apple won’t put 16GB RAM in standard configuration, they may stick with 4GB for this generation and go to 8GB in the next iteration (probably), not 16GB. There’s no Intel reference corresponding to this CPU, but Intel have developped new CPU or created specific reference for Apple (ie: the first MacBook Air!), so this CPU may exist in our future MacBook Pro. There are some doubt about the FireWire 800 port too. I would like to have this CPU, with 8GB base RAM and 3 USB 3.0 port, but I think that we will have to stick with 4GB base RAM, have 1 USB 3.0 port (to protecte Thunderbolt market share) and USB 2.0 ports…
New hardware ready for new MacBook Pro
This week, Intel presented the new Ivy Bridge CPU, including quad-core mobile versions, and AMD also presented it’s midle-end to high-end Radeon HD 7000 Mobile GPU: everything is available to create a new bunch of MacBook Pro, that consume less (on the CPU side) and is really much more powerful (on GPU side). Ivy Bridge CPU have been benchmarked and as expected, they are not really faster clock-for-clock than Sandy Bridge (say 5% average), but draw less power (up to 30% less!). They are perfect CPU for slimmer MacBook Pro thay may look like big MacBook Air, with integrated SSD, no more Duper-Drive (not a typo!), no more room for 2.5″ hard-drive, lightweight and stylish laptops. Radeon HD7700M & HD7800M are the perfect fit for slimmer MacBook Pro that will include a discrete GPU, drawing much power only when necessary (3D Games, OpenCL Pro applications or virtualizer such as VMware). With the ZeroCore™ technology, these GPU draw 0W when not used so autonomy will be real great on office/internet work, aqnd their performance-level is impressive, the Radeon HD7850M being as fast as desktop HD7750, and thus as fast on OpenCL application than a nVidia GeForce GTX680 desktop!!! Hope the new
No more Mac Pro
Now there’s few possibilities that Apple may upgrade it’s Mac Pro, Intel unveiled the new Sandy-Bridge based Xeon line of professional CPU, and no new Mac Pro was announced or showed. Why new Mac Pro were difficult to create You could think that putting a new Xeon and Intel chipset will be enough to create new Mac Pro, but that’s all but true, and the worse thing is that it was Apple choice: Thunderbolt! Thunderbolt mix audio+video output and PCI-Express 4x tunneling. If you want to have a Thunderbolt-enabled Mac Pro (as all other Mac!), you need to be able to send audio, video and PCI-Express bus to a Thunderbolt connector. On a Mac Pro, you expect to have 3 Thunderbolt output at least. The problem is that PCI-Express graphic card use all 16-lane available, and there’s no way to send them the 12 lane necessary to have 3 Thunderbolt port on the card. If you just decide to keep only 4 lane for the graphic card, you will seriously limit it’s performance-level, and anyway you will need a totally new design for few graphic card sold. And anyway there’s no Intel chipset that support to split PCI-Exress x16 into