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

[jecastej]

The article is very good, early and clarifying, and great for my 3D interest. Thank you!

For Pro users, and specifically for Mac users figuring out what to expect also remember the most important feature for the next small cylinder is the dual FirePro cards and the new SSD from Apple. It looks like Apple gave up on the dual CPU Xeon part and is now focusing on dual GPU processing power instead.

To me it will all depend on Apple's effort to put those Pro GPUs to their top performance everywhere possible and also at what price point the Mac Pros will be.

However I am not expecting the next Mac Pro even a 4-core model to start selling under 3K as they will include those dual FirePro GPUs by default.

Being realistic I will need to see something amazing on the next Mac Pros, and I am sure the amazing part wont come from 8 or 12 core Xeons as they will be very pricy and included on the top end. But for sure I will be watching more pedestrian options at 4 or 6 cores. If the GPUs don't deliver something special I will continue updating with my Dual Mac-PC desktops one at a time.

 

[halogen]

savvy tech peple will not buy an expensive macpro because they know macpros dont worth the price and steve wanted to smash the pro division could he knew that pros cant be fooled easily unlike teens or old people that think like teens

 

[Umbongo]

Nice primer for the subject.

We'll be able to answer all of those questions soon enough. This was more of a thought experiment/preview based on architecture (rather than specific SKUs and full-on workstation configurations). A full review will need to wait until after Intel's launch. I'm expecting to have a dual-proc configuration prior to then, and will make an effort to get my hands on more processor pairs to chart out in more workstation-specific benchmarks.

I really hope you can put two E5-2643W V2s (3.5GHz 6-core) up against the E5-2697W V2, also two E5-2650 V2s (2.6GHz 8-core). A lot of enthusiasts are going to see that 12-core CPU and talk uninformed nonsense to those wanting more than 6 cores in their system. While a single CPU is a simpler choice, and certainly more worthwhile to those upgrading existing SB-E systems, a dual E5-2642W V2 system may be cheaper to build as the E5-2643s currently are $900 each and would only consume 0.1 kWH under load - even with the issues of power requirements, cooling, extra heatsink, more considered air flow. I can't imagine that such a system will be cheaper from a tier 1 vendor due to DP workstation premiums, but for system builders it shouldn't have a higher TCO. Other advantages of course being the benefits of double memory capacity and double the PCI-E lanes. Current 32GB DIMM pricing also means it is much cheaper to get more than 128GB RAM on a dual CPU system - although probably out of the realm of interest for most readers of this site.

Also in your article you say SB-E has been out nearly 2 years. It was a late March "launch" and they didn't ship until June 2012.

 

[harna]

Yesterday night I had to advise to clean (blow out) the dust on his you beaut i7 and Nvidia 550M combo because it was BSODing due to excessive heat.....After swearing head off at his $2500 machine, he understands that he needs to keep pristine or else....

so

hehehehhe! At 130 TDP it's no wonder Mac have made something that resembles a chimney or a smoke stack

 

[damianrobertjones]

"The New Mac Pro's CPU"

Is this also going to be available for HP/Dell/Etc servers or is this another Apple advert?

 

[Someone Somewhere]

It will be. It's just that Apple doesn't want you to think that way, and to have people subconsciously link them to 12-core chips.

In fact, you'll even be able to run two of them (or even four) in many servers/workstations.

 

[vmem]

I see one of the largest issues being the lack of an HDD, so far as we know. I get the use of solid-state storage, but even multiple 1TB SSDs won't provide all the space a creative professional might demand, assuming they are high-capacity SSDs. The Thunderbolt connections make it obvious Apple is assuming you'll connect to an external Thunderbolt storage setup, but that just makes the system even more confusing.

Companies have no reason to need this smaller form factor, and the lack of internal storage complicates matters for everybody, since they have to come up with a centralized storage mechanism fast enough for the professional workloads of their employees. And if I'm independant or work at home, I'm already cashstrapped. Saying I have to buy a large, external setup just to have high-capacity storage for a small system is like saying I have to take a diesel generator with my electric car to keep the batteries charged. It defeats the purpose.

This is what's so confusing about the device, because it seems aimed at independant professionals in private studios. I don't see why a company would need such a small computer. Large towers under the desk do fine. And like you said, the independant professional is used to large systems. If they made it a bit larger and fit a couple HDDs in there, it'd make more sense, but I think taking away HDDs is one step too far.

Apple is used to taking steps in odd directions, but they always end up making sense. I'm not sure that's the case with this one, and if it is, I think they've gone the wrong direction.

To me, in this day and age, a creative professional don't necessarily NEED an internal HDD. an external one, or uploading to a NAS or proper server, would be a fair alternative. this is even more true in scientific applications, I have two guys in my lab spitting out modeling data output sometimes exceeding 150MB/s. The data would always be cached in memory. if an SSD is fast enough, it can be cached in the SSD as well, and later transferred for long-term storage.

as for form-factor, I agree with 100%. and not just for companies. This kind of form-focused design is only useful for a professional's home-office, or that professional work area that is often shown off to potential customers and clients. Apple needs to realize that while their designs have been successful in the personal space, to break into business space and replace productivity oriented workstations, they absolutely CANNOT sacrifice function for aesthetics. sure, a pretty workstation is great, but no professional will buy it if it can't do what they need it to do, and there are very few managers out-there who will approve large amounts of funding for a non-up-gradable workstation.

In the end, I agree with your conclusion. this "dustbin" design makes no sense. it's an elegant design, sure. but it only gives us half the package any professional would want.

 

[vmem]

To all those who think the desktop will go extinct: the only thing dying in desktop market is 'budget desktops'. just to add to your point, recently released GPUs from Nvidia have also demonstrated that they're interested in stripping down workstation oriented parts to sell them at a lower price for the general consumer, AMD will probably move to do the same. will people be spending $400-500 on a desktop to surf the web and check facebook 5 years from now? probably not. but if you drop say $2k on a desktop build around Sept or Oct next year, you can get a nice Octacore-Haswell CPU, DDR4, Nvidia Maxwell GPU or AMD volcanic islands. and even leaving gaming aside, these high-end desktops will give you the kind of content creation and modeling capabilities no laptop or tablet can touch in probably 5+ years.

Basically, for those of us who love the desktop, either buy it now, or be prepared to spend about twice the amount you would expect for something nice. the lower end of the desktop market is vanishing rapidly. but the desktop form factor will never go away

 

[Someone Somewhere]

While they do not necessarily need an internal HDD, it's still somewhat faster than a NAS unless you have 10GbE. And external ones are a waste of desk space and power points, and cause cabling mess.

The workstation GPUs are already much the same as the desktop GPUs - AMD's top-end card, the W9000, is based on Tahiti. nVidia's GPUs are typically based on the same GPU too, but the 680 kind of broke with tradition, with a GK104, not the GK100.

 

[razor512]

How well does it overclock?

 

[jimmyz41]

Why are the graphic charts overlaying most of the text on all of the benchmark pages? Is this a layout issue or is it a page rendering issue? Can you fix it?

 

[sanilmahambre]

So its a ivy

 

[guewxkto]

How well does it overclock?

It doesn't overclock due to locked multis. At best you can adjust BCLK, and those increments have shown to be unstable at anything over 3%.

This has been the case since Westmere-EP, and will continue to the case for the prospective future in Xeons.

Which is one of the reasons why I continue to use dual X5680s, OC'd stable to 4GHz @ 200 MHz BLCK. Great performance at a low cost.

 

[Duckhunt]

as usual the folk running intel have become lazy and stupid and the developments in the desktop have gone down the hole. They just add some extra cache and extra threads and then act like they did something.Wow. ( at the stupidity).

Instead of pushing out code or getting the rest of the industry to use more threading applications and develop it to make it more stable and useable. Nothing.

Actually, Intel has done quite a bit toward pushing the industry into multi-threaded applications. Intel Threaded Building Blocks is one such example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Threading_Building_Blocks
or even their Automatic threading built into their compilers (or did you not know Intel releases compilers?):
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/automatic-parallelization-with-intel-compilers

Either way, your comment is uninformed and ignorantly misleading. Except the incremental upgrades to the IPC. It's not nothing, but it's not a P4 -> Core2 jump either.

Wow. You can cut and paste from the advertising rubbish they print out. Sorry but making examples and putting out threaded real world apps is a big difference. You have no idea. Go and read up the rubbish they make up and pretend there is something happening. The hard work is making threaded stuff work and showing that is is possible to make the applications run things in parallel. Its a big difference between the reality of the situation.
Here is the first example for you. The idiot pcs usually hang and sit around waiting for the internet to work. These are pcs with many threads. Why can't one thread be used for the internet and the other thread for rest of the pc. Why? It is because Intel is a failure and so is anyone who can't understand how easy it would be for it to be done. if the hardware was designed to do that. BUt it is not. Its not done because they are incompetent morons or stupid idiots on the hardware side. Anyone who does not believe it is either on there payroll or ignorant. There is no grey area here. This is just one example of the failure. The multi core processors are not really multicore. They are just B.S. Else these types of things would be normal. When you cr+ppy expensive pc hangs. Its because the processes are in sequential order. When you have to wait for things to load up and the screen is white or something else. Its the sequential order of loading aps. GET IT? Somewhere in the hardware. I can't be bothered to work out where everything is running sequential. Maybe its on the bus access to the card. There is your problem. The drivers written by intel are just written for the threaded aps to run and they just pay lip service for stuff that is not on super computers. These problems should of been solved years ago. They are not. WHy? I told you why. If the pc loaded 3 different apps on different cores. It means that the white screen or other blank screens would not effect your ability to run other apps. or access the hard drive. Whatever the problem is. Its hardware/device drive. Its not the programmers. Faster load times. blah blah. These intel F+cks over paid lousy F+kers have done squat. I don't care what they write. LOAD UP THE APPs in separate cores. THAT SIMPLE> geez. Access to the other parts is sequential. You KNow squat.

 

[Duckhunt]

Intel can't really do much about forcing the industry to use more threaded apps.

Not their job to write code, other than drivers. They do make x86 Android though, because the drivers are pretty much hardcoded.

Do agree on the 1366x768 though. It's the same number of lines as XGA, just with a few pixels on the side. Maybe Intel should have forced a PPI measurement on Ultrabooks - that might have helped.

Whatever. Lets understand it. We have 10 million elite programmers. We have Intel. Where do you think the problem lies with threaded apps? The 10 million idiot programers who are obviously fools or One company that has a monopoly who has crap hardware. Answer that?

 

[CommentariesAnd More]

I wonder what other CPUs will Apple offer for the Mac Pro as they offer the choice to select CPU right ? This one ought to be the best one. Also realised my previous comment was a bit above dumb

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Intel can't really do much about forcing the industry to use more threaded apps.

Not their job to write code, other than drivers. They do make x86 Android though, because the drivers are pretty much hardcoded.

Do agree on the 1366x768 though. It's the same number of lines as XGA, just with a few pixels on the side. Maybe Intel should have forced a PPI measurement on Ultrabooks - that might have helped.

Whatever. Lets understand it. We have 10 million elite programmers. We have Intel. Where do you think the problem lies with threaded apps? The 10 million idiot programers who are obviously fools or One company that has a monopoly who has crap hardware. Answer that?

'Elite'? Think that's a bit of an overstatement.

The only ones who I would consider that actually should spend lots of time optimizing is when there is a ridiculous amount of processing going on. Wait, I just realized, Photoshop, Acrobat, HandBrake, etc. all are multithreaded.

For most programs, the maxim that programmer time is worth more than processor time is correct. Do you want Notepad to be rewritten to use all available threads?

The only thing intel can do is release things that make it easier to build your apps multithreaded - think, would you bother to include hashing in a website authentication system if you had to write your own implementation of SHA256?

 

[shirley Santa Rosa]

the comments to this article REEK of the misunderstanding, either intentional (hoping/wishing/delusional dreaming) or unintentional (uninformed), regarding SERVER vs CONSUMER hardware.


Server/mainframe CPUs are TERRIBLE for video games. They are TERRIBLE for running just a few productivity programs like Word, Excel, several tens of browser tabs, a multimedia playback program, etc.


Secondly:

video games still lag horrendously behind software. No video game currently in existence can operate on all 8 threads of a 4 core hyperthreading Intel CPU. No video game currently in existence can operate on all 8 or 12 cores of an AMD or Xeon CPU.


This is because the programmers who write the software for the video game have not developed their software to utilize the super high parallel processing capabilities that have become inherent in semiconductor design (especially multiple distinct cores per die, cheating moore's law)


Video games are not the only class of software that lags considerably behind the current industry-wide hardware standards....

Even the most sophisticated software packages that are explicitly designed to run on 10,000+ core mainframes at LANL or Livermore or any research university, developed in house by a bunch of graduate students and post docs in materials science or ECE or something....

even that software never ever ever uses more than 66-75% of the total processor capacity.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Server/mainframe CPUs are TERRIBLE for video games. They are TERRIBLE for running just a few productivity programs like Word, Excel, several tens of browser tabs, a multimedia playback program, etc.

Mainframe, yes. But mainframes are basically dead now.

Server chips are just desktop chips with ECC enabled, and in some cases a change in the core/clock/TDP balance. An a name and price change.

That doesn't make much difference, as both are more than fast enough.

EDIT: Webkit-based browsers would run beautifully on many-core CPUs; it's exceedingly well threaded.

 

[AndrewJacksonZA]

Server chips are just desktop chips with ECC enabled, and in some cases a change in the core/clock/TDP balance. An a name and price change.

You forgot about Virtualization Technology that's typically disabled on almost all of Intel's desktop chips.
http://www.cpu-world.com/Glossary/V/Virtualization_Technology.html

 

[Someone Somewhere]

List of all 22nm Intel chips with VT-d and VT-x enabled: http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced/?s=t&LithographyValueMin=22&LithographyValueMax=22&VTX=true&VTD=true

That looks like pretty much all their desktop chips. Exceptions are i3s, Pentiums, and Celerons. Some mobile chips too.

 

[AndrewJacksonZA]

Thanks for the link.

 

[PreferLinux]

List of all 22nm Intel chips with VT-d and VT-x enabled: http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced/?s=t&LithographyValueMin=22&LithographyValueMax=22&VTX=true&VTD=true

That looks like pretty much all their desktop chips. Exceptions are i3s, Pentiums, and Celerons. Some mobile chips too.

And you can add in the rest of them as well, if you take off VD-d – and a huge percentage of virtualisation doesn't need it, especially in a desktop rather than server/workstation environment.