
Intel's 12-Core Xeon With 30 MB Of L3: The New Mac Pro's CPU? - yapcguy
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ivy-bridge-ep-xeon-e5-2697-v2-benchmarks,3585.html
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gilgoomesh
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.

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reitzensteinm
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/Mac_Pro#Specifications)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haswell_(microarchitecture)#Con...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haswell_\(microarchitecture\)#Confirmed_new_features)

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

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yapcguy
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.

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

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loser777
Consider a current generation Mac Pro matched spec-for-spec with BYOC prices.
Which costs more for YOU (not Apple)?

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jacques_chester
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.

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yuhong
What would stop vendors creating such programs for Mac too?

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jacques_chester
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_.

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rednukleus
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.

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jacques_chester
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.)

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throwaway1979
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.

~~~
jacques_chester
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.

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

