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Apple Graphics on New Macs: Possibilities

  • Anthony Frausto-Robledo, AIA, NCARB, LEED AP

    • The latest set of rumors, and even changes to Apple’s refurbished Mac items, all continue to point to Apple introducing new Mac Pros next Monday at its 2013 Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Moreover, we’ve heard a nugget that a graphics project for the company has been in the works for over a year.

    Recapping the Rumors & Promises

    Before we go into details let’s recap the very latest pieces of information circulating as of late Friday on the Net. Nothing new has come over the Net since that day. We’ll enumerate here why we believe the Mac Pro is due for a spotlight at WWDC, in reverse chronological order:

    While there are other notable posts on Mac Pro rumors and possibilities–including this well-thoughtout post by Marco Arment of Instapaper–let’s just go back to this time last year when Tim Cook responded to a disappointed pro user named Franz. Here’s what Tim Cook wrote:

    “Franz,

    Thanks for the email. Our Pro customers like you are really important to us. Although we didn’t have a chance to talk about a new Mac Pro at today’s event, don’t worry as we’re working on something really great for next year. We also updated the current model today. 

    We’ve been continuing to update Final Cut Pro X with revolutionary pro features like industry leading multi-cam support and we just updated Aperture with incredible new image adjustment features. 

    We also announced a MacBook Pro with Retina Display that is a great solution for many pros. 

    Tim”

    So it on this total basis that we strongly believe Apple will be introducing new Mac Pros at WWDC 2013 on Monday. Inventory signals, a comment from a product manager, continuous buzz about an imminent release of a new model, new GPU cards and Tim’s promise a year ago.

    A Year Ago: The Story on the Graphics Side

    We find it more than curious that we heard a tiny bird tell us that somebody (cough cough AMD…cough cough Nvidia?) has been working on a graphics project for over a year. Could that major graphics project have something to do with why the Mac Pro line hasn’t been updated in a few years and further, why Tim was confident to tell Franz in his email that “something really great” is coming the following year?

    We think there is possibly some connection. If the special, long-duration graphics project makes it in time for WWDC there is no guarantee it has something to do with the Mac Pro. On the other hand, it might.

    Graphics Possibilities

    We agree with Marco Arment that if Apple is going to release a new designed Mac Pro that scaling it down and going external with Thunderbolt doesn’t make the most sense.

    While we believe Apple is capable of designing a tighter and smaller sized Mac Pro with all the same internal storage flexibility, many pro customers would be just fine with the current sized towers. What might matter more is a lower pricing entry point and more flexibility with GPUs.

    This brings up the slew of new GPU cards spotted or now available for the current shipping Mac Pros (and their older siblings). Here is what is interesting about these nex-gen cards: they all support PCI-Express 3.0 or have the capacity to do so. Yet the current Mac Pro design is designed around PCI-Express 2.1 Furthermore, the current motherboard design doesn’t match the PCI-Express flexibility that you can today find all over the PC industry. While the current Mac Pro contains (4x) four 16-lane PCI-Express slots only one can support an x16 card at full maximum speed. (refer to this Apple support document).

    We think Apple could do a lot better. And we hope to see that this coming Monday. (More details after the turn…)

    next page: PCI-Express 3.0 and Apple’s OpenCL

    PCI-Express 3.0 and Super Highway

    We don’t hear much about the Apple-invented OpenCL these days, but it’s out there and it still has much potential. What is lacking partly is a bus that is fast enough to saturate the massively parallel computational units which are today’s modern GPUs.

    At the moment highend workstations and desktops are still pretty much clustered around the use of PCI-Express 2.1 technology, which supports up to 8GB/sec data transfer rates. Yet GPU’s are internally capable of so much more, up to 264 GB/sec and even more with cache. This means that the data highway between CPU and GPU is a high latency experience. GPU’s may be phenomenal parallel executing devices but there is a massive bottleneck that must be overcome.

    This, by the way, is one area where Apple might innovate in the next Mac Pro, possibly combining CPU and GPU on the same die. The benefits could be felt right away if it did this. And even if it didn’t but simply built support for PCI-Express 3.0 this would bring the bandwidth speed up to 16 GB/sec between all PCI-Express 3.0 cards and the main CPU.

    The Competition and PCI-Express 3.0

    At the moment the majority of workstations and highend PCs are still clustered around PCI-Express 2.1 but you can find several workstations and highend PCs with PCI-Express 3.0 support, often in extensive fashion, like HP’s Z620 workstation, a machine which offers not one but two (2) PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots plus an array of lower lane PCI-Express 2 and 3 slots.

    An interesting tidbit is that the three new-ish GPUs cited below, while supportive of PCI-Express 3.0, are gaming cards. There is a great irony in this however. Games won’t benefit from faster PCI-Express implementations. As it stands today games don’t even really benefit when moving graphics cards from PCI-Express 2.1 x8 slots to x16 slots.

    So what would benefit from PCI-Express 3.0 x16 cards, the kind that have currently started to ship? The answer, is OpenCL and CUDA-based apps.

    Superhigh PCI-Express Cards and Parallel Compute

    There are currently three new or new-ish graphics cards for Mac that support PCI-Express 3.0, whether it is supported on the driver side yet or not. At this time it’s not clear to us what is being supported on the driver side. When Mac OS X 10.9 ships we may see updates. These GPU cards include:

    We may have some minor detail fact-checking to do but to the best of our knowledge only these currently or soon-to-be available game-oriented graphics cards for Mac support PCI-Express 3.0, and therefore could increase GPU-PCIe-CPU bandwidth from 8 GB/sec to 16 GB/sec. (Editor’s note: The Nvidia Quadra K5000 for Mac doesn’t list anything on PCI-Express 3.0.)

    The benefit would be immediately felt for professional applications that utilize either OpenCL or CUDA or both and are designed to benefit from maximum parallel code execution. One such application that fits our Mac 3D users is Octane Render, one of the more exciting GPU-based rendering engines out there. It is strictly CUDA-based at this time so it only supports Nvidia cards for the Mac. A new Mac Pro with onboard support for PCI-Express 3.0 would theoretically boost Octane Render performance if using one of the above supported cards.

    CPU vs GPU Rendering: Finding More Cores

    On the subject of accelerating rendering some in the industry, such as Luxology co-founder Brad Peebler, have questioned the GPU-rendering path and see it not as a “if-or” proposition but rather a “if-and” proposition. In our article Peepler says Luxology is always looking for parallelization increases and perhaps looking at the cloud is a better pathway to finding more rendering cores. Yet, he says Luxology is not anti-GPU rendering just sees it as adding cores to the CPU side.

    01 – Indigo Renderer utilizes OpenCL for near instant rendering results tapping the power of the GPU. (image courtesy Indigo Render, All Rights Reserved)

    Rendering is one area where you can saturate the GPU-PCIe-CPU pipes. But it is not the only area. Arandtech published a superb article that discussed the benefits and limitations of PCI Express 3.0 back in December of 2011, testing the PCI-Express 3.0 implementation of the AMD Radeon HD 7970 on encryption/decryption software.

    Apple’s OpenCL: Implementations

    Apple invented OpenCL and then helped turn it into an open standard. The technology taps the massive parallelization advantages of today’s modern graphics processing units (GPUs) and is a core technology in OS X. Apple has utilized OpenCL within some of its key pro apps like Final Cut Pro and there are dozens and dozens of applications that are built on OpenCL. Here are some key ones that apply to Mac OS X pro users:

    This is just a partial list of some key applications that many Mac pros utilize and  this is just OpenCL. There are also key plugins for Adobe’s products like Photoshop which are CUDA-based and also might benefit from a faster PCI-Express pipeline.

    Closing Thoughts

    Apple’s Mac Pros are old, plain and simple. This demands that they get some attention. Whether that comes in the form of a dramatic new design or simply a significant overhaul of the current tower design, the bottom line is we believe the timing is right at WWDC. This is a developers’ conference. And developers love the Mac Pros as well. The faster the Mac the faster they can compile in Xcode. Even Apple’s current Mac Pro product pages feature Xcode in their own performance benchmarks.

    Beyond just modernizing the PCI-Express slots Apple could also update the processors and importantly consider the possibility of adding a lower-end model that taps the power of Intel’s i7 class (Haswell) 4th generation processors. This brings an affordable scalable option to the Mac Pro and even PC workstation specialist Boxx has already done this with its model 4120.

    If some of the rumors hold true we can expect Apple to do the distance and off us a dramatically new redesigned tower or workstation class Mac. We may even see them redesign the system architecturally in such a significant way that the change the product name all together. One thing they may do is also introduce a new Cinema Retina Display at perhaps a 24-inch model size. Because developers utilize Mac Pros they need a monitor in which they can natively develop Retina Display capable apps. Though such a monitor would be expensive, it could be possible with a whole new set of kit tomorrow that gets the professional crowd really pumped and excited about producing software products for iOS and OS X.

    We shall see….

     

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