Macworld 2008 Predictions

Would they put Blu Ray on a static desktop that is geared toward professionals? It may show up on the MBP or mini first.

 

Blu-ray writers would go into pro machines first.

Its' a hard call when it comes to the blu-ray drives that play the movies (yeah, the writers can't play movies from what I understand) and I dunno if they can burn dvds. But still, they would come into the Pro line before anything else.

Really, they're going to a top dollar upgrade.

 

To me, that's a good reason to include it on the Mac Pro. It's geared towards proffesionals and powerusers. That include video content creators, who would use Bleray, and people who just need exorbant amounts of opitcal disc storage.

 

Big problem with Blu-ray right now though, you can't burn a movie onto a BRD and play it in a Blu-ray player. :-/

HD-DVD will let you burn HD content onto a normal DVD and play it in an HD-DVD player. Just something I find odd about the whole thing. I've seen a lot of people who work with making videos, and want to move to hd, complain they can't do that withe Blu-ray.

 

well that's... Crap. Very crap. (from blurays side. I'm not saying that people are lying)

 

yup. hurray for DRM lockdown....

 

Hurray for HD DVD. Long live the Autobots.

 

Hmm, I wonder if paramount will cave in as well. If they do...

 

SLI/Crossfire support really has nothing to do with overclocking. (In any case the Stoakley server chipset is used in the ultra-high end Skulltrail desktop platform too with extremely low latency FB-DIMMs so overclocking a server board isn't that much of a deal). And it's not like any type of complex routing is involved either. The northbridge used in the Stoakley platform has 36 PCIe 2.0 lanes that are organized into 9 x4 lanes. These x4 lanes can in turn be configurable as 8 separate x4 slots, 4 separate x8 slots or 2 separate x16 slots depending on the motherboard layout. The last x4 lane is used to connect to the southbridge along with another proprietary Intel link. The chipset already supports these various lane combinations so that there is no need to split a x16 lane, which is one of the limitations on the desktop 965 and P35 chipsets. In fact, Apple has already layed out the slots so that slots 1 and 2 are electrically PCIe x16 lanes and slots 3 and 4 are electrically PCIe x4 lanes.

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/01/09/first-exclusive-inqpressions

The above is a Stoakley server motherboard with dual PCIe 2.0 x16 slots exactly like what the Mac Pro has and it's Crossfire enabled. As I said it's just a matter of whether they get a license for Crossfire as ASUS has done.

And from their tests, the entire platform is fairly overclockable, with them using dual 3.2GHz 1600MHz FSB X5482 that Apple uses overclocked to dual 3.6GHz 1800MHz FSBs with the FB-DIMMs running at 900MHz with 5-5-5 timings with a 0.1V bumped in CPU voltage and a 0.05V bump in northbridge voltage.

 

No, I didn't say the northbridge had anything to do with SLI. I meant that these boards are designed to be stable and fast, not for overclocking, irregardless of how well they do it, they aren't built for that in mind.

But it looks like they're using PCIe instead of PCIx now (which I thought they were doing on the previous Mac Pro).

I know there was a discussion about this on here a while back (probably over a year) and we had some info on that line of Mac Pros that had to do with why we wouldn't see Crossfire/SLI on there. Guess they've kinda taken care of that then

Good to know... now if Apple will only give us a consumer line system!