Who wants to kill IoT devices?
The “things” are being hunted down and killed, but why?
IN AN INTERVIEW with Apple blog Daring Fireball, executives admitted the company had made mistakes with its previous configuration, which meant it couldn’t refresh the machines to meet the changing requirements of pro customers. The slim, quiet design meant it couldn’t be upgraded to more powerful processors without causing the cylindrical system to overheat.
“I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner,” said Apple’s senior vice president, Craig Federighi. “We designed a system with the kind of GPUs that… we thought we needed, and that we thought we could well serve with a two-GPU architecture.
“That was the thermal limit we needed, or the thermal capacity we needed. But workloads didn’t materialise to fit that as broadly as we hoped. Being able to put larger single GPUs required a different system architecture and more thermal capacity… so it became fairly difficult to adjust.”
The unusually early announcement suggested the company wanted to dispel the growing fear that Apple had abandoned pro users.
The company said it had gone back to the drawing board for a new Mac Pro, but didn’t specify an exact launch date, save to say that it wouldn’t be ready this year. “We want to architect it so that we can keep it fresh with regular improvements, and we’re committed to making it our highestend, high-throughput desktop system,” Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller claimed.
In the interim, Apple said it would improve performance of its lower-end £2,999 Mac Pro to match its current top-spec machine, while the £3,899 model would get faster processors.
The £2,999 model will move from four Xeon CPU cores to six, and from dual AMD G300 GPUs to dual G500 GPUs. The £3,899 model goes from six CPU cores to eight, and from dual D500 GPUs to dual D700 GPUs.