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iMac Pro 2

Apple appear a bevy of new products, software, and hardware refreshes at WWDC 2017; CEO Tim Cook wasn't kidding when he chosen it the largest WWDC the visitor has e'er produced. For years, Apple's approach to traditional computing hardware could charitably be called erratic. For some users — specifically, those who needed AIO devices with good overall specs, but less GPU horsepower — iMacs have been strong choices for years. If, on the other mitt, you wanted a powerful GPU to match your CPU, Apple'due south options have been much more limited. Its Mac Pro was the merely device to offer a plausible graphics solution, and that platform's update cycle has lagged far behind other hardware.

The newly announced iMac Pro, which nosotros first covered yesterday, is a bid by Apple to change that standing, and an attempt to redefine the kind of performance consumers tin expect from an AIO in general. The space-greyness (that's the only color) iMac Pro will start at $five,000 with a 27-inch 5K panel, up to eighteen Xeon cores, and up to 22 TFLOPS of graphics compute delivered courtesy of AMD'southward Vega GPU. That terminal figure refers to the GPU'southward one-half-precision 8-bit performance; single-precision performance will target 11 TFLOPS. This implies either a cut-down Vega configuration or a lower clock rate, since the Vega Frontier Edition AMD appear in May will target 13 TFLOPS of single-precision performance.

If nosotros had to bet between the 2, we'd bet on a lower clock rate. Squeezing a high-finish GPU into an AIO is no mean feat, and the peculiarities of silicon scaling means that a wider GPU with a slower clock rate is typically more power efficient than a narrower GPU with a college clock rate, all else beingness equal. With a base price at $5,000, you tin bet the configuration will not exist the xviii-core selection with a Vega GPU, simply nosotros don't know anything yet about how pricing will scale, or what exact GPUs and CPUs volition be available at the lower price points.

iMac Cooling

The iMac's improved cooling capabilities.

While we don't know which Xeon chips the new iMac Pro volition use, Intel's current lineup of Broadwell-based E5 Xeons should provide a reasonable comparison point. Right now, the everyman-TDP xviii-core CPU that Intel offers is the E5-2695 v4. That'southward an eighteen-core chip with a ii.1GHz base clock, three.3GHz Turbo, and 120W TDP. We already know that Intel's upcoming Skylake chips drastically reduce L3 cache in favor of adding more L2, so information technology's possible that TDP sectionalization will change besides. Simply a 120W chip in an all-in-one is already a tall order, before you add together a loftier-powered GPU. And then again, AMD may exist able to evangelize a fairly power-sipping Vega — the Radeon Nano leveraged lower clocks and HBM, and still holds the record as the most power-efficient chip AMD has always built.

It's unfortunate AMD wasn't able to lock down both halves of the iMac Pro design. Only given how long product cycles are, Naples likely wasn't set up when the iMac Pro was under evaluation. Apple is claiming that its new thermal design volition improve cooling by up to lxxx percent, but that's the kind of promise nosotros desire to meet independently evaluated. Increasing cooling capability is relatively easy; increasing it without simultaneously increasing noise and thickness is the tricky part.

iMac Pro

The iMac Pro will also feature up to 4TB of SSDs, 128GB of ECC RAM, 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports, and 10GbE ethernet support. In many ways, it seems as if Apple wants to evangelize the kind of workstation performance the Mac Pro has lacked every bit it languished, sans updates, for the by four years. One wonders what kind of system they'll ultimately unveil as a replacement for the electric current Mac Pro, if the new iMac Pro packs this kind of firepower.

The only nitpick we have is the organisation's availability. You won't be able to buy a new iMac Pro until Dec — a date that's going to raise questions about what, exactly, is keeping Apple from introducing new hardware more quickly. Is this a sign of continuing Vega problems? Only if it is — and that'southward far from proven — why would Apple tree have stuck with Vega in the first place, as opposed to using a different AMD solution or an Nvidia GPU? It's entirely possible that other aspects of the system blueprint are holding back its launch. We'll expect to see what kind of availability we see from Vega before drawing further conclusions.