5000 Dollar Apple arcade machine - E-sport oriented Mac rumored for 2020 release

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Kaloob said:

This is a gaming PC. $5K puts it out of reach to many people, not to mention the bang for the buck probably won't be very good.

They did mention up to 5k tbf 

[Bombastinator]

3 hours ago, Kaloob said:

This is a gaming PC. $5K puts it out of reach to many people, not to mention the bang for the buck probably won't be very good.

Probably.  I suspect the theory would be that it would have the same look and logos as a a machine they could afford

[Belgarathian]

A mATX sized Mac Pro with consumer chipsets starting with an i5 and RX 5600 wouldn't be terrible... Configurable up to an i9-10900K and RX 5700XT (or maybe big Navi?)

 

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, Belgarathian said:

A mini Mac Pro with consumer chipsets starting with an i5 and RX 5600 wouldn't be terrible... Configurable up to an i9-10900K and RX 5700XT

I’ve got a wish dream for a gaming capable mini, but some did serve as is going to claim that it will “cannibalizes sales of our other products” which really means “we need to make the product worse because making good hardware isn’t what we want to do”

 

Anyway, the problem the Mac mini has is that while it can run an external GPU in a limited way, it’s still too limited.  A couple of pcie 3 m.2 nvme ports or just one pcie 4 pointing OUT would be enough.  Make an external GPU enclosure with a 200-250w PSU in it and BOOM. Games machine.  The thing would rock.  I’d pick up a Mac mini and an external box and fill it with a gaming card in a hot second.

[hishnash]

7 hours ago, Kaloob said:

This is a gaming PC. $5K puts it out of reach to many people, not to mention the bang for the buck probably won't be very good.

$5k was the top end price tag, assuming like other machines apple offers a 8TB ssd and maybe 124GB of ram option then thats the $5K option.

That is not an option for gamers, most likely it would be priced the same as the current iMac so starting $2.5k for a machine that includes a very nice high refresh rate 5k display would be a good deal. (i would suspect that is a 500GB internal SSD machine with 16GB or ram) the other $2.5k in price can easly be made up for with the options for large internal SSD.

[hishnash]

11 hours ago, Kaloob said:

Wouldn't this be a tower? 

$2.5K is more reasonable, though it still puts it out of reach for a lot of people.

I think apple would do an All in One, that will let them provide a much better screen feature set. So would include a 5k HDR highframerate display

[hishnash]

18 minutes ago, Kaloob said:

I don't think gamers would appreciate an AIO.

I think that will depend on the gamers.

5k 240hz low latency HDR is well beyond the external display cable tec but not beyond what is possible in an AIO. the 5k iMac was 5K well before there were even 4k displays on the market due to being an AIO that could have a supper wide bandwidth connection to a custom timing solution. 

AIO will give apple a platform to lead with their strengths:

* displays
* audio
* extremely low latency wireless communication. 

for some gamers a really nice screen and a really really good audio system (with the $$ power apple can use to get game developers to make use of it) will be more important than a glass RGB case. After all the screen, speakers and input devices are what you use see, feel and hear when playing the game. The glass case is what you post on forums but not really part of the game play.

[Bombastinator]

29 minutes ago, Kaloob said:

I don't think gamers would appreciate an AIO.

It’s an AIO or a laptop. Or most likely nothing at all, of course. I personally would most like to see 8 open pcie lanes on a Mac mini.  They can even sell a proprietary eGPU box for it at a nice markup as long as it’s large enough to hold a gaming card.  I could even see this happening.  One of the deals with the AMD cards is the lines on what makes a pro card and what makes a gaming card aren’t blurred like they are with Nvidia.  If the new Navi21 is a big 5700xt like people seek to be implying and not a vega type card they could build one into an iMac box and boom. Gaming machine that wouldn’t interfere with their arts business.

 

i could withstand an AIO, but mostly because my good monitor happens to have been rendered useless.  They want to get maximum bang for their buck though and they sell a lot more laptops than they do AIOs so they’d probably go for the bigger market. AIOs were the things they historically made marketshare with so I dunno.  I’ve bought Mac laptops in the past.  I got into macs just as they were leaving AIOs behind and left before they picked em back up again.  I’ve owned several Mac desktops and several Mac laptops but never a Mac AIO

[hishnash]

3 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

They can even sell a proprietary eGPU box for it at a nice markup as long as it’s large enough to hold a gaming card. 

how would you expect them to make it proprietary? what would it have compared to a normal Thunderbolt (3/4) one.

[Bombastinator]

2 minutes ago, hishnash said:

how would you expect them to make it proprietary? what would it have compared to a normal Thunderbolt (3/4) one.

Twice the pcie lanes.  The problem atm is the eGPU boxes are connection throttled.  You can put a lower end gaming card in them atm but not a big one. (Well you can, but it’s dumb) There isn’t enough bandwidth

[hishnash]

2 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Twice the pcie lanes.  The problem atm is the eGPU boxes are connection throttled.  You can put a lower end gaming card in them atm but not a big one. (Well you can, but it’s dumb) There isn’t enough bandwidth

Given how TB3 works (on the current intel systems) you would not get much/any benefit by using 2 thunderbolt cables since all the TB3 goes through the chipset and not directly to the CPU.

With the next intel chips i believe it will be direct to the cpu. TB4 (mentioned just now on stage by intel) sounds like PCIe-v4 over TB3 so that will give better bandwidth with a single cable no?

 

[Bombastinator]

10 minutes ago, hishnash said:

Given how TB3 works (on the current intel systems) you would not get much/any benefit by using 2 thunderbolt cables since all the TB3 goes through the chipset and not directly to the CPU.

With the next intel chips i believe it will be direct to the cpu. TB4 (mentioned just now on stage by intel) sounds like PCIe-v4 over TB3 so that will give better bandwidth with a single cable no?

 

I don’t know.  I’ve never even heard of an eGPU that uses multiple tb3 cables to begin with.  I don’t know how that would even work.  Did you quote the wrong poster?

[Blademaster91]

Gamers wouldn't want an AIO, a 4k or 5k high refresh rate display would put it out of the price range of most gamers. The people playing e-sports titles at high FPS are using 1080p or 1440p displays, and anyone competitive are more likely using a headset, also a wired connection over wireless because the latency is still lower than wifi.

[hishnash]

8 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

Gamers wouldn't want an AIO, a 4k or 5k high refresh rate display would put it out of the price range of most gamers. The people playing e-sports titles at high FPS are using 1080p or 1440p displays, and anyone competitive are more likely using a headset, also a wired connection over wireless because the latency is still lower than wifi.

iMac 5k starts at $2.5K (and has been out for a long time) so a high refresh version would start at that price as well. 

[saltycaramel]

It’s already been said but to reiterate

 

THUNDERBOLT 4 CONFIRMED TO EXIST

WHOO-HOOOO

 

so now (or better next year) we have external pcie4.0 4X or roughly pcie3.0 8x or roughly pcie2.0 16x

 

80Gbps 

enough for pcie+displayport_upstream over a single cable 

using DSC, displayport 8K 60Hz is 32Gbps

that would still leave 48Gbps on the table just for the eGPU pcie connection

even more if we talk 5K 60Hz or 4K 60Hz

[Bombastinator]

4 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

It’s already been said but to reiterate

 

THUNDERBOLT 4 CONFIRMED TO EXIST

WHOO-HOOOO

 

so now (or better next year) we have external pcie4.0 4X or roughly pcie3.0 8x or roughly pcie2.0 16x

 

80Gbps 

enough for pcie+displayport_upstream over a single cable 

using DSC, displayport 8K 60Hz is 32Gbps

that would still leave 48Gbps on the table just for the eGPU pcie connection

even more if we talk 5K 60Hz or 4K 60Hz

It was?  I must have missed it.  6 page thread.  I appreciate you pointing it out though.   

Googling thunderbolt 4 it’s apparently part of tiger lake, so not around yet for consumers but an upcoming Mac might have it.  That’s what was meant by TB3/4 then.  Part of the confusion is usb4 is basically going to be thunderbolt 3

[Dwarfs Lord]

One thing I miss being talked about is if this is actually an E-Sports specific computer.

If it is, the price doesnt really matter.

One thing that does matter however is that Apple has a lot of experience (from the mobile market) of how to prioritize screen draws.

Having a better integration of the screen draw into the OS could inprove performance by a few ms... Something that is essential to E-Sports venues.

Another thing is that windows really does add a lot of overhead to everything, and Apple might be able to have a  batter chance of not using up resources during matches.

[Bombastinator]

23 minutes ago, Dwarfs Lord said:

One thing I miss being talked about is if this is actually an E-Sports specific computer.

If it is, the price doesnt really matter.

One thing that does matter however is that Apple has a lot of experience (from the mobile market) of how to prioritize screen draws.

Having a better integration of the screen draw into the OS could inprove performance by a few ms... Something that is essential to E-Sports venues.

Another thing is that windows really does add a lot of overhead to everything, and Apple might be able to have a  batter chance of not using up resources during matches.

I am in agreement that the price likely doesn’t matter because the people on television using it likely won’t be paying for them. 

[Kisai]

20 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

It’s already been said but to reiterate

 

THUNDERBOLT 4 CONFIRMED TO EXIST

 

You do realize that Thunderbolt is now USB right?

https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/2019-09/USB-IF_USB4 spec announcement_FINAL.pdf

 

All Thunderbolt "is", is sending PCIe lanes over the USB bus in practice. So PCIe4 means TB4. No PCIe4, no TB4. In theory you can daisy-chain TB devices, but I've yet to see an example in the wild of this. All the machines at my office have TB, but not a single one of them have TB accessories. Yet I update the TB firmware on the older devices anyway on the high end laptops in the event someone uses it on a TB dock.

 

However, unless the TB protocol is supported by the USB port, some device manufacturers can, and will, be cheakskates and not incorporate this, which means that not all USB-C TB devices work on all USB-C computers. There is a very explicit example of this issue on the Dell service notes. Likewise existing Dell desktops with USB-C ports that do contain a TB controller, do not support displayport over them, with or without a dedicated graphics GPU.

 

So right now only SOME laptops and all Apple desktops/laptops with USB-C let you actually use TB, DP and USB over USB-C. 

 

The nice thing about Apple, is that they are willing to make the risk (of alienating customers) ripping the bandaid off when an legacy thing is done and should have been done 5 years earlier. The speed of progress is slow and steady, and competition with a proprietary solution sometimes helps light a fire under the implementation that is eventually adopted. However this also means that you pay a hefty price if you're the first adopter of a new spec.

 

Anyway, a 5K gaming Mac? It's possible, but I think we're being too generous at $5000. Existing GPU's still suck at doing 4K. There's also the entire "build it and they will come" problem that Apple has by dragging it's feet for 20 years on gaming support. Many developers would love to just straight dump Win10 for something else, but nothing else exists, and I'm sure Microsoft is just itching to drop 32-bit support itself since it's the last hold-out.

[bcredeur97]

id laugh if they launched a mac that runs windows out of the box

[Bombastinator]

45 minutes ago, Kisai said:

You do realize that Thunderbolt is now USB right?

https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/2019-09/USB-IF_USB4 spec announcement_FINAL.pdf

 

All Thunderbolt "is", is sending PCIe lanes over the USB bus in practice. So PCIe4 means TB4. No PCIe4, no TB4. In theory you can daisy-chain TB devices, but I've yet to see an example in the wild of this. All the machines at my office have TB, but not a single one of them have TB accessories. Yet I update the TB firmware on the older devices anyway on the high end laptops in the event someone uses it on a TB dock.

 

However, unless the TB protocol is supported by the USB port, some device manufacturers can, and will, be cheakskates and not incorporate this, which means that not all USB-C TB devices work on all USB-C computers. There is a very explicit example of this issue on the Dell service notes. Likewise existing Dell desktops with USB-C ports that do contain a TB controller, do not support displayport over them, with or without a dedicated graphics GPU.

 

So right now only SOME laptops and all Apple desktops/laptops with USB-C let you actually use TB, DP and USB over USB-C. 

 

The nice thing about Apple, is that they are willing to make the risk (of alienating customers) ripping the bandaid off when an legacy thing is done and should have been done 5 years earlier. The speed of progress is slow and steady, and competition with a proprietary solution sometimes helps light a fire under the implementation that is eventually adopted. However this also means that you pay a hefty price if you're the first adopter of a new spec.

 

Anyway, a 5K gaming Mac? It's possible, but I think we're being too generous at $5000. Existing GPU's still suck at doing 4K. There's also the entire "build it and they will come" problem that Apple has by dragging it's feet for 20 years on gaming support. Many developers would love to just straight dump Win10 for something else, but nothing else exists, and I'm sure Microsoft is just itching to drop 32-bit support itself since it's the last hold-out.

My understanding is usb4 is going to become thunderbolt 3, while thunderbolt 4 is not yet a super well defined thing but apparently involves pcie 4.0 instead of pcie 3.0.  Or something.  There is talk if attempting to merge the standards. It’s confusing and it seems to not have happened yet.  The question is will there be a cable port that will allow 80gb/sec simultaneous throughout or not?  If it happens that cable port can be used to run a reasonably powerful gpu.

 

31 minutes ago, bcredeur97 said:

id laugh if they launched a mac that runs windows out of the box

You mean come pre-landed with Windows as well as macOS? Iirc it’s been stated by Apple that it won’t happen.  As far as ability to run windows though that’s been a thing for many years already.  Boot camp comes pre-loaded and it’s purpose is to make that easier to do.