[~bash $]

I'm waiting like everyone else for a Mac Pro upgrade, but it's not because I'll be buying one. It's because it might make the current processors less expensive, though I wonder what will happen to availability. Is there any reason to believe that the prices will drop on the intel chips for the current line once the new MPs are (finally) released?

Also, if the new MPs use the same RAM, that's great news for old owners, but what's the likelihood of that?

[SierraDragon]

It is a guess. Price/availability of (new) older MPs after new MPs are introduced will depend on how many old MPs are left in the pipeline after Black Friday sales. And also on how spiffy the new MPs are. If the world loves them more old MPs will move into the used marketplace. If I was looking to buy an existing MP I would look at refurbs and aggressively peruse the sales tomorrow at all Apple retailers (e.g. Frys has iMacs for $800).

-Allen Wicks

[Macadvo]

I think the OP was asking if the prices of the actual CPU's from Intel would drop after Apple bump the MP.

My answer to that would be no, Apples contribution to the Xeon sales can't be significant enough IMHO

Alistair

[mduell]

No and no.

Intel dropped the price of the current dual Xeons about 6 months ago; Apple ignored it in their pricing, but it was pretty significant at some clockrates. Once a CPU is deprecated Intel generally holds the price constant (look at the 667Mhz FSB mobile CPUs and 1066Mhz FSB desktop CPU prices since the release of the 800/1333Mhz FSB chips). The newer Xeons are cheaper to produce (they can get about 50% more per wafer), so they're priced lower than the older Xeons and there isn't much incentive to cut prices on the older Xeons.

The new 5400 series chipsets support up to 800Mhz DDR2 FB-DIMMs, so I expect Apple to use those since they've always used the fastest memory that the Intel Mac chipsets support. Of course you could put your 667Mhz modules in and drag the whole memory system back down to 667Mhz if you value capacity/price over performance.

[~bash $]

It would really be too bad if you're right, mduell, that the price of the current Xeons won't go down! But unfortunately, that's sort of what I thought.

Same with the memory -- I just hope the opposite doesn't happen, where due to availability they become rare! I intend on keeping my MP around for a very very long time, but if it were economical, I certainly wouldn't mind a processor bump on it.

Here's to hoping, at the very least, that someone makes a cheap-ish processor card upgrade for it. I am not aware of any technical limitation to this with these boards, but I wouldn't know specifics of such a thing. Regarding whether or not an mfg thought it would be cost-effective to develop and manufacture, let's just hope there are enough MPs of this gen. sold in this abnormally long cycle to create such a market!

[mduell]

Old memory doesn't get expensive, the newer memory just keeps dropping in price. Eventually 667Mhz DDR2 FB-DIMMs will become rare and relatively expensive, like when we're on 2.4Ghz DDR3 FB-DIMMs in a couple years. Apple may stick with 667Mhz for now because I haven't seen 800Mhz DDR2 FB-DIMMs available anywhere.

You won't see any third party processor cards for Intel systems; they don't use processor cards (just the chip on a little piece of backing for connections) and they all come from Intel. Any of the current Mac Pros can be upgraded to the existing quad core chips, and the new quad core chips may also work in them (I haven't seen anything definitive either way). The current Xeons will be available from Intel for at least 2 years from the release date, and in reality you should be able to easily find them for at least 3.