If these things are Thunderbolt 2 devices... it really does open up some different possibilities for you.
I know that everyone doesn't need it... but connecting a few of these together via TB 2 would be kind of interesting for me. I mean being able to see one machine with even as few as 24 or 36 cores.
A Xeon here a GPU there... pretty soon you're talking about real capability. Again, it's not for everyone... but there are a lot of areas where you get some real benefits.
Thinking about buying 4 and just writing the software myself if it's not supported. But I'm pretty sure it probably is. Probably just tcp/ip though :(
Oh well... that'd be enough.
Anyway... not many other devices you can do things like that with and still keep good bandwidth between devices. It is thinking a bit outside the box. I can't think of another machine that would let me conveniently do that, and still take up 1/2 the volume of the current mac pro???
Can you???
(Not snark. Genuinely interested. I'm in the market, and would be willing to write the connecting software myself).
You could build something much more powerful for cheaper, and still be able to upgrade/change out individual internal components. I've bumped the RAM capacity/speed twice since I built this machine three years ago. Upgraded the video card once, and CPU once. When I decide to do a more thorough re-vamp, I can re-use the power supply, the case, the video card, and a bunch of other components.
What you're really paying for is a very expensive and moderately beefy machine that can run OS X legally. Or you need Final Cut Pro in some serious capacity. Oh, and it has an Apple logo on it.
I agree and you'll have to pry my self-built pc from my cold dead hands but my computer is super huge and hard to take with me, the design of the new Mac Pro is super neat
It's OK if you didn't want to, but you can build something cheaper and even more quiet than this new Mac Pro yourself. There are some excellent cases and cooling systems, and you can choose your components with your needs in mind.
With these Mac Pros, I don't think people who buy them are necessarily concerned about specs or cost-effectiveness. I think they are enthusiasts that need Mac OS, and find the Macbook Pro or iMac underpowered.
A person can build something cheaper and more quiet. That is not necessarily the person you are talking to though. Many people don't have that skill set, but say, work in music.
They're premium computers that aren't the highest end specs, but have a pretty good set of specs for the size and noise especially and can be serviced quickly at apple stores across the country pretty easily.
For the Pro market, expansion and user customization far outweigh form-factor. I have a 2000 sq ft lab space and 500 sq ft office, what do I care about the form factor of the Pro if I can't throw in my stock NVIDIA GPUs and any arbitrary hard drive?
That's pretty much every computer out there. Is innovation such a low bar now that a new case and the newer Intel CPU is suddenly deserving of innovation praise because it has a fruit logo?
Also am I the other one bothered by the case mentioning being built in the US but designed in California, like California is now its own nation?
I get that, my point is that you could just say "Assembled and designed in the US" and be done with it. Does mentioning California really give them so much more culture cachet?
I'm glad to see someone finally making the obvious form factor changes we've been needing for a long time at the high end. An ATX style case just doesn't make sense anymore. ATX gives you lots of volume for cooling the CPU and lots of room to add PCB area in the form of expansion cards. But hardly anyone needs 7 expansion cards, and everyone needs more room for the GPU heatsink. Completely throwing out internal expandability may be a bit ahead of its time (like ditching the floppy drive with the iMac), but it does allow for a compact and efficient system layout. I do wonder about being stuck with your original GPU(s).
The Mac Pro wasn't ATX, but it followed the same general principles of being a large tower case with a lot more expansion slots than anyone needed, and not enough space between the slots for a GPU to have good cooling, and expansion slots that were several inches longer than any PCB that ever needed to be put in there.
I know this is a bit off topic but part of the same hardware presentation: does the new Macbook Air have retina display? I couldn't tell from the keynote.
The Mac Pro has always been just about the worst platform for CUDA/OpenCL development. Lack of power, hardware driver support, and underperforming GPGPU (especially OpenCL) APIs have made it more of a prototyping environment than a production environment.
4096 stream processors just reinforces Apple's lack of interest in pursuing that market segment. It's good today (although they'll be clocked down compared to, say, a 7990) but I suspect that's what we'll be stuck with for "the next ten years."
I'll probably mistake mine for my wastepaper bin at some point and set it on fire. :-)
I think most people who use the MacPro (video/image editing people) probably already use external storage because the 4 drive bays from the old MacPro simply are not enough. I'm guessing they analyzed their users produced something that fit users' needs.
With Thunderbolt 2 / USB 3 support, I suspect some enterprising manufacturer will come up with a stackable storage enclosure that matches the design of the Mac Pro. That would meet all your storage requirements while keeping the size down for those who only need the additional performance.
So cords everywhere then. I do a lot of photo editing an have close to 10 TB storage internal (I repurposed the optical drive bays). I can keep all of my working files internally and only have external drives for archiving and backup and aren't connected all of the time.
Yes. Though considering the volume reduction you can probably get more storage in an external enclosure without going above the footprint of the old Pro.
Looks slick, but I was really hoping for something more modern that could drive lots of displays. A limit of three is pretty mediocre; you can do that with other already-available mac hardware. Oh, well.
It's 3 4k displays, not 3 displays. It's probably able to drive more "standard" displays, I expect each 4k saturates one of the controllers (which would be why it has 3 controllers on 6 ports)
It appears to be limited to 3 4K displays at a time with the built in graphics. Graphics is expandable, and presumably onboard can drive more than 3 non-4K displays (We don't know yet, so let's not jump to conclusions)
Right, I recognize that my use case is particular (driving a pile of projectors from one machine). We looked at adding additional video cards to, say, an iMac, but so far as I know, nobody is selling Thunderbolt graphics cards, and none of the Thunderbolt enclosures support adding graphics cards to OS X. Maybe that's changed, but I don't think so.
Editing to add: and more broadly, part of the virtue of the old pro was that if you wanted to do something weird, you could open it up and shove in whatever you wanted, unlike every other product in the Apple line. It's a shame (though not unexpected) that this new iteration sacrifices as least some of that in the name of size, something I don't think most pro users really care about.
The TB ecosystem will probably get a significant boost with the new pro, since its extensibility is basically USB3 or TB2, and mostly focused on TB2 (6 TB ports versus 4 USB3 ports I think?)
^ A 16-lane PCI-E supports 31.51 GB/s of bandwidth. Thunderbolt 2 supports 20Gbps of bandwidth, or 2.5GB/s. So it's actually only 1/12th of the bandwidth.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something, you could already blow this thing away at its price point by building your own. It wouldn't be as pretty looking, but you could do better (if specs are the primary concern).
This is certainly true; but I wonder for how much longer it will be -- it doesn't seem that economics really favor the build it yourself model nearly as much as they used to.
I guess I haven't ran into this. I've been able to re-use some of my components through different incarnations of this desktop, and it's saved me a ton of money.
For example, I don't need to upgrade my entire desktop to upgrade my video card. I can toss something nasty in there, and even if my motherboard doesn't support the latest and greatest PCIe spec, my next one will. Ditto for SATA.
I've got a ton of mileage out of my case, as well. Spent a little more to get something nice, and ended up liking it so much that I've held on to it for close to five years now. Ditto for my modular power supply.
It is very nice; the model of 'everything is soldered down' is really annoying wherever you find it (my BMW, my Mac, &c.) But I think that the difference in cost between standard expandable hardware and custom stuff is shrinking really rapidly, meaning that designers can now do more things with e.g. thermals or layout that are not feasible using PC style standard hardware.
The age of swapping out parts is coming to a close, I fear.
> The age of swapping out parts is coming to a close, I fear.
Wat? TigerDirect, NewEgg, Amazon, and many others have something to say about that. This stuff is cheaper than it EVER has been. Want a bunch of RAM? Get it for under $100. Want a decent 500 GB hard drive? Under $100. Decent processor? Under $100. Decent motherboard? Under $100.
Or are you talking about swapping parts out of pre-assembled computers?
Oh? I had been under the impression that Haswell Xeons (at least the E3 v3 series) were available "now" [1]:
"Twelve of the chips are available now, but the 13 watt E3-1220L that will be particularly interesting for microservers is not going to be available until the third quarter..."
What am I missing here? Presumably the 12-core option would be an E5, is that it?
The Haswell Xeon E3 series is quad core, single-socket. It uses the same die as desktop Haswell CPUs. The Mac Pro is six core, double-socket, so it must be a "-E". Based on the availability date (later this year), it must be Ivy Bridge-E. Intel will almost certainly call it an E5.
They're advertising quad-channel DDR3-1866. That entirely rules out the desktop-class processors, which have never been used in a Mac Pro anyways. The Xeon E3 and E5 lines use completely different die configurations and motherboard sockets, and the E3s don't have enough PCIe lanes to feed all the peripheral connectivity the new Mac Pro will have.
Uh... what exactly is being "innovated" here?