You seem to be forgetting that the current Mac Pros are not the "previous generation" but their CPUs are three years old. 30% might seem like a lot, but the previous Mac Pros were dual CPU machines - the upgrade should have been a significant performance increase.I am still amazed how little people understand about processor speeds between generations. How can anybody expect better than a 30% performance increase between twelve cores on this generation and twelve cores on the previous generation? That is all CPU's ever gain in preformance between genrations when you factor in amount of cores and clock speed.
GPU compute is a nice dream, but for today's applications, it's mostly irrelevant. Yes, there are some apps which can take advantage of it, but in most cases you will see bigger improvements from better CPU performance.The big deal with this machine is not the raw CPU speed but the fact that it can do tasks 30% faster at half the size and half the power with half the fan noise. The other big deal is the dual GPU's which is where a lot of processing is moving in pro applications. Both FCPX and Adobe Premiere Pro see massive performance gains with better GPUs. By having two monster video cards the hope is that most of the applications used on this new machine will make great use of off loading a lot of processing to the video cards. That is where you will see 50% of the performance boost from this machine. The CPU itself is just ok and yes it would have been that much better with a dual CPU configuration. Apple is banking on the dual GPUs to really matter where pros need it. This also happens to be the area that will really jack up the price, fast.
Part of the reason I buy a high end system is so that I am not limited to a single task at a time. A quad-core system might be fine if you are just doing some Photoshop work, but not if you are working in Photoshop while doing video encoding or rendering in the background.Agreed. I run a few apps that probably can deal with 64 threads, and scale very well. But the vast vast majority of software doesn't know what to do with more than 4 threads. Look at all the Adobe apps, I think they can deal with 8 in the best cases in the absolute latest versions. In the present and immediate future the majority of users benefit from less cores at higher frequency. The majority of software needs to catch up, and software developers may even turn to the GPU for that. In another year or 2 there will probably be 16 cores on a single CPU.
Don't forget power. I hate dealing with external drives - especially 3.5" ones.The current Mac Pro can have 4 internal hard drives and 2 internal optical drives. The new Mac Pro has 1 SSD hard drive. Soooo, that means you would have 5 cables, not 20.
Another thing people may not have considered is that hard drives are loud when they are outside a PC case. Using external storage for multiple drives like that sucks.