Mac Pro Update Now Possible with New Xeon E5 Chips Next Week

[spiffers]

My biggest concern with a new MacPro is in fact Thunderbolt. Apple has dilligently replaced all MiniDisplayPorts with ThB ports on their entire line-up, so I wonder if they'd do that to the MacPro as well?

It wouldn't make sense, but if they don't how are you gonna connect their flagship ThB display?

Why does it not make any sense for Apple to have Thunderbolt on Mac Pros? It makes perfectly sense!

Thunderbolt on a Mac Pro would first and foremost be used for drives and video equipment like the stuff from Black Magic.

 

[michelepri]

Nice but who's going to use it?

Apple has been scaring power users professionals away, with many photographers and videographers not getting very powerful 24 core PC systems running Premiere or Lightroom. Final Cut Pro is more or less dead for many, and even some Aperture users are afraid to invest in a software that might end up like Final Cut Pro. Not everybody likes Lion, considered to be a downgrade for some people and even a tablet OS on a desktop. Who wants to buy a Mac Pro system running a tablet OS with stuff like iMovie? If Apple won't support its professional community than it can't expect people to but those systems.

 

[chedda]

Socket ?

Will these chips fit into the current Pro ? Or is 3.46 the current limit ?

 

[laserbeam273]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Man looking forward to a new mac pro! I'd love to own one before they one day get discontinued. I reckon it'll be a while too - as if there aren't hundreds of thousand of jobs out there that don't require that level of computing power. And society just keeps thinking up more demanding ways to use computers, e.g. 8k video!

 

[Mac2012]

There isn't a 6 core iMac and there won't be a 6 core iMac with Ivy Bridge as well.
Only if apple puts SBE or IBE (2013) in the iMac, and i doubt it will happen. Intel won't make a 6 core consumer desktop CPU, maybe not even with Haswell

Yes there will be... it's inevitable but I can get by with 4 cores and an Apollo... believe me, I've been doing this a LONG time and maybe someone else may need to have the power to manipulate a mix but a GREAT performance can make an iMac work JUST AS GOOD as a MacPro so unless your doing video... you really don't need one these days. I can do anything on an iMac that can be done on a MacPro... now if you need to run over 50 plugins, better quit playing music because your pre production skills are where it's at in this business... you have to be talented with software, and musicianship too!! I can do anything on my wife's iMac that I can do on my 8 core MP's.... anything. Apple will release a 6 core iMac, watch.

 

[Umbongo]

Yes there will be... it's inevitable but I can get by with 4 cores and an Apollo... believe me, I've been doing this a LONG time and maybe someone else may need to have the power to manipulate a mix but a GREAT performance can make an iMac work JUST AS GOOD as a MacPro so unless your doing video... you really don't need one these days. I can do anything on an iMac that can be done on a MacPro... now if you need to run over 50 plugins, better quit playing music because your pre production skills are where it's at in this business... you have to be talented with software, and musicianship too!! I can do anything on my wife's iMac that I can do on my 8 core MP's.... anything. Apple will release a 6 core iMac, watch.

"An iMac with 6 cores @ 3.4 Ghz and a TB RAID 0 with an Apollo is a KILLER music production system"

That's a great statement but that won't exist before Haswell comes which is Q2 2013 at the earliest. There is also no guarantee that there will be 6-core CPUs for the consumer orientated sockets. So your "KILLER" system does not exist, won't exist for another year at least and perhaps longer. It may never even come if Intel jump to 8-core CPUs for Haswell.

Yeah you can do anything on an iMac. Same with decent notebooks. However they are not as efficient as high-end workstations. Perhaps your time isn't worth the efficiency increase a few thousand more dollars in tools can bring, but for many it is totally worth it.

 

[Mac2012]

5th and 6th go in the second 5.25" bay. OWC sells very neat one-stop solutions. If you're willing to use an external ODD, you can use the first 5.25" bay for drive 7 and 8.

More importantly, you can drop in an ESATA board and have unlimited superfast external HDD's.



That depends. For film composers a 12-core MacPro is not even powerful enough. With VSL and EWQL stuff you run out of headroom quick.

I used to work on an iMac and loved it, but I find that you really need dedicated hdd's for streaming large sample libraries. If you mostly record and mix bands, a MacbookPro will do that just fine.

Personally, I need the flexibility and scalability, and the MacPro is the only machine to offer that. If Apple ditches it, my next studio machine will most likely be a bespoke Windows workstation. Or Linux, if the audio devs start playing ball.

An iMac will play back 300 or more tracks man... if they'd render as audio, you can layer till you puke! I don't believe they are running out of power... I believe it's their WORKFLOW habits, that's why! If you know what to do when you need to do it you can do magic!
Oh, you can have your windoze... I will build a Hackintosh LONG before EVER having to stoop to that POS!

----------

"An iMac with 6 cores @ 3.4 Ghz and a TB RAID 0 with an Apollo is a KILLER music production system"

That's a great statement but that won't exist before Haswell comes which is Q2 2013 at the earliest. There is also no guarantee that there will be 6-core CPUs for the consumer orientated sockets. So your "KILLER" system does not exist, won't exist for another year at least and perhaps longer. It may never even come if Intel jump to 8-core CPUs for Haswell.

Yeah you can do anything on an iMac. Same with decent notebooks. However they are not as efficient as high-end workstations. Perhaps your time isn't worth the efficiency increase a few thousand more dollars in tools can bring, but for many it is totally worth it.

I put my $$ into killer mics and pres and some other things... an iMac is very capable with a quad Apollo for production... an iMac can play 300 tracks... I know NOBODY who goes over 48... if you do, you need to go take on a different profession or hobby whatever.

 

[zephonic]

An iMac will play back 300 or more tracks man... if they'd render as audio, you can layer till you puke! I don't believe they are running out of power... I believe it's their WORKFLOW habits, that's why! If you know what to do when you need to do it you can do magic!
Oh, you can have your windoze... I will build a Hackintosh LONG before EVER having to stoop to that POS!

I don't know what field you work in, but in AV production rendering to audio is a real pain, because there is always on-the-fly last minute changes etc. The director will always come in with a new edit that requires you shorten that segment by one and a half bar. If you have to unrender 300 tracks for that, ****** gets boring really quick. Not to mention time-consuming.

Especially with large symphonic scores, many composers use VEP over multiple machines to keep everything live.

Finally, when you render everything to audio that iMac's internal hdd is gonna clog up quick, especially at 96k or higher. ThB seems nice, but if you have to share that 10gbps between your hdd's and realtime audio streaming + processing from the Apollo, I bet you'll hit the ceiling at some point.

 

[Umbongo]

I put my $$ into killer mics and pres and some other things... an iMac is very capable with a quad Apollo for production... an iMac can play 300 tracks... I know NOBODY who goes over 48... if you do, you need to go take on a different profession or hobby whatever.

It may well be, but some will want a system that can handle other things too as well as audio and their budget is better spent on a more powerful workstation rather than a weaker one and expensive audio interface. Maybe you feel that isn't the way things should be done, but people do it and have been for years. Some people will also never want an integrated glossy screen. The iMac is not the "best" solution for everyone and your personal anecdotal evidence doesn't count for much when you claim things like 6-core iMacs (which don't exist) being amazing.

 

[lukarak]

Yes there will be... it's inevitable but I can get by with 4 cores and an Apollo... believe me, I've been doing this a LONG time and maybe someone else may need to have the power to manipulate a mix but a GREAT performance can make an iMac work JUST AS GOOD as a MacPro so unless your doing video... you really don't need one these days. I can do anything on an iMac that can be done on a MacPro... now if you need to run over 50 plugins, better quit playing music because your pre production skills are where it's at in this business... you have to be talented with software, and musicianship too!! I can do anything on my wife's iMac that I can do on my 8 core MP's.... anything. Apple will release a 6 core iMac, watch.

Of course it will. It will also release a 12 core iMac. In 2020. You said that as a statement of today, and it won't happen for at least another year and a half. And even then it will be only a below 50% chance that will happen with haswell. So we are talking probably around 2-2.5 years for a six core iMac. And that's only six. Intel configuration of 2 CPU Xeons will reach 16 cores this year. By the time iMac gets 6, Xeons will be on 24 or more (for dual CPU systems, ofc)

 

[heisetax]

Its nice to see news about real computers. It almost feels like apple doesn't care about professionals and is instead focusing on the iOS toys.

Finally a second person has noticed this several year old trend.

----------

Oh please hurry. I rely on Macs with more than the 4 cores currently available on top end iMacs, and i'm not willing to buy a 2 year old machine at those prices! Plus i'm after Thunderbolt. I really hope Apple push the boat out with this update. But i have to admit to not expecting much.

I know Mac Pros aren't exactly Apples bread and butter anymore, but it says something about their company that they're putting no effort into it at all by the look of it. If companies like Sony can sell products for everybody ranging from consumers to broadcast professionals and maintain high quality products throughout those ranges. then surely Apple can too.

But Apple is really just about making the largest profit possible. Apple so far has not shown itself able to operate in more than one area. It sounds more & mre like my next computer to run the Mac OS will have to be a Hackentosh. Apple seems to want to kll off anything but its iToys.

 

[englishman]

Apple are predominantly a phone company now.

 

[chasehusky]

Of course it will. It will also release a 12 core iMac. In 2020. You said that as a statement of today, and it won't happen for at least another year and a half. And even then it will be only a below 50% chance that will happen with haswell. So we are talking probably around 2-2.5 years for a six core iMac. And that's only six. Intel configuration of 2 CPU Xeons will reach 16 cores this year. By the time iMac gets 6, Xeons will be on 24 or more (for dual CPU systems, ofc)

MP Intel Xeon chips have been up to 10 cores since April 2011:

Intel® Xeon® Processor E7-2850 (24M Cache, 2.00 GHz, 10 cores): http://ark.intel.com/products/53573
Intel® Xeon® Processor E7-2860 (24M Cache, 2.26 GHz, 10 cores): http://ark.intel.com/products/53570
Intel® Xeon® Processor E7-2870 (30M Cache, 2.40 GHz, 10 cores): http://ark.intel.com/products/53578
Intel® Xeon® Processor E7-4850 (24M Cache, 2.00 GHz, 10 cores): http://ark.intel.com/products/53574
Intel® Xeon® Processor E7-4860 (24M Cache, 2.26 GHz, 10 cores): http://ark.intel.com/products/53571
Intel® Xeon® Processor E7-8860 (24M Cache, 2.26 GHz, 10 cores): http://ark.intel.com/products/53572
Intel® Xeon® Processor E7-8870 (30M Cache, 2.40 GHz, 10 cores): http://ark.intel.com/products/53580
Intel® Xeon® Processor E7-8867L (30M Cache, 2.13 GHz, 10 cores): http://ark.intel.com/products/53577

Of course, they're incredibly costly and go for anywhere from $2.6k to $4.6k per chip; as an aside, with an 8 CPU motherboard from Supermicro and 512GB of memory, you'll be looking at spending upwards to $72k.

 

[iEdd]

Ah, the poor old Mac Pro. Updated once every 2 years so that Apple's most expensive power station computer can catch up with the little goodies that their consumer models get first, while gaining upgradeability spanning a couple of hard drive bays and PCI(e) slots.

Anyone else feel that unless you're getting the dual-hexacore config, the Mac Pro updates are always too little, too late? (c.f. maxed out iMac)

 

[Inconsequential]

Ah, the poor old Mac Pro. Updated once every 2 years so that Apple's most expensive power station computer can catch up with the little goodies that their consumer models get first, while gaining upgradeability spanning a couple of hard drive bays and PCI(e) slots.

Anyone else feel that unless you're getting the dual-hexacore config, the Mac Pro updates are always too little, too late? (c.f. maxed out iMac)

No.

Tell me where I can get an iMac with a 7xxx or 6xx GPU, slots for 5 HDDs (4 bays + Lower 5.25" bay) and the ability to fit an internal blu-ray drive and get back to me.

Why is everything about performance?

 

[Umbongo]

Ah, the poor old Mac Pro. Updated once every 2 years so that Apple's most expensive power station computer can catch up with the little goodies that their consumer models get first, while gaining upgradeability spanning a couple of hard drive bays and PCI(e) slots.

Anyone else feel that unless you're getting the dual-hexacore config, the Mac Pro updates are always too little, too late? (c.f. maxed out iMac)

That's how it is this time, not how its been in the past. The 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 Mac Pros all had newer technology than the other platforms. Intel switched high-end to coming last with Sandy Bridge and so Apple have had to also. Apple waited a bit in 2010 to release new systems (perhaps so it wasn't a 2 year delay), but other than that they have pushed them as things became available from Intel.

 

[MagicBoy]

Will these chips fit into the current Pro ? Or is 3.46 the current limit ?

Unlikely. Different socket I expect.

 

[the8thark]

Apple has been scaring power users professionals away, with many photographers and videographers not getting very powerful 24 core PC systems running Premiere or Lightroom. Final Cut Pro is more or less dead for many, and even some Aperture users are afraid to invest in a software that might end up like Final Cut Pro. Not everybody likes Lion, considered to be a downgrade for some people and even a tablet OS on a desktop. Who wants to buy a Mac Pro system running a tablet OS with stuff like iMovie? If Apple won't support its professional community than it can't expect people to but those systems.

Just remember it's the tiny minority that cry the loudest. And you just described the tiny minority very well. Most of the creative professionals either will use Aperture and/or FCP or they won't. The whole "Apple is not catering towards professionals anymore" didn't affect them cause Apple is still catering to the professionals.

 

[JesterJJZ]

Just remember it's the tiny minority that cry the loudest. And you just described the tiny minority very well. Most of the creative professionals either will use Aperture and/or FCP or they won't. The whole "Apple is not catering towards professionals anymore" didn't affect them cause Apple is still catering to the professionals.

9000+ Final Cut users actually signed a petition against FCPX. Just think of the ones that didn't. I would say at least 50% of the Final Cut user base feels they got shafted by Apple, hardly a minority. The majority of the people that like FCPX are ones new to editing or casual editor. The DSLR crowd has also flocked to it. I don't know a single pro editor or post house that will even consider looking into it. Final Cut is dead. I will still use FCP7 for as long as I can, but Premiere and Avid seem to be the way to go in the future.

 

[seek3r]

An iMac will play back 300 or more tracks man... if they'd render as audio, you can layer till you puke! I don't believe they are running out of power... I believe it's their WORKFLOW habits, that's why! If you know what to do when you need to do it you can do magic!
Oh, you can have your windoze... I will build a Hackintosh LONG before EVER having to stoop to that POS!

Protip: if you're calling it "windoze" and using unnecessary caps I'm less likely to believe you're a professional and more likely to believe you're a teen in your mom's basement.

I don't work in sound, but I can speak to using a mac pro professionally. Aside from the clusters I offload actually heavy work to I currently use 2 8 core systems (1 of them the MP in my sig running OSX and a pile of VMs, the other a dell running debian and armed with an nvidia tesla c2050) for local modelling and testing. I do cuda tests using the GT120 in the MP then offload to the dell for larger scale testing. There is no way I could do that on an imac (and if I just had tesla drivers for OSX I'd upgrade from both these machines to a 16 core MP the minute the new ones were out!). There are plenty of audio engineers with needs like mine, either because of ram constraints, or render times/deadlines, or.. etc

iMacs have their place, and many professionals can use them. There are quite a bit of us that can't though, and I'm hoping apple isnt driving us off.

As for cost... the C2050 I have costs more than your imac, so to anyone declaiming cost as a factor in getting an imac over a Mac Pro... my cards still manage to cost more than the box, and I need those slots!

 

[jouster]

Let me guess, you're twenty-something?



You're quite right… Apple was saved by all those things after Steve Jobs returned in 1997. But you know what? Apple wouldn't even have made it to 1997 if it weren't for those of us who continued to fork out money for expensive machines from a company which we were constantly told had no future.

All you spoilt ingrates should be thanking us ol' timers, 'cos if no one was buying Macs through the 'dark years', there would be no iMac, no iPod, no iPhone and no iPad.

Twenty something? Not even close. I was working with scientists and lab technicians who used Macs in this period and they deserted in large numbers, because the Macs of the day weren't powerful enough and didn't represent good value. I hung on, using my Lombard G3 even though it got its ass kicked by Pentiums costing half the price. Then I upgraded to a TiBook that was slower than my wife's Dell at *everything*, AltiVec or not, so I guess that makes me one of the ol' timers... .

So sure, Apple wouldn't have made it to '97 without the pro towers, but only because the consumer products were non-existent or far too anemic to be any use. But this idea that they were saved by a loyal pro army is just wrong. They were saved by the products I mentioned, by Microsoft's $150m and by canning the Newton and the clones.

Apple is the least sentimental company I've ever seen. Don't get me wrong: I would like to see new towers, even though I believe they make no sense economically. I'd say that we *will* see them soon, but the long-term prognosis isn't good.

 

[-hh]

Thank the lord. Time to buy my first Mac Pro. My 2002 Power Mac G4 is still chugging along, but can't really keep up with modern scientific computing anymore. Also, Tiger's getting a little old. Switching back and forth between Lion and Tiger gets annoying.

I've been limping by at home for the past two years on a G5; the Mac Pro in the office gets occasionally 'borrowed', but at the time, it wasn't a compelling enough upgrade for the stuff I've been doing. With the dSLR moving up to 1080p in 2010, it has become a different story ... and a waiting game on the next Mac Pro.

Phew! So the 89 pro-sumers in the market for a Mac Pro will be happy. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple killed the Mac Pro line this year.

Sarcasm noted, despite there being 300 posts on a new thread in <24 hours.

So you think a 27" iMac with [Intel Core i7 @ 3.4 GHz, 16GB ram, AMD 6970M with 2GB GDDR5 ram and 2TB HDD] is not good enough?

That depends...what does that iMac have for data storage? Notably, data storage that's configured in a redundancy-based RAID (eg, 1, 5, 10, etc).

And here I thought Thunderbolt was supposed to make the "But I need FOUR hot-swappable HDD bays!" arguments obsolete.

I'm sure there are a mythical few elites out there who actually get an appreciable, worthwhile benefit from $6k rigs, but your average FCP/Avid/CS5.5 jockey is better off buying a top tier iMac with a full RAM slot and a Pegasus TB RAID case and then simply reselling the iMac every year or two and keeping everything else.

It has that potential, although each Promise R4 adds at least $1200 to the cost of that 'cheaper' iMac.

Now considering that my G5 Power Mac has more-than-stock internal drives, plus some FW800 external RAIDs, the question for me is when I get a Mac Pro, how do I organize what goes in which bays and what's still going to be an external?

It's great thinking about the possibilities that Thunderbolt will one day provide. However, thunderbolt technology for external drives ONLY makes sense with SSD.

Even with a RAID 1 on HDDs, TB still going to provide a performance boost vs FW800.

I'm running FCP X and 7 on 27" iMac i7 with 2Gb 6970 graphics card and 16gig ram with Pegasus thunderbolt raid. I get 6 RT streams of pnp with 7 and 5 with X. Same results as everyone else. So much for X and open CL. 7 also renders faster. So much for 64bit.

A rig which is comparable in price to a basic Mac Pro + LCD Apple Display (if the two were compatible today).

Who wants a bunch of Thunderbolt boxes wired up to the back of their iMac? No thanks.

For a desktop system, it is a fairly reasonable solution for those who need gobs of RAID storage capacity...basically not really different than my PowerMac with four external boxes ... three FW800 RAID1 pairs and a NAS.

EDIT: And Apple might think that a 'Cloud' service might supersede some of my local data storage needs, but that still comes down to a question of performance (even before price): does Verizon (et al) even offer Gigabit level service, regardless of the price? To be pushing 150GB here or there is no longer a "once every few years" types of tasks...it is literally how much storage media I have for my digital cameras that I take with me on every trip (and use most of it!)

-hh

 

[jouster]

No you are on the right track. I've got my iMac i7 maxed out as far as ram goes and this one predates thunderbolt so my max I/O outside of the machine is either firewire 800 (far too slow for multichannel audio at the level I demand) or gigabit ethernet to another Mac and its SATA drives (still not much faster than Firewire 800 but a little better).

I'm not your typical rock and roll type application here - my original music is far more like soundtrack music, hundreds of tracks, all with multiple effects, virtual instruments like mad and a Corei7 is a nice processor but it's not a Xeon. I wore out my G5 tower and this is a stopgap measure until I can get a Pro.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the iPad, iPhone, and iPod are devices for content consumers. But we need power for content creation. You create an entire ecosystem and with no content to consume what's the point?

Well, it is just possible to create content on other types of computer...

 

[the8thark]

9000+ Final Cut users actually signed a petition against FCPX. Just think of the ones that didn't. I would say at least 50% of the Final Cut user base feels they got shafted by Apple, hardly a minority. The majority of the people that like FCPX are ones new to editing or casual editor. The DSLR crowd has also flocked to it. I don't know a single pro editor or post house that will even consider looking into it. Final Cut is dead. I will still use FCP7 for as long as I can, but Premiere and Avid seem to be the way to go in the future.

Give me a link to said petition for proof please.
And secondly production houses will not switch applications mid project as you know. It'll take time for the ones that want to switch over to do so. I'm sure one day there'll be a number of production houses will be using FCPX. How many? Only time will tell.

And I disagree with you that FCPX is dead for professional users. I think it is very viable to the professionals. It's an equally good option as Premiere and Avid are.

 

[AndrewClarke]

How many times have you upgraded your 2006 Mac Pro to keep it viable, I'm curious to know? I have a 2006 24" white iMac first Intel chip one and I'm gonna be in the market soon for a new iMac. My old one, as is, served me well, and I never once thought about, 'man I wish I could upgrade or expand this thing'! With the new iMacs, I'd be looking at bumping up the RAM but that is the extent of upgrades and expandability that I'd be concerned about.



Please, and seriously, I mean no disrespect, but aren't you and other Mac Pro users Apple's niche market?

I myself have had three what can be considered early version MacPro's before switching to two iMacs on my way to a third. In all the time I had my three power machines, I never once cared to upgrade or expand even if I could. Even today, RAM is about my only concern for the iMac, but swapping out graphics cards or new processors or Hard Drives or whatever the more inquisitive people do with their PowerMacs, I never had an inkling! I'm sure by shear numbers that your average iMac user feels the same. Plug it in and go to work irrespective of whether I can add to it 3 - 5 years down the road.

Again, it's nice that you have the smarts and capabilities to enhance your MacPro... Me?! I'd just break something if I ever tried to enhance. So, I'm usually content with the offerings out there, as I bet most people are who are in Best Buy to buy their iMacs so as to own a computer to do the lesser things in the first place, are too!

Again, not meaning to rile you or anyone or start a PowerMac versus iMac argument or anything like that. Just trying a nice conversation! Thanks...
/
/
/

I'll bite. I have a 2008 2.8GHz 8 core Mac Pro. Since buying it I've done the following internal upgrades:

- 20GB RAM
- Secondary CD space holding SSD boot drive and 5th spinning 3.5" drive for a total of 6 internal drives (4 in a RAID-0, and one extra).
- eSATA card
- Upgraded to ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card
- USB 3.0 internal card

Thanks to my expandability, I'm now able to run my 8.32TB Time Machine backup array via eSATA instead of USB2. I recently bought the USB 3.0 card just because I was ordering other stuff anyway, and have once or twice wished I had the capability.

Sure I don't have Thunderbolt, and probably won't have any reasonable options to have it, but with USB3 and eSATA it's not the end of the world. I also have a 30" and 24" monitor attached, a Logitech HD webcam, and a Drobo. Try doing all that with an iMac, while running 3 VMs in the background.

----------

After last year's 15" MBP and 13" MBA, I was beginning to fret about what my large expenses for 2012 might be. Sure my MP '08 is still in fine shape but I like the knowledge that if something goes wrong it's covered under AppleCare which as of this month, ran out one year ago. I'm already looking forward to an iPad 3 to take with me on customer visits but a new MP would fit nicely on my expense line this year.

So if/when your existing Mac Pro starts to give you problems, order a new Mac Pro, the latest of whatever's for sale at that point. Sounds like you have two other computers ready to take over the load, so a downtime of 2-3 days of your Mac Pro isn't the end of the world.

I'm in the same boat. I rely on my Mac Pro to get things done, but if it went down, I'd just move over to my MacBook Pro and be happy I have a solid backup system in place. Time==money and if it made sense, there would be a shiny new Mac Pro sitting at my doorstep 48 hours later.

It doesn't make sense to ME to replace something that's working with something newer "just in case", especially since when you WILL need a new computer, there's a good chance the model then will be newer and faster than what's available now.