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Beside the potential huge cost, the simple question is, will Thunderbolt actually get adopted? We've been through this with Firewire, and now that's being abandoned. Good luck getting Firewire peripherals for legacy systems in a year.
 
2. These cards ain't cheap and the price of the Mac Pro will likely reflect this
Oops... if you're right, it's not reasonable to believe the new Mac Pro will be priced at less than $9000, because you not only have two cards like this, but also a last gen Xeon, and a last gen flash storage.

At $9000 I think nobody will buy this.

At the current $2500 Mac Pro prices, it would sell more than iPads, though.
 
Beside the potential huge cost, the simple question is, will Thunderbolt actually get adopted? We've been through this with Firewire, and now that's being abandoned. Good luck getting Firewire peripherals for legacy systems in a year.

Firewire wasn't backed by the heavy players.

Thunderbolt is backed by Intel; it isn't going away.

-mark
 
Scared old men, running away from the future... that's the image I get of you and your peers, with all respect. Enjoy whatever suits you mate, as long as it doesn't mean it makes you insecure enough to have to deride new design and tech.

PS: If you can send me a showreel, I'd love to see it, but sadly I don't own any computer with a ZIP drive or floppies, so maybe I'll have to miss out.

:)

Shouldn't you be in your mom's kitchen making 3 minute production company logos for a company that doesn't exist to put at the head of your overexposed 30 second, 7D skateboard video drowned in dubstep?
 
You are assuming that Apple did not do their homework. Everyone in the cell phone industry assumed the same thing, and I can assure that the original iPhone did every single thing that Apple claimed it did; and it quite honestly made other phones look like junk technology.

Apparently folks from Pixar are going to be doing demos later this week showcasing the new machine, I may be wrong, but I think the folks at Pixar are really into "high-end" computer graphics. ;)

Everyone assumes Steve would not approve; you really think they developed this from the time Steve passed until know, no I don't think that is the case, Steve was involved in this.

I am excited that for once Apple is releasing a machine with real workstation graphics and supporting the latest OpenGL standard and people who business relies on graphical horsepower are bitching. Get real. Ok I get it that Adobe uses CUDA instead of OpenCL, but I will put a big guess that Creative Cloud is using OpenCL by the time this is released. And in the long run it makes more sense for Adobe to switch to OpenCL since it works on both AMD and nVidia -- putting all your eggs in one basket is never a wise decision.

The first time AJA Video released the Io brand of Firewire based capture devices; that pretty much signaled to me that the days of internal PCI cards was going to be dead soon, and how many times have we been burned when card interface technology changed? NuBus -> PCI -> PCI-X (for like 1.5 years) -> PCI express. The promise seems to be that as Thunderbolt matures, it will remain backwards compatible; we shall see.

-mark

The problem is, PCIe is not for the solutions you need today, it is for the problems you won't know you have until three years from now. Thunderbolt is very slow in comparison to PCIe. it is a less flexible solution. (The cables flex, but you get my point.) This is a big step back.
 
Oops... if you're right, it's not reasonable to believe the new Mac Pro will be priced at less than $9000, because you not only have two cards like this, but also a last gen Xeon, and a last gen flash storage.

At $9000 I think nobody will buy this.

At the current $2500 Mac Pro prices, it would sell more than iPads, though.

At $2500 it would be a no-brainer update. Can't see how they would keep it in that price range for a base model. $5k+ is a more likely base model price, which will price most of the "home pros" out of the market for it, and over to PC.
 
Firewire wasn't backed by the heavy players.

Thunderbolt is backed by Intel; it isn't going away.

-mark

Intel aside, if no one else is using it, it will fade away. How many PCs are shipping with Thunderbolt ports now? (honest question, are there any?)
 
The problem is, PCIe is not for the solutions you need today, it is for the problems you won't know you have until three years from now. Thunderbolt is very slow in comparison to PCIe. it is a less flexible solution. (The cables flex, but you get my point.) This is a big step back.

Agreed, but in 3 years time, Thunderbolt will most likely be on fiber optic cables and a lot faster, of course that does not help you with your 3 year old MacPro, but perhaps the CPU cards will be upgradeable. A lot of stuff in the air.

-mark

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Intel aside, if no one else is using it, it will fade away. How many PCs are shipping with Thunderbolt ports now? (honest question, are there any?)

Yes I believe there are.

-mark
 
This thread is an exact, hilarious echo of the ones that flooded onto MR once FCP X was released... noone died from new computers or software - use it or don't, then shut up about it, either way.

Final Cut Pro X has been run out of this town on a rail. The only conversation we have about it now is 'did you switch to Premier or Avid?'. There's still some FCP7 in use (myself included - got a decade worth of work legacy'd in FCP) but once broadcast delivery requirements change to something that FCS doesn't spit out, Final Cut is gone from LA forever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4OVLoDrPME
 
Final Cut Pro X has been run out of this town on a rail. The only conversation we have about it now is 'did you switch to Premier or Avid?'. There's still some FCP7 in use (myself included - got a decade worth of work legacy'd in FCP) but once broadcast delivery requirements change to something that FCS doesn't spit out, Final Cut is gone from LA forever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4OVLoDrPME

Hell I'm still using FCP6. Works just fine for what I need. Of course I do more stuff in After Effects and Lightwave 3D than Final Cut.

Initial reaction to FCP X was no; but I don't have time right now to muck with it.

I'm considering Smoke.

-mark
 
Beside the potential huge cost, the simple question is, will Thunderbolt actually get adopted? We've been through this with Firewire, and now that's being abandoned. Good luck getting Firewire peripherals for legacy systems in a year.

Firewire had its place. Think of all the things Firewire was capable of... fast external hard drives (back in the day)... MiniDV camcorders... low-latency audio interfaces... the list goes on.

Just because Firewire wasn't used for common devices like keyboards, mice and flash drives doesn't mean it was a failure.
 
Can someone please make a plexiglass cover for this.. This thing looks rad without the aluminum trash can cover!! Imagine if it were stainless steel LOL :)
 
What you fail to realize is that sometimes GPU's are not ideal for all purposes. Some are great for high frame rates in games, some are great for high resolution image or video editing and some are used more like CPU's for use in rendering images of digital models. While the cards that apple put in this thing are most likely good at all of those today, they may or may not be so great in 4 years.


http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/23/4359788/xbox-one-3d-4k-content-support

No, but there will be soon. If MS can make a $400 computer capable of displaying 3d 4k games, its only reasonable to assume that other computer manufactures should keep up.

So you want to have the same computer in 4 years with the option to upgrade just the GPU? In terms of overall computing power, that's not the only thing I hope to be upgrading in 4 years.

My education in engineering supports what I see currently in the PC world. We have really hit the wall in pure CPU speed increase. We are now forced to look at alternative engineering designs to reap significant performance gains.

First, it was all about boosting the clock speed. That wall was hit a number of years ago. And that wall was heat. Can't increase the clock speed without overheating.

Then it became about multiple cores - except the primary problems with multiple cores is that the majority of programming does not take advantage of multiple cores. This isn't marketing, this is software engineering fact.

Now we are pushing the limits of GPU cores to aid the multi core CPUs. And as we do, what's the first thing everyone did with their video cards? Add fans!

Heat!

Apple didn't directly say they were solving a heat issue. But as a person who builds PCs and Hackintoshes, that's the number one issue that every computer case has to deal with. Heat dissipation.

And here for the first time ever is a case design that uses only ONE fan to cool not only the CPU, but 2 high end GPUs.

Have you considered that maybe this is the future core of PCs? Instead of just upgrading 1 video card at a time, we can upgrade a CPU and GPU at the same time?

Isn't that what Intel is trying to offer all the PC world with their onboard GPU which is very low powered against a real video card?

Yes, I will absolutely agree with you that this design throws away the concept of upgrading single video cards and it absolutely blows apart any business work flow that is based on the old workflow that you can upgrade a video card when you see fit.

I'm just suggesting that the PC industry is ripe for a whole new way of designing architecture that will allow us to get past the current walls that heat stops us at with clock speed.
 
Say hi to iCan!
 

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Awesome $800 for an adapter that doesn't even come with a cable. There's an awesome solution for a problem I didn't have until they created it.

Hmmm, that's funny, my Mac Pro did not come with a built in Fibre Channel connection like yours seemed to?

Oh that's right, you had to buy one for $500, but since you have had yours for quite some time, lets just assume that it was closer to a $1000.

So with the cable it is $850, cheaper than the current PCIe solution? No, but probably cheaper than when you initially invested in Fibre Channel 3, 4, 5 years ago?

** and yes I get your frustration, your pissed because you already made the PCIe investment and now you can't simply plug it into a new machine, welcome to the world of computers and technology changing every time you fart.

You will be a lot happier when you come to the conclusion that computers are merely tools and getting too attached to them is just going to cause un-needed stress in your life. Bottom line is computers suck, are money pits, are obsolete the minute you buy them and will ruin your life. ;)

I suggest you continue to use your current computer, which I assume works just fine since you are churning out projects, and not to dwell on this change too much. Let's just wait and see what happens over the course of the next couple of years.

-mark
 
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Multiple Configurations

I am guessing what Apple previewed today was the best configuration of the new Mac Pro. For those who are worried that the new Mac Pro is going to be too expensive, I am sure there will be configurations (CPU/GPU/RAM/SSD) that are more affordable.

If there is a rack mount option from Sonnet or some other company (someone will come up with something other than a shelf, right?), I am thinking we will be buying three entry level Mac Pros to use as servers. Too bad there is no redundant power supply, though. I think everything else looks pretty good!
 
Anyone else have issue with the power button being on the 'back'?

The I/O section would be facing back in my machine room....id have to crouch and feel around behind the unit for the switch when i turn it on every morning.
 
Firewire had its place. Think of all the things Firewire was capable of... fast external hard drives (back in the day)... MiniDV camcorders... low-latency audio interfaces... the list goes on.

Just because Firewire wasn't used for common devices like keyboards, mice and flash drives doesn't mean it was a failure.

Didn't say it was a failure, the point is that Apple is abandoning it now, after getting vendors to finally really support it. Of course, this is standard for Apple.
 
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