Apple Offers Sneak Peek of Completely Redesigned Mac Pro

[badmac78]

Not plastic ...

http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/
Refined impact extrusion technologies are more material-efficient and give the polished aluminum enclosure its incredible shape and finish.

I guess people just needed something to complain about.

 

[quasibinaer]

I use my Mac Pro to get work done. I don't really care how it looks.

My choice to buy will be based on how much more this costs over a comparable Hackintosh, factoring in the extra hassle of building and testing a Hackintosh rig against what it will cost to get my existing drives and peripherals working with the new Mac Pro.

If they want $3k, forget it.

Same here, sort of. Seeing this, I´m sort of on the fence if I should get this or an iMac specced to my needs. Both would do I guess, although I´d have to spec that iMac to its teeth to even be near what I need.
So it basically boils down to the price they´re gonna ask. I want one, but it´ll have to beat the iMac. The good thing about this design and having all expansion done via TB, it keeps the entry price down. But it´s not gonna be cheap, either.

Anyhow, fall´s gonna be good with Mavericks and iOS 7. Might even treat myself to a new Air and replace the current one.

 

[zzzachi]

...

most of you people here talking in favor of this new mac "pro" are users that have sufficient power and options with an imac already. we others just begin to understand what apple has done with this... just one cpu? so not even close to the multi core render power of an actual high end pc... and no options for multiple gfx cards, no possibility to do gpu rendering...
this machine is something completely new.. but its certainly not a successor to the mac pro.
and as mentioned by others, this was totally unneccessary. the old case updated with a new motherboard and actual components would have been way better than this new strategy.

 

[ColeHarris]

Upgrading a video card in 4 to 5 years without upgrading the CPU doesn't make sense unless you have a specific workflow that allows for performance enhancement only in the GPU and not in the CPU.

And if you do, I'd be interested in hearing about it as that would be something new for me to learn.

It appears, and I could be wrong, that the CPU in the Mac Pro is upgradable. So my assumption was that you would already have upgraded your CPU but be unable to upgrade your GPU resulting in a performance bottleneck. However if Intel changes sockets 4,5 years down the line then I guess it wouldn't matter either way.

 

[badmac78]

Wow, the design of this new Mac Pro is amazing. I'm going to have to think about its functional expansion though...

But the other wow is the seemingly clueless posters here. I never imagined so many supposed Apple followers (and several WinPC trolls) who are completely ignorant of technology.

1. Go look at Apple's web site and learn something before posting.
2. Whether you like the shape or not, the engineering/design is undeniably phenomenal.
3. Can you say aluminum, not plastic?
4. It appears to have 1 CPU (future 12 core?), 2 discrete GPUs, 4 RAM slots, and 1 SSD slot.
5. RAM is "limited" presumably to 128GB, maybe 256GB. DDR3 is what Xeon CPUs use. GDDR5 is for GPUs (6GB).
6. Storage (SSD) will be "limited" presumably to 1TB, maybe 2TB with new flash chips.
7. The RAM and Storage (SSD) speeds are off the charts!! 60GB/s & 1.2GB/s holy cow!!!
8. Count them - 6 Thunderbolt ports. That's 120Gb/s of total bandwidth.
9. Count them - 3 simultaneous 4k displays. Wow.

I don't think you people quite understand how much power they've squeezed into this little cylinder. The former Mac Pro tower, maxed out with the highest end PCIe cards available doesn't come close to the processing capability of this new system.

Now for you yahoos that don't understand the significance of 4k video, let me try to help you. It is 4 times the resolution of HD, or about 8.3 million pixels per screen (vs 2 million). You don't just plug in a 4k screen like a regular monitor. VGA can't do it (ROFL), nor DVI. HDMI will barely support one 4k screen.

Some PC rigs hack together 2 DVI or 2 DisplayPort connections to a single screen to reach 4k - that's 1 screen. Nvidia's highest end GeForce card supports only ONE 4k display over HDMI. In PC land you would need 3 top-end, double-wide graphics cards attached to a motherboard with 3 PCIe x16 slots to do what this new Mac Pro will do with a simple Thunderbolt cable. No, PCs aren't running 4k all over the place without end. What a laughable statement... I know of no other system that can support three 4k displays.

The convenience of internal expansion capacity is arguable. Some people like all the stuff in one box. Other people don't care about that. It's a personal preference.

Do you need multiple terabytes of hard disk storage? You can easily add an external disk array to this new Mac Pro in capacities that will far exceed what was possible internally with the old Mac Pro. And since you can do it over Thunderbolt, a properly designed Thunderbolt disk array will give you far, far better performance than the old Mac Pro internal SATA connected drives.

How long do you think it will take for 3rd parties to make an external disk array that can hold, say 8 hard drives, and put it into a 6" black cylinder than will fit perfectly under the new Mac Pro? I bet you'll see one before the Mac Pro even ships.

You photo/video guys - what PCIe cards do you have that won't work in an external 20Gb/s (PCIe x8) expansion chassis? The only cards that require x16 slots are high end GPU cards, which won't be necessary considering the internal workstation level graphics on this new Mac Pro. Heck, half the stuff you're relying on PCIe cards for now can be done in software on this new system (once the software is written to do so).

I could go on and on, but this post is already too long as it is. There are so many technical details to explain (like why a Thunderbolt connected disk array will perform better than internal hard drives) that I can't do it here, and you people probably wouldn't read it all anyway, if you've even read this far.

#brilliant

 

[Deedlez]

Someone will definitely come out with a vinyl wrap thing that turns this into R2D2. And maybe even some bluetooth-controlled wheels!!

 

[saba01]

wohooooooo

Also I doubt it will run as cool as the old one, there is no space in there for sufficient amount of fans and airflow. Hope its not going to be a loud machine under load.

What can be louder than the old MacPro, that sounds like an airplane starting under load....

 

[mikeandbecka]

blah

Honestly I love the old design.. this stinks.

There is no reason for the trash can cylinder design.. lets compare:

(Old Design First vs. New Design)

8 memory slots vs. 4.

4 PCI-e slots vs... none (they could have had PCI slots + Thunderbolt with the old design)

4 Sata (standard) Hard Drive slots.. vs. none (I have 4 3TB drives in my mac pro.. not to mention 42TB of external media connected Raid PCI-E slot)

2 Optical Disk bays.. yep I still burn disks.. both of our Mac Pros are filled with BD burners. So I'd need to buy two ugly external cases.

5 USB ports vs. 4

4 FW800 ports vs.. none

And yes every port & PCI-e slot on my mac pro is being used.

I don't care that its smaller.. that it still has a handle.. that its round.. I don't care. But I do care that I have to clutter my desk full of crap enclosures and spend more cash if I want to upgrade my old mac pro sad. I have no idea what to do at this point. Having thunderbolt and USB3 would be great.. but at what cost?

I would no doubt mistake this for a trash can from time to time and toss something in it LOL

 

[wiz329]

Wow, the design of this new Mac Pro is amazing. I'm going to have to think about its functional expansion though...

But the other wow is the seemingly clueless posters here. I never imagined so many supposed Apple followers (and several WinPC trolls) who are completely ignorant of technology.

Agreed

1. Go look at Apple's web site and learn something before posting.
2. Whether you like the shape or not, the engineering/design is undeniably phenomenal.
3. Can you say aluminum, not plastic?
4. It appears to have 1 CPU (future 12 core?), 2 discrete GPUs, 4 RAM slots, and 1 SSD slot.
5. RAM is "limited" presumably to 128GB, maybe 256GB. DDR3 is what Xeon CPUs use. GDDR5 is for GPUs (6GB).
6. Storage (SSD) will be "limited" presumably to 1TB, maybe 2TB with new flash chips.
7. The RAM and Storage (SSD) speeds are off the charts!! 60GB/s & 1.2GB/s holy cow!!!
8. Count them - 6 Thunderbolt ports. That's 120Gb/s of total bandwidth.
9. Count them - 3 simultaneous 4k displays. Wow.

Agreed, the engineering is phenomenal. But do you know how expensive 32GB ECC RAM modules are? And Apple's [proprietary] SSD drives? Cost shooting through the roof.

I don't think you people quite understand how much power they've squeezed into this little cylinder. The former Mac Pro tower, maxed out with the highest end PCIe cards available doesn't come close to the processing capability of this new system.

That's because its 4 year old technology. There was no need to "squeeze" it down so much in the first place. If they just updated the current Mac Pro with the latest Ivy Bridge EP Xeons, the dual socket configuration would spank anything this current MP has to offer.

The convenience of internal expansion capacity is arguable. Some people like all the stuff in one box. Other people don't care about that. It's a personal preference.

False. Its not a personal preference. The fact is, such a design that requires you to buy an external chassis for anything else you need is much more expensive, and actually less power efficient, as you need cooling solutions for anything you attach externally.

Do you need multiple terabytes of hard disk storage? You can easily add an external disk array to this new Mac Pro in capacities that will far exceed what was possible internally with the old Mac Pro. And since you can do it over Thunderbolt, a properly designed Thunderbolt disk array will give you far, far better performance than the old Mac Pro internal SATA connected drives.

The issue isn't performance. If you need raw performance, use an all SSD array. More often than not, you don't need SSDs -- you just need plain old storage with cheap mechanical HDDs and Terabytes worth of storage. Even a RAID5 or RAID6 array of HDDs won't bump you past anything SATA 3 can handle. You've just added extra clutter and extra cost by forcing storage external.

You photo/video guys - what PCIe cards do you have that won't work in an external 20Gb/s (PCIe x8) expansion chassis? The only cards that require x16 slots are high end GPU cards, which won't be necessary considering the internal workstation level graphics on this new Mac Pro. Heck, half the stuff you're relying on PCIe cards for now can be done in software on this new system (once the software is written to do so).

Much of this may be true. But remember, TB only offers 10 Gb/s in each direction. So if you need something that is large uni-directional, you don't really have 20 Gb/s.



Listen, its a great piece of engineering, but there really wasn't need for it in the first place. There was no need to shrink it down that small -- I'm not hurting for space in a desktop configuration.

Honest, aside for the clutter of boxes all around my tower, the biggest issue in my opinion is the lack of a dual-socket option. It seems this is primarily a space/thermal issue. There's simple not enough room for two 12-core CPUs and 8 slots of memory. Which makes me ask the question: why does it need to be so small in the first place, especially if it comes at the cost of only have 4 slots for RAM or a single CPU (not to mention internal storage).

 

[Blu Reel]

This is long time coming. Garage Band, Final Cut X... iMovie for iOS. The new Mac Pro will be amazing for editing DSLR footage and doing effects and what not. It, however, will NOT be for debayering 4K/5K/6K RED footage, rendering complex CGI or After Effects compositions and it will not be used in high end production. Because these tasks still require a lot of CPU and a helluva lot more GPU power.

The prosumer market. That is what they are after, that is where the money is. Let's just all finally realize this and move on.

So why do the guys at Blackmagic love it?

 

[bradl]

Im just waiting for the "Oscar The Grouch" meme's.

Screw that. I'm waiting to see the first KITT or Cylon mod on this Pro!

BL.

 

[fpnc]

It's the G4 Cube evolved...

Exactly, it's the Mac Cube in a cylinder but without the optical drive and with updated components and faster i/o. It also seems to be a single processor unit, since it comes in configurations with up to "12 cores" (probably a single Xeon, 12-core CPU).

Unfortunately, I don't think they are going to win over many new customers with this design. It's strictly for people who want to or must run Mac OS X and by allowing the existing Mac Pro design to languish for far too long I suspect that they have already lost a good number of pro customers. Thus, a small piece of the pie becomes an even smaller piece.

It is, however, a pretty bold redesign so if for nothing else than that they can at least make the claim that they are "thinking outside of the box" (literally).

In any case, since I'm already a Mac OS X "power" user I guess I might consider this to replace my existing Mac Pro as long as the entry-level price is less than $3K.

The Apple website has a fairly complete overview of this new machine. It's pretty (looking) both inside and out and they say that the case is made of aluminum -- so it's not plastic as some have suggested.

 

[Larry-K]

Someone will definitely come out with a vinyl wrap thing that turns this into R2D2. And maybe even some bluetooth-controlled wheels!!

Already working on it.

 

[tevion5]

The new Mac Pro is really bad ass! But, it is not cheap to move all your internal drives external.

Once the industry eventually follows the next shift in connections as seen previously, price will descend. eg. SSD prices are dropping nicely.

 

[torana355]

As i predicted Apple have made the Mac Pro as small as possible, all the while killing what makes a desktop tower favorable to professionals. It will be interesting to see how it all goes.

 

[ColeHarris]

This is long time coming. Garage Band, Final Cut X... iMovie for iOS. The new Mac Pro will be amazing for editing DSLR footage and doing effects and what not. It, however, will NOT be for debayering 4K/5K/6K RED footage, rendering complex CGI or After Effects compositions and it will not be used in high end production. Because these tasks still require a lot of CPU and a helluva lot more GPU power.

The prosumer market. That is what they are after, that is where the money is. Let's just all finally realize this and move on.

Absolutely. I think this, if priced right, will be a fantastic machine for prosumers. I'm sure many people will be very happy with it.

Its just tough for me, I've been an Apple user for so long that being told "hey we don't give a crap about you go buy a pc" is very painful. I've grown up with Apple, but now it seems (as you said) I simply have to move on...

 

[zzzachi]

This is long time coming. Garage Band, Final Cut X... iMovie for iOS. The new Mac Pro will be amazing for editing DSLR footage and doing effects and what not. It, however, will NOT be for debayering 4K/5K/6K RED footage, rendering complex CGI or After Effects compositions and it will not be used in high end production. Because these tasks still require a lot of CPU and a helluva lot more GPU power.

The prosumer market. That is what they are after, that is where the money is. Let's just all finally realize this and move on.

totally agree on this... this mac forces me to switch to pc

 

[Eidorian]

Absolutely. I think this, if priced right, will be a fantastic machine for prosumers. I'm sure many people will be very happy with it.

Its just tough for me, I've been an Apple user for so long that being told "hey we don't give a crap about you go buy a pc" is very painful. I've grown up with Apple, but now it seems (as you said) I simply have to move on...

I'm amazed people are still dropping "prosumer" like it's 2005 again.

 

[820647]

This is long time coming. Garage Band, Final Cut X... iMovie for iOS. The new Mac Pro will be amazing for editing DSLR footage and doing effects and what not. It, however, will NOT be for debayering 4K/5K/6K RED footage, rendering complex CGI or After Effects compositions and it will not be used in high end production. Because these tasks still require a lot of CPU and a helluva lot more GPU power.

The prosumer market. That is what they are after, that is where the money is. Let's just all finally realize this and move on.

So called professionals who use After effects.

I've used a mac mini for nukex, and Houdini. Of course you don't render on them but that's what blade server rooms are for. If I can do most of the stuff I need on a Mac Mini this machine will deal with it all easily. After Effects is nothing compared to nuke or Houdini, as far as performance requirements go. Get your head out of your ass.

 

[ColeHarris]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpJ30U3erkI

The T7600 is a good machine no doubt but after seeing one in person it just seemed very cheaply built compared to the Z820/620. But yes thats certainly a great option and an excellent example of a real pro machine.

 

[dec.]

@Chupa Chupa

Well Johnny Ive once again took a design from Dieter Rahms and said to the engineers "Figure out how to put the electronics in there".

That's great work by the engineers... but what's the point?

I guess what I mean is.....what is Johnny Ive paid for?

Dieter Rams invented the ...cylinder!

 

[thekev]

New mac pro, looks nice. For me it's too bad they don't offer a "low cost" version with more consumer orriented internals like core i7 cpu instead to keep the cost lower

They cost about the same if you're comparing quad Xeon to quad i7. Apple can still apply different pricing to different lines regardless of the cost of the underlying hardware.

As a music studio engineer, looking to upgrade our current Mac Pro, the new Mac Pro might be an economically turn off.

Our system needs two PCI-express slots and several harddrives for projects, sample libraries etc. Buying a Mac Pro, AND a PCI-express chassi, AND external harddrive chassi, might be waaaaaay to much money to spend.

Note that i wrote "might be". I sure do hope i.e. Magma chassis get alot cheaper along with other Thunderbolt devices.

I don't see Magma and Sonnet slashing prices, and a lot of the time cheap versions of those kind of external boxes are buggy with a lot of corner cutting due to carp margins. This is one of those things where I will probably reserve judgement until it's on the market for 6 months or so. By then I'll know exactly what it would take to fully configure one.

Good for 10yrs? NOt sure, DDR3 instead of GDDR5! HMMM? lets look at the rest of the beast!

DDR5 is a gpu spec only. DDR4 will probably be in systems released next year, but it's not compatible with this chipset.

a unified system handling 4K out of the box is... an issue? a problem? too costly? plastic? looks like a trash can (that takes the suburban cherry award)? Can't stick in those POS buggy cards mom gave you money for?

WTF, who are you people?

Some of the comments are silly, but you ignore certain things. Cost is always a factor. What if someone is purchasing for a facility that wants to buy 10? Are you going to suggest their budget is unimportant? Regarding cards, if you need the functionality of one, this doesn't change much. Adding a thunderbolt chassis doesn't make things less buggy. Cards themselves vary considerably. An eSATA card is probably one of the cheapest, but there are PCI cards that cost several hundred or several thousand. If their functionality could be reproduced without specialized hardware, no one would buy them. I'm not sure why I'm explaining this, as that last line cost you all credibility.

The GPGPUs alone would run you $3000.

The mentioned Streams of 4096 and maximum around 7TFLOPS of precision computing puts this combo at the FirePro S10000.

http://www.amd.com/us/products/work...ro-remote-graphics/S10000/Pages/S10000.aspx#3

That presently goes for $3,199 on Newegg.

With a completely different cooling solution and dual on-board GPGPUs with so many stream processors and high computing outputs one expects the 6GB DDR5 shared memory on this GCN 2.0 architecture that is most certainly a custom design for Apple.

Most likely this is the Orlando Team working with AMD on this project.

I agree, I don't see this System starting under $5000+.

Max power consumption: 375W

I'm skeptical how something like that would have fared on the old machine. I know it would have required an auxiliary power connector to work.

 

[OatmealRocks]

Wow, the design of this new Mac Pro is amazing. I'm going to have to think about its functional expansion though...

But the other wow is the seemingly clueless posters here. I never imagined so many supposed Apple followers (and several WinPC trolls) who are completely ignorant of technology.

1. Go look at Apple's web site and learn something before posting.
2. Whether you like the shape or not, the engineering/design is undeniably phenomenal.
3. Can you say aluminum, not plastic?
4. It appears to have 1 CPU (future 12 core?), 2 discrete GPUs, 4 RAM slots, and 1 SSD slot.
5. RAM is "limited" presumably to 128GB, maybe 256GB. DDR3 is what Xeon CPUs use. GDDR5 is for GPUs (6GB).
6. Storage (SSD) will be "limited" presumably to 1TB, maybe 2TB with new flash chips.
7. The RAM and Storage (SSD) speeds are off the charts!! 60GB/s & 1.2GB/s holy cow!!!
8. Count them - 6 Thunderbolt ports. That's 120Gb/s of total bandwidth.
9. Count them - 3 simultaneous 4k displays. Wow.

I don't think you people quite understand how much power they've squeezed into this little cylinder. The former Mac Pro tower, maxed out with the highest end PCIe cards available doesn't come close to the processing capability of this new system.

Now for you yahoos that don't understand the significance of 4k video, let me try to help you. It is 4 times the resolution of HD, or about 8.3 million pixels per screen (vs 2 million). You don't just plug in a 4k screen like a regular monitor. VGA can't do it (ROFL), nor DVI. HDMI will barely support one 4k screen.

Some PC rigs hack together 2 DVI or 2 DisplayPort connections to a single screen to reach 4k - that's 1 screen. Nvidia's highest end GeForce card supports only ONE 4k display over HDMI. In PC land you would need 3 top-end, double-wide graphics cards attached to a motherboard with 3 PCIe x16 slots to do what this new Mac Pro will do with a simple Thunderbolt cable. No, PCs aren't running 4k all over the place without end. What a laughable statement... I know of no other system that can support three 4k displays.

The convenience of internal expansion capacity is arguable. Some people like all the stuff in one box. Other people don't care about that. It's a personal preference.

Do you need multiple terabytes of hard disk storage? You can easily add an external disk array to this new Mac Pro in capacities that will far exceed what was possible internally with the old Mac Pro. And since you can do it over Thunderbolt, a properly designed Thunderbolt disk array will give you far, far better performance than the old Mac Pro internal SATA connected drives.

How long do you think it will take for 3rd parties to make an external disk array that can hold, say 8 hard drives, and put it into a 6" black cylinder than will fit perfectly under the new Mac Pro? I bet you'll see one before the Mac Pro even ships.

You photo/video guys - what PCIe cards do you have that won't work in an external 20Gb/s (PCIe x8) expansion chassis? The only cards that require x16 slots are high end GPU cards, which won't be necessary considering the internal workstation level graphics on this new Mac Pro. Heck, half the stuff you're relying on PCIe cards for now can be done in software on this new system (once the software is written to do so).

I could go on and on, but this post is already too long as it is. There are so many technical details to explain (like why a Thunderbolt connected disk array will perform better than internal hard drives) that I can't do it here, and you people probably wouldn't read it all anyway, if you've even read this far.

AWESOME POST but too many myopically biased idiotic reasoning to even just reason with.

 

[Blu Reel]

It appears, and I could be wrong, that the CPU in the Mac Pro is upgradable. So my assumption was that you would already have upgraded your CPU but be unable to upgrade your GPU resulting in a performance bottleneck. However if Intel changes sockets 4,5 years down the line then I guess it wouldn't matter either way.

That would be an interesting scenario if the CPU is upgradeable. But not to be a naysayer, I don't believe it is. The marketing language says you can have up to 12 cores. Based on Apple's history of marketing, that means at the time of purchase you'll have processor options as high as 12 cores to choose from.

Based on my PC building experience, no CPU is upgradeable without the user being an experienced tech because a CPU fan has to be attached to the CPU with Thermal paste. Once you introduce the paste, that's when most people think it's too hard for the everyday user to upgrade.

Also, using the core i3, i5, and i7s as an example, each of those cores require their own specific chipset which means there own motherboards. Focusing on the i7s, I know when I want to upgrade my i7 Hackintosh to the latest i7 CPU I will need a new motherboard to go with it.

So as a general rule of thumb, I think of CPU upgrade as a computer upgrade because it usually implies you need to upgrade the motherboard, too.

 

[littlenemo]

Well.

For my part, I'm impressed. Innovating design, great performances, that's exactly what I expected from Apple.

Of course, it won't be the most powerful workstation in the world but I think that people who need server-grade workstations with redundant power supplies, insane amounts of RAM and dozens of hot-swappable hard drives never relied on Apple products did they ?

I may be wrong but I think that professionals who always used Macs are for the bigger part independant programmers, video editors, photographers, music composers or sound designers, 3D artists and so on. And for all of them this new Macpro will be great ! I mean it's a lot better than the old one and if they were able to do their work with it, they will be able to do it even better with this new computer.

2 more things I want to clarify :

The sneak peak tells that it will have 2 on-board AMD FirePro GPUs with up to 6gb or VRAM EACH ! with support for up to THREE 4k displays ! Can you tell me who would need more GPU power than that ???

And about expandability, 6 INDEPENDANT Thunderbolt 2 ports for storage, monitors or anything. That's more bandwidth than 6 slots of Pci-e 2.0 x16...