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Apple's New 8-Core Mac Pro Shows Up in Benchmarks
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Unfortunately (outside of buying a console) this is where you're 100% wrong. People that are serious "PC" gamers generally build their own machine, unless they are gaming on a laptop where it would make more sense to buy a souped up Alienware there's just not many people buying gaming PC's.
Then I guess all those people who only attach monitors to their "pro level" computers will have to buy from another company.
For people who do real work and would attach external drives and other devices no matter how large the "CPU" (meaning the main unit the computer is housed in, not the processor) may still view the new Mac Pro as an option.
There are a lot of people who are not going to mind not being able to internally attach drives...
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a round case.. ??
lol
Your previous racks will be useless now...... since round objects won't fit...
Looks like more money to spend..... I bet people will probably start making round racks toojust to accommodate this trashcan.
still.... I say unique design, because no one else will ever do this..
Did the G5 style Mac Pro fit in a rack?
Don't other people just get a shelf for their racks when they have a device that isn't rack mountable? That's what we do...
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I imagine not much difference for many who already had several drives in external cases but I do see that some only needed the 4 bays and like to keep their desks clean. But not everyone works in a showroom, some people have a lot of computer equipment around them...
Nope, I do to. I only have the items that I am working on at that time locally then they go back to my NAS device.
Hacintosh?
Is this what pros do? Build mission critical systems around a hackintosh?
If my livelihood dependend on it, I would not trust anything that had "hack" anywhere near its name. Its not like there aren't alternatives.
What platform is that? I don't see anything available.
Yup. Complainers who can't afford this machine anyway.
I can barely understand your post, but this is an 8-core CPU, it's not even a 12 core. If you want a slower, older machine, well - you already have one.
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Love the hypocrisy here.
2 boxes (at $650 a pop) for my hard drives. I have 6 hard drives in my mac pro.
You buy one office suite, be it Office or iWork, and your computer is good to go for productivity.
Games are a recurrent purchase.
Also "Gaming" and "Productivity" aren't mutually exclusive categories. There's not a flip you have to switch on your machine. I use mine for gaming, and productivity, and media consumption, and scientific computing.
no.. not everybody is talking like that.
there will definitely be 6 core and very likely 4 core models..
plenty of pro apps are single threaded and need fast clock speed as opposed to having more available cores running slower. (which will simply be sitting idle during most work while one core is chugging away at 2.5Ghz #)
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They already have: Graphics, lack of expandability, no optical drives or legacy support, and so forth. But not from me. I'm eagerly anticipating specs and pricing breakdowns to see if I can convince myself that I 'need' this bad boy.
I would submit that, if StarCraft 2 is really your concern, then the new Mac Pro will handle it *quite* easily, with horsepower to spare. After all, StarCraft 2's *RECOMMENDED* specs are an Intel i3 processor, ATI Radeon HD 4850 or NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 650M or better, and 4 GB of RAM. Even if you crank the resolution up to 4K, I don't suspect SC2 will even force the new Mac Pro out of a quiet stroll.
You want a Mac that "isn't terrible at games", you've got a few options. An upper-tier MacBook Pro, and upper-tier iMac, and pretty much *any* tier of Mac Pro.
See ya
I like to place my computers under my desk, with this one it will have to be on the table with all kind of cables & connecting external noisy hard drives.
After being a fervent Mac user since 1992 and having own 10 macs, I must say that I am seriously considering to build a PC that fits my needs.
Oh yeah... and I won't regret Time Machine too...
I like to place my computers under my desk, with this one it will have to be on the table with all kind of cables & connecting external noisy hard drives.
After being a fervent Mac user since 1992 and having own 10 macs, I must say that I am seriously considering to build a PC that fits my needs.
Oh yeah... and I won't regret Time Machine too...
That is a server config. Ivy Bridge-EP is in limited supply and it is going in servers first, workstations will follow. HP and Dell have announced products and Dell are offering non-configurable basic choices for now.
AVA direct have actually updated their HTPC workstations with V2 options, but not their normal ones (i.e you have to buy a Tesla card).
http://www.avadirect.com/workstation-pc-configurator.asp?PRID=23644
With Sandy Bridge-EP it took 3 months to start shipping in workstations, Intel product release announcements aren't like Apple's.
The jury is still out on that scenario you're painting. It's either an all-encompassing comprehensive machine, or a machine with greater expansion capability, but not both. Apple is venturing most power users, when given the choice, will opt for the latter.
If that doesn't suit you, I'd say 'No hard feelings' and 'Happy Trails'.
There are two obvious reasons why gamers (or enthusiasts in general) build their own PCs:
The components the mass producers use are often not that high of quality.
The consumer PC market is known for razor thin profit margins and HP/Dell/etc. do their best to make what they can through bulk discounts. But they also inevitably do things like use second-rate manufacturing partners, skimp on niceties like well-made cases, higher load power supplies, and extra USB ports to cut costs, and they use sub-performance level components for thing that aren't bullet-pointed on the sales brochure. To get a higher quality machine you have to build it yourself, or buy from a boutique brand that will charge you at least 30% more than doing it yourself.
Because they can.
It's possible to buy a case, power supply, CPU, graphics card, etc of your liking and get a fully legal and supported copy of Windows on it. It's not possible to do that for a Mac. Yeah, you can try and build a Hackintosh, but you have to in effect build a copy of one of Apple's existing systems for things to work right, you can't choose a higher performance CPU than something Apple has already used, for example. Or use more exotic motherboard audio. Even if everything does work you're gonna have a hard time getting support for issues that may crop up, because companies that make Mac accessories and software are only going to support real Macintosh hardware and unmolested operating systems.
That's why the gaming market does exist for Apple, because you can't just go and build-it-yourself like you can on the Windows side, and Apple's hardware it a couple notches above the normal PC fare.
Well, I don't do much video and games, just some office work and for fun I built a Macintosh, i3 3.2 Ghz, 8 gb of RAM, Kingstone SSD drive, some DVD drive, a 1 GB hard drive and ATI Radeon HD 6570, a truly mid to low end machine and it runs OS X like a beast. I even didn't bother to install any Windows on any partition (what I normally do) and embraced all Mac life again (i had G3 350ghz long ago).
Some day I will buy MBA but with Mac and iPads/iPhone I have I have zero need for anything else. Even MBA is a kind of unnecessary (I do have old Vaio if notebook is needed). I buy quite a lot of Mac and iOS software from AppStores. Maybe I could do with Mac mini though I always wanted an expandable xMac, midtower.
If you're sure that your important applications can use 10 cores, yes it looks good.
If they don't scale beyond 4 cores, then the 3.5GHz quad would be snappier and cheaper.
If your applications are friendly to OpenCL - you might want to put the money into the GPUs rather than the CPUs - and vice-versa.
Of course, the chances of Apple giving you a choice of 17 different CPUs are rather slim.
This is a really dumb question, but how could I find out how many cores the programs I use need to work the best?
Most important, think about all of your workflows, and focus on the "pain points" - the places where you are waiting for the computer to perform a step. Everything else is already fast enough so don't worry about the other apps.
If you have the programs now, run activity monitor on them and see have much CPU is being used during the pain points. Also look at memory activity and disk activity - in particular the queue lengths on the disk.
If all the CPU cores are busy, then more/faster cores should help.
If there are lots of spare CPU cycles (say 25% or more unused), then there are three likely scenarios.
- the disk is the bottleneck - this will show a big queues on the disk (and "1" is a very big number for disk queues) with spare CPU and memory
- memory is the bottleneck - you'll see little free memory, paging, and probably large queues on the paging disk
- the app can't use the existing cores - spare CPU, memory and little disk activity probably means that the application isn't multi-threaded enough, and faster cores (not more cores) is the answer
(Note that if your data files are on the network, you'll need to look at the network traffic as well.)
Also check on benchmark reports for your problem applications. Often a benchmark report will show results for different core counts.
Often money is wasted upgrading the wrong parts of the computer system - people get a whole new computer when buying an SSD would give much better bang.
You're spot on except you left one TINY thing out. If Apple makes a great gaming iMac or any Mac the first thing people will complain about is the price of it and let's be real about it, Apple is not going to build a great gaming Mac that's affordable enough for people to stop complaining about it, let alone complain that it's not upgradable because Apple is done with upgradable Macs and I wouldn't be surprised at some point if the rest of the industry follows suit. You buy a Playstation or an XBOX and the specs they come with are what you have to live with it outside of the few geeks that know of ways to hack or change proprietary hardware, if that's possible. Upgrading old machines just isn't as "popular" as it used to be unless you're a teenager with no responsibilities and too much time on your hands.
What the iMac is capable of in terms of gaming and the games available for it is "good enough" to qualify it has a machine to play games on but to qualify it as a "gaming machine" will put Apple in the position to raise the end cost to the customer.