Apple's Processor Options for Early 2012 Mac Pro Begin to Firm Up

[pgiguere1]

Although the Mac Pro looks like a nice machine to have, it still seem crazy to me to drop 4-5k on a machine that will be outperformed by a MacBook Pro or iMac a year or a year and a half later for a fraction of the price.

And that's not even considering the MBP and iMac both come with keyboard, mouse or trackpad, monitor and speakers.

I see it as you're not really paying for the power, but for having that power 1/1.5 year in advance. And it seems like people buying Mac Pros don't upgrade every year, a lot of them plan to keep theirs for like 5 years, so it doesn't make sense to me.

For the same price, you could buy the best iMac every year and resell it, and you would end up:
1) Having a more powerful machine on average
2) Paying less
3) Always having a warranty
4) Getting the cool new stuff first (Thunderbolt, 27" IPS display, FaceTime HD...)

So unless you work requires you to have power that can't be achieved with a high-end iMac/MBP right now, and that you also upgrade/change your Mac Pro every 2 years or less, I see no point in buying it.

Am I missing something?

 

[shompa]

These insane Intel prices is because they don't have any competition. When the MacPro was released, AMD had server processor in Intels class = Intel sold Xeons for 300 dollar.

ARM announced its 64 bit CPU for late 2012 release. Lets hope that will force Intel to stop have 95% profit on each CPU.

 

[wizard]

Get a clue guy, clock rates can not be used for performance comparisons.

Uhhhh... i already have a dual 2.5ghz G5. I want something with higher clock speed. Doesnt Alienware sell an overclocked like 6ghz machine!? Also.. this sucks because we HAVE to buy a new Mac before the end of the year (tax reasons) so I'm gonna have to get the current $3499 machine.

So if you are forced to buy for reasons out of your control why bother us?

Also; Apples misleading advertising aside, most intel hardware of the day ran circles around the G5. Now it is like 5 years later and intel has drastically increased processor performance, a new machine should be nothing but a positive for you.

 

[jetjaguar]

I'd love another Mac pro but it's just so expensive ... Tempted to just build a dual xenon pc workstation

 

[Eidorian]

These insane Intel prices is because they don't have any competition.

The performance difference between the ~$300 Core i7 2600K and the current ~$999 Core i7 990X is not all that amazing. Tom's Hardware even played a Core i7 3960X last month. Sandy Bridge-E is going to win in memory benchmarks on only a single socket but you really want to look into Xeon DP segment over Sandy Bridge-DT. After that it is an I/O war for PCI-Express lanes and SATA ports.

Another note, the ASUS P9X79 WS looks like a monster that is larger than standard ATX. *RAGE*

 

[BornAgainMac]

There won't be one. Not enough demand. Other retailers are having a hard enough time as it is moving traditional desktops. The big-sellers are AIOs and portables.

What would it take to create the demand? Get rid of the iMac and beef up the Mini?

 

[shompa]

Although the Mac Pro looks like a nice machine to have, it still seem crazy to me to drop 4-5k on a machine that will be outperformed by a MacBook Pro or iMac a year or a year and a half later for a fraction of the price.

And that's not even considering the MBP and iMac both come with keyboard, mouse or trackpad, monitor and speakers.

I see it as you're not really paying for the power, but for having that power 1/1.5 year in advance. And it seems like people buying Mac Pros don't upgrade every year, a lot of them plan to keep their theirs for like 5 years, so it doesn't make sense to me.

For the same price, you could buy the best iMac every year and resell it, and you would end up:
1) Having a more powerful machine on average
2) Paying less
3) Always having a warranty
4) Getting the cool new stuff first (Thunderbolt, 27" IPS display, FaceTime HD...)

So unless you work requires you to have power that can't be achieved with a high-end iMac/MBP right now, I see no point in buying the Mac Pro.

Am I missing something?

Intels insane pricing.

But to be fair. I bought a dual 4 core 3ghz in 2006 for under 3000 dollars.

Just the latest iMacs are a bit faster. Not much, but a bit. And the MacPro is 5 years old.

Only way for Apple to drive down the prices on MacPro is to use AMDs server cpus. They have some great 16 core CPUs = 32 real cores inside a MacPro.

----------

Isn't it insane that Intel showed a Thunderbolt MacPro in September 2009?

Is there ANY excuse for Apple not to include it on their pro machine in over 2 years?

 

[pgiguere1]

Uhhhh... i already have a dual 2.5ghz G5. I want something with higher clock speed. Doesnt Alienware sell an overclocked like 6ghz machine!? Also.. this sucks because we HAVE to buy a new Mac before the end of the year (tax reasons) so I'm gonna have to get the current $3499 machine.

Dude, the baseline 11" MacBook Air is more powerful than your current computer. You should consider investing less at a time but upgrading more often.

 

[8CoreWhore]

boing!

 

[wizard]

In a short answer power as in watts.

Yea.. I know our G5 wont hold a candle to the current machines, but I'm just wondering why megahertz havent gone up. Moores law and all

By keeping the clock rates down they significantly lower the chips power allowing for more cores. The extra cores are an advantage to almost all users. Beyond that the techniques used in the latest processors to give us these high performance chips may limit clock speed. It comes down to how fast the logic can be toggled and remain reliable.

In the end if the processor can retire more instructions per cycle you get better performance at a lower clock rate.

 

[TwitchOSX]

Dude, the baseline 11" MacBook Air is more powerful than your current computer. You should consider investing less at a time but upgrading more often.

We can't be dropping $2500 every other year for computers. We bought our Dual 2.5 G5 like 7 years ago. I think it's more than paid for itself ($3499). Will be getting a new Mac Pro here soon for the same price.. should be nice.

 

[pgiguere1]

But to be fair. I bought a dual 4 core 3ghz in 2006 for under 3000 dollars.

Just the latest iMacs are a bit faster. Not much, but a bit. And the MacPro is 5 years old.

Under 3000$? How?

Also, what benchmark are you using?

Last gen (early 2011) MBP apparently outperformed some 2010 Mac Pro configurations in Geekbench.

Link

That's crazy stuff.

 

[*LTD*]

What would it take to create the demand? Get rid of the iMac and beef up the Mini?

This doesn't make any sense.

You don't eliminate money-making machines in order to "create" some sort of phantom demand because a minority of a minority in the market want a machine that won't sell.

 

[pgiguere1]

We can't be dropping $2500 every other year for computers. We bought our Dual 2.5 G5 like 7 years ago. I think it's more than paid for itself ($3499). Will be getting a new Mac Pro here soon for the same price.. should be nice.

Where are you getting 2500$? A 599$ Mac mini is faster than your machine. Not that should necessarily get a 599$ Mac mini, but 3.5k is still a lot for a machine that must be pretty slow and incompatible right now.

 

[thekev]

Ah, the good ol' Megahertz Myth. You can't possibly think a dual 2.5 G5 will be faster than even the current gen mac pro, it just doesn't work that way. They used to sell pentium 4 processors at 3.0GHz+, and I'd bet that a core 2 duo would toast that at 1.6GHz

Dude, the baseline 11" MacBook Air is more powerful than your current computer. You should consider investing less at a time but upgrading more often.

That was really a weird time in terms of price/performance. The imacs of the time only held two sticks of ram no matter what. If you needed more, higher density ram killed your savings from the price point of a tower model. As for imac storage, your fastest option was firewire and if I recall correctly the firewire ports used a shared channel. Anyway it was pretty bad.

The minis aren't terrible machines at this point for lighter needs. They just hit the same issue with ram which is why so many people favor the performance of an SSD in one. If you need more ram, it's pretty much the imac or mac pro. The mini can still bring you savings but if you're dumping costly upgrades into it, they can tend to mitigate any savings you might see.

I do hope Apple is taking orders on a new machine before the end of the year. Without that they may not see a number of purchases which would otherwise be made for tax reasons.

 

[Chris Tilton]

Although the Mac Pro looks like a nice machine to have, it still seem crazy to me to drop 4-5k on a machine that will be outperformed by a MacBook Pro or iMac a year or a year and a half later for a fraction of the price.

And that's not even considering the MBP and iMac both come with keyboard, mouse or trackpad, monitor and speakers.

I see it as you're not really paying for the power, but for having that power 1/1.5 year in advance. And it seems like people buying Mac Pros don't upgrade every year, a lot of them plan to keep theirs for like 5 years, so it doesn't make sense to me.

For the same price, you could buy the best iMac every year and resell it, and you would end up:
1) Having a more powerful machine on average
2) Paying less
3) Always having a warranty
4) Getting the cool new stuff first (Thunderbolt, 27" IPS display, FaceTime HD...)

So unless you work requires you to have power that can't be achieved with a high-end iMac/MBP right now, and that you also upgrade/change your Mac Pro every 2 years or less, I see no point in buying it.

Am I missing something?

Yes. You can't have 12 cores, 32GB RAM, and a $3,000 pro 3D card in an iMac. Obviously, this is not for your average consumer, but for professionals working with 3D animation, etc. However, I use my Mac Pro for music writing and production, and we're getting closer and closer to where an iMac will be plenty good enough.

 

[Vantage Point]

This list of Geek scores (scroll down) should put some perspective on a G5 and recent MP - it's not even a contest.
http://www.primatelabs.ca/geekbench/mac-benchmarks/

If I had to buy a MP before the end of the year I would go with refurb for the best value.

 

[iBug2]

Although the Mac Pro looks like a nice machine to have, it still seem crazy to me to drop 4-5k on a machine that will be outperformed by a MacBook Pro or iMac a year or a year and a half later for a fraction of the price.

No iMac outperforms even the top end of 2009 models, let alone the 2010 ones.

Current iMacs outperform only the lowest end Mac Pro of 2010. Not the 5k costing top end. That's around 3 times as fast as the fastest iMac today.

----------

Under 3000$? How?

Also, what benchmark are you using?

Last gen (early 2011) MBP apparently outperformed some 2010 Mac Pro configurations in Geekbench.

It outperformed the low end 4 core one, and that even by couple of percents.

And he's correct. I bought my 8 Core 2.8 in 2008 for 2500$ as well. Intel's Xeon CPU's until they switched to the i series were much lower priced. Mac Pro prices shot through the roof in 2009. 2008 and 2006 models were quite cheap compared to today.

 

[BayouTiger]

iMac is just not the same

Why is it that for some reason I can't explain, the iMac is just not quite as satisfying experience as a Mac Pro. I retired my trusty 2006 2.66 10GB MP two years ago for a 2.8 i7 iMac and while I know that it is much faster in every regard it just doesn't feel as silky smooth performance wise (in general, but Aperture in particular) as the old box did. I am guessing it has to do with all 4 hard drives being on the bus rather than much of my work being on a FW800 LACie Quadra (which was blazing fast over eSata on the Pro).

I am tempted weekly to replace the iMac with a new unit and a Promise Pegasis (for about what a new MP will run) to get back that feeling, but my head says to wait for the new MP.

 

[DisMyMac]

Do these prices help predict the time frame at all? Still early 2012?

 

[Wild-Bill]

I don't expect Apple to price the Mac Pro with any sort of "value" in mind. They want their ridiculous markup.

The last time the Mac Pro was reasonably priced was the 2008 models, of which I bought the 2.8 GHz dual quad-core. Since then, Apple has really made it a "pay to play" proposition.

 

[deconstruct60]

By keeping the clock rates down they significantly lower the chips power allowing for more cores.

Not quite. The overall chip package is at about the same powel levels. The individual cores are operating at lower temperatures. For example:

old tech : 2 cores at 50W per core ==> 100W
latest tech : 4 cores at 25W per core ==> 100W

If your work involves using just one core then there is not as much of a throughput/Watt difference. if your work can leverage as many as 8 cores then there is a big difference in throughput/Watt.

The other issue being swept under the rug is that when the workload on these E5 2600 and 1600 processors drops to just 2 cores the GHz being cited are lower than the operating frequencies.
So related to the above example

latest tech : 4 cores at 25W per core ==> 100W
latest tech : 2 cores at 48W per core and 2 cores at 2W per core ==> 100W


The frequencies being cited for for all available cores doing work. If you cap the newer processors at the max core count from 3-4 generations ago then there typically is a net GHz increase over the time.

The extra cores are an advantage to almost all users.

Almost all users in the market being targeted by the Mac Pro.

Beyond that the techniques used in the latest processors to give us these high performance chips may limit clock speed. It comes down to how fast the logic can be toggled and remain reliable.

There are a number of other issues in play. Keeping the cores feed with instructions and data becomes harder as increase the contention between the cores for the limited memory bandwidth. So not only the power budget can be shifted if turn some cores off, one (or two) cores can consume all of the memory bandwidth with no ill effects upon the other cores (since they are not consuming anything.)

 

[slrandall]

Sweet Jesus. I can't wait. My lab currently uses a PowerMac G4 [with 1.5 whole GB of RAM], but is going to upgrade to the newest MacPro [we upgrade every ~7 years; earlier this year we got two new iMacs].

If anyone here has ever used IDL on massive amounts of data, you'll understand my pain. [I'm talking .txt/.xdr files that are roughly 500MB each. Reading them line by line.]

Needless to say, it'll be nice to run Lion [and the new IDL] on a machine with essentially 32 cores and a cool 64GB of RAM.

I fully expect to become at least twice as productive, now that I don't have to limit myself to only two IDL programs at a time.

 

[TwitchOSX]

Where are you getting 2500$? A 599$ Mac mini is faster than your machine. Not that should necessarily get a 599$ Mac mini, but 3.5k is still a lot for a machine that must be pretty slow and incompatible right now.

No way in hell could a Mac Mini do what I'm doing with this machine. And the incompatible is what's really pushing us to upgrade.... I cant get CS5 until we get an Intel Mac.

 

[GLS]

No way in hell could a Mac Mini do what I'm doing with this machine. And the incompatible is what's really pushing us to upgrade.... I cant get CS5 until we get an Intel Mac.

You really should brush up on CPU specs (not megahertz) and compare what your G5 is capable of vs. a Core I5 or I7.