w00t, would actually buy. a mini pro at a reasonable price.
I'd bootcamp that and make it my main machine easily.
The pro now is too out of my price point and the Mac Mini doesnt' have enough capability (video card expansion etc)
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Mac Pro Supplies Tightening as WWDC Approaches
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w00t, would actually buy. a mini pro at a reasonable price.
I'd bootcamp that and make it my main machine easily.
The pro now is too out of my price point and the Mac Mini doesnt' have enough capability (video card expansion etc)
That's strange we did the same only differently. We dumped all PCs and went VMWare using Macs. Running OS X Server in VM as well as Windows XP, 7 and 8.
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I have a copy of and old OS X Server in a VMWare VM that runs Rosetta just for the odd occasion I want a really old app to run, it works like a treat.
Please explain how you're going to cool dual Xeons and high end graphics cards in half the size.
The GTX Titan fits well on a Mini-ITX board an a SFF case long enough for one.
Seriously though, I could care less about apple shipping the pro without an optical drive. I learned to hate their optical drives. They are the worst part of every apple computer I have ever owned.
You missed the real reason to get a Mac with an optical drive!
The real reason to get a Mac with an optical drive is that you then have the space and the cables to install a good OD. I put an OWC Blu-ray reader in my 2009 iMac 21.5 in. Not only is it quieter than the OEM drive (before that one self destructed) it can read BR to make mkv files. I've never watched most of my BR movies from the disk. I would rather watch the file.
The OD on my 2010 Mac Pro has been great since I haven't used it in two and one-half years. I replaced it early with an LG BR burner from OWC.
Except for the 9.5mm MBP version BR drives are a hundred bucks or so.
Totally agree with you. Apple makes only one real desktop computer, i.e. one with standardized desktop components. The other two Mac "desktops" necessarily have some degree of mobile component compromise.
That means that while the mini and iMac are honestly terrific computers they really aren't desktops in the computer enthusiast sense of the term. An i7, single HD tower with room for an additional HD or OD and a couple PCIe slots would sell in great numbers.
Even if it did not have TB but rather stayed with a FW800 and plenty of USB 3 ports it would still sell. If Apple did it right, with SATA3, PCI 3, at least one 16 lane slot, enough power for high-end GPUs and decent cooling it would be hit.
The base could be gen 4 i5 and HD5100 with the top-end at i7 3.5GHz and a current nVIDIA card.
and they generally only have two DIMM slots, generally only 1 full length PCI-e slot and no socket 2011 version. 2011 with it's 40 lanes would be wasted in mini-ITX
Hopefully you have bought ML licenses already, if Apple pulls the same trick than last year; stopped selling Lion, when ML was launched. New OS every year is crazy... But here's to the crazy ones...
Who says you need PCI slots anymore? I don't think you do. Especially if you're going to work with Thunderbolt, GPU via PCI slots makes no sense to me.
Kill the Optical bays, Kill the PCI slots, redesign the power supply, redesign the handles to be more compact, and you're already well under way to maximizing space.
This doesn't necessarily mean you can't have expandable or replaceable GPU options, but there can certainly be a more efficient way to do this. PCI cards are so old-fashioned and clunky, and if anyone can reinvent a new form factor for expandable GPU, it's Apple, working in conjunction with AMD & nVidia.
That's if they decide expandable GPU is still necessary at all. Might not be. Decide when you BTO, just like a MBP/iMac
Any move to shrink the Mac Pro for the sake of shrinkage is pointless to me. A major virtue of the Mac Pro is that it's configurable and upgradeable by the user ... especially as technology and a user's needs evolve over the life of the machine. It's not meant to be portable so there's no point in making a Mac Pro Lite ... perhaps as an addition to the Mac line, but not as a replacement for the Mac Pro.
Thunderbolt only has about 1/10th the speed necessary for high-end applications, like 4k video capture.
That is why internal PCI slots exist, and the giant cases and cooling necessary for them.
For low-end applications, like still-image photography or web development, an iMac/Mac Mini with Thunderbolt should be plenty.
Since this is suppose to be the professional version of the Mac they really do not have to over obsess about save too much, the Mac mini is there, Macbooks pros are smaller, just give people the power and options they want. This is a machine that should retain the option for an optical drive, if someone does not want it then possible options for more hard drive space etc..
It is getting kind of ridiculous when they are worried about making a desktop machine an inch thinner when there should be more focus on making it as powerful as it can be.
It is getting kind of ridiculous when they are worried about making a desktop machine an inch thinner when there should be more focus on making it as powerful as it can be.
That's actually exactly what it means. Kill the PCI slots, you kill GPU selection. Even the next gen thunderbolt is way too slow for professional GPU applications. Besides, even if it wasn't, you know what's in that Thunderbolt enclosure? PCI slots! Oh the horror!
What you are describing is the Mac Mini, or iMac. The product already exists.
Besides the current Mac Pro is already among the smallest of professional workstations.
You are missing one key constraint..... at the same noise decibel level.
there are 1U boxes meant for data center usage that have dual setups and GPGPU card. You wouldn't to sit next to one and try to concentrate on a getting some work done though. At least not without some heavy duty noise cancelling headphones.
But yes, unless throw out some aspects of what the Mac Pro is or "balloon squeeze" where just move from one box to another and add price/performance overhead to make a more complicated solution, major reductions turns it into an Apple vs. Oranges transition.
Your argument justifies a need for connecting to the PCI buss where Thunderbolt isn't big enough currently, but not for PCI slots as they exist. Even then, it's only Thunderbolt 1.0 that can't handle 4k. Thunderbolt 2.0 can. And of course 3.0 and beyond....
http://siliconangle.com/blog/2013/04/09/intel-unveils-blazing-fast-thunderbolt-2-0-with-4k-support/
So the real question is will a "Next Gen Mac Pro" get Thunderbolt 1.0 or 2.0? It doesn't seem like Thunderbolt 2.0 will be out this year. But if it's only a year away, that's reason enough for me, if I were an Apple engineer, to kill off the ****tay PCI card interface. If you need 4k, you stick with your current PCI capable hardware, make your money and carry on. Or you wait til T-Bolt 2.0 comes to market in the Next Gen Mac Pro 1.5 the following year. Make your money, and carry on.
https://www.macrumors.com/2012/03/0...nderbolt-speeds-with-move-to-pci-express-3-0/
Going beyond Thunderbolt 2.0, do PCI slots still have a future at all? Cause I still don't see it. Skating to where the puck is going, means death to PCI cards.
Isn't T-Bolt just a way to put PCIe devices outside of the box (a slow way, but a way nonetheless).
Death of PCIe implies that T-Bolt is dead as well, since all T-Bolt devices are PCIe devices.
Send me an email when I can get 40 lanes of PCIe 3.0 over T-Bolt. I want my dual-port 40 GbE cards to work.
+1 except I'll take 80. That's what i currently have in my workstation. Don't really feel like going back to IO speed i had in the '90s by using Thunderbolt.
Ok, I'll bite, what is dual-port 40 GbE used for, and why can't it run over a T-Bolt connection? (T-bolt is based off PCI tech but doesn't use PCIe connections, right?) I don't use GbE and I'm not familiar with it, but it looks like a job for data centers and enterprise servers, not a desktop Mac workstation?
It could run over T-bolt but it'd run at max 1/8 potential speed, not to mention latency. And at that it'd saturate the T-Bolt chain.
Ok, but why would this be a job for a Mac Pro style workstation? What is GbE for exactly?
