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I think you would be incorrect on that. If you look at the performance specs of the W9000, the d700 fits nicely within that realm. Apple is assuredly getting a volume discount on the GPU's, probably at lower frequencies, and with the single fan Mac Pro handling the cooling, it isn't a straight equivalent of a PCie card for a PC.

Perhaps, but given that a single W9000 retails here at ~£2700, I cannot see how Apple would be getting such a huge discount to include two of those plus a ~£1300 Xeon chip, not counting the other bits and labour+delivery to retail the package at just below £3800 with "Apple premium" included… Even if Apple were getting those parts at 50% cheaper than they cost retail, it still makes no sense...
 
Unfortunately ribbon cables don't look very nice :(

If you've really been to the future, then you should know everything will be wireless in 3 years time. I don't think you're truthin' here. :mad:

This would affect the entire industry... What new standard do you supposed PCIe be replaced with?

I should've added an /s to my post.

While I can see that Thunderbolt could potentially possibly replace PCIe at some point, and a future where everything is modular, and no one has to spend any time goofing around with screws or trying to fit little cards into tight spaces is kind of appealing, we're nowhere near that point now.

TB doesn't come anywhere near being able to match the bandwidth of an internal PCIe bus. Right now, the up and coming can only provide 20 Gbps. That's a little b, people. A bit, not a byte. That means that the actual max throughput of Thunderbolt is 2.5GB a second. PCIe 3.0 can provide 1GB per lane, upwards of 32GB per second on a 16 lane bus. That's...considerably faster.

I'm wondering how anyone could honestly claim PCIe is becoming a bottleneck. Hell, I think the only thing faster in a computer is the bandwidth between your northbridge and CPU.
 
I wonder if the 6 core model is even overkill for a professional photographer...

Probably so. I use a new 2013 i5 iMac with 24 GB of RAM and a 512 SSD drive (For LR5, RAW/JPEG files go on external drive) and it's completely perfect. I can't imagine needing a Mac Pro for photography. If I had the cash, I'd gladly get one, though. lol.
 
You are so misinformed that its actually painful!
If you make money with your computer by writing books, magazines etc. then a computer you bought 3 years ago will be as fast now as it was then. Writing text never gets intensive . . . .

This is laughably wrong, unless by "writing text" you mean literally typing text into a word processor or text editor. I'd say you're the "misinformed" one.

Sure, you can write just about anything on (say) a MBA 11". I wrote my first published fiction in VMS Edit on an AlphaServer using VT520 terminal. But you're pushing a very narrow view of "writing."

The fiction project I'm working on now (as well as the one completed and published last July) typically involves:

Scrivener open with 2 windows and 130 chapters, plus copious notes
Preview open with 4 GB of searchable fieldnotes
Word open
Either LR or Preview also minding a bunch of images
Quicktime or sometimes FCP X with video spooled up for me to inspect when needed
Firefox

That's my writing environment, and it's computationally-intensive.
 
Apple has clearly abandoned the professional market!

/s

How many years ago should they have upgraded the Mac Pro? Why did they choose form over function and make it damn near impossible to upgrade?

Why isn't anyone talking about how these compare to other, similarly priced workstations? Is this better or worse than a competing system at the same price?
 
Precisely: WTF do you actually mean? 15.75 gigabytes per second is not enough bandwidth for rendering?

So it'll be a big surprise for you that Apple do actually use PCIe as interconnect bus on the new MacPro? I mean, seriously, WTF are you on about man, Xeon has PCIe lanes coming out of it, if you were gonna go with something else, you'd need to have a PCIe to "the something else" bridge first…

Kick in the gut for your argument more like… :rolleyes:

You were not in the PCIe committee meetings and breaks when holding back features in the PCIe bus were discussed. There is a hell of a lot more in the Mac Pro as far as interconnect goes than what's in the PCIe published specifications.

The problem with forums like this is you never know who you are talking with in these threads other than frequency of use. It could be a high school or college student taking their faculty rhetoric as fact, could be a hobbyist who does this between their shifts at Best Buy or TGI Fridays, could be an industry professional with over twenty years experience, could be an Apple employee posting via proxies with root control over the router path or it could be Woz on a slow day.

When you have a few bus designs under your belt, I'll take you comments into consideration.
 
You were not in the PCIe committee meetings and breaks when holding back features in the PCIe bus were discussed. There is a hell of a lot more in the Mac Pro as far as interconnect goes than what's in the PCIe published specifications.

Is there now? How come I haven't heard of this beforehand? From the looks of things, both in benchmarks and writeups, the new MP isn't using anything above and beyond what you get out of standard workstation PCs. The design is what makes it unique. The technology is about standard.

So provide me with some proofs and examples of why PCIe is so weak, why it's so terrible for high bandwidth applications. Because, up until now, I've never heard a single person in all of the internets complain about being bandwidth limited from PCIe 3.0. Sure, you could always have more, that's a given when it comes to the pro market, but it's never been much of an issue otherwise.
 
Man I'd love to buy one of those to edit family videos on but I know that would be such a waste on powerful machine. I'd be embarrassed to use iMovie on it :) lol!

I wonder if the 6 core model is even overkill for a professional photographer...

One thing I really like about this Mac Pro release are the many "this is too much processing power" comments. IMO, it shows that Apple has yet again created a killer machine where some great apps will originate not possible in previous models.

One of the ways to brainstorm on this is think of a computing process that "takes time" for you and now imagine it happening in real time with a good UI to drive it. Just the SSD-only file access will create a lot of apps that are just not possible with the access times of a hard disk.

I have a few ideas for this. One is a multi-camera, real-time video stream interpolation where you can create a real time virtual camera view between the physical angles of multiple camera streams.

Put ultrasonic measured distances in each pixel on the stream and you have the signal feed for some very nice interpolation tools for real-time, post edit, scene display. For example, instead of the director calling the viewing angle, the end user watches a movie following the "release views", the alternative "directors cut" or even views sequences posted on like by fan. You just have all camera feeds going to the end user for their own viewing as desired.

This would be great of TV news so you can see the prejudice in their viewing angle where a "major even" with tight shots of a half dozen protestors is really just only six people no one else cares as the viewer at home zooms out to see what is really going on.

That is just one of many that you can throw this Mac Pro into other than multiple 4K screens and dozens of image filters.
 
Apple should put more resources into improving the stability of OSX - like preventing Finder from hanging if the front UI process has hung.

Or even just improving Finder Folder Explorer... making it comparable to the power of Windows Explorer.

Better networking support - iSCSI perhaps?
 
For those missing the old style and drive bays, just get a old used mac tower and gut it, leave the power supply and drive bays and do this:
 

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Man I'd love to buy one of those to edit family videos on but I know that would be such a waste on powerful machine. I'd be embarrassed to use iMovie on it :) lol!

I wonder if the 6 core model is even overkill for a professional photographer...

Yes. A mac mini would be perfectly fine for a photographer. Still photos are not very demanding.

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Perhaps, but given that a single W9000 retails here at ~£2700, I cannot see how Apple would be getting such a huge discount to include two of those plus a ~£1300 Xeon chip, not counting the other bits and labour+delivery to retail the package at just below £3800 with "Apple premium" included… Even if Apple were getting those parts at 50% cheaper than they cost retail, it still makes no sense...

They are getting them for not much more than the equivalent radeon card. The markup on these cards is all in the drivers which is windows specific.


And regarding form factor how is this an improvement.

a398a_macproexpansion-640x375.jpg
 
Yes. A mac mini would be perfectly fine for a photographer. Still photos are not very demanding.

True. A 6-core Mac Pro is overkill for photographers, since editing stills isn't super processor intensive. If he absolutely had to go with one, a basic entry level 4-core with a goodly bit of ram would be all he needs, and that would last him for years on end.

And regarding form factor how is this an improvement.

Well, if if you want to add any new hardware, you don't have to go digging into the machine itself. You just plug it into the back, set it up in the OS, and it's ready to go. That's one big plus.

...but the downside is it'll take up more desk space, and you'll need to use a big power strip if you get too heavy with the add ons, since you can't plug new hardware directly into the PSU with Thunderbolt.
 
Kind of funny how impressed people are by the PCIe write-read times. My new 13" Retina Macbook Pro has the very same 1TB PCIe drive as the new Mac Pro and is getting the same super fast read-write times.

I'd love to actually see what the computer can do, not just the expected read write times that are the drive....
 
You were not in the PCIe committee meetings and breaks when holding back features in the PCIe bus were discussed. There is a hell of a lot more in the Mac Pro as far as interconnect goes than what's in the PCIe published specifications.

The problem with forums like this is you never know who you are talking with in these threads other than frequency of use. It could be a high school or college student taking their faculty rhetoric as fact, could be a hobbyist who does this between their shifts at Best Buy or TGI Fridays, could be an industry professional with over twenty years experience, could be an Apple employee posting via proxies with root control over the router path or it could be Woz on a slow day.

When you have a few bus designs under your belt, I'll take you comments into consideration.

I've been in enough committees and chaired enough of them to know that getting a portion of people to be happy, let alone a significant one or all of them, and get them to agree on something is a futile task…

Nonetheless, unless Apple got Intel to significantly change the architecture your argument holds no ground: like I said, the Xeons have PCIe lanes come out of it and that's how it interfaces with the system, Apple expressly states that SSD is PCIe based, the graphics cards have to interface with the PCIe lanes that come out of the Xeon at some point.

Neither have you explained why the bandwidth in excess of 15 gigabytes per second is not enough for RT video or rendering (common sense would dictate that it is more of a computational power issue).

As a result of all I said, I cannot take your posts seriously at all!..
 
This ALMOST feels like a computer built like a games console.

A small custom box, mostly soldered together, running the company who makes the console/computer's own OS and running the software fine tuned for the box also.

That's EXACTLY what it is. This goes back to Apple loving to make software... so they make computers that will run it best. This little critter will be the "benchmark system" they use when developing all their Pro lineup and OS features. Imagine the software you can write with this machine as "expected specifications".
 
Apple wisely saw that PCIe was a bloated, dead end standard, not anywhere near capable of providing enough bandwidth for high end computational tasks. So instead of tethering the new Mac Pro to yet another pointless legacy bus, Apple replaced it with about the exact same thing, but at a quarter of the bandwidth, and on a cord.

PCIe is dying, people. Get over it.

Dude, that why Apple got Intel to re-design the Xeon chip not to have PCIe lanes as systems interface and still have PCIe connectors on the SSD?.. /sarcasm

PS: Yes, perhaps you should've put the /s at the end of your post ;-)
 
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I agree. I have been using Avid for the past 6 years. I am currently a student and my school teaches Avid, which kept me using Avid even more since I had already learned it and would continue to use it in college. I have started learning Premiere because as long as I know both Avid and Premiere, I'll be set; since every post house I know uses Avid or Premiere and most feature films use Avid.

I still want to keep an open mind and try using FCPX, I have heard some good things about certain aspects of it, but since it will take awhile to learn and get used to, and the fact that the direction I am heading, no one uses FCPX, makes it harder to want to take the time to use it. But since I am a student, I think I'll just have to take the summer to learn FCPX...while I still have spare time before graduating.

Anyway, I am looking forward to the new Mac Pro and seeing how much performance gain there is. I will be editing and finishing in 4K and it will be interesting to compare the older Mac Pros my school has to this new Mac Pro that they are going to purchase.

No professional is going to use FCX. Ever.

Why? Because look at what happened with FCP. Apple dropped all support for FCP7 overnight with no warning.

They decided that they were going to reinvent the wheel and created a new Final Cut that could open iMovie projects but not old fcp ones. You couldn't organise files or move a project to another editors machine, or export to XML.

Apple are not in the film business. They can drop support for FCX tomorrow and claim the nMP is not selling and drop that too. Who knows? They've done it before.

Avid and adobe are in the film business. Their entire business revolves around editing, sound, graphics and compositing. You know that they will have legacy support for old projects in any upgrade and that they will continue to provide support.

Film projects involve dozens, if not hundreds of people working together simultaneously. Avid is build for this FCX isn't. If anything the remaining fcp7 users will start migrating to lightworks this year. It was the first NLE and now it is $60/yr for the pro version.

As a professional you need predictability and consistency - two things apple have proven not to be when it comes to FCP and MP. Avid users on the other hand wondered what all the fuss was about.
 
Yes. A mac mini would be perfectly fine for a photographer. Still photos are not very demanding.

----------



They are getting them for not much more than the equivalent radeon card. The markup on these cards is all in the drivers which is windows specific.


And regarding form factor how is this an improvement.

Image
Seems that based on the picture you provided, the new system is much more modular allowing equipment to be easily shared with other machines, allows drives to be swapped out while running, and still takes up less space. But you don't like it because you can see a few cords? Guess you are one of those mythical 'form over function' people we hear so much about.
 
They are getting them for not much more than the equivalent radeon card. The markup on these cards is all in the drivers which is windows specific.


Do you seriously think that AMD would open up the spec to Apple (so that effectively they could just copy it and fab their own chips) to enable Apple to write the drivers :confused: I suspect AMD write the drivers for OS X...
 
nobody wonders for that metal stand??

i always see the mac pro on metal stands when apple is promoting it.
how the heck is nobody ever asking for this stand? it looks super elegant.
anyone a idea?
 
No professional is going to use FCX. Ever.

Why? Because look at what happened with FCP. Apple dropped all support for FCP7 overnight with no warning.

They decided that they were going to reinvent the wheel and created a new Final Cut that could open iMovie projects but not old fcp ones. You couldn't organise files or move a project to another editors machine, or export to XML.

Apple are not in the film business. They can drop support for FCX tomorrow and claim the nMP is not selling and drop that too. Who knows? They've done it before.

Avid and adobe are in the film business. Their entire business revolves around editing, sound, graphics and compositing. You know that they will have legacy support for old projects in any upgrade and that they will continue to provide support.

Film projects involve dozens, if not hundreds of people working together simultaneously. Avid is build for this FCX isn't. If anything the remaining fcp7 users will start migrating to lightworks this year. It was the first NLE and now it is $60/yr for the pro version.

As a professional you need predictability and consistency - two things apple have proven not to be when it comes to FCP and MP. Avid users on the other hand wondered what all the fuss was about.

A well said and excellent point. I'm not sure of anyone moving back to lightworks though, but I do know of and have heard of several editors and post houses going back to Avid or moving to Premiere, from FCP 7.
 
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