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New Mac Pro Uses 68% Less Energy, 74% Less Aluminum Than Previous Generation

lilo777 said:
Am I supposed to be impressed? Apple is probably the only company that uses pervert approach to design of workstations (and desktops too). Most other companies will start with tech specs like performance, memory/storage capacity, expandability etc. and then will design an appropriate case. Apple starts with the case (including the size) and then fits as much as they can into the can. Obviously the latter approach guarantees most compact design. The only problem is when you need to actually use these toys.
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Wow. I am impressed with just how profoundly you misunderstand the industrial design of a machine like this. Both the old aluminum anchor design and the new coffee-can design started in the same place: with the tech specs of the electronics, and the electrical and heat requirements of those components.

One design used multiple cooling channels, each with a variable-speed fan, to minimize the noise needed to keep the components from getting hot. (The heat output of the PPC G5 was not pretty.) Size wasn't a consideration, and making it big was in fact welcomed to allow internal expansion.

The other design emphasized used a single cooling channel to serve all of the components, which required a compact design that put them all within heat-conductive reach of it. Internal expansion wasn't a consideration, leaving that to external add-ons.

Same starting point, different priorities, but the same methodology.

Both can be contrasted with the design of a typical desktop computer, which follows the principles pioneered *cough* by IBM back in 1980: put them in a big enough box, and add fans here and there as necessary.
 
Whats scary is how well propaganda works. Some people...most, just soak it up like a sponge. There are so many mindless, brainwashed people out there. Ugh.
 
Funny how no one is looking at a bigger picture of any of this.

How much something costs is a MASSIVE point to take into consideration.

If I have to walk 2 miles, kill a turkey, sell the turkey to get $10 to buy your item its minimal impact.

Some shoe leather, a bullet, and a sandwich for my lunch.

On the other hand if I have to drive 50 miles a day for a month, using my satnav and mp3 player, go to my turkey factory, have 1000 birds killed, all the grain to seed them, my transport to deliver the turkey to the stores, all the food I eat during that time etc etc.

To get enough money to buy your MacTurkeyPro.
There has been a massive hit on the planet for me to get what I need to have you give me the MacTurkeyPro as you want a lot of money for it.

You can't just look at the MacTurkeyPro itself. You need to look at a much bigger picture.
 
osx11 said:
Producing Aluminum requires an insane amount of energy. So yes, less Aluminum is a good thing.

According to Wikipedia, US Aluminum production consumes 5% of US generated energy.
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Good point, but let's not kid ourselves here. Computers are high-value low-volume goods. The aluminium used in every Mac Pro is a drop in the ocean compared to the aluminium industry as a whole.

Let's do some back of the envelope calculations. The old Mac Pro used 11.1 kilograms of aluminium and steel [1]. For a generous estimate, we'll assume all of this is aluminium. Quarterly sales are estimated at 75,000 units [2], so we get yearly sales of 300,000 give or take ten thousand or so. That's 3,330 metric tonnes of aluminium per year in Mac Pros. Sounds like a lot, right? But compare it to 1,990,000 tonnes for the US aluminium industry in 2011 [3], or 44,100,000 tonnes for the whole world's aluminium production in that same year.

That means the old Mac Pro would have been 0.17% of the aluminium industry, in the USA, which doesn't even have a very large aluminium industry. As a percentage of the whole world, including leading Mac manufacturer China, it's only 0.0076%.

Let's go crazy with our generous estimates, and suppose that every Mac sold in 2012 was a Mac Pro, all 18.1 million of them [4]. At 11.1 kilograms each, that would still be only 200,910 tonnes, a mere 0.46% of the world's aluminium industry.

There is much, much more aluminium used in cars, planes, buildings, bridges, furniture and food packaging than is used in computer manufacture.

The environmental cost of computers has little to do with their aluminium shells. It's the semiconductors and rare earth metals that go into their components. These have to be extracted by energy-intensive processes. They must be made super-pure, so a lot of material is wasted. And they have to be transported vast distances, because there are only a few mines in the world that produce them. And they are almost impossible to recycle.

But Apple didn't talk about that in the report, did they?

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MIDI_EVIL said:
That's impressive. Probably one of the main reasons we will upgrade!
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Is this sarcasm? Or is it a sadly misguided attempt to get the first reply without actually thinking about what you say?
 
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wikiverse said:
Why? External HDD chassis use more power, more aluminium and more plastic than a conventional Mac Pro design.

If anything, apple have forced people to use external expansion which is ultimately going to be much worse for the environment in terms of carbon footprint and natural resource use.
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This is true, But not everybody will be using external devices, or are already using them.

so it's one of those times where you're "averaging" less overall.

Those on the lowest end of the curve won't have anything attached. The power will be much much much less than if they bought the traditional tower with it's power requirements.

on the high end, you'll have those who are really power hungry, with lots of externals, and maybe even a few extra servers built to leverage this box, who might end up using more.

The middle ground is likely that the overall power usage by most users could be less. Time will tell. it's hard to know now exactly what the long term usages will be since the machine just came out.


But, on the manufacturing side, the Carbon footprint should be considerably less. We're talking about a serious reduction in the amount of raw materials needed to build this compared to the old one. Just in Aluminium alone! Less raw materials is always better.

my hope is that the overal Manufacturing carbon footprint is significantly lower. We already know that, while aluminium is somewhat costly in energy to prepare, it's fully recyclable, so little of it is wasted in the manufacturing process.

Energy reduction isn't just the amount of electricity needed. its front to back, from manufacturing to end use. As we are completely bound to this planet and it is our sole means of survival, we should be looking for ways to reduce and remove as much of our carbon footprint as possible.
 
IGregory said:
Other than big companies with hundreds of computers does anyone care about electricity costs related to computer use.
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If I had a choice between a kilowatt PC or a 300 watt PC and they both had the some performance I'd choose the 300 watt PC.
 
JAQ said:
Wow. I am impressed with just how profoundly you misunderstand the industrial design of a machine like this. Both the old aluminum anchor design and the new coffee-can design started in the same place: with the tech specs of the electronics, and the electrical and heat requirements of those components.

One design used multiple cooling channels, each with a variable-speed fan, to minimize the noise needed to keep the components from getting hot. (The heat output of the PPC G5 was not pretty.) Size wasn't a consideration, and making it big was in fact welcomed to allow internal expansion.

The other design emphasized used a single cooling channel to serve all of the components, which required a compact design that put them all within heat-conductive reach of it. Internal expansion wasn't a consideration, leaving that to external add-ons.

Same starting point, different priorities, but the same methodology.

Both can be contrasted with the design of a typical desktop computer, which follows the principles pioneered *cough* by IBM back in 1980: put them in a big enough box, and add fans here and there as necessary.
Click to expand...

Kind of like people who claim Apple removed the optical drive in the iMac for the sole purpose of having a display with a 5mm edge.
 
cclloyd said:
I wonder if a wooden shell would work without issue, assuming it's the right wood with the right finish. Anyone know?
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I made a computer out of wood once. The main problem was heat. Metal cases will act as a heat sink and radiate heat from the exterior, even if there is not enough airflow.
Wood, however, is a pretty good thermal insulator apparently.
I ended up overheating until I installed two more fans.
 
Jynto said:
Good point, but let's not kid ourselves here. Computers are high-value low-volume goods. The aluminium used in every Mac Pro is a drop in the ocean compared to the aluminium industry as a whole.
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Relax Dude!

By your logic, any small environmental footprint reduction is pointless because it's just a drop in the bucket. You could have saved yourself your ridiculous long post by realizing that for Apple as a company, this reduction in Aluminum IS significant.
 
The lessened environmental impact of the nMP is part of its function, extrapolated from Apple's attempt to be green in all its products.

So the argument that it is all form over function is not really true.

It's part of an overall schema, too which many of us are blind.

Which is, like us, someday your nMP will die, and be recyclable to mother earth.

Even in death, Job's plan is revealed to us bit by bit (lol).
 
JAQ said:
Wow. I am impressed with just how profoundly you misunderstand the industrial design of a machine like this. Both the old aluminum anchor design and the new coffee-can design started in the same place: with the tech specs of the electronics, and the electrical and heat requirements of those components.

One design used multiple cooling channels, each with a variable-speed fan, to minimize the noise needed to keep the components from getting hot. (The heat output of the PPC G5 was not pretty.) Size wasn't a consideration, and making it big was in fact welcomed to allow internal expansion.

The other design emphasized used a single cooling channel to serve all of the components, which required a compact design that put them all within heat-conductive reach of it. Internal expansion wasn't a consideration, leaving that to external add-ons.

Same starting point, different priorities, but the same methodology.

Both can be contrasted with the design of a typical desktop computer, which follows the principles pioneered *cough* by IBM back in 1980: put them in a big enough box, and add fans here and there as necessary.
Click to expand...

So, when thinking about their original specs they decided: "Let's go with under-clocked GPUs and just 64GB RAM because this is how modern workstations should be done", right?
 
vmachiel said:
So it can operate with a 12 core CPU, two powerful GPU's and it only needs a 450 W PSU. That is damn impressive.
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Yeah, it actually doesn't add up.
TDP on the 12-core CPU is 130W
TDP on the D700 (the top-end GPU) is 250W, each

130W + 250W + 250W = 630 Watts
So with any workflow that maxes out these chips, we are already WAY over the PSU rating with just those three things.

But let's keep going. According to spec, USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt are rated to supply, what, 10W per each port? So there's another 100-150W there. Granted, most people won't max this out, but it is supposed to be available.

Then there's the wi-fi card, the memory, the motherboard with its chips, and the daughterboard with its chips. Unknown values, but certainly not zero watts.

I haven't seen any logical explanation for how this will work.
- Throttling? (they have done this before, even in Pro products)
- Different power supplies in different builds? (seems unlikely and this is not shown in the specs)
- A 200% efficient power supply? (haha)
 
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vmachiel said:
So it can operate with a 12 core CPU, two powerful GPU's and it only needs a 450 W PSU. That is damn impressive.
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You are more than likely to see throttling of the CPU or GPU or both under full load.

There is a reason high performance workstations have redundent 2500 Watt PSUs. ( Some of the GAMEPC workstations at my old employer had dual 2500watt redunent PSUs, but they also had 6 GPUs and 4 CPUS )
 
Konrad9 said:
Wow that's low energy consumption. I wonder how long it would take to recoup the cost of upgrading just from saved electricity costs? Obviously there would need to be a lot of users, but still.
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But you have to add in the materials and power used for storage. You can't compare a new and old MP directly.

Still I bet it is improved over the old one but not by as much as they claim.

The cost of power can really add up. Let's say you have a server that burns 400W of power and round 24x7. I pay 21 cents per KWH. That means 288 KHW per month. Or $60 per month or $725 per year.

But a workstation is not a server and you don't run it 24x7 but if you did you would pay the $3,000 cost of a Mac Pro ever four years in power.

I did run a server for a while until I did the above math and swapped it out for a lower powered one. The payback took less than a year.

Just guessing I figure you'd save $1,000 in power over the lifetime of a new MP if you actually used it 8 hours a day, every day.
 
ActionableMango said:
Yeah, it actually doesn't add up.
TDP on the 12-core CPU is 130W
TDP on the D700 (the top-end GPU) is 250W, each

130W + 250W + 250W = 630 Watts
So with any workflow that maxes out these chips, we are already WAY over the PSU rating with just those three things.

But let's keep going. According to spec, USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt are rated to supply, what, 10W per each port? So there's another 100-150W there. Granted, most people won't max this out, but it is supposed to be available.

Then there's the wi-fi card, the memory, the motherboard with its chips, and the daughterboard with its chips. Unknown values, but certainly not zero watts.

I haven't seen any logical explanation for how this will work.
- Throttling? (they have done this before, even in Pro products)
- Different power supplies in different builds? (seems unlikely and this is not shown in the specs)
- A 200% efficient power supply? (haha)
Click to expand...

thats not how it works.

TDP isn't amount of power the CPU or parts use. it stands for Thermal Design Power. it's actually the limit for thermal heat output that is put in place for circuitry.

A 130W TDP part has a max thermal tolerance of 130W of heat generation.

not that it uses 130W of power.
 
LordVic said:
thats not how it works.

TDP isn't amount of power the CPU or parts use. it stands for Thermal Design Power. it's actually the limit for thermal heat output that is put in place for circuitry.

A 130W TDP part has a max thermal tolerance of 130W of heat generation.

not that it uses 130W of power.
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I understand that TDP does not equal power draw. I bet TDP has a safety margin too. For example, if your part put out 90W under heavy load, you might spec 100W TDP. But the numbers are so staggeringly far off, that they aren't even close.

In the Mac Pro forums we use Hardware Monitor to see the actual power draw as detected by the MP's internal sensors, and from what we've seen, TDP is a fairly good indicator of actual use under heavy load, at least when it comes to GPUs. (We've even seen power draw exceed TDP by quite a bit, although I don't count that because the use scenario was unrealistic.)
 
ActionableMango said:
I understand that TDP does not equal power draw. I bet TDP has a safety margin too. For example, if your part put out 90W under heavy load, you might spec 100W TDP. But the numbers are so staggeringly far off, that they aren't even close.

In the Mac Pro forums we use Hardware Monitor to see the actual power draw as detected by the MP's internal sensors, and from what we've seen, TDP is a fairly good indicator of actual use under heavy load, at least when it comes to GPUs. (We've even seen power draw exceed TDP by quite a bit, although I don't count that because the use scenario was unrealistic.)
Click to expand...

Yeah, the TDP rating on desktop parts is more of a "this is the heat it puts out under normal load in typical usage scenarios". not the heat output at 100% computational power all the time. there is no specific direct relation between TDP and watt usage


I'm not sure how it's rated for Xeon's though.

but as you tried doing the math of 250+250+130 for power, i just had to point out that it doesn't work that way.

the confusion is that when you're talking PSU's wattage, you're not talking about heat output. you're talking about total power provided. But when you're talking about TDP of components, you're talking about heat output of the device, and nothing to do with total power usage.

so no, the Mac pro isn't using 630w of power for those three. I do not know what the exact power draw of those 3 components are in power. smarter men than me probably have those statistics. but it is probably closer to the 450w if not lower than apple uses.

one of the most confusing things people have, especially when talkin about home grown computers. when the Graphics card they're buying says "minimum 400w PSU", they think that the card itself is using 400w of power on top of other things. They go through the roof with 1k PSU's to compensate. this is not needed and often today we completely over do just how strong a PSU we really need.
 
In the next version they'll put a 1-core ARM CPU, 512MB RAM, and a Thunderbolt port. Nothing else. It's the size of a matchbox.

And claim 80% power reduction again.
 
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