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

[MacLC]

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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Is this sarcasm? Or is it a sadly misguided attempt to get the first reply without actually thinking about what you say?

I hope it was sarcasm too. The maximum performance according to Anandtech is not that much better than the old model and if you really want to, you can always manually downthrottle the CPU. The main difference is that by design, these new CPUs do deeper automatic downthrottling than the older CPUs.

AS for people talking about TDP, you most of you seem to be misunderstanding. It is the maximum heat the CPU will dissipate not the power draw. If you look at Intel CPUs you can have an 84w chip at the same MHz as a 65w chip. They both may hit, say, 3.2GHz, but the 65w chip may only hit 3.2GHz 10% of the time (for example just after booting or after long sleep or idle periods) and the 84w chip will hit 3.2GHz 80% of the time.

For consumer level Intel CPUs, you can pay more for a lower TDP CPU or you can just get the regular TDP CPU and underclock it yourself.

 

[Beta Particle]

The power consumption is good, but it's not really due to anything Apple is doing. If their PSU is 90% efficient, that's lower than the best power supplies available in PCs today.

And reductions in power consumption are primarily coming from Intel and AMD than anything Apple is doing.
Aren't Nvidia GPUs more power efficient than AMD these days as well? (though not if you are focusing on OpenCL, I suppose)

Using less materials, and less plastics in particular is always a good thing.

However, moving to a custom form-factor is not.
Unless Apple completely changes how they have done things in the past, these machines are barely going to be upgradable.

Apple is not going to sell replacement GPUs either for repairs or upgrades, and it's unlikely that anyone else will be building custom parts for them.
You would hope that they'll be compatible with Haswell-EP CPUs next year, as they're sticking with LGA2011, but with PC's that normally requires a BIOS(firmware) update for compatibility reasons, which Apple is unlikely to provide.
With a PC workstation, replacement parts are easily available, and parts are all interchangeable. (you can put a 2014 GPU into a 2004 PC etc.)

Earlier in the year, I had a family member take their MacBook into the Apple Store to see if they could repair it as the backlight would turn off with the screen at certain angles.
Their response was that they are no longer serviced, and they tried to sell them a MacBook Air. (which costs twice what their MacBook originally did)

When I heard about this, I then bought the cable which was required for $5 off eBay and fixed it for them myself.
If they didn't know that I would probably be able to fix it, they would have just bought a new machine and the old one would have ended up in a landfill.

Is the same thing going to happen with the new Mac Pros?


And now that there is no internal expansion, you will have to purchase expensive Thunderbolt enclosures for your drives, which means that there's going to be another power supply that needs recycled (and it's probably not going to be 90% efficient) along with all the metal and plastic used in its construction.
Same thing for all those PCIe cards you were using - you'll have to replace them with USB or Thunderbolt hardware as well.

Sorry, but the power consumption is actually pretty bad.
I mean, come on!
A 2011 Mini has an idle consumption of 11 watt, even for the quad i7. And that is a 2 year old 32nm machine.
43 idle watt on the NMP is unacceptable. A Mini 2.6 does 11282 on Geekbench, and the 4 core Pro 12877. So the Pro is almost 4 times less efficient with energy than the mini compared to raw processing power.
Guess those two video cards are messing up completely in idle, where on idle, usually screen sleep pops in and the video cards could be turned off completely.
Also the Mini still has a platter disc, where the new Mac Pro has SSD only.

Big bummer for the environmental aware people!

That is an interesting point. It's even worse when you compare that to a more modern system like Intel's Haswell NUC.
The reason power consumption is so much higher is because the Mac Pro has dedicated GPUs (you can assume at least 10W consumption for each when idle) because it is using full size DIMMs - and four of them, and because it's using Xeons rather than consumer-grade CPUs.
The LGA2011 platform was introduced in 2011, so it's inherently less efficient than anything running on LGA1150.
The thing is, when you go up in the Mac Pro line, your idle power consumption is barely going to change, as the parts with more cores in them are binned for better power consumption.
I also think it is interesting that they only compare idle power consumption and not load power consumption.

Sorry, but this comparison doesn’t fit.

I have replaced my Linux server box with a maxed out Mac Mini + TB drives two years ago and it does a great job as internal / external server for development and some customer web tools.
It saved me >300 $ last year on my electricity bill while working quietly on my desk.

But as great as it is it can’t edit, export 4K video in a economic worthwhile way. It’s not suitable for this kind of heavy lifting.

Buying the right hardware for your requirements is just as important as maximum power consumption.
I'm actually seriously considering moving my user accounts (if possible) and media to a low-powered server which is always on, and keeping a NUC or a Mac Mini hooked up as my main system for general PC use (browsing, listening to music, watching video etc.) keeping a high-end system on standby for the times that I do need a lot of power. (video/photo editing, gaming etc.) Just not sure I want the potential headaches that something like that will bring.

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.

It would be more impressive if the system didn't manage to hit 95C when the CPU and GPUs are working at 100% load.

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.

The better PC towers today are definitely focused a lot more on airflow than simply being a box that holds everything. That's not to say they are as well engineered as some of the things Apple is doing though.

Look at something like the FT02, which uses vertical airflow to exhaust the heat - just like the Mac Pro.
A lot of high-end PCs use watercooling so that you only need fans on a single large radiator that is kept separate from the rest of the system. The TJ07 is frequently used in these builds.

I always feel a bit bad for rabid environmentalists. I'd hate living life in a sense wishing I didn't exist. If I had to live the life you describe (nothing new ever) then what's the point of living?

I feel sorry for people who think life is about being a consumer and acquiring the latest tech to feel good.
I think there's a balance to be struck between the two, but sticking to PCs (or hackintoshes I suppose) is certainly friendlier on the environment than buying a Mac that you can't really repair or upgrade after a few years have passed.
I know people that have bought a really nice ATX Lian-Li case (all aluminum construction) probably a decade ago at this point, and are still using it with any new PC builds or upgrades.

 

[vmachiel]

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)

TDP for each GPU is only 108 W actually, they are basically under clocked Tahiti parts.

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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 )

Anandtech tested this in case you're interested: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/14

 

[MacSince1990]

I'm finding I care 92% less about MacRumors threads of late..

 

[phoenixsan]

Lets forget.....

the incredible amount of engineering and design put into the nMP....This only statistic can make them a viable player. Power cost always is in the rise and ways to reduce comsuption not only help the wallet, but make the world greener.....