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Rack Mount Mac Pro Now Available for Purchase Starting at $6,499
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There's a distinction between on-board and integrated graphics. Xeons generally do not have integrated graphics, where the graphics are in the chipset or CPU, and share system RAM.
PC rackmount servers universally have on-board graphics. They used to use PCI-based graphics chips from the late 90s, stuff like the ATI Rage XL (rebadged as a ATI ES1000). Recent servers use specialized graphics chips which present a similar low-end interface (like the Matrox G200), but also integrate stand-alone remote graphics access. They can output their graphics over an H.264 stream, for example. That way, you can access a special IP and control the server all the way from cold boot.
Read this article on Semi-Accurate - https://www.semiaccurate.com/2019/12/13/amd-releases-the-radeon-5500xt/ - AMD I have to say, I’m pretty appalled that as sloooooow as AMD’s rollout has been of NAVI, that the drivers are I. Such an abysmal state in January of 2020z
It is still a workstation, not a server. I think this is more about mounting it alongside video/audio studio equipment than turning it into a server/high-density computing device.
The MP only remotely makes sense if you want/need to run MacOS based applications (which, as well as being GUI driven, often rely on a meaty GPU for acceleration). If you want a headless server or compute farm, more bangs per buck are available with generic PC hardware (which is why the XServe is no more, too).
Who's going to use this as a server, though? Aside from hardcore Mac partisans, I can't think of anyone using it for that purpose. This is ideal for rack-mounted workflows, like video production.
Or putting it in a road case with all the peripherals and monitor.
Business 101: charge what people are willing to pay, not what it costs. This is true for any business worldwide, other than utilities.
Glad they’re offering this in a variety of flavors and customizations. They’ve really done well listening to the pro consumers who need this machine.
I literally just laughed hysterically in the middle of a quiet cafe. Thank you for that!
I literally just laughed hysterically in the middle of a quiet cafe. Thank you for that!
I have 19" rack equipment in my house… in 2 places. Pretty handy if you ask me. My "problem" (don't have a real problem as I'm not who this computer is aimed at) with it isn't that it's rack mount… its the fact that it's an enormous 5U. If it were 3U I could have happily mounted it into the 19" rack mount that's screwed in under my desk.
Such a blanket statement is not entirely accurate.
Keep in mind that the Xeon brand covers even the lowly 4-8 core Xeon E-2x00 which DO have integrated graphics.
But yes, the W and it's bigger brother the Server models are all lacking Integrated Graphics.
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"Use Cabling"
What does that even mean?
Does Mac OS have some network based setup out of the box?
Does the Mac Pro have an IPMI Interface they are hiding from the rest of us?
Does Apple even support PXE with Mac OS?
As others have said, there is still the benefit of using the GPUs for Application Acceleration anyway.
I'm sure at some point the Mac Pro will also get VMware Certified, then with the right GPU, you can enable SR-IOV based GPU Slicing and run multiple MacOS VMs with GPU support on a single Mac Pro.
Since the tower version has a few TB3 ports on top (which would be inaccessible on the rack version), maybe Apple moved them to the front?
In one way, it's expensive compared to the 1U Xserve G5 which cost $2999 and $3999 before BTO options in 2006-2011. With inflation, that's about $3500 for the base model in today's dollar so this is almost 2X as expensive as the Xserve but the Xserve was far more limited in expandability. you could add hard drives, I think there was one PCI slot and RAM and that's it.
WooHoo! XServe lives!
If they aren't careful they'll have to go back to Apple Computer, Inc.
I used to buy Mac towers when they were under 2 grand. What happened?