And just think of the co$t of the BD-R drive they would charge about $400 bucks
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Sandy Bridge E Processors Suitable for Mac Pro Update Due November 15th?
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And just think of the co$t of the BD-R drive they would charge about $400 bucks
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I really wish Apple will upgrade the Mac Pro soon as well as with good, current stuff (CPUs & GPUs). It's a good workstation, and Apple obviously has the resources to do R&D work on it.
I also miss xServes. They were good servers, and they reaped out in the enterprise market (or at least where I am in a school district). Just wish Apple made a server that even they would use in their data centers. IMO, it looks bad when you don't even use your own software/hardware in your own data centers. Just my 2¢ [/rant]
I also miss xServes. They were good servers, and they reaped out in the enterprise market (or at least where I am in a school district). Just wish Apple made a server that even they would use in their data centers. IMO, it looks bad when you don't even use your own software/hardware in your own data centers. Just my 2¢ [/rant]
I won't disagree there. It's senseless to have all that infrastructure for a high-end, dual-processor workstation and just slap one processor in it. I seem to remember for a period of time a while back an iMac was faster than a single-proc Mac Pro.
The big difference between the high-end i7 and all i5 is that with the i7 (9xxx series) you get the Westmere architecture and QPI (4.8-6.4 GT/s to the bus, yeee-haaaa!). You also get triple-channel RAM. If you do a lot of encryption, or if the OS is constantly doing it for you by using disk encryption, you definitely want Westmere since it includes encryption-specific functions that increase encryption performance 400%. The encryption/performance tradeoff in whole disk encryption practically disappears. Westmere also has better low-power modes, shutting down more of the chip.
As always, you get what's best for you. All of this is just specs.
Well...perhaps you don't recall the heated discussions that occurred when the Mac IIfx (yes, ancient history) with its 6 NuBus slots was discontinued, and the 'next best' Mac had only 3 slots...it had more vigor than all of the Blu-Ray threads combined
Similarly, we could suggest that Apple's MP assumption is that no one ever needs more than four (4) HDDs, since that's the max (OEM) internal expansion. Of course, the problem with this line of reasoning is that there's four FW800 expansion ports on a Mac Pro...they're certainly not there to just hook in a keyboard and mouse.
Understood & agreed, which is why I can envision some sort of rackable Mac Pro configuration, with the presumption that those consumers who want a big bag of expansion can use Thunderbolt breakout boxes. Perhaps a 1U that can also be called a "Pizza Box" (shades of the Macintosh LC series product line)
Sure, which is why I'm trying to be optimistic (such as on a price point) and hope that the vision is for the Mac Pro ... and XServe ... functions be addressed with a single system which has its functional modularity be what allows itself to be tailored to to address different customer needs.
That approach would fit with the cost-concious, as it allows a single hardware kit to serve a wider customer base. With there being some interest on the Mac mini for server configurations (including Sonnet's rack mount adaptor), the basic idea could be to also have the Mac Pro fit into that role, thereby addressing the multiple customer niches (including Servers) that want more power than a mini with only a single hardware solution design.
FWIW, I think the XServe RAID got axed because Apple wasn't sufficiently competitive in "dumb storage" versus other marketplace alternatives.
Understood. With 75% of macs today being portables, the desktop really is more likely to shrink than to grow...but Apple's slow retreat from the desktop has also been partly responsible for this shrink in their desktop consumer base. Putting ourself in Apple's shoes and asking what could be done to try to recapture these little niches that have been neglected (and people driven out of the Mac), could a redesign of the Mac Pro help? If it does so by facilitate recapturing all of these niche uses and if so, what would it probably end up looking like?
While deliberating this, keep in mind also the reports of how Apple asks their designers to make projections as to what the product will look like not just today, but 2 & 3 design iterations into the future ... and how the Mac Pro's basic external design hasn't changed since the G5 PowerMacs were released in 2003...that's eight (8) years and counting...
Historically, I'm inclined to believe that the only "outwardly unchanged" Apple design that has ever had a longer life was the Apple II/IIe (1977-86): 9 years.
...that's why I can see there being a decent chance for a paradigm shift here that would allow Apple to re-broaden their target audience into all of these niches that they've been ignoring, without proliferating (diluting) into additional hardware designs.
Agreed. Unfortunately, that high price point is also what motivates a lot of the Mac Pro customers to try to hold onto their equipment forever, to build DIY Hacintoshes, as well as to do CPU chip replacements: these are all effectively unit sales not going to Apple as the OEM because of its current price point. Frankly, I'd love to see Apple's internal customer research that projects what the difference in sales would be if the base Mac Pro was indeed only $1500.
-hh
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Generally the same doesn't make the them to same. If there was a bug in ECC handling the Sandy Bridge E i7 chips could not slip on schedule because that functionality is turned off in those chips anyway. So it really doesn't matter if its implementation is broken or not. As I pointed out similarly for the C600 chips. Some of them have parts turned-off and some don't. If the bugs the rumors are pointing to are in the turned-off portions then it is not particularly relevant to slipping shipping schedules. It is important to figure out which subset of functionality is on or off and then compare those to the bug reports. You are only going to find what is flipped on by looking at the right marketing bucket ( as opposed to the neighboring buckets ).
There are no reports that the whole chipset is fatally flawed. There are rumored to be bugs in sub-components. That is one reason these designs are chopped up into separate marketing bins to mitigate the risk of schedule slip if need to make a small tweak in an isolated sub-component. Intel doesn't have to ship all of them on the exact same day. In fact, until the demand pipeline smooths out, they probably won't.
Your difference is probably the motherboard, not the CPU. A 2U, dual-processor, rack-mounted Dell PowerEdge server and a tower dual-processor Dell Precision workstation have the same 56xx Xeon processors as options, and both take 16 GB DIMMs. I can get one dual-socket Intel server motherboard for the Xeon 56xx that takes 16 GB DIMMs, and another that only takes 4 GB DIMMs.
Actually the two Xeon lines are for
a) dual-socket systems
b) systems with more than two sockets.
Tons of dual-socket servers are built with what you call "workstation Xeons".
I don't think they would do something that foolish. Many people still need professional video and audio editing PCIe cards, which are already thousands of dollars without the companies having to create a way to make them standalone external boxes.
Besides, they'll always have at least one for the graphics card
I do think you could be right though that they might cut down a bit........ like drop a 4x slot or two.
That's one problem with Apple... unlike the PC industry which sticks with technology (i.e. PCI, DDR, AGP, PCIe, DVI, BIOS) for long periods of time, Apple jumps all over the place leaving a great deal of incompatibility between generations of machines.
This part I agree with 100% ... Apple sometimes adopts new or proprietary technologies that don't ever take off. And there's zero guarantee TB will.
I just received this email from Blackmagic design:
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/ultrastudio3d/
It takes a while for new products to come out.
Found this too:
Matrox announce their Thunderbolt adaptor, works with new and existing MXO products
http://www.fcp.co/hardware-and-soft...tor-works-with-new-and-existing-mxo-products-
And yet again this:
AJA launch the Io XT, their first Thunderbolt enabled product
http://www.fcp.co/hardware-and-soft...io-xt-their-first-thunderbolt-enabled-product
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There are actually a lot of differences in the Xeon's.
When we spec servers speed is not really the thing we look at. They are all pretty quick.
Some support HT, some don't. Some support the complete VT subset, some don't, some fall in the middle, some support TurboBoost, others do not, etc...etc...etc...
Intel has made it a huge PITA to spec all this out. Because of the 4 major options. HyperThreading, TurboBoost(useless IMO), VT and then a special VT sub instruction set that makes Hyper-V much more memory efficient come in a ton of combinations.
When we spec servers speed is not really the thing we look at. They are all pretty quick.
Some support HT, some don't. Some support the complete VT subset, some don't, some fall in the middle, some support TurboBoost, others do not, etc...etc...etc...
Intel has made it a huge PITA to spec all this out. Because of the 4 major options. HyperThreading, TurboBoost(useless IMO), VT and then a special VT sub instruction set that makes Hyper-V much more memory efficient come in a ton of combinations.
I currently use a MBP with a matrox mini that is connected to a cheap sony tv for colour grading (on a budget!)
With the above, if i got a new TB MBP, could I connect the same tv via hdmi and do colour grading?
Also, does the above speed up render times and could you have say 2-3 additional video tracks playing at the same time for multicam in FCP7, or do you still need a raid set up?
I am wondering: will the next generation Mac Pro be A LOT faster than the current generation?
And where will the main changes be besides the CPU?
And where will the main changes be besides the CPU?
It has HDMI out, so I would imagine you could go to a monitor. It only mention 2 streams at once. Don't think it has an encoder chip so render times would probably not be faster.
Mac Pro it is then
a imac is an option, but id need a external raid, that blackmagic video card too (so 3 devices) - a mac pro has the raid and can stick a black magic card so one device...
I only want to run snow leopard as my software may not run on 10.7 - I have Adobe Master collection cs5 - 5.0 and FC Studio 3 which i need to run.... would this work on 10.7?
Seems to me that a lot of folks here hankering for a new Mac Pro are tinkerers, who want the expandability associated with PC's but the elegance of a Mac Pro case design and OS X.
I can totally relate, but I've given up on Apple looking after high end professionals anymore. The writing's been on the wall for a while now where Apple's focus is and I think they're just milking those who are willing to pay top dollar for their "Pro" hardware, which ages very quickly and offers little in the way of expansion options anyway.
So I decided to buy a PC to use as a rendering machine. I've got to say those i7 2600K processors are amazing and the value just trounces anything Apple has to offer. The PC box sates my desire to tinkering and for horsepower, but I still do a lot of design and set up work for my renders on the Mac, so I still get to work in OS X (although I've stuck with Snow Leopard for now until Lion improves).
A nice side effect of this is that I no longer worry how Apple are going to try and squeeze more cash out of their high end users anymore. When my 2008 Mac Pro starts to really crawl, I'll maybe consider an iMac for the same purposes, or maybe a Mac Mini or Macbook Pro plugged into the monitor, who knows. But the current £3k plus that Apple wants for a half decent Mac Pro is just not going to fly in today's economic scenario for me.
Just a thought....
I can totally relate, but I've given up on Apple looking after high end professionals anymore. The writing's been on the wall for a while now where Apple's focus is and I think they're just milking those who are willing to pay top dollar for their "Pro" hardware, which ages very quickly and offers little in the way of expansion options anyway.
So I decided to buy a PC to use as a rendering machine. I've got to say those i7 2600K processors are amazing and the value just trounces anything Apple has to offer. The PC box sates my desire to tinkering and for horsepower, but I still do a lot of design and set up work for my renders on the Mac, so I still get to work in OS X (although I've stuck with Snow Leopard for now until Lion improves).
A nice side effect of this is that I no longer worry how Apple are going to try and squeeze more cash out of their high end users anymore. When my 2008 Mac Pro starts to really crawl, I'll maybe consider an iMac for the same purposes, or maybe a Mac Mini or Macbook Pro plugged into the monitor, who knows. But the current £3k plus that Apple wants for a half decent Mac Pro is just not going to fly in today's economic scenario for me.
Just a thought....
Having just upgraded my 2006 Mac Pro to a 12 core 2010 model... i totally agree, unless there is a big push back to the high end this may be the last high end mac i buy.
In future a low cost high power PC as a render computer may be the way forward with an iMac or even portable macbook (pro) as my only way to continue using what i have grown accustomed to over the past decade or so, in terms of day to day usage.
But one point i think needs raised... with these new external PCI thuinderolt enclosures coming to light... is ther a possibility that in the future one could run a nice desktop setup with the added power coming from one of these boxes.... that would be awesome... even a macbook pro with the external power coming form a TB PCI box. Now ther's a setup thats worth drooling over....
The thing is, if you take a look at Dell's server/workstation PC's that are fairly the same as the Mac Pro, you end up at around 4000$ aswell -- without monitor. So saying that the Mac Pro is too expensive isn't really true.
The problem is that with the Dell(and as with any PC) it's much easier to upgrade the motherboard, which in turn lets you upgrade your CPU to newer architectures of CPUs without the need of getting an entire new computer. It also supports most graphics cards whereas the Mac Pro only supports a handful.
So saying that the Mac Pro is too expensive compared to PC isn't true. It is however VERY limited. It can be upgraded but not nearly as much as a Dell workstation.
And then another thing is that most people will probably do fine with an i7 2600k instead of single/dual xeons, which could bring down the price substantially. The problem is, this isn't the purpose of the Mac Pro. The Mac Pro is meant for servers and workstations where you NEED xeons. If you'll do fine with the i7 then you'd need to get the iMac.
This is unfortunate though since most people want the ability to upgrade and get into the computer to do maintence which the Mac Pro offers and the iMac doesn't.
We'll just have to wait and see what the new Mac Pro's will be offering but I doubt that we will see an i7 Mac Pro
The problem is that with the Dell(and as with any PC) it's much easier to upgrade the motherboard, which in turn lets you upgrade your CPU to newer architectures of CPUs without the need of getting an entire new computer. It also supports most graphics cards whereas the Mac Pro only supports a handful.
So saying that the Mac Pro is too expensive compared to PC isn't true. It is however VERY limited. It can be upgraded but not nearly as much as a Dell workstation.
And then another thing is that most people will probably do fine with an i7 2600k instead of single/dual xeons, which could bring down the price substantially. The problem is, this isn't the purpose of the Mac Pro. The Mac Pro is meant for servers and workstations where you NEED xeons. If you'll do fine with the i7 then you'd need to get the iMac.
This is unfortunate though since most people want the ability to upgrade and get into the computer to do maintence which the Mac Pro offers and the iMac doesn't.
We'll just have to wait and see what the new Mac Pro's will be offering but I doubt that we will see an i7 Mac Pro
See magsafe power with fibre....
So, yes you could get power and LightPeak/TBolt in one plug, but it's not likely to be a mini-DisplayPort.
Wait for Thunderbolt 2.0.
The thing is, if you take a look at Dell's server/workstation PC's that are fairly the same as the Mac Pro, you end up at around 4000$ aswell -- without monitor. So saying that the Mac Pro is too expensive isn't really true.
The problem is that with the Dell(and as with any PC) it's much easier to upgrade the motherboard, which in turn lets you upgrade your CPU to newer architectures of CPUs without the need of getting an entire new computer. It also supports most graphics cards whereas the Mac Pro only supports a handful.
So saying that the Mac Pro is too expensive compared to PC isn't true. It is however VERY limited. It can be upgraded but not nearly as much as a Dell workstation.
And then another thing is that most people will probably do fine with an i7 2600k instead of single/dual xeons, which could bring down the price substantially. The problem is, this isn't the purpose of the Mac Pro. The Mac Pro is meant for servers and workstations where you NEED xeons. If you'll do fine with the i7 then you'd need to get the iMac.
This is unfortunate though since most people want the ability to upgrade and get into the computer to do maintence which the Mac Pro offers and the iMac doesn't.
We'll just have to wait and see what the new Mac Pro's will be offering but I doubt that we will see an i7 Mac Pro
The thing is for 3d graphics people, we need all the processing power we can get. The PC system I bought is overclocked to 4.6Ghz so that's 8 cores (4 real and 4 virtual) belting along at quite a pace. It has 16 GB of RAM and cost £1K. Another thing I hadn't factored in was memory speed. The speed of the RAM in my MP is 800 mhz whereas the PC's is double that. For big projects which use a lot of RAM, this also makes a huge difference. Then there's the speedboost stuff the i7 does with single threaded applications which just put it in a different class to my Mac Pro.
An iMac with the same specs (minus the overclocking) comes to £2800 so there's just no contest if you're talking about raw horsepower, and that was the context I was saying the Mac Pro is too expensive. I know there's no monitor included with the PC but I don't need another one. If you're talking about servers though, I see your point. Thing is, how many people on these forums buy MP's to use as servers?
I think the gaming and PC enthusiasts are keeping powerful enough machines within reach for some of us 3d and rendering people whereas that market is almost non-existent on the Mac side. Frankly, I think of the PC as my Mac Pro's "bitch", doing all the heavy lifting. I have no issues having and using a Windows machine for this purpose and like I say, it takes the worry out of which new way Apple is going to try and squeeze the Pro market next.
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That's a very nice and fast machine you've got there
By the time you need to think about upgrading for more speed and capability, I'm sure the dust will have settled and it will be much more clear what Apple is doing with the Pro sector.
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As long as the internal design isn't the same basic cram & cut that tend PCs use. And every time I go for great internal design I end up thinking that Macs come up cost effective.
Dude... just as a comment. You do realize that Apple didn't even use Xserves to run their own stores; it is (soon to be was) all Sun, Solaris & Oracle. The only piece of their own tech Apple brought to the table was WebObjects.
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