Will the new Pro be a space heater?

Lower than a pair of 250W cards (i.e., the "up to" specs they outlined in the sneak peak) ? .. sure they will have those. However, two 125W cards is likely more GPU thermal emission than your current 2009 quad is emitting into the room.

When idling it probably will be lower. Almost every single component in a 2013 Mac Pro can idle at lower power settings than your 2009 Mac Pro. However, if you do 'all day, all night' computations with your 2013 Mac Pro the output probably won't be much lower.

The power supply is probably slightly more efficient. The power draw may be about the same at load though.

Depends. Hang a spinner off USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt that is "bus powered" and that power is still coming out of the Mac Pro's power supply.

Should help everything. However, will have bigger impact on the Haswell devices since they are more optimized to deal with more fine grained reductions in usage. The higher level Mavericks power management may not save as much if CPUs function units are more hooked together in terms of power management ( all the subcomponents in a group must be 'on' if any one of them are needed. )

That said none of the Mavericks power management mechanisms do much if actually doing alot of work.

 

Not likely. Some Fire Pro cards.
W7000 150W
W8000 225W
W9000 274W
http://www.amd.com/us/products/workstation/graphics/ati-firepro-3d/Pages/product-comparison.aspx

They could do a relatively very wimpy W5000 but that seems unlikely. At that point starting to have a single GPU performance that is below top end BTO iMacs. That would be more than mildly lame at a higher price point.

In the context of an entry level machine.

130 + ( 2 * 150W ) = 430W right there.

The other factor missing is that the Power Supply itself is a heat generator. Even if 95% efficient a 750-800W power supply is kicking out 37.5-40W.


Pragmatically though yes. Few folks are going to have software to push the workload to the wall when this first comes out. And even fewer folks are going to have work for that software that pushes the Mac Pro to that limit for long extended periods of time. Task one of the GPUs with 40-60% workload and its thermals will go down to substnatially below the max limits.


For the "money is no object" machine .... errr no. (even capping the GPUs slightly )

130 + ( 2 * 260 ) = 650W

 

The W5000 would be a good match to push the price down as low as possible. That probably is not an objective. High as possible isn't one either but priced largely overlapping the iMac is too low. That said I don't think the Wx000 pricing structure that AMD has is going to map over at all. I think Apple is still going to put a healthy margin on them, but not sky high margin.

The other major problem is that it only supports 3 displays (not all of them DisplayPort). There are 6 Thunderbolt sockets ( which can also be put into DisplayPort backward compatibility mode) and 1 HDMI socket. So need to drive 7 displays if want to make all ports possible work at the same time for all GPU board options. They will have more than enough with the W7000 and up.