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Did APPLE forget APRIL FOOLS?! Mac Pros?

Will Keir

Will Keir

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APPLE could have at least said "New Mac Pro's available" on April 1st. Not even a tease, I'm starting to miss those old elephant towers.

What's the word APPLE?
 
They are concentrating on selling 5 billion iphone 5's, rather than a mere 100,000 Mac Pro Towers.

Screw 'em, I built a custom PC and am moving on.
 
Screw that, I'll wait for the new Mac Pro. If there isn't one, then and only then will I consider other options! Will be a sad day when I'm forced out of the platform.
 
In Jeff We Trust. April or end summer.

don´t lose faith
 
I am very certain that that there is a new Mac Pro tower coming out in the next few months. Quite a few of the updates to FCP X point to a commitment to the mac pro platform.
 
Hackintosh anyone? if you don't know what that is go visit Tonymacx86.com and you might not have to depend so much on when Apple MIGHT want to upgrade the Mac Pro!!
 
jimhare said:
Screw that, I'll wait for the new Mac Pro. If there isn't one, then and only then will I consider other options! Will be a sad day when I'm forced out of the platform.
Click to expand...

I'm with Jim, and I will wait until April's end to make any hard decision.
 
Frederick Giles said:
I am very certain that that there is a new Mac Pro tower coming out in the next few months. Quite a few of the updates to FCP X point to a commitment to the mac pro platform.
Click to expand...

Well, a lot of FCP X's processing runs the same on an iMac as it does on a Mac Pro. I tested. They claim it's very well multithreaded but it's not particularly.

That said, yes I do think that Mac Pros are coming.

And as long as they remain pretty much the same price as the HP and DELL systems... and you can run Bootcamp on them, why not buy one? It's a PC workstation with the bonus of being able to run OS X without hassles.

Well, the main issue will be gfx cards, I guess... big question is when the ultra-powerful nVidia cards come out toward the end of this year / early next year (not these current new GTX 680 ones - they're for gaming, not compute)... if there's no Mac driver it'll suck.

So, yeah... I'm probably not going to buy a Mac Pro until the GTX 685 / new Quadro series is out AND there is a Mac driver.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
The GPU selection has little to do with Apple these days. It's been a few years now, but Apple has opened up graphics driver development and they have even eliminated the GDI driver/hardware certification program as of last year. What that means is that anyone can ship a video card and provide an OSX driver for it. So, don't bitch about Apple. Talk to nVidia and AMD/ATI about it. The catch is that for full GPU functionality -- being able to see the boot screen or to option-boot into the EFI system, the video card must have proper EFI support. Intel has been trying to move the PC world into EFI land for years, but it just hasn't happened as they want -- everyone still uses the common old BIOS approach from the stone age. We're finally seeing better EFI support lately though. The last real piece of the puzzle should happen this year, when everyone adopts the new OpenEFI spec (and by everyone, I mean Apple too). If that happens, then we should be able to pop any current nVidia or ATI GPU into a Mac Pro and use it with all aspects of the system.

Currently, the GTX200 thru 500 series cards work in OSX with nVidia's own driver. They just don't support the EFI functions unless you pick up a card that has Mac EFI support. nVidia did make a goof with the latest CUDA driver release though and it seems that it's a problem on both OSX and Windows in that it accidentally cuts off support for multiple GPU linking under CUDA. Oops. But the previous version works just fine with the latest graphics card drivers. OSX 10.7.4 beta does not currently play nice with the nVidia drivers, but that's because Apple changed a few things with the GDI -- they're purging a lot of legacy support and deprecated functions, or that's most of what is going on. I'm sure nVidia will have it cleaned up in time for the 10.7.4 release.

IMO, what's keeping the GPU selection so poor is that the only system in the Mac World that would benefit from other cards is the Mac Pro and the small selection of graphics cards offered by Apple, which they supply the EFI, drivers and support for, already satisfy the needs of 75% of those purchasing the systems.

Apple will release a new Mac Pro. There are so many references to associated components within the 10.7.3 and later developer seeds as well as in some of the Xcode tools. What we don't know is just what the new Mac Pro will be. It's entirely possible that they will continue with the same old tower design, which was conceived nearly a decade ago, FWIW. Or perhaps they will update it to something more current and functional. I'm thinking the latter is more likely. They have had oodles of time to work on the design due to all of Intel's delays and the current design is very stale both aesthetically and functionally.

People like to bitch about Apple not releasing a new Mac Pro, but keep in mind there have bee no new Xeon CPUs from Intel for 2 years now. There have been no new Xeon workstation chipsets for three years. What was Apple going to give us? HP and others have not released any new Xeon workstations in the same amount of time. In fact, HP has several irate customers who sound an awful lot like the Mac crowd at the moment. Most of them seem to be relaxing since HP announced the new Z-series systems, which are supposed to ship this month. And to the crowd that says "Apple should have released a new model anyway just to add Thunderbolt". Well, I disagree. Thunderbolt is promising, but it's not going to gain us anything if they were to throw it into a current model Mac Pro with the old chipset. Most people don't realize, but the Thunderbolt header must still interface with the PCIe bus and a single Thunderbolt port (with its dual 10Gbps channels) occupies 4 lanes of PCIe Gen 2. So you would be giving up the top slot, an X4 PCIe slot, in order to gain Thunderbolt. Made little sense for Apple to do a minor release to add it, IMO.

There are times I think I might come across as an Apple fan-boy. I'm not. I do like a lot of what Apple does, but not everything. I still run far more PC systems. In fact, I only own one Mac Pro at the moment. Partially because I'm planning to buy two new ones, while retaining this older one as a media server. But if Apple releases a turd, I won't buy it. I'm always building new PCs and I spend more time working in Windows due to the software selection. I do like OSX better than Windows, but that strikes back to my old-school roots where I'm a unix/irix guy. I do like Linux as well, but it's just not where it's at for most of what I do...
 
Jeez Jeff, what a useless post. You really know how to waste valuable real estate on this forum. I really hate reading all your nonsense. Hee hee. (sarcasm alert!)
 
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OK Jeff, now that we have your attention...

What's the bet on an Ivy Bridge Xeon being way less delayed? Late 2013 / early 2014?

It should slot into the same chipset, right? So all of the delays for Sandy Bridge Xeons did (what with SATA controller issues, etc) might not happen.

I'm strongly thinking of just waiting until then to get a new super-fast computer and skipping this generation. What I have is good for doing design and concept work... and I have an awesome super-secret cloud solution for rendering :)

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
Bob Gundu said:
Jeez Jeff, what a useless post. You really know how to waste valuable real estate on this forum. I really hate reading all your nonsense. Hee hee. :)
Click to expand...

Mmm... Thanks for quoting the whole thing.

Edit: Lol, thanks Bob.
 
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Bruce Allen said:
OK Jeff, now that we have your attention...

What's the bet on an Ivy Bridge Xeon being way less delayed? Late 2013 / early 2014?

It should slot into the same chipset, right? So all of the delays for Sandy Bridge Xeons did (what with SATA controller issues, etc) might not happen.

I'm strongly thinking of just waiting until then to get a new super-fast computer and skipping this generation. What I have is good for doing design and concept work... and I have an awesome super-secret cloud solution for rendering :)

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
Click to expand...

I don't think the Ivy Bridge Xeons will be behind schedule. The Sandy Bridge ones have been done for some time now, however the C6xx chipsets faced numerous delays. If you don't need a new system now, then waiting is not such a bad option. I would guess that Ivy Bridge Xeons should ship within the next 12 months, give or take a few. Looks like they're slated for end of Q4 this year, according to some roadmap discussion I've read. They will use the same chipsets that have just been released. And the next iteration of chipsets is looking to be about 2 years away at this point.

E5-2600 series Sandy Bridge Xeons will be a nice upgrade over the current "Westmere" models. They gain more than 15% boost in memory speed along with a quad-channel controller for overall gains of close to 25%. And transaction speed across the board gets a 25% boost from 6GT/s to 8GT/s.

For those of you unsure about sticking with the Mac or who would like to delve into PC territory some more and don't want to build your own box. Take a look at the new HP Z620 and Z820 workstations. HP has done a great job with these new systems. I've had my hands on a Z620 already and I have a Z820 of my own being delivered here in the next week or two. I'm also building a couple more dual Xeon-E5 workstations and parts are trickling in now for them. The Z620 will serve most people well, unless they need more slots and a few other options of the Z820 and it has a base price of $1650. Just be warned, like with the Mac Pro and any other high-end workstation, the prices skyrocket quickly as you choose more powerful CPU options, more RAM, etc.. The 2.9GHz (3.8GHz turbo) 8-core Xeon CPU (E5-2690) is selling in the open channel for about $2K a piece. So whether you build yourself or buy something like this HP, or potentially a new Mac Pro, if that's the level of CPU power you're looking for, a dual-CPU 16-core (32 thread) system is going to run you $6K minimum. You can actually stack more cores in a system for less money (per core) if you go with the E7 CPUs, but they are based on the prior Westmere architecture. At least until the new E7's release this summer...
 
Bob Gundu said:
Jeez Jeff, what a useless post. You really know how to waste valuable real estate on this forum. I really hate reading all your nonsense. Hee hee. (sarcasm alert!)
Click to expand...
Havent posted in awhile and glad I caught Jeffs post today :) He does seem to be full of it huh? LOL!
Keep it up Jeff, you def back up your words ;)
 
Always great to get The Word from you Jeff - thanks for your 2¢

Stu Aull
Alaska
 
Yep - absolutely awesome as usual - thanks Jeff!

That decides it for me, BTW. I'm just going to save my pennies until the next update in mid-late 2013.

Why?
Because in late 2012, the real monster compute cards should come out from nVidia in both GTX and Quadro and Fermi forms.
Then in 2013 I can see which Ivy Bridge workstation platform works best (Apple or HP/DELL/BOXX or Build-Your-Own-PC) for what I use.
Then buy accordingly. What I have will last me until then...

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
jimhare said:
Screw that, I'll wait for the new Mac Pro. If there isn't one, then and only then will I consider other options! Will be a sad day when I'm forced out of the platform.
Click to expand...

+1

I was glad the day I let the PC world and never want to go back. I think the future will be in modular computers but till then I will watch and wait for a new model. Just get to 16 cores, thunderbolt and hopefully USB2 and I'll be good for 4 more years.
 
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