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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Interesting future Mac Pro rumor

I really think it's 4K or bust. And given articles like these saying that there won't be a 4K Cinema Display until next year I find it hard to believe that it will be anything amazing. Is Tim Cook really going to go up on stage and say, "Here's our amazing new Mac with this incredible form factor, plugged into a monitor with a lower resolution than the one we released 9 years ago."
 
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If Apple ditch the tower the tower chassis and expansion slots then that will be game over, in a sense; we will quickly see Hackintosh going mainstream, and machines being openly configured and sold to run OSX on non Apple hardware.

Mike
 
Tower, Smower. give me a 4k Imac with Intel's MIC Knights Corner for under 10k and we will all be laughing about the days of pcie slots, rendering and transcoding the same way we reminisce about dropping Slide film at a photomat booth in the middle of a parking lot.

"The cores of Intel MIC are based on a modified version of P54C design, used in the original Pentium.[37] The basis of the Intel MIC architecture is to leverage x86 legacy by creating a x86-compatible multiprocessor architecture that can utilize existing parallelization software tools."[13] Programming tools include OpenMP, OpenCL,[38] Intel Cilk Plus and specialised versions of Intel's Fortran, C++[39] and math libraries


and

also say good-bye to the Rocket x, and HD SDI. The Computer monitor and the Home TV will be 1 in the same. prepare for a price drop from AJA and Blackmagic...

http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/11/15/intel.shows.xeon.e5.in.supercomputer.tech.first/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_MIC
 
Mike 'Fireman' Ross said:
If Apple ditch the tower the tower chassis and expansion slots then that will be game over, in a sense; we will quickly see Hackintosh going mainstream, and machines being openly configured and sold to run OSX on non Apple hardware.

Mike
Click to expand...

Intel has actually slowed the pace of innovation to accommodate Apple so much that
the next Workstation format is basically a laptop motherboard/soldered-on APU with good power consumption, thunderbolt 2, external PCI and underpowered integrated graphics.

The just-released at Computex 2013 Haswell architecture that Intel is basing all the new CPU's and chipsets on are no more powerful than the ones they replace except by single digits, after billions of research... just to save a couple of watts?

it's a complete disaster for the PC platform- Worst "progress" I ever remember for a new architecture from Intel. I looked at most of the releases the last two days, no real progress other than power consumption, otherwise just rehashed older tech in different color schemes with new labels... pretty disappointing to say the least... Nobody will intentionally upgrade machines, simply replace dying ones. this will feed the "PC format is dead" arguement, except Intel is behind it this time...

I call it forsaking years of progress/advancement obtained thru increasing performance for a trendy unhealthy obsession to chase Apple's need to look physically thin, have fat profits and save a few watts...

Anyway, this winter/ next spring-summer seems to be the timing of the Apple 4K mobile platform with Thunderbolt 2 solution most people here would appreciate for editing Red stuff on, and we plan on upgrading then also...

I really hope Apple starts producing all their own CPU's/APU's/gpu's soon so everyone else is forced to innovate on the PC platform based on performance instead of courting Apple's customer base / supplier business...
 
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Mike 'Fireman' Ross said:
If Apple ditch the tower the tower chassis and expansion slots then that will be game over, in a sense; we will quickly see Hackintosh going mainstream, and machines being openly configured and sold to run OSX on non Apple hardware.
Click to expand...


I understand why you might say that. But I also think it's a very narrow minded conclusion. Motherboards with card slots are a legacy design that started with the original IBM Personal Computer way back in about 1982. There is no reason to believe that it's the only acceptable form factor, especially when chips, memory, storage, bus design, and single cable interconnects, not to mention networking, have advanced by light years since that original legacy design. The fact is that an Apple laptop today is considerably faster and more powerful than the Mac Pro of only 2 years ago, and the top of the line iMac even more so. The notion that slots and cards are the only way to expand a computer's power, and that towers are the only acceptable configuration, is not very forward thinking. I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, but if everyone thought that way - namely that legacy designs need to be slowly evolved rather than replaced with newer, better designs - there wouldn't have been a Red One or an Epic. If you look at this in those terms, maybe you'd come to a different conclusion. Maybe that's why Apple might.
 
M Most said:
I understand why you might say that. But I also think it's a very narrow minded conclusion. Motherboards with card slots are a legacy design that started with the original IBM Personal Computer way back in about 1982. There is no reason to believe that it's the only acceptable form factor, especially when chips, memory, storage, bus design, and single cable interconnects, not to mention networking, have advanced by light years since that original legacy design. The fact is that an Apple laptop today is considerably faster and more powerful than the Mac Pro of only 2 years ago, and the top of the line iMac even more so. The notion that slots and cards are the only way to expand a computer's power, and that towers are the only acceptable configuration, is not very forward thinking. I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, but if everyone thought that way - namely that legacy designs need to be slowly evolved rather than replaced with newer, better designs - there wouldn't have been a Red One or an Epic. If you look at this in those terms, maybe you'd come to a different conclusion. Maybe that's why Apple might.
Click to expand...

I understand what you're saying, and it's not without merit. But until such time as I can edit and transcode .R3D natively without a Rocket, don't need a Kona, and can hook up a SaS array without an additional card, I don't want to have expansion boxes and spaghetti with consumer-grade plugs running around my desk and running my edit station. Change for the sake of change isn't good, and it's professional to be able to play nice with peoples existing investments and tools.

Junking expansion slots would be the equivalent of releasing the Red One with a fixed proprietary lens mount; well yes you can use those old-fashioned PL lenses, but it's a kludgey adapter you'll be needing...

Mike
 
this is fun (=

well I'm guessing that apple will at least have thought about maintaining the pro appearance. so probably something like the RED readers? stackable, maybe even locking in some way. basic module with one or two full PCI express slots for graphics if I'm to believe the earlier speculations. and then using all the lanes that are left for loads of thunderbolt 2 connectors. someone will be able to calculate how many that will be? expecting them not to share lanes for utmost speed? believing in less is better, probably only powercord and thunderbolt connectors. only wifi/BT/NFC built in. only user updatable part will be memory like in the last couple of generation products. maybe twice the size of the mac mini?

speculating even more

the expension racks that stack; all you need thunderbolt cables and powercables
choice of
-disk array with some 5 bays or so? 5 1/4 is dead so small form factor as apple doesn't believe in optical anymore either.. something like the small drobo raid maybe but more stylish? built in hardware raid capabillity
-card extensiion room for 2 full PCI-X cards (if so maybe ditching the two internals would be even more apple like) something like the sonnet but then horizontally orientated maybe?
-IO add 'legacy' IO very thin units, would be neat. USB3/firewire800/network combo, esata/SAS/fibre combo, sound/HDMI/DVI/VGA combo maybe? other companies will jump in and add same sized
locking modules for PRO IO like HD-SDI, AES EBU, etc.

would be something if you can stack the basic modules as well.. all containing 12 cores or so, slaving them to one master.. maybe automatically mirroring the boot disk to give some added MBF

supercomputing, heavy duty rendering in 6K? just stack 20 modules and you're done (-;
 
Adam, the Apple WWDC conference is next week, and MacPro have disappeared from retailers, so it seems all but certain.

Supposedly Apple is developing 2TB SSDs.

I would not be surprised to see a workstation that's designed to be almost portable, with the above-mentioned two GPU slots, with small, expensive, proprietary Apple storage that's designed to move between a MacBook and a MacPro. Editing at home but need to keep working on the plane and in another country? Just bring the storage module in your carry-on, leave the beast processor and GPUs at home. The Apple Pegasus, half the size, and with SSD speed.

That is a dream. When I brought it up at Tekserv the manager actually asked if I was on acid.

Instead maybe we'll see these Apple SSDs soldered to the motherboard, for extra-speedy performance compared to Sata but forcing users to shell out for Apple storage at point of sale. Erghmff.
 
Mike 'Fireman' Ross said:
If Apple ditch the tower the tower chassis and expansion slots then that will be game over, in a sense; we will quickly see Hackintosh going mainstream, and machines being openly configured and sold to run OSX on non Apple hardware.

Mike
Click to expand...

I hardly use my tower at all these days. My laptop is pretty much as quick as it... And portable.

BLACKMAGIC make small thunderbolt boxes to images through to all sorts of monitors.
RED rocket through thunderbolt works fine...

Honestly.. I doubt I'd be buying another tower, unless it was at least 4x quicker than my laptop.

I say im about done with towers from PC or MAC.
 
Blair S. Paulsen said:
Better still would be a mid-case tower (rack mountable for god's sake) that housed PCIe 3.0 slots and drive bays and used an internal "switch"(perhaps hybrid CPU) to rout data - your laptop, iMac, iPad or AppleTV (plus keyboard/mouse) would be the UI portion and could carry enough information on board for things like proxy editing. It's basically "flying the saucer section" with the tower as a data appliance. Using WiFi and Cloud infrastructure there would be a ton of ways to remotely drive the appliance. I can easily imagine next generation gesture and voice based UI topologies as well, further enabled by processing muscle in the data appliance which lives "in the closet" or some other convenient place.
Click to expand...

1960's mainframe computing is back.
 
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Given Apple's current direction in their software development and their focus on OpenCL, I can see the MacPro of the distant future being a low-power Xeon box with internal GPU(s) and external peripherals like the Xeon Phi cards and the Red Rocket for the heavy lifting as well as storage arrays.
 
For what it's worth - a couple of months ago I received a call from Douglas Brooks, Apples project manager for the new Mac Pro to address my concerns about the new machine. Obviously he didn't tell me anything about the new MP, but asked me what I wanted to see. I told him expandability for extra graphics cards support, and memory expansion were at the top of my list amongst other things. His reply was simple:

"You are going to be really glad that you waited [to buy a new tower]. We are doing something really different here and I think you're going to be very excited when you see what we've been up to. I can't wait to show this off".

That conversation gave me enough confidence to wait for the new machine. I'm looking forward to the announcement. Hopefully the wait will be worth it.
 
Drew Baird said:
For what it's worth - a couple of months ago I received a call from Douglas Brooks, Apples project manager for the new Mac Pro to address my concerns about the new machine. Obviously he didn't tell me anything about the new MP, but asked me what I wanted to see. I told him expandability for extra graphics cards support, and memory expansion were at the top of my list amongst other things. His reply was simple:

"You are going to be really glad that you waited [to buy a new tower]. We are doing something really different here and I think you're going to be very excited when you see what we've been up to. I can't wait to show this off".

That conversation gave me enough confidence to wait for the new machine. I'm looking forward to the announcement. Hopefully the wait will be worth it.
Click to expand...

Seems like the light at the end of the tunnel is not an incoming Shinkansen after all... :reddevil:

P
 
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