New Mac Pro Announced at WWDC! - It's OFFICIAL!

[Tehben Dean]

A fast enough computer will actually alleviate the need for a RR. Here's to hoping the new MacPro can play with 4k r3d's full res and 6k 1/2res and i'll be happy.
Also I'm pretty psyched with the possibilities of this new machine. Internal storage is for OS and Apps, I don't want or need my RAID system to be in the same box as my computer, PCIe is becoming less and less important with TB esp TB2 and the ability to move your peripherals between MacPro, iMac and Macbook is I think pretty sweet.
This is the Brain, where you go from there is up to you. I'm excited!

 

[Bruce Allen]

Not incorrect. You didn't get my meaning. Because the architecture is different, a 3.0 GHz i7 and a 3.0 GHz Xeon do not actually output the same amount of performance. You absolutely can have an i7 that outperforms a Xeon. But just looking at the number of hertz doesn't tell you whether or not it will win.

No, you can't just look at the hz. But it's not like comparing G5 vs Intel or something.

If you choose the same processor generation (Haswell, Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge, etc), choose the same ghz... performance will be extremely close for the majority of uses. Mine for sure. Yes I have actually tested this.

Same thing here. What I meant, is that a Mac with a 3.0 GHz i7, 8GB or ram, and a Quadro 4000 will generally outperform a PC with the same
hardware. I say this because, since there are less options in a Mac, they are specifically coded for and optimized.

Is that coming from actual factual observation? Do you have some benchmarks you'd like to share?

It might be true if Apple and nVidia optimized the drivers heavily... but they don't.

The real picture is far more mixed.

Mental Ray (a renderer we use a lot for Maya jobs) is significantly faster on OS X. Which is one of the reasons why we have 12-core OS X renderfarms, not 12-core Windows renderfarms.

Conversely, Adobe has stated several times that their code runs faster on Windows due to the compilers for the Windows platform, etc. This may not be true now but it certainly was last time a proper test has been done.
http://www.creativemac.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=167680

The advantage of Windows is also the disadvantage; because it allows for so much more possible hardware configurations, it can't specialize to any of them. Of course, as I just said, this is also an advantage; the best GPU cards are available on Windows and not available on Mac. But with equivalent hardware, a more specialized system will usually outperform a more general system, and Mac is a more specialized system than Windows. This does not mean that Windows is worse than Mac. It's a fundamental difference in the mentalities between the two operating systems, and certain users benefit from each approach.

This may be true in theory but not in practice. In reality it is far more complicated than that.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Peter Majtan]

I'm still interested in stuff like power supply (is there a gigantic wall wart thing?)

It is rather obvious from the pictures that the power supply is internal, included inside the machine. Apple (or any other manufacturer) would never include the standard plug that is used to connect directly in the wall socket if it was not meant for it (I actually believe this would be illegal and the computer would never receive the needed certifications)...

What is intriguing is that the ports on the back (along with the PSU) are on a unit separate from the main motherboard. This could potentially mean that in the future you could swap this unit and get new set of new generation ports. In many ways it seems to me like pretty much every board in the Mac Pro could be upgraded later - including the processing unit. This, if true, would go well with Phil's comment about "designing and building something for the next 10 years"...

Time will tell...

:sifone: Peter

 

[houkouonchi]

Well... So much for being able to have large external fast I/O... I know my dated two generations old PCI-E 2.0 x8 raid controller gives me about 2000 MB/sec reads and 1100 MB/sec writes on a 84 TB raid6 volume (30x3TB drives). Newer controllers are closer to around 3000 megabytes/sec read and write. No way you will ever get anything near to that on thunderbolt.

Not to mention what if you want to go 10 gig ethernet? This seems like such a step in the wrong direction for apple IMHO.

 

[jimhare]

Doesn't the RedRay CODEC work at 9Mb/s? My 3 year old router can handle this so my suggestion would be absolutely.

I presume Apple would use H.265. What kind of bitrates are 4k 265 streams running at?

A recent article suggested between 20-30Mb/s. That's megabits so maybe 3MB/sec. No brainer.

That's less than Standard Def FireWire in the 90s. We've come a long way!

 

[Bruce Allen]

It is rather obvious from the pictures that the power supply is internal, included inside the machine. Apple (or any other manufacturer) would never include the standard plug that is used to connect directly in the wall socket if it was not meant for it (I actually believe this would be illegal and the computer would never receive the needed certifications)...

OK awesome - thanks for the notes on PSU.

What is intriguing is that the ports on the back (along with the PSU) are on a unit separate from the main motherboard. This could potentially mean that in the future you could swap this unit and get new set of new generation ports. In many ways it seems to me like pretty much every board in the Mac Pro could be upgraded later - including the processing unit. This, if true, would go well with Phil's comment about "designing and building something for the next 10 years"...

I hope so... but then you already know I would love it if it were like a standard PC you can swap out GPU, CPU, power supply, etc

I think that even if Apple planned to make it non-user-upgradeable, they would still do something like that in order to make it easy for them to bang out updated versions of this thing without too much development cost.

Anyway, I hope they do that: the quicker they get to version 2 the better for me. Next Haswell Xeons are supposed to ship end of next year, right? Fingers crossed... if they actually stick some Titan 2's in it (if those ship by the end of next year), it'd be an option for artist workstation at least.

For now though, I've decided to put the money I was saving for a Mac Pro into a new Cintiq and some cheaper hardware that's available now and will likely give much better price / performance Anyway, this thread definitely helped me think things through.

Sorry I'm so down on this machine. It may be perfect for everyone else of course but I'm pretty good at guessing what machines hit the price / performance curve for my use case... and this one just ain't for me.

Hope to chat again about next year's model with more positive-ness!

Cheers

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Rob Castiglione]

Mike, just how good is the latest beefiest imac with red footage? Can it actually play red footage natively or do u have to transcode?

 

[Bob Gundu]

Mike, just how good is the latest beefiest imac with red footage? Can it actually play red footage natively or do u have to transcode?

Transcode??? What's that? :laugh:

 

[Mike Garrick]

@ Rob ...................Yep transcoding is so yesterday. Haven't transcoded anything for a loooooong time as Bob hinted at ^^^^ hah!

I Mac with Epic files plays fine 1/4 resolution or 1/2 pending what you are doing. Most of my work is commercial so not sure what happens on long form projects but certainly not missing a Redrocket....hence comments about the new Mac Pro.

 

[Mark Toia]

WOW 37,000 hits on this thread in just a few days. I think this tube is going to be hot property.
I hope APPLE and RED are working close together, I'd love to be able to work without having to use a REDROCKET through a bottle necked thunderbolt plug to transcode or render out.
Looking forward to seing some real world R3D tests on this baby.

 

[Craig Schober]

Unless something changes drastically, what I understand as of now is that it will have built-in AMD graphics, no PCIE slots, and no internal hard drive slots. It will rely on thunderbolt for expansion. No thanks

what an uninspired way to look at technology.

"no change for me, thanks. i like my technology only in little speed bumps."

 

[Eric Santiago]

Alex 4D Posted on his site saying that Graphics cards in this new macpro are swappable. They are bespoke and a new form factor. Ram / GPU and the Main drive are all updatable.

http://alex4d.wordpress.com/

I also read this

http://alex4d.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/2013-mac-pro-expansion/

 

[michael zaletel]

WOW 37,000 hits on this thread in just a few days. I think this tube is going to be hot property.
I hope APPLE and RED are working close together, I'd love to be able to work without having to use a REDROCKET through a bottle necked thunderbolt plug to transcode or render out.
Looking forward to seing some real world R3D tests on this baby.

Lots of intelligent, high-level, technical debate. The bigger this thread gets, the more likely Apple is to pay attention to it and make course corrections. If not for the version one, then perhaps for 2nd generation. But again, I've said Apple would not be hand-assembling these in the USA if they didn't plan to allow customization.

Michael Zaletel

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Well... So much for being able to have large external fast I/O... I know my dated two generations old PCI-E 2.0 x8 raid controller gives me about 2000 MB/sec reads and 1100 MB/sec writes on a 84 TB raid6 volume (30x3TB drives). Newer controllers are closer to around 3000 megabytes/sec read and write. No way you will ever get anything near to that on thunderbolt.

You do realize that a single Thunderbolt 2 port can do 40Gb/s and allocate to a single device if the device can take it. The port is backed by 4 lanes of PCIe v3, which has almost 3600MB/s real-world throughput. Not sure why you say we'll get nothing near that. We can already get real-world 1400MB/s with two Pegasus RAIDs on a single Thunderbolt 1 port, which has half the throughput and less robust backing than Thunderbolt 2.

Not to mention what if you want to go 10 gig ethernet? This seems like such a step in the wrong direction for apple IMHO.

Simple adapters are coming, they will still be expensive or about the same price as a 10Ge PCIe card... $350+. Currently we can put one of those cards in a small PCIe box or pick up the in-between solutions from makers like ATTO, still $600 for 10Ge though in that form.

 

[Louis Maddalena]

I just hope that:

1) It is possible to utilize 2 Thunderbolt ports for a single device.
2) Somebody comes up with an enclosure that can do this for the RedRocket-X
3) Somebody comes up with RAID system that can do this.

This would essentially kill 4 ports unfortunately, but should give ridiculous performance.

With the rest of the system.. based on the specs and the design, I think this thing will scream.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

@ Rob ...................Yep transcoding is so yesterday. Haven't transcoded anything for a loooooong time as Bob hinted at ^^^^ hah!

I Mac with Epic files plays fine 1/4 resolution or 1/2 pending what you are doing. Most of my work is commercial so not sure what happens on long form projects but certainly not missing a Redrocket....hence comments about the new Mac Pro.

Transcoding is so 2009... It's what people who are still using FCP7 do.

A great case study is the current generation Xeon E5-2600 series based on Sandy Bridge. A 16-core HP Z820 with the 2687W CPUs can transcode R3Ds at about the same speed as a much lesser system with a Rocket. Playback is still hampered somewhat by other bottlenecks in apps like Premiere and RC-X, but playback of 5KFF Epic footage at half-rez is not a problem or a stretch for this system with no rocket. Serious working resolution is 1/4 rez on this system, Rocket or not. In this situation, the Rocket doesn't help with actually editing because that's not where its strength is. Rocket is for doing a full quality decode of the image, every time, and when working with lower rez extractions from the wavelets, the Rocket loses its speed advantage. Especially compared to these systems with 8 to 16 cores.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the Rocket is no longer necessary or no longer an advantage. It sure is a huge advantage because it just adds more to a system like that.

The upcoming Rocket-X will be faster than what Thunderbolt 2 can offer. However, I don't think it will be a problem. Even at Thunderbolt 2 speeds, there is still enough bandwidth for the new Rocket to feed data back to the system at over 3GB/s, yes that is 3000 megaBYTES per second. Hope you have one seriously fast RAID to handle that. You'll be able to fill up a 3TB HDD in less than 17 minutes. Oh, wait, no you won't be able to.. There are no 3TB HDDs fast enough to do that. In fact, even with the fastest HDDs on the market, you're going to need at least 24 of them in a RAID config with one of the best controllers on the planet to be able to keep up with the data potential from that Rocket, even over TB2...

Uncompressed 6K frames should be about 113MB each. At 24fps, that's 2.6GB/s. Thunderbolt 2 will handle that. In fact, TB2 should also handle it at 30fps.

 

[Kenny Mosher]

Jeff, you are pretty much selling me on this Which I don't mind.

 

[Alex Kiritz]

The upcoming Rocket-X will be faster than what Thunderbolt 2 can offer. However, I don't think it will be a problem. Even at Thunderbolt 2 speeds, there is still enough bandwidth for the new Rocket to feed data back to the system at over 3GB/s

Isn't Thunderbolt v2 20 Gbps or 2.5 GB/s?

 

[Mikael Lubtchansky]

One feature that may not exist (but I'm really hoping for) would be the ability to plug this little Mac Pro directly into a MacBook Pro via Thunderbolt, then use the display, keyboard, and trackpad from the MacBook Pro's chassis to control the new Mac Pro tower.

Why? Because if you throw this new Mac Pro, a MacBook Pro, a small Thunderbolt RAID, and a Thunderbolt RED Rocket enclosure into a backpack, you'd have one seriously portable world-travelling indie DIT solution.
Fingers crossed that someone at Apple has already thought of this.

To jump back on this it is now confirmed OS X 10.9 Mavericks beta can create an IP network between 2 machines over a simple thunderbolt connection (just like it was possible with a firewire cable).

Nice way to use the mac pro from a MacBook screen / keyboard on the go for example...

 

[michael zaletel]

O

To jump back on this it is now confirmed OS X 10.9 Mavericks beta can create an IP network between 2 machines over a simple thunderbolt connection (just like it was possible with a firewire cable).

Nice way to use the mac pro from a MacBook screen / keyboard on the go for example...

Nice!