Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • 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 :)

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

Bruce Allen said:
I'd settle for Gen3 if I could actually plug anything in.

"We see that the future is GPU compute... so we decided to build in a non-upgradeable middle-of-the-road solution so that you'll have to buy a whole new computer and more overpriced Xeon chips when you want more GPU power"

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

Agreed. ...but, if I remember correctly, the nice thing about GEN4 is that it was designed from the get-go to be an external form factor. ...meaning you could have one small ribbon cable that would transfer all the data you can handle (and then some) to an external 10 slot chassis.

Too good to be true, but a solution that would make everyone happy.
 
Stefan Antonescu said:
From Grant Petty :
http://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=8898

Hi,

We have been testing with DaVinci Resolve 10 builds and this screams. Its amazing and those GPUs are incredible powerful. I am not sure what I can say as I am only going off what Apple has talked about publicly here in the keynote for what I can say right now, however there is a whole new OpenCL and DaVinci Resolve 10 has had a lot of performance work done to integrate it and its really really fast. Those GPUs are very powerful and have lots of GPU memory so this is the Mac we have been waiting for! We have lots of Thunderbolt products too so video in and out is taken care of.

We will have more details once the guys get back from WWDC and we get some more info from Apple on what we can talk about etc.

Overall we could not be happier!

Regards,

Grant Petty
Blackmagic Design
Click to expand...

BlackMagic down. Now if Adobe says something similar, the "NVidia or Bust" mentality can entirely melt away and we'll just be left with the merits or lack-thereof of the formfactor and design decisions.
 
NEVER SAW THIS COMING

NEVER SAW THIS COMING

new_improved_zpsbaf86e91.jpg

one way to become more productive........
 
Nick Pasquariello said:
BlackMagic down. Now if Adobe says something similar, the "NVidia or Bust" mentality can entirely melt away and we'll just be left with the merits or lack-thereof of the formfactor and design decisions.
Click to expand...

Bingo!
 
The price is going to be pretty high as well..... Not to mention adding the price of all the external components you will need to upgrade... But still interesting as it will spur some innovation from other competitors in the PC world...ultimately it will be a win/win situation for MAC and PC users alike. (But I personally don't see myself getting one those machines)
 
Peter Proniewicz-Brooks said:
A 7990 is a dual GPU card.
Click to expand...

I know that. All I'm pointing out is... this new Mac Pro's built in graphics power is not particularly great.

7990-level power should be great for editing, OK for light Resolve use at 4K, etc.

Once you get into things like running realtime Neat Video-grade noise reduction, doing GPU 3D rendering etc - eg the really computationally heavy stuff... it's an issue.

Doing 48fps or 60fps 4K will be an issue. Doing 4K stereo will be an issue.

And at the prices they will charge (plus the non-upgradeability) it shouldn't be.

Actually... does this thing even support dual CPUs? I think you might be stuck with 1 CPU as well.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
Bruce, you must have missed the (above quoted) feedback from BlackMagic Design's CEO.
Or did not look at the specs of the AMD's on their site. By the Apple's spec we are looking at "pacified" 2x W9000 (the "slowest" with 6GB VRAM)...

I think you should wait for proper testing of these units before continuing your barrage of negative comments about the new Mac Pro...

With all due respect...

Peter
 
Peter Majtan said:
Bruce, you must have missed the (above quoted) feedback from BlackMagic Design's CEO.
Click to expand...

If I were in his shoes, I'd say exactly the same thing:
"Resolve will work great on the new Mac Pro. By the way, we also sell lots of Thunderbolt things you can buy to plug into it."

That's not saying much though.

I'd expect Resolve to kick ass on pretty much any >$2000 computer sold in late 2013.

Peter Majtan said:
Or did not look at the specs of the AMD's on their site. By the Apple's spec we are looking at "pacified" 2x W9000 (the "slowest" with 6GB VRAM)...

I think you should wait for proper testing of these units before continuing your barrage of negative comments about the new Mac Pro...
Click to expand...

I've seen the specs - they are below a current AMD 7990 in terms of teraflops.

OK for now (unless you want to really push things, in which case it won't be and you really want multiple Titans). Will feel sluggish in a few years. That's just Moore's Law.

The whole point of this exercise is to stop folks from just putting fast new PCIe graphics cards in their Macs down the line to extend the life of their machine. That wasn't making Apple any money.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
Nowhere does it say that the GPU's are not upgradeable. If you look closely at the internal design at Apple's website, the GPU's are two independent custom boards not soldered together to the rest of the computer. It sure does not look like end-user type of upgrade, but certainly doable at Apple. Also these GPU's seem to be custom designed / built for Apple. You can expect Apple "making more money" by offering new GPU's down the track. After all - they will be offering several GPU options already with this current generation...

:sifone: Peter
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
It means no CUDA... But Resolve supports OpenCL as well. As does Adobe CC. As does the RC-X build 18....
Click to expand...

Yay, Jeff is here...!
Time to merge the two oldest and more frequented Mac Pro threads, clear some of the pointless jokes and close the bunch of the new Mac Pro threads...

:sifone: Peter
 
Yawn so blackmagic said about the macbook pro retina look wat type of performance we gor from the retina
 
Bruce Allen said:
I've seen the specs - they are below a current AMD 7990 in terms of teraflops.
Click to expand...

Can't tell much from that... The FirePro GPUs are AMD's equivalent to the nVidia Quadro line, meaning they are clocked back for extra stability and longevity, but augmented with increased memory bandwidth and some other features. All things considered, I think Apple made a fine choice here. Part of me would have liked to seen nVidia GPUs announced here, but the AMD's will do just fine.

The cylindrical design is nice. Columnar designs with central chimney-style airflow make a lot of sense and it's a concept I've investigated in some of my PC design thinking. Where the columnar design starts to fail is making use of current form factors for expansion cards and other peripherals. Apple's solution here is to just eliminate that from the equation. Have to admit that was becoming the obvious direction for them. I'm not so sure they made the right choice on that front, time will tell. Ultimately, it won't matter as Thunderbolt progresses in the future. The unfortunate bit of it is current Thunderbolt, even Thunderbolt 2, just doesn't have the bandwidth. Every TB2 connector is essentially 4 lanes of PCIe v3 where we can only dedicate a maximum of 2 lanes of that throughput to any connected device.

For most any peripheral out there, this is plenty good enough. For a few niche products, like the Rocket-X, it's not enough... As long as the current Rocket still works with Dragon footage, it will be a great card to have as it. Sure, it will be a lot slower than the Rocket X, but the Rocket X will be bandwidth restricted and won't be able to push transcoded data back to the system as quickly.


When it comes down to it, I think Apple has come up with something great here. For those who need monstrous power, there is always the option of building or buying a monstrous PC. For most everyone else, this is still going to be a powerhouse workstation. Personally, I can't wait to get my hands on one.

Now I'm hoping that storage makers will jump on the Thunderbolt bandwagon and move to PCIe storage hosted on Thunderbolt rather than trying to use intermediary SATA/SAS controllers. I'd love to buy a companion external storage box that is the same size and shape as the new Mac Pro and gives me 15TB+ of storage and can sustain 1.2GB/s or faster I/O speeds. Unfortunately, I'm sure we're doomed to seeing cylindrical HDD products that make inefficient use of space or even square boxes that hold drives and serve as a pedestal to set the new Mac Pro cylinder on. Oh well...

My guess is these are going to ship as soon as the new Xeon CPUs are a go for launch. Apple may even be the first to ship the new Xeons in a workstation. CPU rumors out there still keep pointing to September/October time frame.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top