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

[Ron Lagerlof]

No, not again...

No, not again...

Dear God, I hope it's not like this... Yikes!

 

[paul engstrom]

Well ... there's no moving parts other than the fan - so ... as long as you don't block air intake and exhaust - it should perform exactly the same.

That's what I expect too. I can't see how being on the side would hurt the fan's operation... In which case this will will fit in 4u of rack space. 6 of them would fit in 4u of rack space. Regular rack space. Its been frustrating all along that you couldn't fit the old factor into a rack.

 

[Terry VerHaar]

Yes. The fact that it is so much smaller than the existing tower is fantastic. I'm curious to know how well it will perform on its side...

It'll roll off your desk. LOL

 

[Neil Dearman]

What will be the cost? That is my biggest concern/question. Also can you buy the base model and upgrade it like my Current/newest Model Mac Pro?

 

[Scott Crawley]

Well ... there's no moving parts other than the fan - so ... as long as you don't block air intake and exhaust - it should perform exactly the same.

Yes, while I would expect to see some loss of cooling efficiency in a horizontal orientation, but that massive fan is probably able to handle handle it.

It'll roll off your desk. LOL

Secure it to an airfoil and you might have to answer to the FAA.

 

[Paul Russell]

I was just joking with some friends in a post house last week that Apple has abandoned the pro market. Now it would appear that it's true.

 

[Joseph Coleman]

only single socket support.....WTF. If you want real power.....go PC!

 

[Bruce Allen]

Bruce, I'm really surprised at all of your comments on this thread. You're usually a lot more reasonable and a lot more reasoned in your thinking. But on this, you seem to have made up your mind far in advance of the reality of an actual shipping product. Even Apple was very careful to call this a "Sneak Preview." In our industry, that usually means the sound is not final, the visual effects are temporary, and the color has not been done. To judge a movie based on those things is not a good idea for laypeople. And to judge a radically redesigned computer at that stage is equally as presumptuous.

Mike! Tons of respect to you.

Please understand that I am basing this on actual info shown here:
http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/

As far as video and GPU, my guess (and my guesses have been pretty good up to this point...) is that by the time this ships, there might be an NVidia option available, either directly from Apple or from others. Apple has clearly sanctioned a new form factor for the GPU's in this machine, and probably a new connector as a part of that. Giving that spec to Nvidia and its manufacturing partners would not be much of stretch.

So, the best case scenario is we have the privilege of paying more for the exact same GPU but in a proprietary card design with limited resale value because it only fits into Mac Pros. And we can't resell the cards we're taking out, either!

Personally, I don't understand so many people here being so attached to cards.

Price / performance. That's huge!

PCIe cards completely suck in every way. They have all of their components exposed, making them fragile. They are static sensitive. They have many connectors that are easily damaged, and have to be reseated from time to time for no apparent reason.

I have never really had many issues in the approx 2 decades plus of using graphics card adapters.

The only issues I have actually had has been graphics cards dying on their own. Boy was I glad I could pull them out of the Mac Pro and replace them. No such luck now!

They cannot be miniaturized since they have to conform to a legacy form factor. They require more and more power and produce more and more heat.

I think that the power requirements are more due to the GPUs themselves.

They often require drivers, and that leads to incompatibilities with new OS's and other issues.

This will not change with the Mac Pro if they offer GPU options.

The fact is that one needs to look at real world cases to see whether Apple's new approach is really limiting anything.

OK here are two real world scenarios I could see a 4x GPU solution succeeding at (and a brand new Mac Pro sucking at):
1. GPU-based rendering for 3D apps in 4K
2. GPU-based 4K stereo compositing
3. GPU-based complex grading / online at 4K beyond 24fps mono

I'm agree that we don't need 4K stereo / high-fps all of the time... but right now we do have those requirements for it on real jobs.

The only solution to this is massive GPU power - and the processing power of two current-generation AMD Radeons won't cut it.

For my purposes, most towers contain cards to do only a few things: GPUs, storage HBA's, storage I/O (eSata and USB3, usually, but often SAS or Fibre Channel as well), and video I/O, especially SDI video. So based on that, let's review. GPU: in the new Mac Pro, that's a moot point

No it's not. The GPU is the whole issue for me. I like the system otherwise.

Give me the ability to stick 3 or more nVidia Titans and whatever comes after that - and I'm totally sold.

BTW... I do think that down the line the GPU and CPU will move closer for various memory transfer / latency reasons. But we're still a little ways away from that.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

I see quite a lot of Kool-Aid being drunk here. Consider:

With a conventional form factor case, you plug in your Rocket, your Kona, your Blackmagic card, whatever. It's fit and forget, the system supplies the power, all secure inside a nice solid case. You pick your industry-standard graphics card and slot that in. There's enough space for enough storage (several TB) to get some decent work going on in the box. If you need more, you hook up a fast SaS raid, or a slower NAS solution.

With the new Mac Pro, you're going to need a bunch of external boxes. External PCIe box for Rocket (plus another power supply to drive it), external TB boxes for Kona or Blackmagic, and no alternative to external storage for any reasonable configuration. A bunch of boxes, a bunch of power and data spaghetti across and under your desk, probably a bunch of wall warts to power them. All with non-locking consumer-grade TB connectors - with everything that implies for reliability. Graphics is an open question, but at the moment it seems, if the ARE upgradeable, they're Mac Pro specific cards - proprietary form factor, proprietary connector - with everything that implies for price and choice in the marketplace. Bye bye industry-standard cards.

On the plus side, you get a very sexy box. And… that's about it.

Exactly how is this an advance on the same capabilities, the same TB connectivity, built into a conventional expandable Mac Pro type chassis? How is it a superior solution? That's an unanswerable question.

It's *unprofessional*. Put down the Kool-Aid.

Mike

 

[Mark Phelan]

I see quite a lot of Kool-Aid being drunk here. Consider:

With a conventional form factor case, you plug in your Rocket, your Kona, your Blackmagic card, whatever. It's fit and forget, the system supplies the power, all secure inside a nice solid case. You pick your industry-standard graphics card and slot that in. There's enough space for enough storage (several TB) to get some decent work going on in the box. If you need more, you hook up a fast SaS raid, or a slower NAS solution.

With the new Mac Pro, you're going to need a bunch of external boxes. External PCIe box for Rocket (plus another power supply to drive it), external TB boxes for Kona or Blackmagic, and no alternative to external storage for any reasonable configuration. A bunch of boxes, a bunch of power and data spaghetti across and under your desk, probably a bunch of wall warts to power them. All with non-locking consumer-grade TB connectors - with everything that implies for reliability. Graphics is an open question, but at the moment it seems, if the ARE upgradeable, they're Mac Pro specific cards - proprietary form factor, proprietary connector - with everything that implies for price and choice in the marketplace. Bye bye industry-standard cards.

On the plus side, you get a very sexy box. And… that's about it.

Exactly how is this an advance on the same capabilities, the same TB connectivity, built into a conventional expandable Mac Pro type chassis? How is it a superior solution? That's an unanswerable question.

It's *unprofessional*. Put down the Kool-Aid.

Mike

I disagree. I can easily see this being a part of a tower setup, if you want to continue to go that route. Get a box, any box, and stick it inside. I can see third party vendors developing portable solutions with slots for peripherals.

To me, it is akin to the Epic, i.e. modular design. Build it as big as you want, or keep it small and have a DIT station that is really compact. I'm seeing opportunities with this design.

 

[Bruce Allen]

Also... um, have you noticed that the SSD is attached to one of the GPU printed circuit boards?

So even if a 3rd party actually makes replacement graphics cards... I get to risk frying my 1.5TB boot SSD if I want to swap out the GPUs.

Good old PCI cards seem a lot safer to me!

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Scott Crawley]

People are using expansion chassis already with the current tower, and their laptops. How will this be any different? Why will we need a bunch of boxes and wall worts? Isn't it likely that roomy expansion chassis will come out to accommodate our needs with a single box or maybe two? I personally wouldn't be surprised to see a single box with enough room to monopolize every bit of throughput the machine can take... If people desire such a thing.

 

[Shane Betts]

Don't know if anyone else has posted this. http://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=8898

 

[John Bellari]

I see quite a lot of Kool-Aid being drunk here. Consider:

With a conventional form factor case, you plug in your Rocket, your Kona, your Blackmagic card, whatever. It's fit and forget, the system supplies the power, all secure inside a nice solid case. You pick your industry-standard graphics card and slot that in. There's enough space for enough storage (several TB) to get some decent work going on in the box. If you need more, you hook up a fast SaS raid, or a slower NAS solution.

With the new Mac Pro, you're going to need a bunch of external boxes. External PCIe box for Rocket (plus another power supply to drive it), external TB boxes for Kona or Blackmagic, and no alternative to external storage for any reasonable configuration. A bunch of boxes, a bunch of power and data spaghetti across and under your desk, probably a bunch of wall warts to power them. All with non-locking consumer-grade TB connectors - with everything that implies for reliability. Graphics is an open question, but at the moment it seems, if the ARE upgradeable, they're Mac Pro specific cards - proprietary form factor, proprietary connector - with everything that implies for price and choice in the marketplace. Bye bye industry-standard cards.

On the plus side, you get a very sexy box. And… that's about it.

Exactly how is this an advance on the same capabilities, the same TB connectivity, built into a conventional expandable Mac Pro type chassis? How is it a superior solution? That's an unanswerable question.

It's *unprofessional*. Put down the Kool-Aid.

Mike

I agree with almost all most of your points.
This "workstation" is ridiculous from form and function standpoints.

All Apple had to do is put out an updated Xeon based rackable form factor with pretty Apple logo on front.
This box is a complete nightmare from a maintenance and upgradeability standpoint- i'd fire the design team immediately.

The next Pro Workstation from Apple for us is the 2014 Macbook Pro Retina with thunderbolt 2 coming next spring
and a hackintosh ...

 

[Tom Lowe]

I think you ungrateful bastards are overlooking the real news here... USB 3.0!! :smilielol5:

 

[Jason Osterday]

Glad there's some open minds in this thread. Refreshing to see guys actually dissecting this collaboratively and finding new (albeit speculative) solutions through Apple's design decisions and approach.

As some have said, I think the new PCI form factor will drive new cards and devices. We'll eventually see Apple coaxing NVidia and ATI to create a new line of micro PCIe (or whatever it may be coined) that will most likely find its way into PC's because, gasp, a vast number of PC users are gamers who want mobility as well and often drive the industry anyway due to their demands for those platforms. Just look at E3 which was happening simultaneously as WWDC. Just imagine how small we would be on the radar of the E3 showfloor with these requests.

To think that I can pack this into an oversized lens bag and take it on a plane, in a backpack, hell on a motorcycle is fantastic for those times I want the performance of a desktop. There's nothing else of this size that can perform to these specs. It isn't the perfect machine for the heavy user, but we make up 1% of this industry. This setup will likely sell very successfully to all the boutique shops and one-man bands, and any creative types looking for more than an iMac.

Say, you're shooting remotely on location as a photographer and you have a 1080 display at your disposal from a local hotel, friends house, establishment of your choice. One HDMI cable, magic mouse, bluetooth keyboard and power cable and you're in photoshop making realtime adjustments on your firepro's then uploading via 802.11ac to the local network available. Jump on the bus, plane, whatever and you're back home to edit the Epic footage you shot with your desk arrangement comprised of 4K Cinema Display, RRx or RR, and some TB2 storage of sorts. Want to jump over to LAN party? Sure. Want to yank the machine off your desk and use it for some 4K projection at a local gallery? Sure. Want to build a cart that can actually break down into 2 pelican 1600 cases and a mag mini hand truck? Sure. I probably lug a tower back and forth between studio and home once a month just because I have one tailored just the way I like between fiber, 10gigE, RR, Nvidia fill in the blank GTX, and USB3/SATA3/SAS.

Look at the bigger picture. If this machine doesn't do 4 GTX770's it doesn't mean its vaporware. I'm glad Apple started with a clean sheet of paper and actually pushed for some tower transformations. If I were to look at it objectively, the majority of our machines are last gen '09s running FCP7 and Adobe CC. They handle it fine and no one has complained (yet). I could comfortably replace any of them with these new Pros and feel the bandwidth is on point and the additions they bring are welcome in way of USB3, Flash storage for apps, and even improved Blutooth and Wifi. I get full OSX ML or Maverick integration and a fully supported Apple product to carry another 3 or 4 years worth of NLE, Photo and Compositing for our clients. If I need a RAID50 tower with a Cubix for online 5K+ I'll go to that dedicated box. Not to mention, an MP 5,1 will be cheaper come fall time anyway.

I can't blame Apple for wanting to make a product that is a little juiced up for the pro crowd but not so overtly dedicated to those specific end users that it can't appeal to the masses. If you're telling yourself, "I want better than iMac performance at price point of a Retina MB, but no larger than a Canon 300mm lens. This works. The fact that I'm actually able use that as a sentence speaks volumes. Not sure what flavor of Kool-Aid you're referring to.

 

[Craig Parkes]

Yes. The fact that it is so much smaller than the existing tower is fantastic. I'm curious to know how well it will perform on its side...

I think while performance is unlikely to be immediately hurt by having it on its side, life span will decrease because the design is intended for heat to travel up and away from the components via both the fan and natural convection. if you put it on it's side, you will be exposing some components to more heat than others - which may well be within tolerances but isn't a great idea in general for optimal longevity.

Of course, you could mount them on some sort of rotating device - rotisserie Mac Pro.

 

[Craig Parkes]

I see quite a lot of Kool-Aid being drunk here. Consider:

On the plus side, you get a very sexy box. And… that's about it.

Exactly how is this an advance on the same capabilities, the same TB connectivity, built into a conventional expandable Mac Pro type chassis? How is it a superior solution? That's an unanswerable question.

It's *unprofessional*. Put down the Kool-Aid.

Mike

I disagree - what you get is a smaller unit, which is quieter, with more efficient fans, with more power than existing models. In terms of design it solves a very specific set of problems.

It doesn't solve the 'super expandable top of the line super configurable workstation' problem - but ultimately, the audience for that computer isn't THAT much larger than the audience willing to build Hackintosh machines etc. It'a not just a very sexy case - and it is a replacement for the mac pro for a number of people who used the mac pro.

However, it isn't an UPGRADE to the existing mac pro line - which a lot of redusers would have loved - but I think wouldn't sell as well as this model will if they have got their price/economies of scale right. s
If it's TOO expensive is the real question.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Haha, you're pulling my chain, right? You see they're only getting those transfer rates by running 240 TB RAID 0(!).

No, TB and even TB2 is not close to a true RAID 50 over SAS. Bonkers Apple isn't allowing even one expansion port here.

I get 790MB/s reads and 710+MB/s writes on my Pegasus TB RAIDs. Thunderbolt 2 is PCIe v3 backed and gives us 4 channels per port instead of two. We can also multiplex channels, even across multiple connectors, on TB2. The Anandtech article on TB2 someone referenced around here has the specs wrong, they are incorrectly extrapolating bandwidth based on PCIe v2 and limitations of the current TB host chipset. Each TB2 port is backed by 4 lanes of PCIe v3, which provides 3.95GB/s throughput. Apple's info on the Mac Pro isn't very clear, but this is why they are saying 40Gbps PCIe v3 throughput. They should make it clear and say that is for each of the 6 TB2 ports.

When not operating in bonded or multiplexed mode, TB2 can still pin two channels together (which is still multiplexing, but I digress) and feed a bi-directional 20Gbps. If a single TB2 device is on the chain as the only device and requests full bandwidth, it can have all 40Gbps. If you multiplex two TB2 ports and feed both into a single device for 80Gbps, that is the same aggregate bandwidth as a PCIe v2 X16 slot, or close enough.

For super high performance cards, TB2 is obviously not the most elegant solution, but it is very capable and rather flexible. A single TB2 port if all channels are locked to feed a single device, should be capable of 4.5GB/s throughput. But like I said above, it's actually capped at 3.95GB/s due to the PCIe bus backing it. Either way, I don't know of any real-world SAS RAID host that provides more than half of that. ATTO R680 tops out at 2GB/s.

That Toms Hardware thing is pointless. They're using the 5Big Thunderbolt boxes, which are notorious garbage and have controllers that are severely crippled. They need to use a TB drive enclosure that actually can handle the full 10Gbps, or close to it. 10Gbps over TB is about 925MB/s, the RAID host in the Pegasus has a max throughput of 800MB/s. With fast drives in a Pegasus R6, we can saturate its internal SATA host. The LaCie craps out at about 530MB/s... The ARECA ThunderRAID (sold by others like MAXX Digital) craps out about 550MB/s. ATTO R680 in a Sonnet enclosure will saturate the PCIe/ Thunderbolt bandwidth can can send us over 800MB/s.

Thunderbolt 2 can deliver up to about 1800MB/s on a 20Gbps channel and still run a 4K display off the same port.


That's one more thing to consider about the upcoming Rocket-X. Sure, TB2 isn't going to be fast enough to swallow the amount of data that card can potentially send back to the system. But most systems are not going to have the storage bandwidth to deal with it anyway. I'd wager that most people will be transcoding to 4K anyway and. 4096x2160 for DCP as 16bit uncompressed is about 51MB per frame, or 1.25GB/s for 24fps. TB2 will handle that on one channel with room to spare, will actually handle 30fps. Rocket-X isn't going to be as crippled as some people fear.

 

[Max Nguyen]

Thanks for that, Jeff. Awesome info.