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

[Bruce Allen]

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.

Well... there are already some pretty small PCs that can fit a GTX TITAN.

This one is 14" x 4" x 14". It can also fit two industry-standard 2.5" SSDs (up to 1.5TB... or more - just swap new ones in) AND a 3.5" HDD in there as well. Plus a Blu-Ray burner, in case you're feeling retro. And a top-of-the-line, liquid-cooled, overclocked Haswell 4770K. Far better price / performance than Xeon.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[PatrickW]

I dislike these vague pre announcements.

how many CPUs?

is xgrid going to get a TB update? plug a bunch of Mac Minis into one of these would be interesting....

are there any pci-e slots at all?

are the video cards a standard form factor? doubtful that ATI/nVidia would put the effort into a new connector just for the low volume mac pro.

looks like the beginning of thin-client video editing. move the data and the power away from the editor, and just have a machine with a fast cache and crispy graphics, all fed from a 'server'.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

So whilst all the heavy Tech hitters are on this thread , some basic questions from a none tech type
1) Will this beast handle 6k ?

I would imagine so. It gains a 15% increase in power per watt as well as a 15% boost in memory throughput over the dual Xeon E5-2600 series as used in the HP Z820 at this time and an aggregate 30% increase of the same nature with more than a 55% increase in memory throughput over the prior generation of dual Xeon platform -- as used in the 2010 thru current Mac Pro and HP Z800. All those systems handle 4K with ease and 5K in a respectable manner. Do I expect this thing to play 6K in real time? Heck no, but I bet it chews through 6K a lot better than the "monster" 8-core Mac Pro did with 4K on its release back in early '08.

2) Can It handle "Smoke' ...smoothly ?

I guess we'll have to see, but I'm not much of a Smoke guy, so don't even want to speculate...

3) Can Da Vinci 10 run on it

Resolve 10 runs great on current systems and not bad at all with ATI GPUs. I bet It will make a great little Resolve system and nicely portable or mountable on a DIT or location cart too.

4) Can it handle 4K natively (as we know it, not some apple variety )?

My current workstations handle most flavors of 4K just fine, including R3D native. If this system doesn't chew through 4K with ease, I'm sending it back as defective.

5) Where does this leave Redrocket ?

In an external box.

...thank you, thank you. I'll be here all night, folks.

6) Do i need additional hardware to run external monitoring

We don't know that yet. But You have lots of ports that can connect a device like the BMD UltraStudio if needed. It also has TB2 and HDMI ports that support 4K resolution.... I would say it's more of a question of software vs. hardware.

7) How much more performance does this system offer compared to fully spec'd Retina or even I Mac's

It has significantly more compute power than the current iMac or MBP systems. We should see updated versions of both of those in the coming months too. But it's not an apples to apples comparison.... or is it? haha... OK, anyway, a lot of this depends on how the software uses the system. Software written to make use of the additional CPU cores will benefit from this system far more than something that only scales between two CPUs, for example. The impending iMac update that will bring quad-core i7 CPUs with the same memory throughput and Thunderbolt 2 and all that will be comparable in performance for apps that can't scale to use all those extra CPU cores. Or for users who don't need to run several demanding apps at once...

I'm somewhat of a crazy geek when it all boils down to it. I'm refusing to buy any new iMac until they put a retina 4K+ screen on it. And I would like to use that 4K/ retina iMac as not only its own system, but as a monitor attached to a new Mac Pro. Sorry, going off on a tangent there.

And finally as off right now I'm going to steal Phils "Lava lamp" idea. This is exactly the sort of 3rd party add on that will sell in huge numbers because it is perfect for us creative types who wear black skivvies whilst editing, enhancing the positive aura of the edit suite.

I'm going to rebuild my desk as an X-Wing fighter. I think we all know where the Mac Pro would sit...

 

[Eric Santiago]

I'm going to rebuild my desk as an X-Wing fighter. I think we all know where the Mac Pro would sit...

Best post ever Mr Kilgroe

 

[Todd M.]

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

Am I the only one getting the vibe that Bruce isn't into this new machine?

:wink5:

But seriously. We do get it. LOL.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

"Thank you Apple for making every piece of high end professional hardware completely incompatible with my computer! So that the box under my desk looks a little prettier! I hated the option of upgrading my internal SSD as prices plumeted and capacity increased at an exponential rate. I really hated running raytracers which are CUDA only or CUDA optimized. I was deathly opposed to upgrading to a twice as fast GPU in 12 months so this will save me the trouble. And most of all I love having my entire desk covered in a tangle of little metal boxes daisy chained to one another. I was just thinking today that if there was one thing I really wanted more of... it was more clutter on my desk."

I don't care how it looks, you won't be able to see your MacPro behind the giant pile of shit hanging off of it to make it a professional workstation. This takes the worst part of a laptop, all of the external shit without any of the portability. I can't think of a single thing about this design that makes it superior to a mid or small tower. You're making huge sacrifices and in return getting absolutely nothing in return.

Even if somehow you can team together TB connections in to one UltraThunderbolt connection, the external box is going to cost you $1,000 for the privilege. You have to be a serious Apple cool-aid/pipe smoker to think that it's a good idea to have to spend $1,000 for every PCIe card you want to install in your computer. Yay an $8,000 workstation. Oooo a new GPU it's only $1,500... nope $2,500. Yay a new REDRocket only $4,500 nope $5,500. Oooo a new ray-tracing card only $500... nope $1,500. Oooo a new 1TB SSD only $600--I mean $1,600. If you add a RedRocket card, a 10GbE card and two Titans you've shelled out $4,000 just for the privilege of doing what every workstation on earth does for free. This is the biggest Apple Scam--err tax in history.

Also, don't forget to invest in power strips. Now everything will want its own power supply instead of just running off of one nice central case power supply.

 

[paul engstrom]

I'm somewhat of a crazy geek when it all boils down to it. I'm refusing to buy any new iMac until they put a retina 4K+ screen on it. And I would like to use that 4K/ retina iMac as not only its own system, but as a monitor attached to a new Mac Pro. Sorry, going off on a tangent there.

Exactly. It's mind boggling how much power we'll be able to utilize in such a small (and thermally/electronically efficient) package.

We've got very smartly put together towers for onset. But these new products (the new tower and the recent iMac) permit a much more compact system. A 4k iMac monitoring a Mac Pro tower = fiendish amount of power in a tiny small space.

Mac has always been more than the sum of its parts. I think we see that a LOT with the iMac and the new tower (and the OS).

 

[Bruce Allen]

OK Question #1 for Jeff-Meister:

When they say "12 cores"... are they talking about:

a) one 12-core CPU
b) two 6-core CPUs
c) one 6-core CPU with Hyperthreading

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[michael zaletel]

Apple Posts 27" Retina iMac-Sized OS X Mavericks Background


5120x2880

 

[Bruce Allen]

Am I the only one getting the vibe that Bruce isn't into this new machine?

:wink5:

But seriously. We do get it. LOL.

Bwahaha!

Actually I'd be totally into it. Just make it a little bit bigger and give it:

- 2x standard 2.5" SSD drive bays
- 3x standard PCIe 16x expansion card slots
- Option to have good old Core i7 processor

Everything else is great.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Peter Majtan]

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.

I am glad we are drinking the same flavor of koolaid Jeff, it must be in short supply... :reddevil:

 

[Alex Kiritz]

It has one Xeon-E5 processor which will max out at 12 cores. In a few years, by the time 100 gigabit thunderbolt has come out, this form factor will look a lot more normal.

 

[Jeff Coatney]

All this nostalgia for old tech is funny. What happened to the embracing of disruptive technology? Did anyone think the 4K future would come wrapped in yesterday's newspaper?

 

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

All this nostalgia for old tech is funny. What happened to the embracing of disruptive technology? Did anyone think the 4K future would come wrapped in yesterday's newspaper?

No. But this is the equivalent of publishing your newspaper in Farsi...

Or releasing the Red One with a proprietary non-interchangeable lens mount...

Mike

 

[Bruce Allen]

All this nostalgia for old tech is funny. What happened to the embracing of disruptive technology? Did anyone think the 4K future would come wrapped in yesterday's newspaper?

I am all for new technology if it actually enables better performance for me (or at least better performance per dollar) than the older technology.

I actually really want to like that new Mac Pro. It's super cute. It's nice that they are doing something different. The PC manufacturers suck for being so boring. I really want to like the black shiny little R2D2 and pat it on the head.

Just why all of the $@%*ing proprietary nonsense? They could have totally made one that was a little bit bigger and worked with normal PCIe, normal SSDs etc. It would have been faster, cheaper and more expandable too.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Sergio Perez]

"Thank you Apple for making every piece of high end professional hardware completely incompatible with my computer! So that the box under my desk looks a little prettier! I hated the option of upgrading my internal SSD as prices plumeted and capacity increased at an exponential rate. I really hated running raytracers which are CUDA only or CUDA optimized. I was deathly opposed to upgrading to a twice as fast GPU in 12 months so this will save me the trouble. And most of all I love having my entire desk covered in a tangle of little metal boxes daisy chained to one another. I was just thinking today that if there was one thing I really wanted more of... it was more clutter on my desk."

I don't care how it looks, you won't be able to see your MacPro behind the giant pile of shit hanging off of it to make it a professional workstation. This takes the worst part of a laptop, all of the external shit without any of the portability. I can't think of a single thing about this design that makes it superior to a mid or small tower. You're making huge sacrifices and in return getting absolutely nothing in return.

Even if somehow you can team together TB connections in to one UltraThunderbolt connection, the external box is going to cost you $1,000 for the privilege. You have to be a serious Apple cool-aid/pipe smoker to think that it's a good idea to have to spend $1,000 for every PCIe card you want to install in your computer. Yay an $8,000 workstation. Oooo a new GPU it's only $1,500... nope $2,500. Yay a new REDRocket only $4,500 nope $5,500. Oooo a new ray-tracing card only $500... nope $1,500. Oooo a new 1TB SSD only $600--I mean $1,600. If you add a RedRocket card, a 10GbE card and two Titans you've shelled out $4,000 just for the privilege of doing what every workstation on earth does for free. This is the biggest Apple Scam--err tax in history.

Also, don't forget to invest in power strips. Now everything will want its own power supply instead of just running off of one nice central case power supply.

I'm not that negative. The good thing here is I can exchange these "add ons", such as graphic cards, Rocket, SAS, capture IO cards with my Retina Macbook Pro. Last year I did a job that required an incredibly fast workflow completely shot on Epic and C300, all connected to a Macbook Pro retina- Rocket, 4TB + 2x2TB Thunderbolt and one USB3 Lacie drives, and at the same time outputing through displayport to my old 23" Mac monitor. Worked for 4 days non stop without a hitch- side of the Macbookpro Retina was incredibly hot but didn't feel any performance issues.

With this Mac Pro, which is much more portable than the old 2008 tower which I needed a dolly cart to help carry everywhere, I can see myself packing the workstation to locations without a problem. And I see myself sharing these gpu's, cards, etc with my laptop, no need to buy independently for each. Of course I'm an individual user and in post houses this is no major advantage, but this looks tailor made for me.

What I think I will need is to buy the "next" Retina, to take advantage of the Thunderbolt 2 connection and all OSX Maverick has to offer. I predict full external GPU support in the next revision. Why add drivers and support to all those cards in the code anyway?

Great times! (Hope the price stays in the 3000-4000 USD tops range!)

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

a) one 12-core CPU
b) two 6-core CPUs
c) one 6-core CPU with Hyperthreading

It is either option a or option b. Intel's integration partners are not allowed to advertise the number of HT threads or virtual cores as the number of physical cores. Now here' the enigma at this point, they say there are multiple configurations offering up to 12 cores. The animated graphic on the teaser page clearly shows a single CPU. However, to properly support dual GPUs at dual PCIe v3 X16 plus another 24 lanes of PCIe v3 for the TB2 ports, it would require dual Xeon CPUs. Unless... Apple and Intel have some sort of voodoo trickery or customized offering up their sleeves. Let your speculation run wild, but I do know the 6-core Xeons are a bit smaller than their 8 core counterparts. I'm thinking we'll see config options along the lines of single or dual 6-core or single 8-core. I'm not too wild about the 4-slots for RAM. OK, so let's say I want 128GB in this thing. Which is really what I'm going to want. So 32GB 1866MHz RDIMMs are freakishly expensive right now and almost impossible to find. Oh, wait, I don't think anyone is actually shipping those... RDIMMs out there at 1866 are all over clocked. Yep, gonna be expensive.

Sorry if I come across as drinking too much Kool-Aid here, but I won't lie that I'm intrigued by what Apple is doing here, even a bit excited. That said, I do recognize that it's not going to be the ideal situation for everyone. The situation isn't as dire as what Gavin is saying about all the external boxes for each device. But then again, for someone who needs to run 3 or 4 PCIe cards, it's going to require an expensive external box and there's going to be 2 or 3, maybe even 4 TB2 cables going from the Mac Pro to the box. The box which will be several times larger and will also have its own power cord to contend with.

I see a future for PCIe expansion boxes that are built to accommodate the new Mac Pro cylinder within their design. Makes the most sense. And I also think people are over-estimating the need for PCIe cards here. What cards do you all need to use? Seriously? With the hardware available on this system, as well as most newer high-end PCs, what is it you're looking to add? Rocket, sure. Video I/O hardware doesn't need to be a card. Monitor output via HDMI can be done onboard with the right software. Devices like the UltraStudio are good to go via Thunderbolt, if you need all the connectors, you'll end up using a breakout box or ugly looking cable bundle coming off of the PCIe card anyway. 10G ethernet? Um... those are about to become a simple Thunderbolt to RJ45 or SFP dongle type device. IMO, Intel should have rolled 10GoC right into their workstation and server chipsets by now anyway... But industry politics and patent trolls are running that show.

While we're talking about incorporation, it seems we can set 9 of these new Mac Pros on a deep rack shelf and actually get similar density to 1U servers or blades... Just a thought. Seems awkward.


Seems to be quite a few people around here wanting to pee in my Kool-Aid. But yes, I'm excited for this system, I see a lot of benefits and great uses for it. When I buy, and I fully intend to unless the actual specs suck, will it be my only system? No. Am I going to sell off my PC workstations or larger towers? No. Would I recommend this as the only computer anyone needs to conduct reasonably efficient R3D post? I don't know, will have to test first. I do probably 40% of my day to day work on an MBP retina and have no issues. This is going to be significantly more powerful. 12 cores at a 15% overall increase over the current E5-Romley platform.... Should render faster than my Z820 I'm sitting at right now. Of course, a new Z8xx whatever should be even more powerful. But that's not all we're looking at here. Apple has never been the leader in raw computing power. Their strengths lie elsewhere. For those who are only concerned with that aspect of it, that's their deal.... There are solutions for that. One of them being a monster workstation running Windows. I own several of those too. And I'll also say that Windows sucks a dick. I know because I use it every day. Hackintosh... meh, got better things to do with my time.

I think I'm just going to go sip my Kook-Aid quietly in the corner for a bit.

 

[Bruce Allen]

No, no, don't go away Jeff! We need you, man!

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Kwan Khan]

And I'll also say that Windows sucks a dick. I know because I use it every day. Hackintosh... meh, got better things to do with my time.

Hahahahaha
I agreed

 

[Peter Majtan]

They could have totally made one that was a little bit bigger and worked with normal PCIe, normal SSDs etc. It would have been faster, cheaper and more expandable too

I would hold on to that "faster" part for now. Using the "normal SSD" will reduce (or rather increase) one of the major workstation performance limits (access to OS and apps) by 2.5x alone...

:sifone: Peter