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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 :)

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

Peter Majtan said:
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
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I am running a very very fast PCIe SSD in my current Mac Pro at work, actually.

Not worth the money. They should have just bought a normal SATA SSD like they have for the other guys.

Also... if it had 3 PCIe slots... you could just plug in a PCIe SSD card and get the same speed.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
Oh and Question #2 for Jeff:

So is the SSD storage really attached to one of the video cards??? What does that bode for being able to swap in new cards? It does seem rather difficult...

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Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
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…. 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.
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Oh I see the attraction for a lot of people Jeff. Bottom line, it's a Mac Mini that's been working out at the RED gym and taking some seriously badass drugs. Something like stuffing a nuclear reactor in an insanely small box. I get that, don't think I don't.

Point is, for many of us, it's as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike.

Point is, it's frozen out the entire ecosystem which relies on working 5K raw in real time. You cannot do that without Rocket, and the only way to get Rocket on this thing is a total kludge.

Apple have *killed* everything that relies on cards. There *will* be people selling reliable preconfigured Hackintoshes off the shelf, ready to roll; it won't take any of your time. You'll unpack it, stick in a Rocket, and get to work - just like you used to be able to do with a real Mac.

Mike
 
Jeff Coatney said:
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?
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How do you plan on using this disruptive technology if your computer can't be upgraded.

"Hey guys we invented a new GPU that makes everything before it look like garbage.... now umm... where do I put this thing? Oh I can't plug it in?!"
 
Actually, you know what I think one of the problems is?

Dishonesty.

If Apple had said 'We've made a business decision to kill the Mac Pro; we're withdrawing from that marketplace. But, we have this insanely cool new box which we're calling Mac Power; we feel many Mac Pro fans will love it' - well, that would have gone down a lot better.

Mike
 
Thanks M Most & Jeff for words of wisdom on this piece of disruptive tech....for some it seems.

Still laughing about the X wing ..........

@ Bruce your gripe seems to be that it cant be updated without updating the computer . I thought that was answered numerous pages ago with a hint from someone about being able to configure with 3rd party stuff internaly ........... or was I laughing so hard at Jeff's remark I missed something ?

P.S. Now Steve that is bloody funny (See below V V V )
 
Mike 'Fireman' Ross said:
Actually, you know what I think one of the problems is?

Dishonesty.

If Apple had said 'We've made a business decision to kill the Mac Pro; we're withdrawing from that marketplace. But, we have this insanely cool new box which we're calling Mac Power; we feel many Mac Pro fans will love it' - well, that would have gone down a lot better.

Mike
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I think you've hit it on the nail there. Calling this the new Mac Pro is like telling the professionals what to use, rather than putting a new line out there for professionals to adopt if proves to be the bst tool available. Because this certainly does not feel like a Mac Pro to me, but as a new line of desktop computers? I can buy that.
 
I disagree. Expandability is going to be different for each person so I think have a massively powerful core, and a bunch of TB2 connections is brilliant. No iMac can every touch this, no current Mac Pro can come close to it. Each person can customise as they see fit. If someone needs 8 PCI-e cards they can get the proper chassis. Hard drives, displays, pretty much anything can be driven outside the case. I think it's great.

Mike 'Fireman' Ross said:
Actually, you know what I think one of the problems is?

Dishonesty.

If Apple had said 'We've made a business decision to kill the Mac Pro; we're withdrawing from that marketplace. But, we have this insanely cool new box which we're calling Mac Power; we feel many Mac Pro fans will love it' - well, that would have gone down a lot better.

Mike
Click to expand...
 
If your studio is Red Rocket centric, I absolutely see no reason why you wouldn't buy a Red HP workstation. It's actually pretty discounted for the price of the working components. This is essentially a disruptive Mac for non Red Rocket centric professionals. If you absolutely need a Mac the current Macpro 2012 12 core towers are a beast, you can can easily connect a cubix box and have multiple cards running. You'll only be missing thunderbolt2 and USB 3, but you don't like thunderbolt anyway. Maybe you can start a petition thread to have the Foundry revive Storm, which used the power of the GPU in its blink technology.
 
Bruce Allen said:
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If you look closer at the left GPU in your picture, you will see that there is a "cut-out" around the area where the Apple's SSS (Solid State Storage - just to make it clearly different from the "normal" SSDs) connects just bellow the right card. This is obstructed on the right side to see it clearly - but I do not believe that the SSS is connected to the GPU...

Again - you should take a chill-pill, or at least a sip of the koolaid myself, Jeff and few others have been apparently drinking, before you continue your outrage. This goes for many others...

:sifone: Peter
 
After reading probably way too much about this new Mac Pro for one day, it seems like Apple will certainly change the entire market with this... one way or another. I'm just hoping they make the most of this.

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.
 
Peter Majtan said:
If you look closer at the left GPU in your picture, you will see that there is a "cut-out" around the area where the Apple's SSS (Solid State Storage - just to make it clearly different from the "normal" SSDs) connects just bellow the right card. This is obstructed on the right side to see it clearly - but I do not believe that the SSS is connected to the GPU...

Again - you should take a chill-pill, or at least a sip of the koolaid myself, Jeff and few others have been apparently drinking, before you continue your outrage. This goes for many others...

:sifone: Peter
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That little white connector thingy looks like it has contacts that attach to the one GPU PCB on the right, doesn't it? And those contacts are absent on the left PCB. So that means two different custom PCBs?! Seems a bit of an expense. Ah well, at least they can change that and charge you for a proprietary dual SSD option later.

Sorry that you don't like my questioning... but for personal reasons I need to buy some hardware and software in the next month or so (I'm taking some months off to go away from the USA and hang out with parents and do some 3D work on personal projects. Since my home 27" iMac won't exactly fit on the plane (and I'm lending it to a friend anyway), I'll be buying a computer system now and need to consider things ilke resale... whether I want to keep it afterwards or not... etc. So I have to decide between Macbook Pro, PC laptop, airline-luggable PC desktop, etc. Figuring out what the Mac Pro will be will affect that decision. Because if I want to get the Mac Pro, then I'll spend less on the computer I buy now.

I don't have a lot of money to waste. I'm not rich and all of my savings come from lots and lots of stressful overtime. So yes, this is important to me to do this right.

A lot of the stuff you're saying will make this Mac Pro great... is stuff I've already used very similar technologies to - and it's not that impressive price / performance wise for me.

I use PCIe SSDs and they're not worth the money for me. I don't care if an app loads in 4 seconds or 1.5 seconds. Not worth the money unless you're doing a fancy caching system with certain apps or need specific throughput for video.

I use Thunderbolt and it is great but has issues. The damn external boxes have loud fans. The cable doesn't lock and comes unplugged. External GPU solutions are dodgy. Sometimes bandwidth is an isue.

I have used Radeon 7990s for GPU work and they suck versus GTX TITAN.

BTW... have you tried using apps such as Octane or VRay RT? They are really good. Here's a primer:
http://www.fxguide.com/featured/octane-render-realtime-ray-tracing/
They also mention in there nVidia's next chips - which sound like they are designed even better for graphical compute. Yes - I definitely want to be able to stick those in a computer the moment they are out (unless I can sell and buy new again - great resale is an argument usually in favor of Mac Pro).

As it stands the new Mac Pro for someone who just wants to edit in FCP X in 4K or use a few nodes in Resolve in 4K. Or someone who wants to do something more taxing and is prepared to wait on occasion. I've been there - hey, I colored a feature on a 2009 iMac. Wasn't exactly realtime all of the time but it got the job done.

I think you assume I'm some kind of yokel who is going to be blown away by the Mac Pro. I can tell you right now that the specs are very likely a little underwhelming for the future needs of projects I work on.

We have a huge ton of 12-core Mac Pros at work churning away on high-end rendering tasks and boy... we can't wait to move to a heavy GPU system.

MAYBE Thunderbolt will work (it really depends on bandwidth / latency being not a bottleneck to the compute task at hand) but chats to my friend who worked on the drivers for nVidia suggest that there may be some non-optimal cases.

And again it's a huge waste because then you have a mix of nVidia and AMD. Sorry you don't like CUDA but for people actually doing heavy GPU compute tasks, it is the stronger option right now. You go fight your religious OpenCL war (hey, I like standards - I'm in favor of it when it actually gets the spec 100% right - and it's not). I want to just do awesome film stuff on my GPU.

OK going to bed. BTW - you going to SIGGRAPH? Because if you do, you'll see some things that will make you think the new Mac Pro is a little underpowered too, I think.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
After mulling it over through-out the day, here's my final tally:

THE GOOD:
- New top-end Apple hardware with USB 3, HDMI, and TB2
- Dual GPU native support
- 1/8th size form factor
- Perfect for DIT, cart, rental, etc
- Apple officially recognizing 4K and revealing 5K+ artwork and assets
- BMD giving this 'the nod'

THE BAD:
- Proprietary everything means limited upgrades and options
- Moving lots of things outside of the box means lots more things plugged in and wires hanging about
- Waiting many more months for this

THE UGLY:
- Not a single accessible PCI expansion slot
- Why is the power button around the back of this thing?
- A few more inches all around and we could have had our cake and eaten it too
- No damn ports on the front or top? What the hell...

So in the end this feels like change for changing sake. Not sure why Apple could not have used less-proprietary components, offered cleaner upgrade and option paths, kept the Pro in expandability, and simply offered us a true Apple workhorse that solved all of our needs.

Did we really need to have a 1/8th sized mini-cylinder? Is this really the best path for pros? Could all of that peak performance Apple stuffed into this thing simply have been molded inside of a larger form factor that would have pleased everyone? ...Of course. We didn't need to get another massive, heavy aluminum tower. But something a little bigger would have solved everyone's concerns.

So typical Apple, we're left happy but still hungry. Forced compromise. And it really didn't need to be like this.
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
How do you plan on using this disruptive technology if your computer can't be upgraded.

"Hey guys we invented a new GPU that makes everything before it look like garbage.... now umm... where do I put this thing? Oh I can't plug it in?!"
Click to expand...

Having everything upgradable is a nice idea, but I've never found it that useful in real life... I've often found that by the time I need to upgrade a video card, I need to upgrade my processor as well - but the new processors use a different socket so I'd have to replace my motherboard. And then, to get the most of it I'd have to upgrade all my RAM. And that new GPU and new processor sucks more power down than the old ones so I need to replace the power supply...

Or I want to upgrade my GPU, but the new GPU needs the next version PCI-E port... Etc.

RAM and storage is really all I upgrade between getting new machines so the level of upgradibility of the new Mac Pro doesn't bother me much...
 
looks like a trash bin....

features so far seem to be nice. and if they convinced the guys from the foundry to showcase some of their software on it, I'm sure it'll work out just fine for our purposes. now let's wait til we get to see the price tag.
 
Burke Doeren said:
After reading probably way too much about this new Mac Pro for one day, it seems like Apple will certainly change the entire market with this... one way or another. I'm just hoping they make the most of this.

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.
Click to expand...

Well it kinda already exists... and I use it quite often with my tower "on the go".
Create a local network connection setting and put a fast ethernet cable between MBP and MacPro, put all drives, rockets etc on the tower... then simply use screen sharing on the MBP to control the tower.

Maybe the same will be possible / faster with TB but it is already very usable to have 2 machines sharing same portable screen / keyboard when needed
 
Stephen Gentle said:
Having everything upgradable is a nice idea, but I've never found it that useful in real life... I've often found that by the time I need to upgrade a video card, I need to upgrade my processor as well - but the new processors use a different socket so I'd have to replace my motherboard. And then, to get the most of it I'd have to upgrade all my RAM. And that new GPU and new processor sucks more power down than the old ones so I need to replace the power supply...

Or I want to upgrade my GPU, but the new GPU needs the next version PCI-E port... Etc.

RAM and storage is really all I upgrade between getting new machines so the level of upgradibility of the new Mac Pro doesn't bother me much...
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Apple already said this form factor may be around for "10 years". I cringed when they said that during the presentation. And it reminded me of how long the current aluminum full tower has been around and how allowing an upgrade path has been the only thing that has kept it viable for all of this time.

Without the upgrade path, I could have never added a USB 3 card, eSATA card, ATTO mSAS card, new graphics cards, even dual graphics, upgraded RAM, and experiments with things like internal Rockets, etc.

Quite frankly, without an upgrade path we would have, right now, a "Pro" machine with USB 2.0 and FireWire. That's a joke.

So while this current form factor may do just enough... Where does building the upgrade options leave all of us Pros another year or two down the road? Let alone 3 or 4. I know TB leaves overhead for many of the known things, but what about the unknowns? And that circles back to the fundamental point of, why won't Apple just give us options and stop making us compromise. Is it not a Pro platform?

Edit: In the end I'm almost certainly going to be getting one. And on launch day, I have no doubts. It's not perfect, it is compromised and annoyingly, it could have easily been all things and beyond all hopes, but it is what it is. I know none of these exercises are going to change what we get. So to heck with it. "Yaaaaay." Still glad I'm a split PC/Mac shop. There continues to be reasons for both.
 
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