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

[Maz Mawlawi]

I think this thread is divided between:

1. folks who understand the new Mac Pro, accurately assess that it doesn't fit their needs and are complaining.

2. folks who don't understand the new Mac Pro and think i doesn't fit their needs when it actually does.

3. folks complaining at both of the above groups, not understanding that they are actually different.

Do you do high end VFX / rendering? Do you push GPUs to the limit, upgrade them often, etc? If so, new Mac Pro might not be for you. I fit into this category and it's definitely not suited for me (this version at least).

Do you do just want a nice little 4K editing / finishing / mid-level GFX system that's reasonably fast? Then sure, Mac Pro will probably be lovely.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

You forgot number 4) Mac and PC fanboys alike... who will judge the machine solely and blindly depending on the logo that is on the machine.

 

[Sarah C.]

@Bruce

For your argument... I've made fun for fun's sake, but I fit in Apple's target market and could very well buy one within a year or so. If I need externals for projects I'll buy or rent them. (I love my Hackintosh, but it is an older, less speed-able machine.) Hat tip again to Apple owning to the importance of "core" product for the masses and leaving the rest to the various niche markets. Smart. We make fun and grumble from our various standpoints but rationally, practically it is a brilliant move for them.

 

[IAN SUN]

Mike I was thinking along the same lines but your design is more elegant than what I had in mind which had pcie going to an expansion box that looks surprisingly like a Classic Mac Pro : )

Actually there is ONE way for Apple to save this, even make it great.

You slip a cover off the base of this thing, revealing an internal PCIe bus connector and docking mechanism.

You plug the Jobsian Beer Can into the Apple Pro Expansion Chassis.

Four PCIe slots on one side, four drive bays on the other side - with an integrated RAID controller FTW. Or something very similar.

You now have your Real Mac Pro - but you can unplug the powerhouse heart of the thing, slip it in a baggy pocket, and take it on the road.

Best of both worlds; full-speed expansion, no mess of data and power cables, portability of the Mac Pro core. And no need to sell the expansion box to people who don't need the expansion but just want fast eye candy on their desk.

THAT I would get in line to buy.

Mike

 

[Peter Majtan]

Its a lot simpler then that Bruce - there are only two types of people here when it comes to yet unreleased products:

A. Peeps that keep open mind and discuss constructively the pros and cons of any such a product, while waiting to pass any judgements until after the said product is actually released and they had a chance to have a proper go with it...

B. The others...

This goes both for RED-branded products and 3rd-party stuff, such as this new Mac Pro...

:sifone: Peter

 

[Brian Merlen]

The current Mac Pro holds 20tb in a raid 0, even more if you get a third party expander to add more hdds...flash will be small relatively speaking
and until someone figures out how to run external CUDA there are serious problems for many workflows with this...PCI slots exist for a reason...

Actually - I think you either missed, or are choosing to misrepresent, all the points being made in favor of the new Mac Pro. There is internal storage - very fast internal storage - it's flash-based.

External storage is pretty much always necessary for video work. TB2 is a very fast connector for that storage. There are as many form factors for external drives as you'd want to choose from. Choices...

There are already expansion chassis for TB, TB2 is just the next iteration. You really think there wont be any??

Whine, whine whine - for no reason whatsoever. Modular is good - modular is forward thinking. You can like the form factor or not but the functionality is massive.

If all this connect-ability is too darn complex for you to deal with, I'd suggest you do all your work on an iPad.

 

[Nick Pasquariello]

I think this thread is divided between:

1. folks who understand the new Mac Pro, accurately assess that it doesn't fit their needs and are complaining.

2. folks who don't understand the new Mac Pro and think i doesn't fit their needs when it actually does.

3. folks complaining at both of the above groups, not understanding that they are actually different.

Do you do high end VFX / rendering? Do you push GPUs to the limit, upgrade them often, etc? If so, new Mac Pro might not be for you. I fit into this category and it's definitely not suited for me (this version at least).

Do you do just want a nice little 4K editing / finishing / mid-level GFX system that's reasonably fast? Then sure, Mac Pro will probably be lovely.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

There are also those of us that actually do get what you're saying and why you're complaining, and think certain members of both group 1 and group 2 aren't actually listening to or acknowledging the correct counterpoints.

The last time a Mac Pro came out, it was not capable of being the top-of-the-line GPU based renderer. There have always been higher-end PCs capable of being built to spec of bought as turnkey solutions. Acting like the new Mac Pro is vastly inferior and no one should choose it just because it has 2 GPUs internally and no room for any more is silly.

For your specific needs, you need as many GPUs running as possible, right now. Well of course the new Mac Pro isn't going to fill your need right out of the gate.

However, if properly adapted to with peripherals, could it match a higher-end out-of-the-box PC? The answer is: Probably. Up to a point at least. Does this mean you should chose it for your work? There's no way of knowing. We won't know until we get our hands on it and test it. To claim that it absolutely positively will not without actually testing it is close minded.

You may then argue that, if PCs can pack more raw GigaHertz, why would anyone use Macs? One of the answers is that the Unix based operating system is just more stable and reliable. One of the answers is that the hardware tends to work more reliably together. One of the answers is that people will like the look of the round, polished aluminum on their desk the same way they liked the look of the large, imposing perforated metal beast with handles. There are other answers too. And certainly there are counter-answers as to why one would use a particular PC over a particular Mac. That's the joy of Choice.

The issues that people are taking with your posts are not that you don't like the Mac Pro. It's not that you are pointing out the foibles and where the design fails. It's that you're completely refusing to acknowledge viable counter points and reasonable ways to accomplish the end goals that you are after, and instead are now just whining that no one is listening to you, which is made apparent by you now lumping everyone, without exception, into three disparaging groups of people.

 

[Mark Phelan]

You forgot number 4) Mac and PC fanboys alike... who will judge the machine solely and blindly depending on the logo that is on the machine.

2013 and we are still fighting the Mac vs PC war? Must we insult folks because they choose differently from us and see things that work better for them? I think there is much to like about this new direction and can easily look forward to it without being a fanboy. Frankly, I think Mike Ross has a great idea of the Apple Pro Expansion Chassis and is what I was alluding to earlier, albeit through a third party.

 

[Nick Shaw]

There are already expansion chassis for TB, TB2 is just the next iteration.

See this statement Magma gave me regarding Thunderbolt 2 and the ExpressBox.

 

[Eric Santiago]

See this statement Magma gave me regarding Thunderbolt 2 and the ExpressBox.

Makes sense since our Magma uses a card unlike the Sonnet collecting dust here.

 

[Bruce Allen]

The last time a Mac Pro came out, it was not capable of being the top-of-the-line GPU based renderer. There have always been higher-end PCs capable of being built to spec of bought as turnkey solutions.

When the last Mac Pro came out... GPU rendering wasn't production ready. V-Ray RT, Octane, iRay, etc were not production ready. It was not as much of an issue.

Acting like the new Mac Pro is vastly inferior and no one should choose it just because it has 2 GPUs internally and no room for any more is silly.

OK, please quote where I said that. In most of my posts I took great pain to point out that it would work for a lot of other uses.

Anyway, my main questions revolved around the cost / ability to upgrade the GPUs... and the thought that Apple designed this primarily to encourage an upgrade cycle where the simplest way to upgrade your GPU is just to sell your old Mac Pro used (hopefully for a decent price, since Macs hold value relatively well) and buy a new one - eg no option to just swap out PCIe cards (and sell the old one used).

I'm interested in the SSDs and whether their connectors are soldered to the GPUs. I'm still interested in stuff like power supply (is there a gigantic wall wart thing?)... whether GPUs can be swapped by the user... whether the SSDs use M2 format or not. These are all interesting questions to me.

The issues that people are taking with your posts are not that you don't like the Mac Pro. It's not that you are pointing out the foibles and where the design fails. It's that you're completely refusing to acknowledge viable counter points and reasonable ways to accomplish the end goals that you are after

OK... what is the counter point to the GPU issue? Apart from "they'll be fast enough for me for the life of the machine" or "I have lots of money and just plan to upgrade GPUs each year by buying a whole new Mac Pro each time" or "I'm going to do some kind of expensive Thunderbolt thing and hope the bandwidth is OK" or "maybe there will be expensive custom GPU upgrade cards". None of those seem particularly compelling.

and instead are now just whining that no one is listening to you, which is made apparent by you now lumping everyone, without exception, into three disparaging groups of people.

Go to saner places than Reduser (read fxguide or arstechnica). Come back to Reduser and see if it doesn't look like one big shouting match.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Scott Crawley]

The shroud or cover that goes over the unit, which covers all the internals, RAM modules, etc.. is indeed polished shiny aluminum. Reflective, like a mirror and bound to show finger prints and dust like nothing else. About as close to chrome as you can get and still be environmentally friendly and recyclable. The Apple logo is laser etched on it. Apple's web site also states it's polished aluminum.

Ahh, I see that now. I can also see why the top plate on the core unit might look black in Brandon's picture. I can't say I am excited about the finish, but then again I don't really give a shit. They should offer iPod Nano colors... like the old iMac.:biggrinjester:

 

[Victor MOREIRA]

I have been relatively quiet and letting the new specs simmer. I've got to say that Jeff and Peter M are thinking progressively. After what I've seen from Apple's small public "sneak peak" the new Mac Pro is far from being a joke. The internal processing power and eliminating some of the most speed plaguing bottlenecks that pc's and your soon to be hackintosh's will experience is kind of a big deal. The graphics are a non issue for my workflow (and pretty much everyone else that I know). OpenCL has advanced and is very fast, as well as its support by adobe (Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop, Speedgrade...) and Black Magic Design, The Foundry (Nuke etc...) and of course Final Cut Pro 'X'. Avid will probably take a while to come around, but they live a decade behind the rest of us anyways... Peter is right when he says most PCIe cards aren't going to bottleneck with Thunderbolt 2 and the data rate is stackable anyways, so when needed just use 2 TB2 ports when we have 3rd party support for it - assuming apple won't release their own, and hopefully they are on the way. Which leads me to design. I'm not a fan of cables strung all over the place at all, but as silly as it looks now,mthis design makes sense. It is modular, and will kick your computers ass right out of the box. I can get over the cables. My DIT friends are looking forward to how much space this will open up on their carts. Not to mention from what I've heard the "fan noise" everyone complained so much about with the previous MacPro's - is gone.

There is still a lot to be known about this small funny looking machine, but to be fair lets hold off on the trash talk until its been released. This computer was built for 4k, and in theory, that is exactly what I'm looking for. And I'm going to go ahead and assume that most of the rest of you have very similar requirements to mine.

True and wise...

 

[Nick Pasquariello]

Anyway, my main questions revolved around the cost / ability to upgrade the GPUs... and the thought that Apple designed this primarily to encourage an upgrade cycle where the simplest way to upgrade your GPU is just to sell your old Mac Pro used (hopefully for a decent price, since Macs hold value relatively well) and buy a new one - eg no option to just swap out PCIe cards (and sell the old one used).

I'm interested in the SSDs and whether their connectors are soldered to the GPUs. I'm still interested in stuff like power supply (is there a gigantic wall wart thing?)... whether GPUs can be swapped by the user... whether the SSDs use M2 format or not. These are all interesting questions to me.

These are the first paragraphs I've seen you write in this thread that have not come off as either whining or completely ignoring what has been said. And I say this with all due respect; you used to be one of my favorite posters on RedUser. Which is why I've been shocked by your tone in this thread.

Again, it's the tone. And the complete disregard for opposing views. At least, that's how it's come off to me.


As for the GPU issues, there are unknowns. Will GPUs in expansion boxes work just as well over Thunderbolt 2 as they would in an internal slot? Certainly not as secure of a connection, but that doesn't mean it won't work. Will the internal cards be a new standard in form factor that other vendors will start to produce, and other PCs will start to use? We don't know; may seem unlikely, but standards change and adapt and evolve and are created. Will the two AMD GPUs in the Mac Pro meet the needs of most of us? We don't know. I mean that last one as both a positive possibility and a negative; Open GL may just not work nearly as well as CUDA despite everyone's best efforts, and leave us all needing a different solution. Or it could be the opposite. Plus, and here's a big one: everything can be made to work if you have enough money to spend on making it work. So what's the Mac Pro going to cost in terms of dollars? We don't know. We just don't know.

Which is why I'd rather open-mindedly speculate on how we can get it to meet a certain goal, how it's set up internally, how much throughput it can bust out. Let's figure out what it *can* do so that when the final specs and dollar amount are revealed in 6 months, we'll all know, instantly, whether or not our individual businesses should pounce on it, or leave it the hell alone.

 

[C_Westover]

YES!

 

[Mike Garrick]

Like any new tech. some people will luv it, others will hate it.....others are sitting on the fence waiting for it to hit the street. This product has been out what 3 days (?) so to luv it or hate it is IMO opinion is extreme. Sure luv/hate the concept not sure if you can legitimately argue either way on anything else.

On a side note, I've noticed the dimensions posted when viewed against Brandon's & others pics, the thing looks a lot bigger then the dimensions suggest on paper & that's allowing for optic "perspective shifts"...maybe it's a "Tardus".

P.S. thanks Nick for googling......I def. heard Apple is now considering offering this finish with PCIe slots ; )

 

[Bruce Allen]

These are the first paragraphs I've seen you write in this thread that have not come off as either whining or completely ignoring what has been said.

Sorry you don't like my tone. I just reread pg1, pg2, pg3 and didn't really find anything I said that was offensive or untrue though.

I actually think I was quite well-mannered and patient. I still didn't get many of my questions addressed or answered. I got insulted a bit. That's OK.

I did ignore your posts - because you were saying incorrect things like telling me I'm wrong to compare i7 and Xeon eg:

You're comparing Apples to Oranges, no pun intended. GigaHert for GigaHert, you can't compare an i7 to a Xeon; they don't work the same and thus this is not a good comparison.

Yes you can. You run V-Ray or Mental Ray or After Effects or whatever on them. They both work. Actually they are incredibly similar

You also can't compare a fully, 100% integrated system to a system that has as many swappable parts.

Yes you can. You look at the options and figure which makes most sense for your use case. I am articulating why the new Mac Pro is a step backwards for us for our use case.

As for the GPU issues, there are unknowns. Will GPUs in expansion boxes work just as well over Thunderbolt 2 as they would in an internal slot? Certainly not as secure of a connection, but that doesn't mean it won't work.

1. They will certainly be more expensive (you have to pay for the Thunderbolt enclosures) so price / performance will be less even if performance is equivalent.

2. If you can't aggregate Thunderbolt cables together, they will have significantly less bandwidth. This may or may not be an issue depending on task (for me I know it'll be an issue).

3. If you can aggregate Thunderbolt cables, you might get equivalent performance. If they get it to work and it doesn't cost a fortune and you're OK with tying up a bunch of Thunderbolt ports...

All in all, it sounds expensive. Also a bit wasteful of the GPUs already in the Mac Pro if you want to use CUDA externally for example. Even if you wanted to put AMDs in externally... you usually want all of the GPUs to be on the same architecture version for best compute results.

My suspicion is that in the end, it'll just make way more financial sense to just sell the old Mac Pro and buy the new one with the faster GPUs built in. Which is exactly what Apple wants you to do.

Will the internal cards be a new standard in form factor that other vendors will start to produce, and other PCs will start to use?

Possibly... but I will donate $100 to a charity of your choice if by Dec 2015 you can buy a GPU on this new form factor that will be cheaper / faster than the equivalent PCIe card.

Will the two AMD GPUs in the Mac Pro meet the needs of most of us? We don't know.

I know right now they won't for my needs. But then I know I need more than the ~8 teraflops Apple listed as the max (or rather, what AMD calculates as 8 teraflops).

Probably will be fine for most of us, sure. I think people underestimate how easy 4K video is to process. What's tough is doing rendering that holds up at 4K! I know because we have a farm of 12-core Mac Pros churning on a render right now.

I mean that last one as both a positive possibility and a negative; Open GL may just not work nearly as well as CUDA despite everyone's best efforts, and leave us all needing a different solution. Or it could be the opposite.

Having coded both in OpenCL (please note that it is different to OpenGL) and CUDA... my answer would be that they are both quite similar, however there are specific issues with OpenCL that make it not good at the moment. These will be fixed at some point.

I doubt that OpenCL will be significantly faster than CUDA unless nVidia totally drops the ball. Personally I'd be fine with OpenCL if they make it work right.

The main issue is: probably by the time they make OpenCL catch up to CUDA totally... those GPUs in that Mac Pro will be a version behind so you'll have to buy a new Mac Pro. Which, again... might just be what Apple wants

Which is why I'd rather open-mindedly speculate on how we can get it to meet a certain goal, how it's set up internally, how much throughput it can bust out. Let's figure out what it *can* do so that when the final specs and dollar amount are revealed in 6 months, we'll all know, instantly, whether or not our individual businesses should pounce on it, or leave it the hell alone.

Glad you're with me on this. Apple has given quite a lot of info on their website. It's not like this is some mystery machine that we're not allowed to criticize just because we can't use one yet.

Anyway, cheers!

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[paul schefz]

we all know that 99.9% of all mac buyers do not need or want a mac pro...so it really is a niche product....and it seems that out of the people who do need/want one, there are only a small handful who need it to be some kind of mega computer/render farm....even most people lusting after a macpro do not want/need that....other then a rocket, i would not even know what to do with a pcie slot....let alone 3 or 5....i haven't used internal storage in years other then on my macbook pro and there only for files.....i try to swap my macs every year or so....resale value is great and i get the latest and am not stuck on some 4 year old thing that nobody wants to buy...sad but true....
this is for the most part a great discussion but when people complain about built in (pcie ssd!) storage and mention the lack of firewire/ethernet or optical drive in one post i just can't take it serious....
we are all here because we like the idea of a central brain and a modular system....which is exactly the reason i am excited about the new mac pros...i have no clue if i will get one, if it makes sense to me.....but the idea of a 4k iMac used as a display (while running back ups and such in the back ground) for a mac pro (or retina mbp) a couple of pegasus (or other raid boxes) maybe a rocket in a box....all of it easy to transport and all easy to update (replace!) connected by a couple of TB cables sounds great to me....

 

[Nick Pasquariello]

I did ignore your posts - because you were saying incorrect things like telling me I'm wrong to compare i7 and Xeon eg:


Yes you can. You run V-Ray or Mental Ray or After Effects or whatever on them. They both work. Actually they are incredibly similar

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.

Yes you can. You look at the options and figure which makes most sense for your use case. I am articulating why the new Mac Pro is a step backwards for us for our use case.

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. 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.

1. They will certainly be more expensive (you have to pay for the Thunderbolt enclosures) so price / performance will be less even if performance is equivalent.

2. If you can't aggregate Thunderbolt cables together, they will have significantly less bandwidth. This may or may not be an issue depending on task (for me I know it'll be an issue).

3. If you can aggregate Thunderbolt cables, you might get equivalent performance. If they get it to work and it doesn't cost a fortune and you're OK with tying up a bunch of Thunderbolt ports...

If the AMD cards in the Mac Pro are truly unique, then who knows what they cost. There's a reason that AMD chips are in both the XBone and the PS4; almost as good as Intels and a fraction of the cost. Could it offset the cost of a $1,000 expansion chassis? It might. Yes, I'm aware that Apple is usually set at a premium. I just don't want to close the door on the discussion because it's already assumed to be too expensive.

Also, it has been mentioned multiple times already that the spec for TB2 differs from that of TB1 in a few ways, including the option of using multiple channels at once. So option 3 is plausible according to spec. Of course, until someone actually comes out with a device that utilizes it, we have no idea how well that'll work. In theory? It's supposed to.

All in all, it sounds expensive. Also a bit wasteful of the GPUs already in the Mac Pro if you want to use CUDA externally for example. Even if you wanted to put AMDs in externally... you usually want all of the GPUs to be on the same architecture version for best compute results.

My suspicion is that in the end, it'll just make way more financial sense to just sell the old Mac Pro and buy the new one with the faster GPUs built in. Which is exactly what Apple wants you to do.


Possibly... but I will donate $100 to a charity of your choice if by Dec 2015 you can buy a GPU on this new form factor that will be cheaper / faster than the equivalent PCIe card.

The squarer, top-down format does open the door for more design options, from everyone, not just Apple. If it's not exclusive or patented, we may start to see some knockoffs that try to say they have the same "thermal cooling" as the new Mac Pro.

 

[Mike Garrick]

@ Paul

Good point , I was a Mac Pro heavy user until it died about 6 weeks ago since then I've been cutting on a New 32G ram I Mac and I got to say I'm sort of questioning the need for another Mac Pro. At the price I paid for the I Mac I can afford to replace it every year with the latest & greatest for less dollars than a Mac Pro initial purchase, I paid 10K ish for mine in 2008 .

Theres a lot to like about the new Mac Pro IMO but given what we can now do with "lesser machines" plus modularity, is it the future ? To illustrate didn't I read on this thread 20 or 2 Terrabytes of storage ? For me I would never use it, as all media is on third party HDs & its safer that way as well . To entrust all that data on an internal drive scares me witless.

So for us mere mortals this is the BIG question we should all ask ourselves about the new Mac Pro "do we really need it" ?

 

[paul schefz]

@ Paul



So for us mere mortals this the BIG question we should all ask ourselves about the new Mac Pro "do we really need it" ?

i think that is apple's "problem" and that is why this has not been their most pressing project....even people like you or me who still push obscene amounts of data (compared to 99.9% of all users) question if we even need a mac pro....i know i haven't needed on in years....yes, it would have been great to have the extra power every now and then but for me the biggest issue is final render and i just walk away and check in when it is done...i have never had a time crunch there....
to me the question is: rocket (x) or mac pro....as simple as that....considering that the mac pro won't be out for a while and a rocket will probably still give me better performance with red files, the answer is pretty clear.....and by the time the mac pro does come out, i will probably get a 4k iMac and replace my retina with a smaller mbp air (both with TB2 of course), which along with a portable rocket will be a perfect set up.....for probably less then the mac pro...