New Mac Pro opinion thread... No facts... Just opinions.

[Scott Crawley]

TY Jeff

 

[william howell]

You can already network over Thunderbolt. There are already Fiber channel and 10GE adapters for Thunderbolt. Rumor has it that Apple will be offering both of those themselves. I've seen a Thunderbolt to 10GoC adapter that has not hit the market just yet (don't know price), which is rather simplistic and compact. It's a pigtail like design with TB on one end and a less than 2" cubic dongle on the other end with network port and a couple status LEDs. Simple.

Not going to see 10GE ports on Intel products. Intel has Thunderbolt and has also acquired Infiniband so they can <sunglasses> disband it. 10G ethernet has too many industry roadblocks that are keeping prices at stupid high levels thanks to politics and patent trolls. That's why Cisco/Netgear had to design their own chips just to release a few "low-cost" 10G switches. The 8-port switch sells on Amazon for about $860 and they're still being sued over these products. Adapters have been priced north of $350 at the entry-level for the past several years. It's not about the cost of the components or R&D leading up to them or any of that, it's about royalties and licensing extortion. Nope, not going to see 10G ethernet ports integrated into Intel products (or AMD for that matter). In fact, Ethernet may just shrivel up and die once Thunderbolt and 32Gbps fiber take hold...

ok.

so... I have nothing to complain about.

i personally love the new design... When we see neural processing at the consumer level, the boxy tower design will be far too inefficient for heat management.

Next Mac Pro will probably have a pulmonary valve pushing coolant through the processing core, and heat absorbing/distributing fibers on top that will serve as a nifty handle.... And be easily styled to whatever look the user wants his/her tower to have.