How will the new MacPro compare with a topped out 2012 27″ iMac

[Oliver Peters]

FWIW – if you guys think a round design is new or odd, do a Google search for images of Cray Supercomputers.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Charlie Austin]

[Oliver Peters] “FWIW – if you guys think a round design is new or odd, do a Google search for images of Cray Supercomputers.
“

But Oliver, Crays are really big. The Mac Pro is really small. Logically that means that it’s crap. 😉

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Walter Soyka]

[Daniel Frome] “it will take many developers 1-2 years to fully utilize openCL.”

My based-on-no-facts gut feeling is that this timeframe is a bit optimistic. In many cases, you’re talking about complete re-writes of renderers to exploit OpenCL instead of CPUs or OpenGL.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[James Cude] “A graphics card cannot be both OpenCL and CUDA but an app can support both, so that’s more a developer concern than a hardware one.”

Sure it can. NVIDIA cards support both CUDA and OpenCL today.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Bill Davis]

Because the shaping of the debate is happening right now.
Today.
It’s the modern on-line debate era.
We read about something new like the R2DX plus FCP-X reveal – and both sides have to instantly claim their territory and defend it at all costs.
Doesn’t matter what the reality is. Tho I have to say tha this week, Shane’s stock went up even higher in my book because he actually copped to a prior post where his opinion turned out to be wrong, and instead of skating over that, he owned it. That speaks of integrity and the ability to change an opinion in the face of evidence. Something much more valuable, IMO then continuing to defend a position that’s proving to be harder and harder to support.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[John Chay]

Doesn’t the tubular design allow the airflow to touch more hardware, thus allowing for more efficient cooling. Seems simple to me.

[Larry Towers]

The tube is the cosmetic outside. The inside and the heat sinking area is triangular and INFERIOR in terms of thermal impedance, surface area and air flow. Sharing the heatsink area might be novel and maybe good (that is debateable). But it could have been a square or rectangular shared area which would have had greater benefits.

The shared heat sink idea is debateable for the very reason Apple says its good. Yes there is more surface area available to any given component. But shared also means that when one component generates heat all the other components get warm too. In fact they will get warm BEFORE the heat is dissipated since the FINS do the dissipating not the shared thermoconductive surfaces. All devices are in effect sitting in the same “frying pan” while forced air hopefully dissipates the heat through the fins. This is not instantaneous. The shared thermoconductive surfaces conduct heat faster than the fins can dissipate it.
Furthermore how likely is any scenarios where only the CPU or only the graphics cards is getting hot? A shared surface can easily lead to thermal runaway as the heat radiating devices generate heat while sinking the other devices heat. Remember a heat sinks surface is not unidirectional. Every thermoconductive device attached to it will get hot. I will almost guarantee that the fan on this will be working almost all the time. If the fan fails on these units the devices will probably fry.

[Larry Towers]

It is highly unlikely for apple to write code for specific cards. That is pretty much the whole reason move to OPEN CL vs Cuda.

[Rick Lang]

In the 70s, I actually walked inside one of those cylindrical supercomputers! I can no longer recall the power it represented but I am sure it was less than the Mac Pro Tube with dual GPUs and 12 core processor.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB