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It’s official! New Mac Pro
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Some random thoughts from the resident sizzle-core beast aficionado.
THE GOOD
I’m glad to see a Xeon CPU with ECC RAM.
Dual GPUs is forward-looking. OpenCL will benefit from a good hard push in the marketplace. LOADS of VRAM available. The Mac has never had a workstation-class GPU like this before, let alone two of them in the same machine.
Thunderbolt the Second is fast enough on paper to handle a bunch of my objections against Thunderbolt the First. TB2 should handle “real” storage (like what needs a PCIe 8x card today).
Very clever-looking engineering. The size reduction will be important to some.
Presumably the awesome new fan carries no risk of accidental finger removal like the former Mac Pro.
THE BAD
A single socket for CPU is limiting. Likewise 4 slots for RAM.
The lack of internal storage and lack of internal expansion somewhat negates the “space” argument. You’ll still need what you needed before, but now it will sit outside the box, and now it will require its own power supply.
I would have rather seen dual NVIDIA GPUs so CUDA could have been supported in addition to OpenCL.
The size reduction creates constraints.
THE UGLY
I find it very interesting that Apple carefully avoids the word “workstation” on their website. It’s a “pro computer.”
In other threads, I’ve described Motion as having a high floor and a low ceiling. My initial reaction to this hardware is the same. It’s got a high floor — it looks very nice compared to an iMac in terms of raw computational ability — but with only a single CPU and limited RAM, there is a distinct ceiling on performance.
What saddens me about this machine is that it indicates there will be no good choice for CPU-intensive tasks from Apple. Apple is practically ceding the high end in 3D, advanced mograph and compositing, which will all (continue to) suffer on this machine versus higher-spec Windows or Linux boxes.
THE VERDICT
This will be a great machine for a lot of folks here, but for me personally, I think it’s too soon to tell. I see two major factors that people in my situation may consider.
The first is the as-yet-unannounced pricing. This is not the workstation of my dreams, but I’ll pick one up if the price is right as I’m pretty well committed to staying cross-platform and this will be my highest-performance Mac option. I do expect most of my daily work will stay on higher-spec PCs, but this could be a nice system for Smoke.
The second is what the developers will do with it. If Apple is actually making a commitment to what their pro hardware will look like in the future, developers can adapt. Applications that are totally CPU-bound today may make better use of OpenCL in the future, reducing the liability of the new Mac Pro’s single-socket design.
Finally, a doff of the cap to my frequent sparring partner Craig Seeman, who correctly predicted what this system would be like ages ago — even that they would come up with a whole new cooling system (though I reserve a little credit for myself for correctly predicting that any new Mac Pro would still obey the laws of physics). I hope this is the right box (I guess we can’t call them that anymore, huh?) to replace your current Mac Pro.
Cheers,
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 -
I saw that as I read down Joe.
After going to the site I have to say, it just screams Apple…as they’ve been since I’ve known them.Obviously the proof will be in the performance, but I have to say, they continue to push boundaries in concept and design. I’m not weighing into the differences in components that others here are much more qualified to opine on, but from an overall approach, they’ve got my attention.
Here’s my guess. They’ve been at this design and FCPX development in parallel. I think FCP 10.2 will have a lot of serious feature additions/refinements and that it will be promoted as fully optimized for the new MP architecture and that the new MP will be promoted the same way, re FCPX.
I think they plan to sell a lot of MPs specifically around FCPX, and probably Motion, and to use the MP as a “next generation computer for the new generation of professional editing”. It’s their MO. A lot of people will see the MP/FCPX/Motion combo as a really attractive creative environment. And others will see the more traditional, internally configurable tower as preferable and continue to move the other way.
I’ve got a number of maxed out iMacs running wonderfully here but this has definitely got my attention.
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Totally agree. Thunderbolt cables are an expensive ripoff.
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12 cores of Xeon isn’t enough? Should do for me.
Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1,Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1.3, Premiere Pro 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Avid MC, Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz 24Gb RAM GTX-285 120GB SSD, Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 8Gb SSD, G5 Quadcore PCIe -
Harleys are too big. I like cafe racers, Ducatis, etc., myself. Look better too.
Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1,Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1.3, Premiere Pro 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Avid MC, Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz 24Gb RAM GTX-285 120GB SSD, Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 8Gb SSD, G5 Quadcore PCIe -
With 6 Thunderbolt 20GB/sec ports, there will be externals for I/O, rack mountable perhaps as well. I’m just very happy to see a new Mac Pro that is powerful and not a d**n sealed iMac. Now that would be worth bitching about. Now I can stay on OSX. Not interested in a Hackintosh problem hobby and certainly not in Windows.
Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1,Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1.3, Premiere Pro 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Avid MC, Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz 24Gb RAM GTX-285 120GB SSD, Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 8Gb SSD, G5 Quadcore PCIe -
I really miss my 3 pound Motorola Cell phone.
Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1,Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1.3, Premiere Pro 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Avid MC, Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz 24Gb RAM GTX-285 120GB SSD, Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 8Gb SSD, G5 Quadcore PCIe -
You get a pass on that, Joe. Configurability is a design problem to be worked out. I’m sure it will be. Connector size is the issue there. But these things do change through the years. BNC’s are a lot smaller than UHF’s as I am sure you will remember.
Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1,Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1.3, Premiere Pro 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Avid MC, Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz 24Gb RAM GTX-285 120GB SSD, Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 8Gb SSD, G5 Quadcore PCIe -
Those of us that would like to purchased 24 cores would disagree. A core is not the direct equivalent of a processor.
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[Jim Wiseman] “12 cores of Xeon isn’t enough? Should do for me.”
No, 12 cores are not enough.
This will be a great system for editorial, but anyone with CPU-bound processes in their pipeline like 3D rendering or compositing can max that out easily.
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
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