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my first comments on the new Mac Pro
1) you can make your existing Mac Pro’s into a nice server.
2) no 10gig ports. I am surprised, but not that surprised.
3) I guess ATTO, Magma, and Sonnet better get busy making Thunderbolt 2 expansion chassis, and Tbolt2 products.
4) it appears that there are SIX independent Thunderbolt 2 ports, that each can control 6 devices on their chain. So it APPEARS to me (and what the hell do I know) that these are “independent busses”, and not everything is sharing one buss. Maybe I am wrong. But if I am right, this means that when you plug in a Thunderbolt 10gig box, you are not splitting the bandwidth with an external Thunderbolt drive array. Which is a good thing. But I could be wrong.
5) if in fact these are independent busses (again, I could be wrong, and misinterpreting all of this), this means that you could plug in several 10gig Tbolt boxes (like ATTO) and have multiple direct connect 10gig ports. If you want to avoid a switch.
6) I don’t really give a crap if it looks like a “mess” with all the external boxes and cables hanging off of it. As long as it actually works, and does not bog down in high performance applications, like a Mac Mini does.
7) at least it has 2 independent 1GbE ports, and they didn’t force you to buy Tbolt to Ethernet adaptors for this.
I wonder what it’s going to sell for ?
And I wonder if OS X 10.9 will still run FCP 7. I can already assume that every card manufacturer that we use (Areca, ATTO, Sonnet, Small Tree, Solarflare, Myricom, AJA, Blackmagic, Matrox, Highpoint) is going to have to write new drivers to get any of their stuff to work.
Well – at least they didn’t say “no new Mac Pro, but we have a really super duper new iPad !”.
Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
ma*****@****rr.com -
25 Replies
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One thing some may have missed … It appears there are only 4 memory slots.
Also, I’m not sure where they fit the second CPU? If you look at the pictures @ apple.com it looks like it only has one slot. So… Maybe a next-gen E5 with 12 cores? I believe the E5-2600 V2 will top at 12 cores.
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Yes, I do believe this is a single CPU system. The E5-2600 V2 is a 12 core (24 thread) Chip. I don’t think there’s enough room for 2 CPU’s.
How important will firewire be for existing users? T-Bolt to PCIe expansion bay in order to plug in FW drives?
Jess Hartmann
CEO
ProMAX Systems
https://www.promax.com -
https://www.sonnettech.com/product/echo15thunderboltdock.html
Sonnet will sell A LOT of these, as well as their (non existant)
Tbolt 2 Echo expansion chassis. I can only assume that this is Sonnet’s #1 research project now (as well as Magma, and ATTO).Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
maxavid@cfl.rr.com -
I think FW is going to die fairly quickly now that Apple is moving on. USB 3.0 is sufficient for most.
But we NEED TBolt drive enclosures to come down in price.
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[David Gagne] “But we NEED TBolt drive enclosures to come down in price.”
Agreed; I am pessimistic about it though: enclosure, cooling, power, circuitry, etc. – you’re basically re-creating a small computer with that enclosure. The market is not big enough for them to come down in price, they’ll keep costing a dear penny. Storage boxes – more so, because each has to house a full-featured RAID controller, and you can’t expand it outside the box. What if I wanted a 48TB array with a 2GB/s throughput? Stripe two (or four) Promise boxes together over multiple TB ports? It’ll get expensive faster than it’ll get fast.
What Apple did (again, like with Mac Mini, iMac, MB Air)) was create an all-in-one box that you can’t mess with much, at the expense of expandability and upgradeability. You can’t add a SAS RAID controller or a Fibre Channel HBA to it. 10GbE? An extra box, lots of extra $$. More storage? More boxes, more $$. Each with their own fans and power supply – very efficient (not).
Sure, it’s the right thing to do in the face of the shrinking PC market, in general. Is it the right approach for a high-end editing system though?
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@ Jess – Apple sells TB to FW800 adapters for $29
I do believe FW800 will go away. it’s so much slower than USB3.
Thunderbolt RAIDs are cheaper than SAS, and faster than RAIDs based on eSATA port multiplication (limited to 250MB/s). I think single and dual drive USB3 enclosures will become the norm, along with Thunderbolt for the larger RAIDs. The Areca 8050 levels out around 900MB/s. So theoretically you could stripe 2 of them for 1800MB/s. Switching from SAS to Thunderbolt is an interesting proposition. I’m curious to see how it will work at the SAN level.
having said that, I don’t like the requirement to use Thunderbolt for all expansion. I’ve used a few Thunderbolt expansion boxes from Small Tree, Sonnet and Magma and none of them are as quiet as a Mac Pro tower. And that’s 3 more power supplies. The Promise SANLink has heat sinks instead of a fan, which is nice. But it requires a power supply that I’ve already lost.
e
Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv -
I doubt those are independent TB controllers. Probably three at best. To be able to add four pci cards to it would add 1.800 bucks for expansion cases on top right from the get go – to get basic functionality you get for free with any other workstation – at higher speeds. And it’s a single cpu system. It’s cables and adapters on top of cables and adapters – plus probably issues with chaining order and what not. Also, much bigger and substantially cheaper Raid systems available via SAS. That won’t change. TB is and will remains a niche with a not so great adoption rate – so Apple does what they always do if they want you to use what they think you should use – force and bully you into using it by taking everything else away.
All this sacrifice for what – so it’s smaller. Unless, of course, you add all the additional boxes you’ll need. It’s a weird machine and a concept I’d never support or buy into.——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement -
I fully understand (and I fully wanted) a simple Mac Pro, with TBolt and USB3, and the damn internal PCIe slots. But then, I wanted
FCP 8, and I didn’t get it.I fully understand that I could run a HP Z820, and do the exact same thing that a loaded new Mac Pro Maverick can do, but I also understand the reality of this business. From the early days of AVID and Sound Tools (now Pro Tools), thru all the changes of Pro Tools, FCP 7, Adobe CS6 (Premiere), Smoke for Mac, Davinci Resolve for Mac – one thing in common from DAY 1 of the non-linear revolution – EVERYONE WANTS TO USE A MAC. IT doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to me if this is a stupid decision, or a poor financial decision. This is what people want to do, and have wanted to do from day 1 of the original NLE revolution.
There are countless external T Bolt boxes out now – drive arrays from G-Tech, Lacie, Maxx Digital and others, T Bolt I/O boxes from
AJA, Blackmagic and Matrox, expansion chassis from Sonnet and Magma, specialty boxes for RAID cards and 10gig cards from Small Tree, ATTO and Sonnet. And all of these (and plenty of new brands) will become Thunderbolt 2 interfaces, and this will happen within the next few months. Because there is a demand for it. So it will be RARE for people to say “oh, I have to get an expansion chassis for my AJA Kona LHi card” – THEY WONT DO THIS – they will BUY a Tbolt 2 product for their new expensive Mac Pro.And do you know what all of this means. It means that ALL the hardware companies, including Apple, ATTO, AJA, and everyone else get to SELL NEW HARDWARE, which is the #1 thing they are in business for. And everyone (like you and me) will bitch about this (my AJA card and my ATTO card work just fine right now !) – but we will eventually give in (maybe you will buy the HP Z820, or build your own Super Micro Win 7 chassis).
Bottom line – people want Macs. Apple wants to sell new products. And so does every other advertiser that you see here on Creative Cow. They could not give a S@#$ about your perfectly working I/O cards, hard drives, etc. They want MORE of your money, and Apple has found a way for them to get it. So EVERY manufacturer will embrace this, because ALL of them want more money, and Apple has given them a way to get it.
What makes sense, has nothing to do with what people use.
Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
maxavid@cfl.rr.com -
Oh, I agree with you 100 per cent. A large part of this is squeezing more money out of people, and shorten the intervals till the next squeeze is due.
And yep, I am dropping Apple one machine at a time. We’re down to two Mac Pros from 8 early last year and we won’t buy any new Apple stuff. We switched NLEs, too. Guess what, I live, quite happily, and I am kicking myself for not looking into alternatives much earlier.
For video guys this machine may work, for 3D, scientific computing… I don’t see it. Which takes away another chunk from an already small market. The server guys have left the playroom quite a while ago and nobody from that end wants a Mac anymore.
Everything has a breaking point. So far, Apple has been lucky in their choices to take things away left right and forth, people still bought into it. Let’s see how it goes this time.——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement -
Frank writes –
The server guys have left the playroom quite a while ago and nobody from that end wants a Mac anymore.REPLY – I feel like my reply almost belongs on the FCP-X The Debate forum at this point, since I am discussing politics, and not technical issues about drive arrays.
The server guys have left the playroom, because they can’t be the big bullies anymore (“I’m the IT guy and I control all your computers”). While OS X Server in it’s Lion/Mountain Lion version is limited, it works quite well as a simple file server. But the MOST important thing, and the only reason I am even writing this, is that EVERYONE (including the owners of companies that employ the server guys) don’t want to rely on the “server guys”. They want it to be easy. Just like a Canon Camera is easy to take professional pictures with. This is the whole mindset of FCP-X. Any high school student can become an editor very quickly. Maybe not a great one, but they can kind of “fake it”. And modern OS X server lets a NON “server guy” fake it, and have his file sharing system, without any knowledge of servers, Open Directory, etc. Netgear ain’t Cisco, but there are a heck of a lot more Netgear switches out there than Cisco today.
The point is that “hi end professionals” are threatened with all this new stuff, and Apple is working very very hard to make doing “professional stuff” easy, so that “anyone” can do it. So of course, pros hate this. And pros feel they can “back this up” because they can do SO MUCH MORE than FCP-X editors using OS X Server. But you know what – more and more people don’t care. They don’t want to hire server guys. They don’t want to hire professional editors that can dance with AVID, FCP 7 and Adobe Premiere. They want to do it themselves, or have some $22,000 a year kid do it for them. And if it looks “ok”, and the system kind of “works” then they are happy. And this is why Mac’s dominate in so many markets.
Me ? I’m just trying to make a living. For the record, I am writing this to you on my HP Z420 Workstation.
Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
maxavid@cfl.rr.com
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