my first comments on the new Mac Pro

[Craig Seeman]

[Walter Soyka] “They discontinued XGrid, and when was the last major update to Qmaster?”

We’ll have to see where Apple is going with Mavericks. Maybe IP TB is just a “throw in/throw away” feature.

It’ll certainly be useful to some as Alex Gollner notes:

I assume IP over Thunderbolt is less efficient than a dedicated Fibre Channel PCI Express card, but at least Thunderbolt is available on a wide range of Macs.

With a little distributed rendering, my 27” iMac connected to a pair of Thunderbolt equipped Macs will get through QuickTime encodes much more quickly

I’m assuming if it’s there in the OS, this may be what Apple is intending.

[Andrew Richards]

[Mark Beazley] “First, the new MacPro uses PCIe 3.0, which is 985MB/sec per lane. Not sure how mane lanes they dedicated to each TB controller, but TB2 is only 20Gb/sec which is only 2.5 GB/sec. So in theory they only need 3-4 PCIe 3.0 lanes to handle the data rate.”

If you read the articles I linked to AnandTech carefully, they say that the new TB2 controllers are still a PCIe 2.0 x4 device. Now maybe they are stating that with incomplete info from Intel’s press releases, but I trust them to be technically accurate. The E5 Xeons do indeed have PCIe 3.0 baked in, but the chipset they socket into also provides PCIe 2.0 lanes and this is what the TB2 controllers could be hanging off. We don’t know till we can take one of these new tubes apart.

[Mark Beazley] “That could be were the confusion is. GB = gigabytes , Gb = gigabits”

I accounted for bits vs bytes in my math.

[Mark Beazley] “Not exactly sure how may PCIe lanes the new Haswell chip has, but I have seen the number 40 mentioned.”

I’m not concerned with how many lanes Ivy Bridge E5 Xeons will support (the new Mac Pro will have these, not a Haswell CPU), I only want to understand how TB2 is delivering its claimed bandwidth. It is not adequately explained anywhere I have been able to find.

Best,
Andy

[Bob Zelin]

Rich Rubasch writes –
I can see the new MacPro being a server to other older MacPros via Thunderboldt. I have four systems that are used all day every day…add a PCI thunderbolt card to them and hook them to the new MacPro. Add a raid via thunderbolt to the new MacPro and serve it up like a SmallTree RAID etc

REPLY –
rich,
1) there will be no thunderbolt card for older Mac Pro’s
2) you are MUCH better off retiring one of your existing Mac Pros, make that the server, and connect to the new Mac Pro Maverick as the server. Then you have a super duper Mac Pro for hi speed AE renders, and your old dog Mac Pro as the server via 1G or 10G Ethernet. It will work perfectly.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
maxavid@cfl.rr.com

[Bob Zelin]

Frank writes –
it has three controllers so it’s 3×20. Of course, the interesting question is what happens when you plug-in a TB 1 device, or use it a part of a TB device chain. Very likely that the whole port switches to slower TB1 mode.

REPLY – well, you know that 100% of the manufacturers in this business (ATTO, Areca, AJA, Blackmagic, Matrox, G-Tech, Cal Digit, Sonnet, and everyone else) will be building T-Bolt 2 everything, and you will see TONS of Tbolt 2 products BEFORE NAB 2014. So if you have 3 independent TBolt 2 busses, and you MUST use that AJA I/O XT that you have right now (or promise Pegasus, etc.), then you put it on ONE buss, and you have the other busses available for your new TBolt 2 products that you will purchase when the new Mac Pro comes out.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
maxavid@cfl.rr.com

[Mark Beazley]

Hmmm, that is a good point since PCEe 2.0 only gets 2GB/sec over 4 lanes.

Perhaps the TB and the GPUs are tied directly to the CPU lanes. That would allow the GigE and the UBS3 to be tied to the chipset lanes.

It will be interesting once someone gets a hold of one and tries to reverse engineer.

I am holding off any negative judgements until more info is released; from what we do know, it seems like a very capable out of the box kit for 3d animators and motion graphic designers.

-mark