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New Mac Pro AND a FCP-X shout out. Happy now?
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[Rick Lang] “The D300 has 2GB on each card, the D500 has 3GB per card, and the D700 has 6GB on each card. Surely having 6GB will be enough… until the next great thing we can’t imagine being without arrives at least.”
I remember ‘back in the day’ of 2006 where 512mb was an insane amount of vram.
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[Darren Roark] “I remember ‘back in the day’ of 2006 where 512mb was an insane amount of vram.”
With only one physical chassis for the new Mac Pro but all options being available, you could conceivably order a 4-core CPU, with only 12GB compressible DDR3 memory, say 512GB of PCIe flash storage, and the dual D700 GPUs with a total of 12GB DDR5 VRAM. It’s stunning to think that machines now can have as much VRAM as RAM when traditionally graphics memory was always a small fraction of system memory. Is this the true marker of the ascendency of the GPU?
Rick Lang
iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB
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[Gary Huff] “Not worth getting in my opinion, considering you can’t upgrade anything other than the RAM.”
You may be right, Gary, but let’s wait and see when the Mac Pros have been released. The memory is certainly an easy user-upgrade, but I’m wondering if the various other options will only be available as build-to-order at time of purchase or could be offered as upgrades later by Apple and/or third parties.
Technically it looks like it could be possible that any of the options could be offered by Apple if they chose that route. Doesn’t look like a physical impediment except for the CPU originally selected but maybe even that CPU card is replaceable. The flash storage and GPUs may just be boards that can plug into a socket. Might really help their sales if buyers thought they had an upgrade path in the future if they needed more power.
Rick Lang
iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB
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[Gary Huff] “you can’t upgrade anything other than the RAM”
The SSD can be upgraded as well. Upto 1 TB.
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[Rick Lang] “With only one physical chassis for the new Mac Pro but all options being available, you could conceivably order a 4-core CPU, with only 12GB compressible DDR3 memory, say 512GB of PCIe flash storage, and the dual D700 GPUs with a total of 12GB DDR5 VRAM. It’s stunning to think that machines now can have as much VRAM as RAM when traditionally graphics memory was always a small fraction of system memory. Is this the true marker of the ascendency of the GPU?”
VRAM: It’s Not Just for Frame Buffers Anymore ™.
I actually think that VRAM growth has stalled, even as the usefulness of GPUs has taken off. The Quadro 6000, available for Windows and Linux, featured 6 GB of VRAM on a single card in 2010. (Of course, it also cost more than this entire computer!)
GPGPU wasn’t quite as awesome then as it was now, and the card with all its glorious VRAM was really aimed its certified apps which mainly used traditional graphics acceleration.
I have been sharply critical of Apple for their lame GPU support in the past, but credit where it’s due: no one is doing more to push GPGPU than they are, shipping dual GPUs standard.
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 -
[Sandeep Sajeev] “The SSD can be upgraded as well. Upto 1 TB.”
While technically a solid state disk, I think the term SSD might get confusing. The Mac Pro’s PCIe-based flash storage is significantly faster than traditional SATA-bus-bound SSDs.
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] “I have been sharply critical of Apple for their lame GPU support in the past, but credit where it’s due: no one is doing more to push GPGPU than they are, shipping dual GPUs standard.
“I haven’t been following recently. How similar an approach is this to SLI? Always bugged me that I couldn’t do that on a Mac. Is that pretty much what this is?
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[Chris Harlan] “I haven’t been following recently. How similar an approach is this to SLI? Always bugged me that I couldn’t do that on a Mac. Is that pretty much what this is?”
SLI is way of dividing traditional graphics processing (i.e., drawing and shading textured polygons, hardware antialiasing, etc.) among multiple cooperating GPUs.
GPGPU (general purpose computing on graphics processor units) is all about crunching numbers like a CPU does.
I would not be surprised if these systems use AMD’s CrossFireX technology, but like SLI, that’s about accelerating the graphics processing pipeline and would not be used for distributing OpenCL processing across the GPUs.
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 -
[Rick Lang] “The flash storage and GPUs may just be boards that can plug into a socket. Might really help their sales if buyers thought they had an upgrade path in the future if they needed more power.”
The GPU’s are custom designs though and going by the stupid-high price ‘Mac versions’ of standard GFX cards go for I can’t imagine what the after market price of MP Tube GFX cards would be (talk about a niche w/in a niche w/in a niche market).
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[Walter Soyka] “Did they mention the specs for the base model?”
Walter, J think I found the corresponding Intel Xeon E5 chips for each model except for the 3.0GHz 8-core.
4-core: E5-1620 v2 1-socket 3.7GHz cache 10MB power 130W
6-core: ES-1650 v2 1-socket 3.5GHz cache 12MB power 130W
8-core: E5-1680 v2 1-socket? 3.0GHz cache 25MB power 130W
12-core: E5-2697 v2 2-socket 2.7GHz cache 30MB power 130WEdit: found the correct description for the 8-core chip. Intel has not yet updated all web pages for it.
Rick Lang
iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB
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