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New Mac Pro twinges?
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[Craig Seeman] “Sans Xeon it seems more like something between an iMac and a MacPro rather than a MacPro. Of course even that would probably beat the current MacPro with its ancient Xeons.”
Exactly.
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[Craig Seeman] “This? What CPU? It’s i7 at best, not Xeon which is what a MacPro has always been.”
You know you can install a Xeon in those motherboards without a problem. It’s certified for Intel Xeon E3s. It’s just not a xeon based chipset so some features unique to a Xeons won’t be supported (eg. ECC memory). And, of course, it is not a dual socket system but neither are all Macpros and ECC isn’t that relevant for what people want to use such a system here.
Given Apple’s lackluster hardware io – few sata ports and pci slots-, most of the advantages of a Xeon are lost anyhow in a single socket Macpro.——
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I don’t think it’s necessary to have Xeon’s anymore. I’d love to see a new Mac Pro sporting an i7 6 core Extreme Edition CPU – this should be plenty of horsepower for everyone’s needs and would knock thousands off the price compared to a dual Xeon system.
More important to me would be dual PCI-E 3.0 16x slots for the latest GPU’s, an extra PCI-E slot or 2 for Red Rocket or Kona etc. SATA 3, USB 3 and dual channel Thunderbolt.
With most of the software we use utilizing the GPU for so much heavy lifting, the ability to run the fastest GPU’s available is key. Plus being able to update the GPU regularly as better cards come out by just running out to Fry’s or wherever like I can with my PC is what I’m hoping for.
Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Downtown Long Beach, California
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I agree with Lance. Most of the horsepower is going away from the CPU and going to the GPU. CUDA for Premiere and After Effects, OpenCL for FCP X, and so on.
If you have an older Mac Pro, there are many off the shelf PC CUDA cards that can be used out of the box in Mountain Lion. You will want a single slot Mac friendly GPU in another slot to get the happy apple white screen at boot, but it’s really handy for Resolve to have dual GPUs anyway. If you put a GTX 670 in an older Mac Pro, it will breathe new life into it using applications that take advantage of OpenCL and CUDA.
I have a similar setup to the “CustoMac Pro” here: https://www.tonymacx86.com/333-building-customac-buyer-s-guide-february-2013.html That prices out to just over $1300.00 if you opt for the GTX 670. Monoprice is selling 27″ displays with the same panel that Apple uses for less than $400.
I have an NVIDIA GTX 570 in my home built tower. The processor is the Intel Core i7-3770K, and I have 32GB of RAM. I get a Geekbench Score of around 14,500ish. Lastly, it has two Thunderbolt Ports. (They work great minus hot swap)
So for $1700 you can build a much more powerful workstation than the iMac (and some current model Mac Pros) that can be upgraded, can hold internal Kona or BM cards, and not break the bank.
The only downside I have found is in order to update the OS, I need to clone the boot SSD to another drive until I can be sure everything is working. In reality, this should be done anyway, it’s not that much different than updating OS X back in the day with real macs!
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The driver support in OSX was one of the primary pieces of evidence as to why the Mac Pro was coming out last year.
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Except (again) that we know a new one is coming this year.
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Yes, it’s been dragging on too long.
Now that thunderbolt is now two years old (as is my March 2011 MBP) they could have been waiting to see if it catches on in the pro world before radically redoing the Mac Pro. Thankfully it has. USB 3.0 is great for what it is, but it cannot replace daisy chaining, and it’s direct connection to the logic board. They will coexist like firewire and USB 2.0 did.
I do wonder if they are purposely becoming more laxed about only supporting Apple blessed hardware. Now that you can use PC GPUs in a Mac Pro it seems they may go away from a one stop shop machine. Before having only three choices for a GPU, (stock crap one, ‘premium’, and ‘holy crap you better be rendering DNA models) it made every release of the Mac Pro kind of repetitive. It would be “Faster processor, and a new choice of a card that PC users have had almost a year.”
Thunderbolt ports and being able to use whatever graphics card you want would be huge. I do like my home built solution, but that might tip the scales back to having a warranty for me.
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Thunderbolt in it’s current state is really just a much more robust Firewire. Until Intel can implement the much faster optical version that can support everything that PCIe can provide… the crossover point is moot.
That’s why I remain convinced that the MacPro can’t be a radical departure from what we know- there’s simply no way to replace PCIe today with anything else. Perhaps Apple was hoping that Intel could evolve Thunderbolt faster than it has, but regardless it’s not ready for the really heavy lifting yet.
And there’s no room for anything smaller or less capable than the current MacPro. Anyone who doesn’t need a MacPro is already using a topped out iMac.
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That’s sort of a glass half empty view. I could never have used something like a Teranex with one small cable that handles I/O. Yes, 10gb is considerably slower than 16gb in a PCIe slot. But hot damn can I run RED 4K in FCPX with no problems off a crappy Seagate desktop external with the thunderbolt adapter.
I do love the Mac Pro case. There isn’t much reason to change it except for making more room for another expansion slot or two.
I do need something more than an iMac which is what lead me down the road of building my own system. I would have rather bought one from them.
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