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OT: Apple to drop Mac Pro?
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We have a similar problem here, TB would be impossible to install with 3m limitation. Maybe later optical iterations will solve that ?
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[Herb Sevush] “If the system case isn’t designed to be opened and worked on by a skilled amateur”
Well, current mac minis and macbooks pro are designed to be opened and worked on by a skilled amateur!
And you can clone your internal drive to a firewire/usb/thunderbolt drive and work from
there if the internal drive fails.I have all of my work data on external raid drives and time machine backups
of emails, address book, calendar and other documents.if you have a spare mini your up and running in minutes.
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Video editorial used to require a workstation and all its throughput just to move video around. Over the last decade, computers have advanced significantly while video standards have stayed mostly still, so you no longer need a monster machine just to edit. You can run Autodesk Smoke on an iMac with Thunderbolt storage today.
This doesn’t mean that workstations are useless, though. It just means that if you’re a video editor, you don’t need a workstation anymore, and you can use a desktop PC/Mac very comfortably.
There are disciplines adjacent to video editorial that really do need much more power. Motion graphics, 3D animation, and compositing applications can all max out a top-of-the-line workstation, even if that same machine still has plenty of processing headroom for video editorial applications.
Everyone immediately points to PCIe slots and expandability as the most important feature in a workstation. I value it highly, too, but PCIe expansion does not a workstation make.
Do you want multiple processors? You need Xeons, because the i7 does not support multiple sockets. With multiple processors come increased power consumption and heat production, so you must add bigger power supplies and cooling systems. You also need more RAM slots, error-correcting RAM to fill them, and faster memory/CPU busses.
Once you have all these big, heavy, expensive components in place, you have a big, heavy, expensive system.
In other words, the difference between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro (or any desktop-class machine and workstation-class machine) is far more than a handful of PCIe slots or Thunderbolt. You cannot strip two PCIe slots out of the Mac Pro and instantly build an equally-capable, smaller, cheaper machine.
If you are primarily a video editor, then the Mac Pro is not for you anymore. It’s simply unnecessary. You can get by with the Mac Mini of the future (or maybe even the Mac Mini of today).
However, while you are editing on your Super Mac Mini, some of us are actually happy to pay for proper workstations for animating and compositing. While you are envisioning iPad editorial, some of us are building render farms to get better work done faster.
The appeal of the Super Mac Mini may certainly be broader, but it is by no means a one-size-fits-all solution. You may want the the same power in a case half the size, but I’d rather have twice the power in a case the same size.
If Apple does indeed drop the Mac Pro, it will slot right into the timeline I laid out in my article FCPX and the Domino Effect [link], showing Apple’s continued march toward exclusively consumer-oriented products.
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 -
It would probably be a good idea to let Apple know what we are thinking:
https://www.apple.com/feedback/macpro.html
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
[Bill Davis] “Looking backstage it [Watson] was nothing but a bunch of racks of processor boxes. Each packed with cores – running in massively parallel arrays. The point is that this planetary class computer didn’t use a “big iron” monolithic approach. It was computing build around an array of processors modules each doing what they do best – with the simplest possible power distribution and IO necessary to enable them to do their job of crunching data fast.
The old “everything in one big tower” mode is dying out across the industry. The computer will increasingly be a string of task specific smaller modules – the sum of it’s parts rather than a big massive central “all in one” unit – all connected by fast I/O pipes.
Thunderbolt I/O enables that.”
I certainly agree that parallelization is the driving trend behind supercomputing, but it’s not exactly a straight line between Watson and Thunderbolt.
Watson cost $3 million to build, and would probably place 94th on the Top 500 Supercomputer list.
Watson is a cluster of 90 IBM Power 750 servers, each with an eight-core, four-thread POWER7 processor, for a total of 2,880 virtual cores — not counting additional cluster, storage, and I/O controller systems. The system as a whole had 16 TB of RAM and 4 TB of hard disk storage. All of the content on was stored in RAM and distributed throughout the cluster, because the hard disks were slow to access during the game.
Watson’s interconnect system is 10GB Ethernet. Thunderbolt fans will no doubt point to the fact that the line speed here is the same. I’d argue that 10GB Ethernet’s robust switches enable interconnect well beyond what’s possible with Thunderbolt today, but that’s really tangential to my point:
Watson was built with server/workstation-class hardware.
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 -
[Herb Sevush] “the mini is a closed box. Unless you see the mini as a CPU only device, the fact that you can’t open it and swap out drives “
I suspect the new box will be SSD and HD combo maybe build to order. They may need to be swappable but I don’t think that would be impossible. This new box would be a bit bigger.
[Herb Sevush] “memory easily is a major drawback.”
Have you seen the new Mini? Just twist turn the bottom and you can add memory. I think with a bit of work and a larger box it may be viable. You’d need access to the one or two PCIe slots as well to change the GPU(s) and/or install remove the one legacy card it would allow. Rack mountable servers have accessible components.I’m thinking of something that can work as that as well as sit on a desk (or under it). The variable is whether it’ll open like a pizza box or have slide out components from the back. The latter would be better I think but the Mini requires you to twist turn the bottom for access but that’s not really convenient for rack or stack situations.
Think of it this way. Put your MacPro on it’s side. Get rid of the handles and legs. Then cut the height down since it’ll only have two PCIe slots (one populated with GPU). You’re losing the optical drive as well as all the internal hard drive expansion. They’ll have to deal with air flow/cooling but I think it’s possible if not likely for Apple to head in this direction. The goal is to maintain a “Pro” CPU/GPU and allow everything else to be external.
Yes external can mean clutter but it also means mobility with Thunderbolt across the line and for some it means dropping cost through the redundant use of PCIe cards on several workstations. To me this is how Apple plays its game back into the “facility” market by making a viable commodity computer that can server that market. It lowers the cost for many facilities with modular components that can be moved from machine to machine or the MiniPro to MBP for example.
BTW if I would venture a guess, Acer, who announced Thunderbolt support, might be the Windows computer maker most likely to head in this same direction. Realistically that would be idea because, for best value, being able to use those Thunderbolt devices on a Windows box would further lower costs for facilities that need to use both OSs.
For Apple, you then need to consider how FCPX ties in to this setup vs Avid and Adobe. Avid sells hardware so if the above ties in to things that compete against Unity and Isis, especially on price, Avid will get hurt further. Adobe on the other hand might like this especially if Acer heads in this hardware direction as well. I think down the road FCPX, which looks like it designed for a seat feed to a “management brain” may be part of a software tie in to take advantage of this setup.
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[Walter Soyka] “If Apple does indeed drop the Mac Pro, it will slot right into the timeline I laid out in my article FCPX and the Domino Effect [link], showing Apple’s continued march toward exclusively consumer-oriented products.
“Totally agree. And I’m pretty sure it ain’t an “if.” The iPhone has become a commodity, and the revenue from it and related products is just too powerful for them not to continue to focus exclusively on commoditization, even to the point of eventually burning themselves out.
Hey, Walter, when we were talking about BeOS a few months back, I had no idea how serious a contender it was for the Mac OS. That Jobs biography is filling in a lot of little holes in my understanding of what was going on back then.
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Nice post Walter, insightful as ever
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[Craig Seeman] “Put your MacPro on it’s side. Get rid of the handles and legs. Then cut the height down since it’ll only have two PCIe slots (one populated with GPU). You’re losing the optical drive as well as all the internal hard drive expansion. They’ll have to deal with air flow/cooling but I think it’s possible if not likely for Apple to head in this direction. The goal is to maintain a “Pro” CPU/GPU and allow everything else to be external.”
Sounds fine to me. If the peripherals are on the outside it makes it easier to swap out and change. I have no love for opening dusty computer cases and swapping out boards hunched under my desk.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[James Mortner] “We have a similar problem here, TB would be impossible to install with 3m limitation. Maybe later optical iterations will solve that ?”
Of course optical is in the works. I guess the question is if/when there’ll be one optical TB port on the MacPro replacement. I’ve heard changing things about Intel’s Optical TB strategy so I have a hard time guessing what’s going to happen. I think originally it was going to have more bandwidth (sans power) but now I’m hearing that’s further down the road but it will have the same bandwidth (sans power) and allow for long runs. Maybe that makes it easier to get into the current motherboard and processor designs.
I think this may well be one more reason Apple is in a holding pattern about what to do with the MacPro replacement. Somewhere in there it might be impacting the case design and I don’t think they want to do that twice in a row. It may impact things such as supply chains and bulk parts orders. Keep in mind what Apple’s strategy on how to commodify but keep quality and profit margins up. I think dealing with this is probably Tim Cook’s specialty but they have to be in a challenging situation on this at the moment.
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