[Chris Kenny]

You know, the HDMI port on the new Mac Pro supports Ultra HD. Given that video pros seem to be a primary target of this machine, it doesn’t seem totally inconceivable they might allow that port to be used for ‘real’ broadcast monitoring, or at least something a lot closer to it than is currently possible with GPU display outputs. This would require OS X to finally support 10-bit GUI displays, though.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Craig Seeman] “I suspect my thinking comes from how a move through machines. I tend not to sell them but, rather, move them to less demanding tasks. Additionally, going forward, I’m thinking of clustering older machines for encoding. If I had to replace more frequently then, yes, I’d probably have to sell but it does require a rethink for me.”

Most encoding/rendering tasks are getting so fast on current hardware that the idea of clustering a bunch of large, power-hungry old machines isn’t going to be that appealing in many cases.

[Craig Seeman] “With Apple particularly, the tech changes are often “jumps” punctuated by speed bumps. The trick is timing the purchase with the jump. “

In many ways just planning on a regular two year upgrade cycle helps with this problem, I think. I tried to play the purchase timing game with my last MacBook Pro, a 2007 model, and ended up keeping it for five years, first holding out for Thunderbolt to show up, then holding out for Retina displays to show up. I certainly saved some money in the process, but toward the end that machine was pretty damn useless for pro video work despite having an SSD added and its RAM doubled (it couldn’t plausibly run FCP X or Resolve because of limited graphics memory). In retrospect I’m pretty sure I’d have been better off buying an additional machine in between the 2007 MBP and the 2012 MBP.

Once you just plan for a two year upgrade cycle, the stakes of ‘missing’ a new feature by buying a year early are greatly reduced, because you’ll just get it the following year, whereas if you keep machines for four years and miss a new feature by a year, you’ll have to wait a full three years to get it.

And, of course, if it really comes to it, you can always resell and buy a new machine after a year — since it’ll retain more of its resale value at that point, this might not even end up costing very much more.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Mark Dobson] “Just wondering how the new MacPro will compare with my 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7 2012 27″ iMac, will I really benefit from this new machine?”

It’s hard to be certain, when Apple appears to be speccing the machine around unreleased next-gen CPUs and hasn’t specified exactly which graphics chipset will be used. But plausibly a decked out version of this Mac Pro could be 3-4x as fast on CPU and GPU. More than that on GPU if you didn’t get the 680MX. Plus with three times as many Thunderbolt ports and twice the bandwidth each, you’ve got 6x the external bandwidth. Of course that $6K you mention probably isn’t that far off with respect to what such a system would cost.

It really all depends on what you’re doing. For editing at 1080p or 2K in FCP X, a decked out 27″ iMac is more than sufficient. For working at 4K in Resolve, you’d absolutely want the Mac Pro.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Craig Seeman] “Yes I know the GPUs are beasts today but I wonder about the demands in late 2016 early 2017 when it’s 3 years old and the base price will have been even higher than 2008 8 Core MacPro.”

Upgradability, at this level, is merely a price calculation.

If the thing ends up costing, say, $4500 in the configuration you buy, you can probably get $2000 selling it two years later. Apple stuff holds its value pretty well over such time periods. Then just buy a new one. That’s not necessarily going to cost much more over time than, say, spending $800 buying two new graphics cards after two years, and then holding the machine for a full four years after which its resale value will probably be well under $1000.

With the numbers above, for instance, $4500 purchase price – $2000 resale price over two years works out to $1250/year. Then do it again.

$4500 purchase price + $800 GPU upgrade two years later + $1000 resale price after four years = $1075/year.

Given that the former approach will, during those second two years, give you the benefits of a new CPU (with, probably, more cores, more memory bandwidth, etc.), probably a larger SSD, and whatever other slick things Apple has on a late 2015 or early 2016 Mac Pro, it doesn’t seem obviously worse by any means. There’s also the distinct possibility that even if you need to buy a $4500 configuration this year, you’ll only need to buy, say, a $3500 configuration to meet your needs in two years, which could make the resell-and-replace approach cheaper outright.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Andrew Kimery] “I think you misunderstood something in the video. The RED Rocket card (in an enclosure connected via ThB) is allowing him to do all of that because it’s processing the RED footage. Before he enabled the RED Rocket card the computer couldn’t even playback the footage.”

His point, though, is that in order to use a Rocket at 4K via Thunderbolt, Thunderbolt needs the bandwidth to handle 4K — uncompressed 4K RGB, since that’s the decoded signal the Rocket is sending back. And if it’s that fast, why is the lack of internal slots such a big deal?

He’s pretty much right. First-generation Thunderbolt is a little iffy for 4K, but Thunderbolt 2 should manage it easily. The truth is, with Thunderbolt 2’s bandwidth, the list of real-world use cases where you still need PCIe is pretty slim. It mostly does just come down to GPUs.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Michael Gissing] “I agree Jeremy that from a service point of view it is nice to have the guts of the machine on the outside. From the point of view of fitting a few machines into an existing rack room, this is awkward. “

A lot less awkward than sawing the handles off of a traditional Mac Pro to get it to fit in a 19″ rack….

These things are so small that unless you need a large number of them, you’re not going to lose much by just arranging a few of them on a rack shelf with 6″ of clearance over them.

In fact, if you wanted to get really silly, it seems like you could plausibly fit 10 or 11 of them on a 29″ deep rack shelf. (You’d obviously want some well planned auxiliary cooling to move air out of the space over those machines if you went that far — there’s probably 3-5 KW of heat coming off that shelf at that point.)

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[Chris Kenny]

[Michael Gissing] “If not then why has this form factor never been used by seriously players who make money out of power to space ratios and thermal efficiency?”

This machine is designed for your desk, and most systems focused on density are designed for data centers. Data center use means that a) you want case shapes that interlock with no wasted space in between (which cylinders do not) and b) you don’t care very much about how much noise your cooling system produces, which means you can use small, fast fans, making this machine’s ‘unified thermal core’ approach less relevant.

Also, as I described in my previous post, this cylindrical shape seems to flow from the fact that the internal hardware consists of three boards of roughly similar size (the CPU board is somewhat larger). That’s not necessarily applicable to other machines.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Harry Pallenberg] “My issue is that it is a round peg fitting into and onto a square hole. My desk is a rectangle. I like things that are 90º’s. A old tower fits nicely under it or on it. The large flat side makes a nice place for post-its. The other large flat side is a nice barrier which stops (round) things from rolling off. The top is a great mini-table for a drive or airport or pen & paper… which I still use… and comes in a rectangular notebook… as do all the external drives and just about all the other ‘things’ I’m looking at.”

Have you actually measured out the size of this thing? It’s 6.6″ in diameter an 9.9″ tall. Even if you assume any space saved by it being a cylinder with a 6.6″ diameter instead of a rectangular solid 6.6″ on a side is useless because of how it interacts with rectangular items (which is not strictly true), it still has a desk footprint 26% smaller than that of a Mac mini. I suspect it won’t actually be all that difficult to fit onto a cluttered desk. Instead of resting external drives on your Mac Pro, this is a Mac Pro small enough to rest on a (full size) external drive.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Michael Gissing] “I really don’t think space efficiency is important nor is a cylinder ever going to be the most efficient shape for square components. This is clearly a style decision. We shall see if it can keep cool anyway.”

Look at the photos Apple has posted of the internals. There are three main boards in there — a motherboard and two of what are effectively (very non-standard) graphics cards. They run vertically up the sides, arranged in a triangle relative to each other so they can share a cooling channel. This triangle clearly takes up less space than would a rectangular sold enclosing the motherboard and two GPU boards positioned at a 90 degree angle to it (i.e. sticking out the way standard PCIe cards do from the motherboard).

OK, so that explain why the case isn’t a rectangular solid. But why not have the case follow the prism shape created by the boards themselves? Well, if you follows that shape, that would provide the same clearance over the boards at all points. But some components are taller than others, which means you can have the machine take up less total volume by using a cylinder and placing components that require more clearance closer to the center of each board, and those that require less toward the edge.

In other words, though the cylindrical case looks like it was a purely stylistic choice when you first see it, this actually seems to very much be an example of form following function. It all flows from asking “We’ve got these three boards. How can we arrange them to achieve the most efficient cooling?”

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[Chris Kenny]

This takes it further. The Mac has been much more homogenous than Windows, but at the level of, say, video workstations, RAID controllers, graphics, video I/O, etc. were all still variable. Now RAID will often just be Thunderbolt mass storage, and there’s going to be one model of GPU (with some variants) to worry about every 12-18 months. (Video I/O is still going to require devices with third-party drivers, etc. I think, unless Apple has some unannounced plans for that HDMI port.)

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