the New Mac Pro...Whatda think

Seems like a rather strange object with limited upgrade possibilities.
Able to do 4K might be the deal breaker if the new Apple monitor ends up being 4K took.
here's hoping.

Where are the specs, do you know? All I'm seeing is a black cylinder that promises to be out soon.

Got to scroll down
And keep scrolling

Michael Horton
-------------------

Doesn't work for me. Oh, wait, it looks like it just took a really long time to load. Working now.

It's very pretty. And they're certainly pushing it towards video users.

The bull just crashed through the window of the china shop. The question was never could they, but rather would they? They surprised everyone and did. Nailed it on the form factor too. I was abolutely ready to jump to the dark side, but now I'm a fan again.

It won't be cheap. I don't really care. This machine plus Blackmagic gear plus DaVinci Resolve plus CCloud and I'm solid for the future. Now we can get back to business of selling talent, ideas and artistry instead of being bogged down with gear management.

Where's the line start?

That puppy ain't going to be cheap, I have a horrible feeling it could be in the "sell the car, pimp your wife" department, those are all expensive parts and im sure they will be wacking a premium on it.
Ive got mixed feelings: new xeon chips, usb 3, TB2, super fast ram etc all fantastic... no PCIe slots and a GPU (or two) thats soldered onto the mono? just when we have got to the point of parity with windows users in the selection of cards and the site of a shopping basket with the best cards that we could get our hands on from Nvidia and its all taken away.... and no TB2 isn't upto the job of external boxes for these high powered GPUs still.

Its going to be a monster there is no doubt about it, but i wouldn't have minded if the new crate was the size of beer barrel, its the power and expandability and return for the investment which maters for me with a workstatation. Alas it feels like while apple gave with one hand, they sure did take away with the other.

Just a case of waiting for these beasts to be released into the wild and for those final specs and the all important price tag i guess now.

Holy ***, it's tubular.

It's looks like the dream of many a Mac Pro user-- the Mini-Tower!!

I suspect the basic cylinder price will be something like US$2499. But that PCI-Express expansion chassis, which we'll likely need for all legacy hardware, may be a sticker shock. They should go light on that; it would feel like blackmail otherwise. AND it should include at least 4 SATA/SSD drive bays which of course we miss from its big brother, so that we can access archived media, form a software RAID, etc.

Of course, that module should echo or compliment the new design. Maybe a sideways cylinder which melds with the main cylinder? I like cylinders. Maybe I could hide a waste basket inside. Or a place to park a pet. Or heat up shawarma?

- Loren

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I really think the cylinder design is style over substance. The idea of a heavy CPU having a slippery, curved outer chassis seems like a choice to go for sexy rather than practical. And when you're transporting it, you can forget about laying it on its side -- it will roll around and get damaged much more easily.


www.derekmok.com

It might get confused with a waist paper basket. My dog likes to drop it's bones in them.

I think everyone missed a small detail in the specs. It is only 9.9 inches tall and 6.6 inches wide. This is not meant to go on or near the floor. It's more the shape of a large coffee grinder than a trash can...but with a$$-kicking render abilities. This machine is aimed directly at US...not the iPhone / iPad crowd. Thank you Apple. I will be getting mine when released.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

[ It is only 9.9 inches tall and 6.6 inches wide. ]

I didn't miss that, but if it generates any kind of noise, I don't want it on my desktop.

To Derek's point re shape: think cooling efficiency. Maybe requires only one fan, or lower power fans.

As to lying an expansion cylinder flat, it won't roll-- they'll make sure it has feet. I also think it would be way cool to have motorized panels break the clean surface with drive trays...oh, yeah...and a big hatch which rises on hydraulics to gain access to 4 PCI lanes. Ahhh. That will demo well. (But don't omit the paper clip hole for manual open when the motors burn out.)

- Loren

Today's FCP 7 keytip:
To reposition a Marker press Command and drag it!

Your Final Cut Studio KeyGuide™ Power Pack
with FCP7 KeyGuide --
now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com

Quote
I didn't miss that, but if it generates any kind of noise, I don't want it on my desktop.

There is no computer, except for an iPad and iPhone that does not make noise. My laptop, and yours for that matter and whirring away right now.

Michael Horton
-------------------

my iMac makes so little noise i don't notice it.
a LOT less than my laptop.

hopefully the new MacPros are similar.


nick

It has a single fan over the central thermal core (you have to go into the exploded views of the unit on the Apple site - pretty amazing). They claim it is very quiet because of this design. This is what Apple says about the cooling:

An incredible amount of innovation went into designing a fan system capable of cooling such a high-performance device. Instead of adding extra fans, we engineered a single, larger fan that pulls air upward through a bottom vent. As air passes vertically through the center of the device, it absorbs heat and carries it out the top. It’s simple and elegant — and also astonishingly quiet. To achieve that, we had to consider every detail: the number of blades, the size of the blades, the spacing of the blades, and even the shape of the blades. By minimizing air resistance throughout the system, we were able to design a fan with backward-curved impeller blades that runs at fewer revolutions per minute, draws air more efficiently as it spins, and creates considerably less noise.

Mine will be on a shelf off to the side of my desk.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I love it.
I just about have tape and Elmer's glue holding my 2007 machine together waiting on this. I do wonder about the PCI slots as i have had a GTX570 in the box for a year now waiting for the newest machine. I how that the PCI / sata / fw800 module is not the same price as the tower... correction can. The mxo boxes should be fine with this unit but i wonder how the vcard crowd will fare.

Concerns:
I did notice that there was no dvi on the unit and a lot of people have dvi monitors (really good ones too). There is only one hdmi and again no PCI so how do you run 2 monitors without ad-ons. It has sdd but is it gonna be a TB or more. I have increased capacity on my main drive about 3x because most programs don't get smaller and freelance buys software on need or epiphany (mostly the later).

The thing that has been my biggest qualm with the mac pro is that its has always been built based a 3 year compatibility shelf life. I know that technology moves fast but a 8 core pc is compatible to these evolutions for a much longer time. I have an 08 that can not run nvidia cards stable but if i had the 2011 tower i could. No divinci resolve on this machine due to limitations.. Those type of little things are bothersome.
However, with them going big on Thunderbolt 2 says that they thought this design to have a much longer compatibility with the evolution of technology and software.

And yes, i just said something nice about pc's but i have some pepto right on my desk.

WTS, There is noway i am not gonna get one. Its both beauty and beast. Even if i have to work part-time as a stripper i will buy the accessories. I am so glad that they did it and i am glad it will be made in the USA. Yeee!!Haaa!! ...ish.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

<so how do you run 2 monitors without ad-ons>

The only way I think to run your dvi monitors is through the Thunderbolt with an adaptor of some kind. I guess something like this:

Thunderbolt Port to DVI

You can daisychain 2 - 27 inch Apple Thunderbolt Displays to a single thunderbolt port and charge your laptop at the same time:

[www.apple.com]

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I'm a little mixed on this. I think a large part of this depends on the pricing. They are pretty expensive parts, so we expect it to cost, but hopefully not too much because of the need to purchase external peripherals.

The good:

- Workstation class GPUs and 2 of them
- Thunderbolt (finally!) with individual busses
- USB 3
- Re-emergence of the Mac Pro
- Interesting design
- SSD internal drives
- Very fast RAM

The not so good:

- No PCIe 3.0 expandability
- No CUDA
- Not rackmountable (because it's circular, dammit!)
- Single CPU

Without a doubt, it's a machine that will be great for most pro users. My single biggest concern is the lack of CUDA since there are still quite a few operations across various applications that are exclusively CUDA accelerated, partly because CUDA came to prominence before OpenCL did.

It's interesting to note that there are more GPUs on this Mac than there are CPUs.



www.strypesinpost.com

Wow. Thunderbolt is nice. Daisy chained screens and still recognized as 2 separate units. Pricey with only one choice of high end screens.

strypes:
They have not released yet so maybe CUDA might make it in. It would seem like a needed feature for a machine of this ilk. I wont mind the missing PCI as long as theres a nice expansion module that can help with legacy devices and give the PCI.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

Word out there is that the GPUs aren't swappable. You won't complain about GPU speeds on this thing, just that there isn't CUDA which is necessary for some functions.

There are expansion chassis available for thunderbolt, just that currently they do not allow for GPU expansion. Also they are limited to 20Gb/s.



www.strypesinpost.com

Less customization and more standardization will mean a lower price. The less options they have to provide, the more economical it will be for the majority of users.

CUDA would mean NVidia, which is not part of the picture. For DaVinci, Grant Petty has a post up on the Blackmagic forum addressing the issue. For them, not a problem. Don't know about Adobe although I can't imagine that there won't be a solution for PPro and AE. With the GPU power Apple is offering though, is CUDA even that big a deal anymore?

Has there been any word yet on how much RAM the new rigs will carry? In the keynote they talked about the type, but not how much. It looks like the machine has four slots for maybe a 4 x 8 for 32 GB or maybe a 4 x 16 for 64 GB option? And I'm guessing that only their (expen$ive) RAM will work. No more buying a machine with minimum RAM and then filling it up with cheaper third party sticks. If so, that could push the price way up.

By the way, up to six of them will fit inside the old aluminium cheese grater case. One could build quite the tricked out DIT station for 4K stereo Raw codec shoots. Hang on to those old cases, they just might become useful/valuable.

>
> CUDA would mean NVidia, which is not part of the
> picture. For DaVinci, Grant Petty has a post up
> on the Blackmagic forum addressing the issue. For
> them, not a problem. Don't know about Adobe
> although I can't imagine that there won't be a
> solution for PPro and AE. With the GPU power
> Apple is offering though, is CUDA even that big a
> deal anymore?

It is for some operations. CUDA is a set of instructions to utilize certain Nvidia GPUs (most if them anyway), so if certain operations are coded for CUDA, and there is no OpenCL equivalent, the operation goes down to the CPU, which is often slower.

Most operations in Adobe are supported on both OpenCL and CUDA, a couple of them aren't. Same thing with the Resolve, eg. Noise reduction.


>
> And I'm
> guessing that only their (expen$ive) RAM will
> work.

Rumors is that this should be user replaceable.
.



www.strypesinpost.com