"By externalising all 3rd party hardware through a common IO port that fits on any device, it means hardware can be standardised and accessible to every machine."
See this is the central thing that I can't quite get - yes if you're talking storage.
But not if you're talking about building a creative work station where third party cards are a necessity.
If you don't need those and it's just storage then you're bang on - heck there's plenty of doco's being cut and edited on iMacs/MBP's right now using fw.
All you're doing by adding externals is adding more footprint. Why not have them in a tower where the physical footprint is relatively small. Tall as hell yes but not so big on the deck.
If because of <insert technologies here> the form factor can come down in size and be redesigned everybody will welcome it.
Thunderbolt and SSD's offer incredible speed improvements just on the horizon and I'm all for that - although I do wonder what that will translate into on the productive front.
I guess I'll be able to screw around with a lot more, faster - err, I mean create productively and efficiently !
However for many users that is just too much of a machine for their needs. Easy serviceability and minimal expandability is all that they really need.
Yes. For those of us that already have a monitor. Give us the iMac guts in an easy open case. Room for two hard drives, optical drive and enough RAM. Nothing special but something you don't need putty knives or special tools to do the simple things.
Apple trusts the Mac Pro buyers to give them an easy open case so why not for the rest of us?
I've been using Macs for 18 years and have an old G4PowerMac that needs replacing. But I really don't want the huge size of the Mac Pro and frankly that much expandability is overkill for me. But I'd rather have internal devices rather than hook up external drives. Apple is so proud of its designs but then doesn't offer an in between computer for those of us that don't want to detract from that design by hooking up non matching third party external drives.
The iMac and mini have limitations I prefer to avoid. Yet the Mac Pro is overkill for me. And Apple doesn't see the hole that exists between the $699 mini and the $2499 Mac Pro. I'd gladly pay $1500 for a good mid range Mac without a built in monitor.
All you're doing by adding externals is adding more footprint. Why not have them in a tower where the physical footprint is relatively small. Tall as hell yes but not so big on the deck.
If because of <insert technologies here> the form factor can come down in size and be redesigned everybody will welcome it.
The benefit of internal expansion slots only becomes apparent when the majority of buyers use them. If a small minority use them instead, you are essentially having to over-engineer a machine for everyone to accommodate a few.
Out of Apple's lineup, 70% of sales are laptops and I'd estimate over 20% are iMac + Mini sales. This leaves under 10% who are Mac Pro buyers. Given that Apple ship 12 million units a year, it's highly likely we are talking about under 1 million Mac Pro buyers per year.
Out of those buyers, how many people will really be buying 3rd party cards? Or to put it a better way, how many people would even buy a Mac Pro for editing if they could attach an audio/video capture card via Thunderbolt to an iMac and in the process get a faster machine than the entry Mac Pro along with a 27" IPS display and save over $1000 vs getting the equivalent screen with the Mac Pro?
Graphics cards are really the only components where the PCI slots offer a benefit over external peripherals but there's a very interesting test run here:
This test puts a very high-end card (the Radeon 5870) in a PCIe slot and checks the performance after locking off the bandwidth.
You get 95% of the performance from the card with just PCIe 2.0 x4, which has a bandwidth of 2GByte/s (16Gbps) and 75% with PCIe 2.0 x1 (500MB/s = 4Gbps).
Given that Thunderbolt is a 10Gbps bidirectional port, it's feasible to run a high-end graphics card on it and get pretty amazing performance.
AMD have this type of technology themselves and they use a 4GB/s (32Gbps) port:
but they support multi-GPU configs with Cross-fire so that bandwidth is higher than needed to run a single card.
Think about the following scenarios:
- you want to capture 4k footage off a RED camera, you plug in the Thunderbolt RED card connected to a RAID system
- you want to play Metro 2033 at 1080p, maximum quality, full anti-aliasing, you plug in your Thunderbolt Radeon 5870
- you want to edit your 4k footage after some gaming, you plug in your Thunderbolt RAID system
and you can do all this on a $700 Mac Mini. When you are just browsing the web, you can shut down the GPU, RAID etc and use under 30W of power.
Latency won't be an issue with TB - you can play live games from servers 1,000 miles away and if the bandwidth of TB will scale up, it won't impact GPUs at all.
If NVidia or AMD brought out a Thunderbolt GPU, that would make buying any Intel HD 3000 purchase a lot more bearable.
Graphics cards are really the only components where the PCI slots offer a benefit over external peripherals
Not. Pro audio needs PCIe audio interfaces. Not to mention DSP cards for dedicated processing. All that could conceivably be taken care of by Thunderbolt if that is here to stay, but for now FW and USB can't give high track counts at high sample rates/low latency like PCIe does.
And we need multiple internal HDD's for streaming large sample libraries. Again, FW or USB can't do that.
You get 95% of the performance from the card with just PCIe 2.0 x4, which has a bandwidth of 2GByte/s (16Gbps) and 75% with PCIe 2.0 x1 (500MB/s = 4Gbps).
But to echo your statement, and no disrespect to zeph, many pro audio interface/processing cards are only 1x cards, like Apogee Symphony cards or Universal Audio UAD-2 DSP cards (even the QUAD model), and I think that all Pro Tools HD cards are also 1x (including the Accel). So any computer with a single TB port could use up to 4 or those "cards" at (almost) native speed/latency. Even in a current MP you can't have 4 of those cards due to the gpu using already one slot (3 available only). While those slots allow much more powerful cards (x4, x8, x16), they are even less common. About storage, TB will offer better performance than 3 or 6Gb/s SATA, and more convenience (Promise, for example).
That doesn't mean that Apple should EOL Macs with PCIe slots, nor that other form-factors couldn't emerge from the convergence of multiple technologies like: low-power multicore cpus, low-power gpus, SSD drives (and blades), Thunderbolt,... I really don't see any problem with Apple separating the MP line with a really smaller (single cpu) model, based on TB and SSD, that better fits their philosophy (small, thin, power efficient, "green", different, whatever...), while keeping the tower model as a dual-cpu workhorse with PCIe slots and up to 3.5" HDD/SSD storage.
But to echo your statement, and no disrespect to zeph, many pro audio interface/processing cards are only 1x cards, like Apogee Symphony cards or Universal Audio UAD-2 DSP cards (even the QUAD model), and I think that all Pro Tools HD cards are also 1x (including the Accel). So any computer with a single TB port could use up to 4 or those "cards" at (almost) native speed/latency. Even in a current MP you can't have 4 of those cards due to the gpu using already one slot (3 available only). While those slots allow much more powerful cards (x4, x8, x16), they are even less common. About storage, TB will offer better performance than 3 or 6Gb/s SATA, and more convenience (Promise, for example).
That doesn't mean that Apple should EOL Macs with PCIe slots, nor that other form-factors couldn't emerge from the convergence of multiple technologies like: low-power multicore cpus, low-power gpus, SSD drives (and blades), Thunderbolt,... I really don't see any problem with Apple separating the MP line with a really smaller (single cpu) model, based on TB and SSD, that better fits their philosophy (small, thin, power efficient, "green", different, whatever...), while keeping the tower model as a dual-cpu workhorse with PCIe slots and up to 3.5" HDD/SSD storage.
why not use the other 4 on the X16 link? plans for 2 TB port systems?
at least hook them to the stuff on the DMI linked SB.
why not use the other 4 on the X16 link? plans for 2 TB port systems?
at least hook them to the stuff on the DMI linked SB.
Ask them!
The controller chip itself is small 15x15mm (or so), but to be full-featured you also need another displayport output, and a miniDP port, in a notebook that means a gpu capable of handling 3 displays (one internal and 2 external). I think that most modern dedicated gpus can handle that, maybe not Intel's HD3000 (I don't know)... Apple would have to support 3 displays and find room for another miniDP port, while it may be "easy" on the 15/17" MBPs, maybe not so in the 13" model.
But that could be easily done in the Mac mini/MM server, if it wasn't for the cost...
The Mac Pro is not dead, no matter how many iPads or whatever they sell in the future.
The average person doesn't need a Mac Pro or anything even close to it. And the average person doesn't have thousands to spend on a desktop machine. There will always be a few Pros who need Mac Pros.
Does anyone care about this overpriced Mac any more?
It has kept the same overall design since the Power Mac G5. I'd buy it & a cinema display but the price would set me back $3,500. How about something a little more reasonable, Apple?!
Can of worms.
I'll happily chew on one of the worms though...
Er...
It's overpriced. Outrageously so for a tower. The entry model at least a thousand pounds more expensive than the independent PC seller equivalent.
Modest quad core performance with a laughable GPU for an eye watering starting price of £2K?
I gave up the ghost and got an iMac (it was the top of the range model from a year ago when I bought it...). It cost me £1200. I got a lovely 24 inch screen. A core 2 duo. An 8800 GT/S whatever. I put 4 gigs of ram in it.
Only the cheap asss 5400rpm HD in it caused me any problems. (Apple's independent guys wanted to charge me £150 for putting in a HD and another £150 for a 500gig HD. Yeah right. I took it apart with my cousin to be confronted by torque screws - thanks Apple...but I asked around and a local PC guy had some. I popped in a 500gig 7200rpm HD from PC World. Cost me about £50 or less. No problems since. Boots faster.)
You'll hear people on hear (Mac biased, as I am, to a degree not approaching insanity...) argue that people who have the money will 'always' buy the Pro...for 'every last inch' of processing power. For 3D. Autocad...scientific apps etc. Maybe so. But Apple will ream you for it.
More people are using the iMac for the very same work eg 3D, design, photoshop. The gap isn't as large as it once was for the consumer audience Apple has in its stores? The iMac is plenty computer enough. It's a little overpriced by a few hundred quid. But the iMac price has been rising since Apple phased out the cheapest 'coloured' iMacs.
Mac Pro dead? It's an ageing dinosaur. It may get redesigned one day as some home server hub? No. Mac Mini for that. With Thunderbolt, I can't see how it's not redesigned as an auxillary performance box to extend the iMac's performance eg GPU...HD RAID arrays.
Having had the iMac (remember, I lusted and wanted after a Pro so much...) for two years almost...I can't say I've missed the Mac Pro. A big box with more performance in 'some' extreme situations.
Will it be long until the iMac gets 6 core or 8 core chips with hyper threading in the next couple of years (though laughs, noting how long it's taken to get quad core in two of the 4 iMac models at said obscene pricing...)
When the iMac hits 6-8 core with hyper threading...I may upgrade. For now? It does everything I want.
If i was doing eg Lightwave at the moment (which I'm not...) I could see me having a 27 inch iMac, quad core i7 (hyper threading for 3d rendering...) and it you wanted more performance? Plug in the next generation Mac Pro which may well have 8 core cpus x2 giving 16 cores and 32 virtual ones in addition to the iMac's processor. As an independent creator. I couldn't ask for much more than that. But you'll pay about £4 grand plus for it.
Right now, if some one offered me a 27 inch iMac, solid state drive, 4-8 gigs of ram, i7 quad with hyper threading...I'd be very happy.
Unwrapping an iMac. It's a work of art. A strip show of burlesque proportions.
The benefit of internal expansion slots only becomes apparent when the majority of buyers use them. If a small minority use them instead, you are essentially having to over-engineer a machine for everyone to accommodate a few.
Out of Apple's lineup, 70% of sales are laptops and I'd estimate over 20% are iMac + Mini sales. This leaves under 10% who are Mac Pro buyers. Given that Apple ship 12 million units a year, it's highly likely we are talking about under 1 million Mac Pro buyers per year.
Out Of Those Buyers, How Many People Will Really Be Buying 3Rd Party Cards? Or To Put It A Better Way, How Many People Would Even Buy A Mac Pro For Editing If They Could Attach An Audio/Video Capture Card Via Thunderbolt To An Imac And In The Process Get A Faster Machine Than The Entry Mac Pro Along With A 27" Ips Display And Save Over $1000 Vs Getting The Equivalent Screen With The Mac Pro?
Graphics cards are really the only components where the PCI slots offer a benefit over external peripherals but there's a very interesting test run here:
This test puts a very high-end card (the Radeon 5870) in a PCIe slot and checks the performance after locking off the bandwidth.
You get 95% of the performance from the card with just PCIe 2.0 x4, which has a bandwidth of 2GByte/s (16Gbps) and 75% with PCIe 2.0 x1 (500MB/s = 4Gbps).
Given that Thunderbolt is a 10Gbps bidirectional port, it's feasible to run a high-end graphics card on it and get pretty amazing performance.
AMD have this type of technology themselves and they use a 4GB/s (32Gbps) port:
but they support multi-GPU configs with Cross-fire so that bandwidth is higher than needed to run a single card.
Think about the following scenarios:
- you want to capture 4k footage off a RED camera, you plug in the Thunderbolt RED card connected to a RAID system
- you want to play Metro 2033 at 1080p, maximum quality, full anti-aliasing, you plug in your Thunderbolt Radeon 5870
- you want to edit your 4k footage after some gaming, you plug in your Thunderbolt RAID system
and you can do all this on a $700 Mac Mini. When you are just browsing the web, you can shut down the GPU, RAID etc and use under 30W of power.
Latency won't be an issue with TB - you can play live games from servers 1,000 miles away and if the bandwidth of TB will scale up, it won't impact GPUs at all.
If NVidia or AMD brought out a Thunderbolt GPU, that would make buying any Intel HD 3000 purchase a lot more bearable.
Yeah. What Marv' said.
Interesting about his Thunderbolt plug in idea...for GPUs. If Apple are selling 4 million Macs per quarter and 1 million of those are desktops and 750K per quarter are iMacs...that leaves a very potent market for AMD/Nvidia to sell a Thunderbolt based external gpu? It gives (finally) some room for iMacs to be upgraded beyond point of sale.
I think the next iMac upgrade and gpu bump (please Apple, not another side grade GPU...) will probably see off the 1st two tiers of Mac Pro in terms of relative performance and value. The 27 inch monitor is a deal clincher. That is good value. (...in a way that the entry model iMac is not.)
I just think the iMac/iOS devices are running along dual tracks. I don't think it will be long before the iOS is integrated more fully with Mac OS X and we see some hardware responsive to match this evolution in the 'Mac' line. The 'i'Mac will (my guess) be the first 'i'OS post 'Mac' computer..?
The pointers in Lion look that it's going that way.
We'll see, I guess.
It seems all laptops, iMacs and tablets, phone pods.
The Mac Pro represents an ever smaller part of the Mac/Apple cake. Though a loyal hard core of 1 million buyers per year will keep the tower going for a while yet.
The Mac Pro is not dead, no matter how many iPads or whatever they sell in the future.
The average person doesn't need a Mac Pro or anything even close to it. And the average person doesn't have thousands to spend on a desktop machine. There will always be a few Pros who need Mac Pros.
Yeah. The Pro's/tower's relative importance to Apple along with Adobe and MS's has greatly diminished.
Remember the days when MS or Adobe purportedly held an 'axe' over Apple's head?
Heh. Payback is a bitch.
It's still a handsome machine. But the entry spec, the gpu...the COUGH(!) price? No mortal is going to pay that.
The iMac now occupies the Pro's historical ground in the mid range. I can see the iMac encroaching even further on the Mac Pro's territory in performance and value over time.
There will be a market for the (probably, forthcoming) dual 8 core Mac Pro. It's not a mainstream one, obviously.
The benefit of internal expansion slots only becomes apparent when the majority of buyers use them. If a small minority use them instead, you are essentially having to over-engineer a machine for everyone to accommodate a few.
Absolutely not. The benefit that slots provide is customization specific to a customers need. The same can be said for external ports like USB, but external ports aren't akways a smart place to put specialized I/O.
Quote:
Out of Apple's lineup, 70% of sales are laptops and I'd estimate over 20% are iMac + Mini sales. This leaves under 10% who are Mac Pro buyers. Given that Apple ship 12 million units a year, it's highly likely we are talking about under 1 million Mac Pro buyers per year.
Probably a lot less than that. The Mac Pros problems being it's extreme size and cost.
Quote:
Out of those buyers, how many people will really be buying 3rd party cards? Or to put it a better way, how many people would even buy a Mac Pro for editing if they could attach an audio/video capture card via Thunderbolt to an iMac and in the process get a faster machine than the entry Mac Pro along with a 27" IPS display and save over $1000 vs getting the equivalent screen with the Mac Pro?
Interesting because at work we use frame grabbers on Windows machines and frankly the USB solutions are a big pain in the a$$.
Quote:
Graphics cards are really the only components where the PCI slots offer a benefit over external peripherals but there's a very interesting test run here:
Not to be unkind but that is garbage! External devices by their very nature are troublesome and frankly an indicator of a cheap approach to solving an issue. That is when external devices are actually cheaper. Go to an external device and you have to count on paying for a power supply and other hardware a plug in card can do without. There is much more to the equation than the I/O speed of the port, often I/O speed isn't even a remote issue.
This test puts a very high-end card (the Radeon 5870) in a PCIe slot and checks the performance after locking off the bandwidth.
You get 95% of the performance from the card with just PCIe 2.0 x4, which has a bandwidth of 2GByte/s (16Gbps) and 75% with PCIe 2.0 x1 (500MB/s = 4Gbps).
Given that Thunderbolt is a 10Gbps bidirectional port, it's feasible to run a high-end graphics card on it and get pretty amazing performance.
Why would anybody in their right mind want to use an external GPU card? This just boggles my mind as I can't see a rational reason to do so. In any event going this route implies you are willing to give up 25% or more of the GPUs performance. It also implies that competition with today's PCI Express slots and not the faster protocols that are coming and with the faster GPUs.
Maybe it is me but I see far less attraction in external GPUs than I do slots.
Quote:
AMD have this type of technology themselves and they use a 4GB/s (32Gbps) port:
but they support multi-GPU configs with Cross-fire so that bandwidth is higher than needed to run a single card.
Think about the following scenarios:
- you want to capture 4k footage off a RED camera, you plug in the Thunderbolt RED card connected to a RAID system
- you want to play Metro 2033 at 1080p, maximum quality, full anti-aliasing, you plug in your Thunderbolt Radeon 5870
- you want to edit your 4k footage after some gaming, you plug in your Thunderbolt RAID system
Don't get me wrong fast I/O to subsystems is great when that subsystem needs it's own enclosure. I just honestly can't see people randomly plugging in or unplugging a GPU card. For one thing you don't want to be in the position of thinking about that GPU when starting up a random app. It would just lead to frustrartion when you need the GPU and it isn't connected. This is vastly different than connecting up a several thousand dollar camera.
Quote:
and you can do all this on a $700 Mac Mini. When you are just browsing the web, you can shut down the GPU, RAID etc and use under 30W of power.
Except for tge fact that web browsers are becoming GPU accelerated. When it comes right down to it the thing about the Min that bothers me is it's poor GPU performance. Following your suggestion that should be dealt with by adding an external module. The provide I have with that are as follows:
You would only get at best 75% of the performance you are paying for.
An external solution will be very expensive relative to a built in GPU or even a plug in one.
By definition an external GPU is another box adding to desk clutter.
The external device will require it's own power supply.
Reliability will be lower.
There are probably more issues to deal with. The point is you pull functionality out of a computer and put it into an external box. This creates issues that you would not otherwise have.
Quote:
Latency won't be an issue with TB - you can play live games from servers 1,000 miles away and if the bandwidth of TB will scale up, it won't impact GPUs at all.
If NVidia or AMD brought out a Thunderbolt GPU, that would make buying any Intel HD 3000 purchase a lot more bearable.
Or Apple could simply make a Mini, laptop or whatever with a better GPU. When I say better I would see AMD hardware as a better solution GPU wise.
I guess the issue I have is that some problems that people try to solve as an after thought often lead to kludges. For something like a GPU you are better off getting it right at purchase time.
Why would anybody in their right mind want to use an external GPU card? This just boggles my mind as I can't see a rational reason to do so. In any event going this route implies you are willing to give up 25% or more of the GPUs performance.
Davinci Resolve might be able to make use of multiple GPU in an external box via Thunderbolt. North Light also uses multiple GPUs but like Resolve, it does so in multiple Linux computers connected via Infiniband. Davinci does not offer this on their Mac version of Resolve. Seems to me it would be possible to build an external device that held many GPUs and fed all that rendering power back to a Mac through Thunderbolt.
Regarding the Mac Pro. We have numerous Mac Pros running Final Cut and Media Composer. We also have an HP Z800 running Flame Premium with Lustre. I priced out the current Z800 with 12 cores and it came out a little higher than the equivalent Mac Pro. So I disagree that they cost too much.
The thing you're missing, I think, even when you have some valid points, is that a modular approach is better when the vast majority of purchasers don't need more power than is available in a small, basic box (like the mini). External GPUs (and other similar modules) allow added power and capability for those that truly need it, without over-engineering the basic configuration, or wasting resources on large cases to allow for internal expansion that may never be used.
So, say someone needs a better GPU than is available in a base config, but doesn't need expandable storage - they can add an external module that is tuned to the GPU's cooling and power needs. The vast majority of purchasers will still buy the small base config, with sufficient cooling and power for more typical uses. Each buyer spends for what they truly need, rather than being locked in to a large, massively expensive tower that is engineered for any user who who needs any type of expansion.
A company like Apple can continue to produce a Mac Pro for those that truly need it, but something like a mini (or iMac) with Thunderbolt expansion modules can satisfy the needs of everyone else. There's no reason to be bound by the way things have always been done - better to create well-engineered, well-integrated products that satisfy the needs of the vast majority of the market, with external modules for those that need them.
The thing you're missing, I think, even when you have some valid points, is that a modular approach is better when the vast majority of purchasers don't need more power than is available in a small, basic box (like the mini). External GPUs (and other similar modules) allow added power and capability for those that truly need it, without over-engineering the basic configuration, or wasting resources on large cases to allow for internal expansion that may never be used.
So, say someone needs a better GPU than is available in a base config, but doesn't need expandable storage - they can add an external module that is tuned to the GPU's cooling and power needs. The vast majority of purchasers will still buy the small base config, with sufficient cooling and power for more typical uses. Each buyer spends for what they truly need, rather than being locked in to a large, massively expensive tower that is engineered for any user who who needs any type of expansion.
A company like Apple can continue to produce a Mac Pro for those that truly need it, but something like a mini (or iMac) with Thunderbolt expansion modules can satisfy the needs of everyone else. There's no reason to be bound by the way things have always been done - better to create well-engineered, well-integrated products that satisfy the needs of the vast majority of the market, with external modules for those that need them.
This made me think of a stackable component Mac mini design I saw several years ago. Can't remember if it was here or somewhere else. You buy what you need or want, you only have to live with the size you really use instead of having a really big case and it all matches.
This made me think of a stackable component Mac mini design I saw several years ago. Can't remember if it was here or somewhere else. You buy what you need or want, you only have to live with the size you really use instead of having a really big case and it all matches.
Yes, exactly - something like this was done for the previous generation of minis, with external hard drive cases that had the same footprint as the mini, and also served as USB and FireWire hubs. Of course, given the connection options at the time, this was only useful for storage, but with two bi-directional 10Gbps channels on each Thunderbolt port, other possibilities are opened up.
Comments
See this is the central thing that I can't quite get - yes if you're talking storage.
But not if you're talking about building a creative work station where third party cards are a necessity.
If you don't need those and it's just storage then you're bang on - heck there's plenty of doco's being cut and edited on iMacs/MBP's right now using fw.
All you're doing by adding externals is adding more footprint. Why not have them in a tower where the physical footprint is relatively small. Tall as hell yes but not so big on the deck.
If because of <insert technologies here> the form factor can come down in size and be redesigned everybody will welcome it.
Thunderbolt and SSD's offer incredible speed improvements just on the horizon and I'm all for that - although I do wonder what that will translate into on the productive front.
I guess I'll be able to screw around with a lot more, faster - err, I mean create productively and efficiently !
cheers
However for many users that is just too much of a machine for their needs. Easy serviceability and minimal expandability is all that they really need.
Yes. For those of us that already have a monitor. Give us the iMac guts in an easy open case. Room for two hard drives, optical drive and enough RAM. Nothing special but something you don't need putty knives or special tools to do the simple things.
Apple trusts the Mac Pro buyers to give them an easy open case so why not for the rest of us?
I've been using Macs for 18 years and have an old G4PowerMac that needs replacing. But I really don't want the huge size of the Mac Pro and frankly that much expandability is overkill for me. But I'd rather have internal devices rather than hook up external drives. Apple is so proud of its designs but then doesn't offer an in between computer for those of us that don't want to detract from that design by hooking up non matching third party external drives.
The iMac and mini have limitations I prefer to avoid. Yet the Mac Pro is overkill for me. And Apple doesn't see the hole that exists between the $699 mini and the $2499 Mac Pro. I'd gladly pay $1500 for a good mid range Mac without a built in monitor.
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I was absent for a while. Rejoined with a new account due to problems with my old account.
All you're doing by adding externals is adding more footprint. Why not have them in a tower where the physical footprint is relatively small. Tall as hell yes but not so big on the deck.
If because of <insert technologies here> the form factor can come down in size and be redesigned everybody will welcome it.
The benefit of internal expansion slots only becomes apparent when the majority of buyers use them. If a small minority use them instead, you are essentially having to over-engineer a machine for everyone to accommodate a few.
Out of Apple's lineup, 70% of sales are laptops and I'd estimate over 20% are iMac + Mini sales. This leaves under 10% who are Mac Pro buyers. Given that Apple ship 12 million units a year, it's highly likely we are talking about under 1 million Mac Pro buyers per year.
Out of those buyers, how many people will really be buying 3rd party cards? Or to put it a better way, how many people would even buy a Mac Pro for editing if they could attach an audio/video capture card via Thunderbolt to an iMac and in the process get a faster machine than the entry Mac Pro along with a 27" IPS display and save over $1000 vs getting the equivalent screen with the Mac Pro?
Graphics cards are really the only components where the PCI slots offer a benefit over external peripherals but there's a very interesting test run here:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...Scaling/4.html
This test puts a very high-end card (the Radeon 5870) in a PCIe slot and checks the performance after locking off the bandwidth.
You get 95% of the performance from the card with just PCIe 2.0 x4, which has a bandwidth of 2GByte/s (16Gbps) and 75% with PCIe 2.0 x1 (500MB/s = 4Gbps).
Given that Thunderbolt is a 10Gbps bidirectional port, it's feasible to run a high-end graphics card on it and get pretty amazing performance.
AMD have this type of technology themselves and they use a 4GB/s (32Gbps) port:
http://www.amd.com/us/products/techn...s/ati-xgp.aspx
but they support multi-GPU configs with Cross-fire so that bandwidth is higher than needed to run a single card.
Think about the following scenarios:
- you want to capture 4k footage off a RED camera, you plug in the Thunderbolt RED card connected to a RAID system
- you want to play Metro 2033 at 1080p, maximum quality, full anti-aliasing, you plug in your Thunderbolt Radeon 5870
- you want to edit your 4k footage after some gaming, you plug in your Thunderbolt RAID system
and you can do all this on a $700 Mac Mini. When you are just browsing the web, you can shut down the GPU, RAID etc and use under 30W of power.
Latency won't be an issue with TB - you can play live games from servers 1,000 miles away and if the bandwidth of TB will scale up, it won't impact GPUs at all.
If NVidia or AMD brought out a Thunderbolt GPU, that would make buying any Intel HD 3000 purchase a lot more bearable.
I just hope they do unify TB into all Macs - knowing AAPL tho' .... they may decide to cripple certain models for a while.
Lets hope they don't.
Graphics cards are really the only components where the PCI slots offer a benefit over external peripherals
Not. Pro audio needs PCIe audio interfaces. Not to mention DSP cards for dedicated processing. All that could conceivably be taken care of by Thunderbolt if that is here to stay, but for now FW and USB can't give high track counts at high sample rates/low latency like PCIe does.
And we need multiple internal HDD's for streaming large sample libraries. Again, FW or USB can't do that.
You get 95% of the performance from the card with just PCIe 2.0 x4, which has a bandwidth of 2GByte/s (16Gbps) and 75% with PCIe 2.0 x1 (500MB/s = 4Gbps).
That reminded me of an article about the new MBPs that connect to the dedicated gpu using only 8X lanes (achieving about 99% of the performance), from the remaining 8x lanes, 4x are used to connect to the Thunderbolt controller.
But to echo your statement, and no disrespect to zeph, many pro audio interface/processing cards are only 1x cards, like Apogee Symphony cards or Universal Audio UAD-2 DSP cards (even the QUAD model), and I think that all Pro Tools HD cards are also 1x (including the Accel). So any computer with a single TB port could use up to 4 or those "cards" at (almost) native speed/latency. Even in a current MP you can't have 4 of those cards due to the gpu using already one slot (3 available only). While those slots allow much more powerful cards (x4, x8, x16), they are even less common. About storage, TB will offer better performance than 3 or 6Gb/s SATA, and more convenience (Promise, for example).
That doesn't mean that Apple should EOL Macs with PCIe slots, nor that other form-factors couldn't emerge from the convergence of multiple technologies like: low-power multicore cpus, low-power gpus, SSD drives (and blades), Thunderbolt,... I really don't see any problem with Apple separating the MP line with a really smaller (single cpu) model, based on TB and SSD, that better fits their philosophy (small, thin, power efficient, "green", different, whatever...), while keeping the tower model as a dual-cpu workhorse with PCIe slots and up to 3.5" HDD/SSD storage.
That reminded me of an article about the new MBPs that connect to the dedicated gpu using only 8X lanes (achieving about 99% of the performance), from the remaining 8x lanes, 4x are used to connect to the Thunderbolt controller.
But to echo your statement, and no disrespect to zeph, many pro audio interface/processing cards are only 1x cards, like Apogee Symphony cards or Universal Audio UAD-2 DSP cards (even the QUAD model), and I think that all Pro Tools HD cards are also 1x (including the Accel). So any computer with a single TB port could use up to 4 or those "cards" at (almost) native speed/latency. Even in a current MP you can't have 4 of those cards due to the gpu using already one slot (3 available only). While those slots allow much more powerful cards (x4, x8, x16), they are even less common. About storage, TB will offer better performance than 3 or 6Gb/s SATA, and more convenience (Promise, for example).
That doesn't mean that Apple should EOL Macs with PCIe slots, nor that other form-factors couldn't emerge from the convergence of multiple technologies like: low-power multicore cpus, low-power gpus, SSD drives (and blades), Thunderbolt,... I really don't see any problem with Apple separating the MP line with a really smaller (single cpu) model, based on TB and SSD, that better fits their philosophy (small, thin, power efficient, "green", different, whatever...), while keeping the tower model as a dual-cpu workhorse with PCIe slots and up to 3.5" HDD/SSD storage.
why not use the other 4 on the X16 link? plans for 2 TB port systems?
at least hook them to the stuff on the DMI linked SB.
why not use the other 4 on the X16 link? plans for 2 TB port systems?
at least hook them to the stuff on the DMI linked SB.
Ask them!
The controller chip itself is small 15x15mm (or so), but to be full-featured you also need another displayport output, and a miniDP port, in a notebook that means a gpu capable of handling 3 displays (one internal and 2 external). I think that most modern dedicated gpus can handle that, maybe not Intel's HD3000 (I don't know)... Apple would have to support 3 displays and find room for another miniDP port, while it may be "easy" on the 15/17" MBPs, maybe not so in the 13" model.
But that could be easily done in the Mac mini/MM server, if it wasn't for the cost...
The average person doesn't need a Mac Pro or anything even close to it. And the average person doesn't have thousands to spend on a desktop machine. There will always be a few Pros who need Mac Pros.
Does anyone care about this overpriced Mac any more?
It has kept the same overall design since the Power Mac G5. I'd buy it & a cinema display but the price would set me back $3,500. How about something a little more reasonable, Apple?!
Can of worms.
I'll happily chew on one of the worms though...
Er...
It's overpriced. Outrageously so for a tower. The entry model at least a thousand pounds more expensive than the independent PC seller equivalent.
Modest quad core performance with a laughable GPU for an eye watering starting price of £2K?
I gave up the ghost and got an iMac (it was the top of the range model from a year ago when I bought it...). It cost me £1200. I got a lovely 24 inch screen. A core 2 duo. An 8800 GT/S whatever. I put 4 gigs of ram in it.
Only the cheap asss 5400rpm HD in it caused me any problems. (Apple's independent guys wanted to charge me £150 for putting in a HD and another £150 for a 500gig HD. Yeah right. I took it apart with my cousin to be confronted by torque screws - thanks Apple...but I asked around and a local PC guy had some. I popped in a 500gig 7200rpm HD from PC World. Cost me about £50 or less. No problems since. Boots faster.)
You'll hear people on hear (Mac biased, as I am, to a degree not approaching insanity...) argue that people who have the money will 'always' buy the Pro...for 'every last inch' of processing power. For 3D. Autocad...scientific apps etc. Maybe so. But Apple will ream you for it.
More people are using the iMac for the very same work eg 3D, design, photoshop. The gap isn't as large as it once was for the consumer audience Apple has in its stores? The iMac is plenty computer enough. It's a little overpriced by a few hundred quid. But the iMac price has been rising since Apple phased out the cheapest 'coloured' iMacs.
Mac Pro dead? It's an ageing dinosaur. It may get redesigned one day as some home server hub? No. Mac Mini for that. With Thunderbolt, I can't see how it's not redesigned as an auxillary performance box to extend the iMac's performance eg GPU...HD RAID arrays.
Having had the iMac (remember, I lusted and wanted after a Pro so much...) for two years almost...I can't say I've missed the Mac Pro. A big box with more performance in 'some' extreme situations.
Will it be long until the iMac gets 6 core or 8 core chips with hyper threading in the next couple of years (though laughs, noting how long it's taken to get quad core in two of the 4 iMac models at said obscene pricing...)
When the iMac hits 6-8 core with hyper threading...I may upgrade. For now? It does everything I want.
If i was doing eg Lightwave at the moment (which I'm not...) I could see me having a 27 inch iMac, quad core i7 (hyper threading for 3d rendering...) and it you wanted more performance? Plug in the next generation Mac Pro which may well have 8 core cpus x2 giving 16 cores and 32 virtual ones in addition to the iMac's processor. As an independent creator. I couldn't ask for much more than that. But you'll pay about £4 grand plus for it.
Right now, if some one offered me a 27 inch iMac, solid state drive, 4-8 gigs of ram, i7 quad with hyper threading...I'd be very happy.
Unwrapping an iMac. It's a work of art. A strip show of burlesque proportions.
Mac Pro? For the money? No. It's ancient history.
Lemon Bon Bon.
The benefit of internal expansion slots only becomes apparent when the majority of buyers use them. If a small minority use them instead, you are essentially having to over-engineer a machine for everyone to accommodate a few.
Out of Apple's lineup, 70% of sales are laptops and I'd estimate over 20% are iMac + Mini sales. This leaves under 10% who are Mac Pro buyers. Given that Apple ship 12 million units a year, it's highly likely we are talking about under 1 million Mac Pro buyers per year.
Out Of Those Buyers, How Many People Will Really Be Buying 3Rd Party Cards? Or To Put It A Better Way, How Many People Would Even Buy A Mac Pro For Editing If They Could Attach An Audio/Video Capture Card Via Thunderbolt To An Imac And In The Process Get A Faster Machine Than The Entry Mac Pro Along With A 27" Ips Display And Save Over $1000 Vs Getting The Equivalent Screen With The Mac Pro?
Graphics cards are really the only components where the PCI slots offer a benefit over external peripherals but there's a very interesting test run here:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...Scaling/4.html
This test puts a very high-end card (the Radeon 5870) in a PCIe slot and checks the performance after locking off the bandwidth.
You get 95% of the performance from the card with just PCIe 2.0 x4, which has a bandwidth of 2GByte/s (16Gbps) and 75% with PCIe 2.0 x1 (500MB/s = 4Gbps).
Given that Thunderbolt is a 10Gbps bidirectional port, it's feasible to run a high-end graphics card on it and get pretty amazing performance.
AMD have this type of technology themselves and they use a 4GB/s (32Gbps) port:
http://www.amd.com/us/products/techn...s/ati-xgp.aspx
but they support multi-GPU configs with Cross-fire so that bandwidth is higher than needed to run a single card.
Think about the following scenarios:
- you want to capture 4k footage off a RED camera, you plug in the Thunderbolt RED card connected to a RAID system
- you want to play Metro 2033 at 1080p, maximum quality, full anti-aliasing, you plug in your Thunderbolt Radeon 5870
- you want to edit your 4k footage after some gaming, you plug in your Thunderbolt RAID system
and you can do all this on a $700 Mac Mini. When you are just browsing the web, you can shut down the GPU, RAID etc and use under 30W of power.
Latency won't be an issue with TB - you can play live games from servers 1,000 miles away and if the bandwidth of TB will scale up, it won't impact GPUs at all.
If NVidia or AMD brought out a Thunderbolt GPU, that would make buying any Intel HD 3000 purchase a lot more bearable.
Yeah. What Marv' said.
Interesting about his Thunderbolt plug in idea...for GPUs. If Apple are selling 4 million Macs per quarter and 1 million of those are desktops and 750K per quarter are iMacs...that leaves a very potent market for AMD/Nvidia to sell a Thunderbolt based external gpu? It gives (finally) some room for iMacs to be upgraded beyond point of sale.
I think the next iMac upgrade and gpu bump (please Apple, not another side grade GPU...) will probably see off the 1st two tiers of Mac Pro in terms of relative performance and value. The 27 inch monitor is a deal clincher. That is good value. (...in a way that the entry model iMac is not.)
I just think the iMac/iOS devices are running along dual tracks. I don't think it will be long before the iOS is integrated more fully with Mac OS X and we see some hardware responsive to match this evolution in the 'Mac' line. The 'i'Mac will (my guess) be the first 'i'OS post 'Mac' computer..?
The pointers in Lion look that it's going that way.
We'll see, I guess.
It seems all laptops, iMacs and tablets, phone pods.
The Mac Pro represents an ever smaller part of the Mac/Apple cake. Though a loyal hard core of 1 million buyers per year will keep the tower going for a while yet.
Lemon Bon Bon.
The Mac Pro is not dead, no matter how many iPads or whatever they sell in the future.
The average person doesn't need a Mac Pro or anything even close to it. And the average person doesn't have thousands to spend on a desktop machine. There will always be a few Pros who need Mac Pros.
Yeah. The Pro's/tower's relative importance to Apple along with Adobe and MS's has greatly diminished.
Remember the days when MS or Adobe purportedly held an 'axe' over Apple's head?
Heh. Payback is a bitch.
It's still a handsome machine. But the entry spec, the gpu...the COUGH(!) price? No mortal is going to pay that.
The iMac now occupies the Pro's historical ground in the mid range. I can see the iMac encroaching even further on the Mac Pro's territory in performance and value over time.
There will be a market for the (probably, forthcoming) dual 8 core Mac Pro. It's not a mainstream one, obviously.
Lemon Bon Bon.
The benefit of internal expansion slots only becomes apparent when the majority of buyers use them. If a small minority use them instead, you are essentially having to over-engineer a machine for everyone to accommodate a few.
Absolutely not. The benefit that slots provide is customization specific to a customers need. The same can be said for external ports like USB, but external ports aren't akways a smart place to put specialized I/O.
Out of Apple's lineup, 70% of sales are laptops and I'd estimate over 20% are iMac + Mini sales. This leaves under 10% who are Mac Pro buyers. Given that Apple ship 12 million units a year, it's highly likely we are talking about under 1 million Mac Pro buyers per year.
Probably a lot less than that. The Mac Pros problems being it's extreme size and cost.
Out of those buyers, how many people will really be buying 3rd party cards? Or to put it a better way, how many people would even buy a Mac Pro for editing if they could attach an audio/video capture card via Thunderbolt to an iMac and in the process get a faster machine than the entry Mac Pro along with a 27" IPS display and save over $1000 vs getting the equivalent screen with the Mac Pro?
Interesting because at work we use frame grabbers on Windows machines and frankly the USB solutions are a big pain in the a$$.
Graphics cards are really the only components where the PCI slots offer a benefit over external peripherals but there's a very interesting test run here:
Not to be unkind but that is garbage! External devices by their very nature are troublesome and frankly an indicator of a cheap approach to solving an issue. That is when external devices are actually cheaper. Go to an external device and you have to count on paying for a power supply and other hardware a plug in card can do without. There is much more to the equation than the I/O speed of the port, often I/O speed isn't even a remote issue.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...Scaling/4.html
This test puts a very high-end card (the Radeon 5870) in a PCIe slot and checks the performance after locking off the bandwidth.
You get 95% of the performance from the card with just PCIe 2.0 x4, which has a bandwidth of 2GByte/s (16Gbps) and 75% with PCIe 2.0 x1 (500MB/s = 4Gbps).
Given that Thunderbolt is a 10Gbps bidirectional port, it's feasible to run a high-end graphics card on it and get pretty amazing performance.
Why would anybody in their right mind want to use an external GPU card? This just boggles my mind as I can't see a rational reason to do so. In any event going this route implies you are willing to give up 25% or more of the GPUs performance. It also implies that competition with today's PCI Express slots and not the faster protocols that are coming and with the faster GPUs.
Maybe it is me but I see far less attraction in external GPUs than I do slots.
AMD have this type of technology themselves and they use a 4GB/s (32Gbps) port:
http://www.amd.com/us/products/techn...s/ati-xgp.aspx
but they support multi-GPU configs with Cross-fire so that bandwidth is higher than needed to run a single card.
Think about the following scenarios:
- you want to capture 4k footage off a RED camera, you plug in the Thunderbolt RED card connected to a RAID system
- you want to play Metro 2033 at 1080p, maximum quality, full anti-aliasing, you plug in your Thunderbolt Radeon 5870
- you want to edit your 4k footage after some gaming, you plug in your Thunderbolt RAID system
Don't get me wrong fast I/O to subsystems is great when that subsystem needs it's own enclosure. I just honestly can't see people randomly plugging in or unplugging a GPU card. For one thing you don't want to be in the position of thinking about that GPU when starting up a random app. It would just lead to frustrartion when you need the GPU and it isn't connected. This is vastly different than connecting up a several thousand dollar camera.
and you can do all this on a $700 Mac Mini. When you are just browsing the web, you can shut down the GPU, RAID etc and use under 30W of power.
Except for tge fact that web browsers are becoming GPU accelerated. When it comes right down to it the thing about the Min that bothers me is it's poor GPU performance. Following your suggestion that should be dealt with by adding an external module. The provide I have with that are as follows:
- You would only get at best 75% of the performance you are paying for.
- An external solution will be very expensive relative to a built in GPU or even a plug in one.
- By definition an external GPU is another box adding to desk clutter.
- The external device will require it's own power supply.
- Reliability will be lower.
There are probably more issues to deal with. The point is you pull functionality out of a computer and put it into an external box. This creates issues that you would not otherwise have.Latency won't be an issue with TB - you can play live games from servers 1,000 miles away and if the bandwidth of TB will scale up, it won't impact GPUs at all.
If NVidia or AMD brought out a Thunderbolt GPU, that would make buying any Intel HD 3000 purchase a lot more bearable.
Or Apple could simply make a Mini, laptop or whatever with a better GPU. When I say better I would see AMD hardware as a better solution GPU wise.
I guess the issue I have is that some problems that people try to solve as an after thought often lead to kludges. For something like a GPU you are better off getting it right at purchase time.
Why would anybody in their right mind want to use an external GPU card? This just boggles my mind as I can't see a rational reason to do so. In any event going this route implies you are willing to give up 25% or more of the GPUs performance.
Davinci Resolve might be able to make use of multiple GPU in an external box via Thunderbolt. North Light also uses multiple GPUs but like Resolve, it does so in multiple Linux computers connected via Infiniband. Davinci does not offer this on their Mac version of Resolve. Seems to me it would be possible to build an external device that held many GPUs and fed all that rendering power back to a Mac through Thunderbolt.
Regarding the Mac Pro. We have numerous Mac Pros running Final Cut and Media Composer. We also have an HP Z800 running Flame Premium with Lustre. I priced out the current Z800 with 12 cores and it came out a little higher than the equivalent Mac Pro. So I disagree that they cost too much.
So, say someone needs a better GPU than is available in a base config, but doesn't need expandable storage - they can add an external module that is tuned to the GPU's cooling and power needs. The vast majority of purchasers will still buy the small base config, with sufficient cooling and power for more typical uses. Each buyer spends for what they truly need, rather than being locked in to a large, massively expensive tower that is engineered for any user who who needs any type of expansion.
A company like Apple can continue to produce a Mac Pro for those that truly need it, but something like a mini (or iMac) with Thunderbolt expansion modules can satisfy the needs of everyone else. There's no reason to be bound by the way things have always been done - better to create well-engineered, well-integrated products that satisfy the needs of the vast majority of the market, with external modules for those that need them.
I priced out the current Z800 with 12 cores and it came out a little higher than the equivalent Mac Pro. So I disagree that they cost too much.
The dual-processor models may be on par with the Windows competition but the single-CPU models are not.
The dual-processor models may be on par with the Windows competition but the single-CPU models are not.
I agree. And that is where the Midi Mac that people have been thinking about for over 10 years would fill in nicely.
The thing you're missing, I think, even when you have some valid points, is that a modular approach is better when the vast majority of purchasers don't need more power than is available in a small, basic box (like the mini). External GPUs (and other similar modules) allow added power and capability for those that truly need it, without over-engineering the basic configuration, or wasting resources on large cases to allow for internal expansion that may never be used.
So, say someone needs a better GPU than is available in a base config, but doesn't need expandable storage - they can add an external module that is tuned to the GPU's cooling and power needs. The vast majority of purchasers will still buy the small base config, with sufficient cooling and power for more typical uses. Each buyer spends for what they truly need, rather than being locked in to a large, massively expensive tower that is engineered for any user who who needs any type of expansion.
A company like Apple can continue to produce a Mac Pro for those that truly need it, but something like a mini (or iMac) with Thunderbolt expansion modules can satisfy the needs of everyone else. There's no reason to be bound by the way things have always been done - better to create well-engineered, well-integrated products that satisfy the needs of the vast majority of the market, with external modules for those that need them.
This made me think of a stackable component Mac mini design I saw several years ago. Can't remember if it was here or somewhere else. You buy what you need or want, you only have to live with the size you really use instead of having a really big case and it all matches.
This made me think of a stackable component Mac mini design I saw several years ago. Can't remember if it was here or somewhere else. You buy what you need or want, you only have to live with the size you really use instead of having a really big case and it all matches.
Yes, exactly - something like this was done for the previous generation of minis, with external hard drive cases that had the same footprint as the mini, and also served as USB and FireWire hubs. Of course, given the connection options at the time, this was only useful for storage, but with two bi-directional 10Gbps channels on each Thunderbolt port, other possibilities are opened up.