They aren't going to premium charge this for the aesthetic design changes, they are going to premium charge this because it's a premium piece of hardware.
Well it certainly is in the configuration that Apple has detailed. However the rank and file can hold out for a less than premium model. I can easily see this frame offering up a more mainstream machine.
I mean just take a look at the hardware and try to price out some of these components.
Actually it isn't that easy to do. FirePro covers a wide range of Hardware. This might be a machine with $500 GPUs or one with $2000 GPUs. Unlike we understand what Apples "range" of machines look like we can only gues at the price range. However I still firmly beleive that they need a machine that comes in under the entry price of the current Mac Pro. More than anything the Mac Pro line needs a sound entry point.
I bought a Mac Pro 5 years ago and it was almost $3000 and that was for a very much low end model. I figure the starting price on this is going to be in the same $3000 neighborhood and that's not going to have anything to do with the aesthetics.
This thing is going to be blow your pants off fast though!!!
Apple needs a model that comes in under $2000 for an entry level machine.
The two video cards are the same because it's cheaper to manufacture identical cards and then solder the PCIe slot onto one of them. There is only one slot, Apple made that clear. They also made it clear that there is NO internal expansion.
They may very well change their minds on that one. At least for the SSD slot.
Then they insinuated that the problem is not with their hardware, but with Mac users.
With every technological advance a few Luddites try to ruin it for everybody.
Your BTO ideas are awesome, but I'm afraid Apple will never execute them.
I don't know about that. Apple has been very responsive to customers. I could see three or so variants of the "Tube" to cover a wide array of professional users.
Still, we can dream. It's not like we haven't gotten plenty of practice dreaming about an xMac since around 2001.
Dream we can.
Interestingly this comes close to what an XMac could be, plug in a 55-85 watt desktop processor and a couple of 75 watt GPUs and you have the basic idea down. Actually one 75 watt GPU would be pretty good considering most desktop processors these days have their own GPU. Built that way this machine would have been very close capability wise to what I imagined an XMac should be. The goal for XMac was or is a half decent GPU coupled with a good desktop grade processor which this chassis could easily support.
If you take the released materials at face value this isn't in Apple release plans. I could see them scraping the current Mini for a machine built in this platform concept. Shrink the height of the machine and lighten the heat sink for mobile chips or low end desktop chips and Bingo a new Mini.
What's the point of getting this over priced macbook when it will have terrible specs? I would rather save up my money and upgrade my gaming computer.
Well, if all you are doing is gaming, then maybe all you need is a gaming computer. Then keep your gaming computer. This would actually make a great gaming computer if you think about it. Ability to drive 3 4K monitors and you don't have to have some big bulky tower. What's so terrible about the specs?
Our existing Pro has a slot into which we can drop an upgraded video card. We never have. We bought the best the machine could support at the time and have never changed it.
We already have an external Blu-Ray drive (for the two or three times a year we use it) so that's not an issue.
Thunderbolt pretty much solves the last of the cases we had for slots. The Blackmagic Design cards we use for HD-SDI I/O are now available in Thunderbolt versions, as is our Pro Tools controller. There may be a brief awkward period as manufacturers migrate from cards to outboard devices, but it's clear that's the direction things are going.
Storage is via outboard RAID, so lots of slot for conventional drives are no longer necessary. Besides, this thing completely dumps SATA in favor of a storage system that links directly to the PCIe bus. That's why it's so freakin' fast.
The design does LOOK goofy, but it allows for the most ingenious cooling system ever. It's hard to argue just because it ain't pretty.
If an old fart like me can adapt, or more accurately recognize the way the industry is going, you can too!
The old one had two CPUs so 130W went to one of them. You can't put two of these FirePros in a 2012 Mac Pro. The Dell Precision has a 1300W PSU.
Given that folks run dual GTX 680 by adding a small secondary internal PSU simply upping the current CPU by a little doesn't strike me as a significant change for Apple to make in the update.
Seriously, if a random guy can make this work then it's just not a hard problem to move to a 1300W PSU.
Quote:
The space saving is quite dramatic. I don't think they quite got that across in the presentation:
Yes, it is. That's why I think of it as a Mac Mini Pro.
Quote:
It could have been built faster but it wouldn't be if it had the same restrictions the design has had for the last 10 years.
Thus far you have PSU as the only restriction and that's a very easy upgrade for Apple to make given the form factor. Seriously it's just a PSU and you don't know that the two GPUs are 275W devices in the new Pro.
Quote:
Also, when you say 'more expandable', you mean you could use 3 devices at a time instead of 36. I'd say 36 is more than 3. The slots are faster but I haven't seen any real world scenarios where it's a measured problem.
As in more expandable I mean 2 x16 PCIe 3.0 and 2 x4 PCIe 3.0 slots and 2 x2.5 TB2 ports vs 2 dedicated x16 GPUs and 6 x2.5 ports. Hell yes that's a lot more expandable.
Given that there are 16 bay expansion chassis for PCI 2.0 x8 slots you can have 32 from the two PCI 3.0 x4 slots and still have another 12 from the TB2 ports for 44. That's with both x16 slots occupied by GPUs.
If I only needed one GPU then I could have 48 expansion chassis slots + 12 TB2 device chain for a total of 60. I'd say that both 44 and 60 are bigger than 36.
What? You think PCI expansion chassis only existed after Thunderbolt was introduced?
Even if you believe that the two GPUs are running as x8 cards the classic Mac Pro is STILL more expandable. Two x8 GPU slots + Two x4 slots = 24 lanes leaving you 16 for TB2 ports. At 2.5 lanes each that's 6 ports at 20 Gbps plus 1 lane spare.
It depends upon the Fire Pro card. It is hard to tell exactly what FirePro Apple will be using, but it is likely to be between 200 and 300 watts per card. I wouldn't be surprised to find Apple using unreleased chips. If fact I don't think it is much of stretch to say that Apple and AMD may very well have a custom version of the FirePro to support the faster TB ports. In any event a budget of 750 watts for the processors isn't unreasonable add in another 100 watts or so for the rest of the machine and you have ballpark figure for the system powersupply. This is a substantial machine.
Looking at the pictures I'm wondering where this 850W PSU is located.
Given the specs probably around 500W total with two W9000 tuned for power consumption vs raw speed.
Well it certainly is in the configuration that Apple has detailed. However the rank and file can hold out for a less than premium model. I can easily see this frame offering up a more mainstream machine.
Actually it isn't that easy to do. FirePro covers a wide range of Hardware. This might be a machine with $500 GPUs or one with $2000 GPUs. Unlike we understand what Apples "range" of machines look like we can only gues at the price range. However I still firmly beleive that they need a machine that comes in under the entry price of the current Mac Pro. More than anything the Mac Pro line needs a sound entry point.
Apple needs a model that comes in under $2000 for an entry level machine.
Yep. It's the same line of thinking adopted by those that think i7 is automatically cheaper than Xeon 6GB of ECC ram somehow tacks hundreds onto the price. The only truth to that would have been if they did a direct transport of the imac internals to a headless case, because of how many parts could be reused. I don't think a lot of people get which chips are labeled i7 or the array used under the Firepro label. In fact many of those are just Radeons with different drivers. I like the use of Firepros because those drivers can make a significant difference when it comes to OpenGL operations.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
They may very well change their minds on that one. At least for the SSD slot.
With every technological advance a few Luddites try to ruin it for everybody.
I wouldn't personally call myself a luddite, but I would have liked to see them make better used of already available connections, whether via arrays of PCI based storage like your concept or a bunch of 2.5" drives. You need backups either way, so it's not possible to alleviate all extra boxes. I definitely prefer to minimize them when it's possible. The same thing went for the imac. Poor display experiences and lack of hard drive access put me off it. I think they could do better rather than try to childproof every computing experience. The focus on simplicity gets to the point of being too restrictive at times.
Quote:
Actually one 75 watt GPU would be pretty good considering most desktop processors these days have their own GPU.
Intel tends to include the cheaper configurations in desktop gpus for cost effectiveness reasons. It's obvious that the use of integrated graphics remains for budget reasons there. For something focused on computation, one of their better variants would be a good thing.
Well it certainly is in the configuration that Apple has detailed. However the rank and file can hold out for a less than premium model. I can easily see this frame offering up a more mainstream machine.
Actually it isn't that easy to do. FirePro covers a wide range of Hardware. This might be a machine with $500 GPUs or one with $2000 GPUs. Unlike we understand what Apples "range" of machines look like we can only gues at the price range. However I still firmly beleive that they need a machine that comes in under the entry price of the current Mac Pro. More than anything the Mac Pro line needs a sound entry point.
Apple needs a model that comes in under $2000 for an entry level machine.
I'd love for a model to come under $2000. That would make a reasonable UK price.
The new Mac Pro is revolutionary. Design? Phenomenal.
Stunning.
Drop dead Gorgeous.
'Can't innovate anymore my ass' knock it out it out the park.
The Pro never looked this good or was this powerful.
CPU up.
Platform redefining Dual GPUs moving to the future of computation. (If you'd have offered me an Amiga in the old days with x2 co-processors like the ATI FIRE GLs I'd have torn your arms off...)
Blistering SSD PCIe speed at 1.25 size?!??!?
Memory boost.
...and to top it off...Thunderbird 2? Pegasus Raid on steroids? Here it comes....
Nerd-gasm.
Wow. Blown away.
Jaw dropping.
And it's about the size of the old Cube give or take?
It needs a prosumer config' priced around £1295-1495.
8 gigs of ram. SSD. i7. Nvidia 7xx card.
Home run Apple.
Start your lobbying of Apple right now if you want that machine.
Lemon Bon Bon.
At last someone is listening. This design has the potential to answer the needs of most Mac users, provided Apple decides to offer low end configurations. I said it here, you gave a nice example. The question still stands though: what Apple will finally do?
It needs a prosumer config' priced around £1295-1495.
8 gigs of ram. SSD. i7. Nvidia 7xx card.
Home run Apple.
Start your lobbying of Apple right now if you want that machine.
Lemon Bon Bon.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PB
At last someone is listening. This design has the potential to answer the needs of most Mac users, provided Apple decides to offer low end configurations. I said it here, you gave a nice example. The question still stands though: what Apple will finally do?
This chassis could be both the Mac Pro AND the mythical xMac…
I definitely missed that post.
Anyway, I am not going to ask rights of intellectual property about it. The thing speaks by itself. It is just the fact that the name Mac Pro attracts all kinds of pro's, each one with his arguments and heat, and all forget to think about the obvious.
I'm a proud iMac owner (and a spiritual Power Mac, sorry, 'Mac Pro' owner...having had one of the 'Mac Clones' back in the 'Clone Wars...' back in '97...says in a Vet grizzled voice...)
However, you could make the argument (it won't happen) for Apple to bin the Mac Mini, iMac and just scale the innards of this revolutionary desktop.
Pick your i5-i7-Xeon.
Pick your Ram.
Pick your GPU.
Pick your SSD.
Done.
BTO would never have been so much fun!
That way, Apple would have just one desktop (how's that for consolidation...) and 1 monitor. Scale of economies.
In reality. Not so much. This is Apple.
The Mini, iMac and now preview Mac Pro have their identifiable markets by the badge of their design and what specs they include. The iMac being the most mainstream of the three, perhaps. (At least as sales go.)
They're all workstations by any previous definition. Gone are the days when you NEED a 'Pro' to do photo, music, video work.
It's all about the level of how much computation each 'Pro' needs.
And the new 'Pro' provides that in spades.
It does say 'upto' so presumably the base model will come in at £2045 if the current 'Pro' pricing is anything to go by. I think this would be a mistake though...
Time to take this into the car park and price it much lower. Lop £500, at least off the starting price. Just take the monitor price off the top end config' iMac and you have your X-Mac right there.
Comments
Interestingly this comes close to what an XMac could be, plug in a 55-85 watt desktop processor and a couple of 75 watt GPUs and you have the basic idea down. Actually one 75 watt GPU would be pretty good considering most desktop processors these days have their own GPU. Built that way this machine would have been very close capability wise to what I imagined an XMac should be. The goal for XMac was or is a half decent GPU coupled with a good desktop grade processor which this chassis could easily support.
If you take the released materials at face value this isn't in Apple release plans. I could see them scraping the current Mini for a machine built in this platform concept. Shrink the height of the machine and lighten the heat sink for mobile chips or low end desktop chips and Bingo a new Mini.
Quote:
Originally Posted by John Oi
What's the point of getting this over priced macbook when it will have terrible specs? I would rather save up my money and upgrade my gaming computer.
Well, if all you are doing is gaming, then maybe all you need is a gaming computer. Then keep your gaming computer. This would actually make a great gaming computer if you think about it. Ability to drive 3 4K monitors and you don't have to have some big bulky tower. What's so terrible about the specs?
Quote:
Originally Posted by v5v
I used to think that way too, but not anymore.
Our existing Pro has a slot into which we can drop an upgraded video card. We never have. We bought the best the machine could support at the time and have never changed it.
We already have an external Blu-Ray drive (for the two or three times a year we use it) so that's not an issue.
Thunderbolt pretty much solves the last of the cases we had for slots. The Blackmagic Design cards we use for HD-SDI I/O are now available in Thunderbolt versions, as is our Pro Tools controller. There may be a brief awkward period as manufacturers migrate from cards to outboard devices, but it's clear that's the direction things are going.
Storage is via outboard RAID, so lots of slot for conventional drives are no longer necessary. Besides, this thing completely dumps SATA in favor of a storage system that links directly to the PCIe bus. That's why it's so freakin' fast.
The design does LOOK goofy, but it allows for the most ingenious cooling system ever. It's hard to argue just because it ain't pretty.
If an old fart like me can adapt, or more accurately recognize the way the industry is going, you can too!
a pro speaks. thank you.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
The old one had two CPUs so 130W went to one of them. You can't put two of these FirePros in a 2012 Mac Pro. The Dell Precision has a 1300W PSU.
Given that folks run dual GTX 680 by adding a small secondary internal PSU simply upping the current CPU by a little doesn't strike me as a significant change for Apple to make in the update.
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1520765&page=2
Seriously, if a random guy can make this work then it's just not a hard problem to move to a 1300W PSU.
Quote:
The space saving is quite dramatic. I don't think they quite got that across in the presentation:
Yes, it is. That's why I think of it as a Mac Mini Pro.
Quote:
It could have been built faster but it wouldn't be if it had the same restrictions the design has had for the last 10 years.
Thus far you have PSU as the only restriction and that's a very easy upgrade for Apple to make given the form factor. Seriously it's just a PSU and you don't know that the two GPUs are 275W devices in the new Pro.
Quote:
Also, when you say 'more expandable', you mean you could use 3 devices at a time instead of 36. I'd say 36 is more than 3. The slots are faster but I haven't seen any real world scenarios where it's a measured problem.
As in more expandable I mean 2 x16 PCIe 3.0 and 2 x4 PCIe 3.0 slots and 2 x2.5 TB2 ports vs 2 dedicated x16 GPUs and 6 x2.5 ports. Hell yes that's a lot more expandable.
Given that there are 16 bay expansion chassis for PCI 2.0 x8 slots you can have 32 from the two PCI 3.0 x4 slots and still have another 12 from the TB2 ports for 44. That's with both x16 slots occupied by GPUs.
If I only needed one GPU then I could have 48 expansion chassis slots + 12 TB2 device chain for a total of 60. I'd say that both 44 and 60 are bigger than 36.
What? You think PCI expansion chassis only existed after Thunderbolt was introduced?
Even if you believe that the two GPUs are running as x8 cards the classic Mac Pro is STILL more expandable. Two x8 GPU slots + Two x4 slots = 24 lanes leaving you 16 for TB2 ports. At 2.5 lanes each that's 6 ports at 20 Gbps plus 1 lane spare.
Quote:
Originally Posted by John Oi
What's the point of getting this over priced macbook when it will have terrible specs? I would rather save up my money and upgrade my gaming computer.
troll alert! oops, sorry, that was like a movie spoiler wasn't it, even the obvious part. darn.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
It depends upon the Fire Pro card. It is hard to tell exactly what FirePro Apple will be using, but it is likely to be between 200 and 300 watts per card. I wouldn't be surprised to find Apple using unreleased chips. If fact I don't think it is much of stretch to say that Apple and AMD may very well have a custom version of the FirePro to support the faster TB ports. In any event a budget of 750 watts for the processors isn't unreasonable add in another 100 watts or so for the rest of the machine and you have ballpark figure for the system powersupply. This is a substantial machine.
Looking at the pictures I'm wondering where this 850W PSU is located.
Given the specs probably around 500W total with two W9000 tuned for power consumption vs raw speed.
I think they are. 1.3GB/s
My PCIe SSD is 240GB in size. But the card actually has 2 sticks of 120GB each, and their in RAID0, making it 800MB/s or something.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
Well it certainly is in the configuration that Apple has detailed. However the rank and file can hold out for a less than premium model. I can easily see this frame offering up a more mainstream machine.
Actually it isn't that easy to do. FirePro covers a wide range of Hardware. This might be a machine with $500 GPUs or one with $2000 GPUs. Unlike we understand what Apples "range" of machines look like we can only gues at the price range. However I still firmly beleive that they need a machine that comes in under the entry price of the current Mac Pro. More than anything the Mac Pro line needs a sound entry point.
Apple needs a model that comes in under $2000 for an entry level machine.
Yep. It's the same line of thinking adopted by those that think i7 is automatically cheaper than Xeon 6GB of ECC ram somehow tacks hundreds onto the price. The only truth to that would have been if they did a direct transport of the imac internals to a headless case, because of how many parts could be reused. I don't think a lot of people get which chips are labeled i7 or the array used under the Firepro label. In fact many of those are just Radeons with different drivers. I like the use of Firepros because those drivers can make a significant difference when it comes to OpenGL operations.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
They may very well change their minds on that one. At least for the SSD slot.
With every technological advance a few Luddites try to ruin it for everybody.
I wouldn't personally call myself a luddite, but I would have liked to see them make better used of already available connections, whether via arrays of PCI based storage like your concept or a bunch of 2.5" drives. You need backups either way, so it's not possible to alleviate all extra boxes. I definitely prefer to minimize them when it's possible. The same thing went for the imac. Poor display experiences and lack of hard drive access put me off it. I think they could do better rather than try to childproof every computing experience. The focus on simplicity gets to the point of being too restrictive at times.
Quote:
Actually one 75 watt GPU would be pretty good considering most desktop processors these days have their own GPU.
Intel tends to include the cheaper configurations in desktop gpus for cost effectiveness reasons. It's obvious that the use of integrated graphics remains for budget reasons there. For something focused on computation, one of their better variants would be a good thing.
Quote:
Poor display
The new iMac has a fantastic display. The old one was pretty good. This new one is even better. Crystal clear. Vibrantly punchy.
Lemon Bon Bon.
Quote:
Well it certainly is in the configuration that Apple has detailed. However the rank and file can hold out for a less than premium model. I can easily see this frame offering up a more mainstream machine.
Actually it isn't that easy to do. FirePro covers a wide range of Hardware. This might be a machine with $500 GPUs or one with $2000 GPUs. Unlike we understand what Apples "range" of machines look like we can only gues at the price range. However I still firmly beleive that they need a machine that comes in under the entry price of the current Mac Pro. More than anything the Mac Pro line needs a sound entry point.
Apple needs a model that comes in under $2000 for an entry level machine.
I'd love for a model to come under $2000. That would make a reasonable UK price.
Lemon Bon Bon.
...which would just about give us an X-Mac. (The new Pro IS the mythical 'X-Mac.)
What we're talking about is...an accessibly priced version.
i7. 7XX Nvidia card. £1295-ish. (...if you take off the iMac monitor...this is about right...considering what I payed for mine...)
They'd walk out the stores.
Who knows, Wizard may even buy one...
Lemon Bon Bon.
The new Mac Pro is revolutionary. Design? Phenomenal.
Stunning.
Drop dead Gorgeous.
'Can't innovate anymore my ass' knock it out it out the park.
The Pro never looked this good or was this powerful.
CPU up.
Platform redefining Dual GPUs moving to the future of computation. (If you'd have offered me an Amiga in the old days with x2 co-processors like the ATI FIRE GLs I'd have torn your arms off...)
Blistering SSD PCIe speed at 1.25 size?!??!?
Memory boost.
...and to top it off...Thunderbird 2? Pegasus Raid on steroids? Here it comes....
Nerd-gasm.
Wow. Blown away.
Jaw dropping.
And it's about the size of the old Cube give or take?
Darth Pro has emerged.
The shadow of the 'dark side' is upon us.
Lemon Bon Bon.
The legendary 'X-Mac' has arrived.
Caveat.
It needs a prosumer config' priced around £1295-1495.
8 gigs of ram. SSD. i7. Nvidia 7xx card.
Home run Apple.
Start your lobbying of Apple right now if you want that machine.
Lemon Bon Bon.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemon Bon Bon.
The legendary 'X-Mac' has arrived.
Caveat.
It needs a prosumer config' priced around £1295-1495.
8 gigs of ram. SSD. i7. Nvidia 7xx card.
Home run Apple.
Start your lobbying of Apple right now if you want that machine.
Lemon Bon Bon.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PB
At last someone is listening. This design has the potential to answer the needs of most Mac users, provided Apple decides to offer low end configurations. I said it here, you gave a nice example. The question still stands though: what Apple will finally do?
Huh, I could swear I covered this days ago…!
http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/157958/apple-throws-out-the-rulebook-for-its-unique-next-gen-mac-pro/160#post_2343370
This chassis could be both the Mac Pro AND the mythical xMac…
Anyway, I am not going to ask rights of intellectual property about it.
I'm a proud iMac owner (and a spiritual Power Mac, sorry, 'Mac Pro' owner...having had one of the 'Mac Clones' back in the 'Clone Wars...' back in '97...says in a Vet grizzled voice...)
However, you could make the argument (it won't happen) for Apple to bin the Mac Mini, iMac and just scale the innards of this revolutionary desktop.
Pick your i5-i7-Xeon.
Pick your Ram.
Pick your GPU.
Pick your SSD.
Done.
BTO would never have been so much fun!
That way, Apple would have just one desktop (how's that for consolidation...) and 1 monitor. Scale of economies.
In reality. Not so much. This is Apple.
The Mini, iMac and now preview Mac Pro have their identifiable markets by the badge of their design and what specs they include. The iMac being the most mainstream of the three, perhaps. (At least as sales go.)
They're all workstations by any previous definition. Gone are the days when you NEED a 'Pro' to do photo, music, video work.
It's all about the level of how much computation each 'Pro' needs.
And the new 'Pro' provides that in spades.
It does say 'upto' so presumably the base model will come in at £2045 if the current 'Pro' pricing is anything to go by. I think this would be a mistake though...
Time to take this into the car park and price it much lower. Lop £500, at least off the starting price. Just take the monitor price off the top end config' iMac and you have your X-Mac right there.
Lemon Bon Bon.