I suspect a better transition would have quelled much of this as opposed to a move to pull old licenses from the store and try to push the new thing with a 1.0 version.
In suppose this is so. I suspect though that Apple thought they where working with professionals not children. Stopping support on the old FCP and saying this is the way forward would have made sense.
I have to wonder if all of these complainers had everything they needed or wanted in the forts version of FCP or even the second version.
I would agree regarding world politics, although it has gone this way for a very long time. I've begun to wonder if anyone reads about McCarthyism in their history courses. New day different boogieman.
I'm almost 54 years old and I never seen the country as bad as it is know. Probably in most respects I grew up different than many far removed from city life or even small town life by the time I got to my teens it was the mid seventies. I doubt that anybody would have approved of the drastic curtailment of freedoms we have seen in recent years back then. Sadly liberalism was indeed associated with freedom back then, today if not a nazis a liberal is just an oppressive individual take joy in tormenting others. For the voter though who do you vote for today that actually believes in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Hard question to answer especially with the corruption in the news media and the biased reporting associated with it.
Why even post this here? Because forums like this take people's minds off what has been lost.
For some people it might. I would look at it this way. If someone is going to spend $30K or so on ProTools PCI cards to stuff them, I would think that it might be better to have an expansion chassis to always keep the cards plugged in or be able to transport them elsewhere, and when the main box needs to be replaced, it's a simple unplugging process that would take literally a few seconds.
I would tend to agree however I still see the need for the internal slots, especially in cases where TB isn't app fast enough. The flip side is that many professionals posting here don't see it that way, I see their side of the argument too. In the end the number of users truly screwed buy this move is rather small part of the user base.
Same goes for the storage system. In some ways, I do think that if they bring out TB or TB2 expansion chassis for these PCI slots, get what you need and then you keep that investment.
In the long run it could work to most users advantage.
I think this box maybe priced less than a current MacPro with similar CPUS because the new one doesn't have a more powerful, expensive power supply, it does't have a TON of fans, PCI slots, cage, etc. etc. so they might be able to bring the cost down enough to afford an external TB or TB 2 based expansion chassis for PCI boards if you need it, and then an external storage system. Both of which can be used when the time comes to upgrade.
I agree! The potential is there for a drastically lower priced entry level model.
Apple has a history of replacing existing systems for the same price or even less. Only once in a while have they ever increased the price of the unit. But, as you said, we'll have to wait until we know the actual cost and configurations.
This is huge, Apple can totally screw up any potential for success here by over pricing the unit. Frankly I'm still wishing for an XMac equivalent. That is a machine with one GPU card and a desktop processor all for $1250 or so. Such a machine would shake up the PC market and almost assuredly get my money.
I also think that the days of internal PCI slots is over and Apple is just taking the bold step in letting people know that if you REALLY need PCI slots, buy an external Thunderbolt (or maybe Thunderbolt 2?) chassis
I've been told that even Thunderbolt 2 is only about one-THIRD the bandwidth of a PCIe slot, so external boxes are not really suitable for things like super-high-end graphics cards, and that even cards with lower bandwidth requirements may be a problem when you need a few of them. The six ports on the Mac Pro don't necessarily mean that there are six discrete busses, or even more than one.
I've also heard there are issues with drivers for many graphics cards. Is that a situation that's unique to placing them in an external enclosure, or is that a problem that would exist even if the Mac Pro had internal PCIe slots?
In suppose this is so. I suspect though that Apple thought they where working with professionals not children.
Y'know Wiz, I've really enjoyed this exchange but I challenge you to back away from your insulting tone towards users until you've walked a mile in their shoes. You sympathize with the developers' challenges but not those of the users, even though the latter are the ones paying the former!
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
I have to wonder if all of these complainers had everything they needed or wanted in the forts version of FCP or even the second version.
Of course not, but what relevance does that have to the discussion? FCPX is not a 1.0 product. It's version EIGHT! The product it replaced was not a first or second generation product either. It was showing signs of neglect and needed refreshing, but it was capable and mature. As such, users had a reasonable expectation that the next version would be an improvement, not a downgrade.
If the rewrite resulted in a product that took such an enormous leap backwards that it's considered to have reverted to a stage of infancy like you suggest, that's a failure on the part of the developer, yes?
Of course not, but what relevance does that have to the discussion? FCPX is not a 1.0 product. It's version EIGHT! The product it replaced was not a first or second generation product either. It was showing signs of neglect and needed refreshing, but it was capable and mature. As such, users had a reasonable expectation that the next version would be an improvement, not a downgrade.
I'm almost 54 years old and I never seen the country as bad as it is know.
People have been saying that for 237 years.
"Probably in most respects I grew up different than many far removed from city life or even small town life by the time I got to my teens it was the mid 1730s. I doubt that anybody would have approved of the drastic curtailment of freedoms we have seen in recent years back then. Sadly patriotism was indeed associated with freedom back then, today if not a ruffian a "patriot" is just an oppressive individual take joy in tormenting others. For the voter though who do you vote for today that actually believes in the Bill Of Rights (1689) and the Magna Carta. Hard question to answer especially with the corruption in the press and the biased reporting associated with it. Take that rabble rouser Thomas Paine where the Crown is to blame for everything and that fellow James Robertson who is nothing more than a Loyalist mouthpiece. Bah! Humbug! I say."
Frankly I'm still wishing for an XMac equivalent. That is a machine with one GPU card and a desktop processor all for $1250 or so. Such a machine would shake up the PC market and almost assuredly get my money.
The average unit price of PCs is under $600 - less than half Apple's average. Apple makes more profit from PCs than the next 5 PC vendors combined. I'm sure they'd convince some PC desktop owners across to the platform but they already own the premium segment because of the iMac and it would be silly of them to sell a quad-i7 with a 7970 for $1250 and just give away a display sale to Dell or HP when they can sell a quad i7 with a 780MX or Radeon and make as much as double that.
The desktop PC market cannot be shaken up. They can't do it with $600 PCs so they can't possibly do it with $1250 PCs. They said they're using Xeons and FirePros, they'd have worded it differently if there was any chance of there being desktop components. From a consumer point of view, it would be a nice option but I don't think it would do anything for Apple.
I've been told that even Thunderbolt 2 is only about one-THIRD the bandwidth of a PCIe slot, so external boxes are not really suitable for things like super-high-end graphics cards, and that even cards with lower bandwidth requirements may be a problem when you need a few of them. The six ports on the Mac Pro don't necessarily mean that there are six discrete busses, or even more than one.
I've also heard there are issues with drivers for many graphics cards. Is that a situation that's unique to placing them in an external enclosure, or is that a problem that would exist even if the Mac Pro had internal PCIe slots?
Anyone able to confirm or refute this?
PCIe slots don't all have the same bandwidth but Thunderbolt 2 is equivalent to a PCIe 2.0 x4 slot. The old Mac Pro had two x16 and two x4 with a GPU taking up the first x16.
This new Mac Pro essentially gives you six x4 instead of one x16 + two x4. It's the same overall bandwidth but distributed differently. A redesigned Mac Pro with PCIe 3 slots would have offered more bandwidth per slot but the extra bandwidth doesn't really get used in practice and if you had two GPUs, you'd be stuck with just two x4 PCIe 3, which is fine speed-wise but some people would run out if they wanted a RAID card too. Audio processing is very low bandwidth. Video is higher but much fewer streams. Thunderbolt 1 might have had some bottlenecks but they didn't really show up much in a whole variety of tests. TB2 shouldn't have any real-world problems.
Here's a Red Rocket over TB:
[VIDEO]
1/2 res playback of 5K with real-time export. In workstations, it's the same performance:
"WITHOUT A REDROCKET: I can edit a 5K project without a REDrocket on CS5.5 in realtime by playing footage back between 1/8 or 1/16 resolution and take maybe 45 minutes to export a 3 minute video
WITH A REDROCKET: I can edit with a REDrocket on CS5.5 in realtime by playing footage back at 1/2 resolution and take about 3 minutes to export a 3 minute video."
One of them runs fine over TB1, so two should be ok in a TB2 chassis.
Running GPUs isn't ideal over TB but shouldn't be necessary with two high-end GPUs internally anyway. With the right drivers, TB2 bandwidth would be enough.
Y'know Wiz, I've really enjoyed this exchange but I challenge you to back away from your insulting tone towards users until you've walked a mile in their shoes.
That's the best way to do it because you're a mile away and you have their shoes so what's the worst they can do?
"1. PCI is a bus, whereas PCI Express is a point-to-point connection, i.e. it connects only two devices; no other device can share this connection. Just to clarify, on a motherboard using standard PCI slots, all PCI devices are connected to the PCI bus and share the same data path, so a bottleneck (i.e., performance decrease because more than one device wants to transmit data at the same time) may occur. On a motherboard with PCI Express slots, each PCI Express slot is connected to the motherboard chipset using a dedicated lane, not sharing this lane (data path) with other PCI Express slots. Also, devices integrated on the motherboard, such as network, SATA, and USB controllers, are usually connected to the motherboard chipset using dedicated PCI Express connections."
Every one of the 6 Thunderbolt ports should be able to sustain PCIe 2 x4 speed regardless of what any other device is doing. The only bottlenecking that would occur is while daisy-chaining.
I've been told that even Thunderbolt 2 is only about one-THIRD the bandwidth of a PCIe slot, so external boxes are not really suitable for things like super-high-end graphics cards, and that even cards with lower bandwidth requirements may be a problem when you need a few of them. The six ports on the Mac Pro don't necessarily mean that there are six discrete busses, or even more than one.
Actually it is far worst than that. TB is rated at 20Gbps that is Giga BITs per second. PCI Express however delivers about 985 MBps per lane, that is BYTES per lane. Most PCI Express supporting machines usually have at least one card slot supporting sixteen lanes. So you can see it is far worst than it might first seem, TB is about two lanes worth of PCI Express.
I've also heard there are issues with drivers for many graphics cards. Is that a situation that's unique to placing them in an external enclosure, or is that a problem that would exist even if the Mac Pro had internal PCIe slots?
Drivers are always an issue, most cards won't run without drivers, anywhere. As to specifics the only way to get a straight answer would be to ask the cards manufacture after the Mac Pro ships.
Anyone able to confirm or refute this?
Wikipedia has an excellent intro to PCI Express.
It should be noted though that few cards saturate a sixteen lane PCI Express slot. However many cards will be performance constrained in a 4 lane implementation.
As to external GPU cards that idea was nuts when it was first offered, up when TB first came out and it is still nuts. Think about why Apple offers up this new Mac Pro with the GPU card built in. They gave those fast PCI Express lanes to the hardware that needs the performance the most.
Now the flip side; do these Max rates make that much difference for many Mac Pro usages? I'd say no because you don't even need 20GBps for many DAW station usages for example.
As to the Mac Pro implementation. The rumor is that the six TB ports are implemented with 3 controller chips, if true this is a good thing and should mean that we will see very good through put on many of the ports at the same time. In the end it looks like Apple has done a very good implementation in this rev one Mac Pro. Well it is good if you can tolerate having no PCI Express slots. In effect the new Mac Pro brings the same frustrations any other technology transition has offered up. Like dropping SCSI and other hardware ports over the years people will get over it.
Y'know Wiz, I've really enjoyed this exchange but I challenge you to back away from your insulting tone towards users until you've walked a mile in their shoes. You sympathize with the developers' challenges but not those of the users, even though the latter are the ones paying the former!
If you take what I say as insulting then that is really your problem not mine. I'm just calling it like I see it.
As to sympathies, I completely up understand the issues here. At the place I work we have just transitioned to some new metrology hardware simply because the vendor of the original hardware no longer wants to support the old machines. Part of that is directly due to an old AT style I/O card. We are talking huge bucks here for the machines plus huge dollars for validation and training. Probably more than $80,000 per machine spread across several machines.
So I really do get this from the users standpoint. Moving to new technologies can be costly. The problem is you simply can't expect your vendors to support hardware from technologies dark ages forever. Think about it, if your where still using an Apple 2 to run a process or do critical work within a process would you still expect to be able to buy hardware for that machine if and when needed?
Now obviously PCI Express is a different story here as there is a certain mass of hardware within the industry that will be around for a long time. Apple could build hardware to support the past but then their ability to innovate goes out the Window.
Of course not, but what relevance does that have to the discussion? FCPX is not a 1.0 product.
Sure it is, it is a complete rewrite that readiness the concept a bit.
It's version EIGHT! The product it replaced was not a first or second generation product either. It was showing signs of neglect and needed refreshing, but it was capable and mature. As such, users had a reasonable expectation that the next version would be an improvement, not a downgrade.
Downgrade? That is an opinion not a fact. Many users adapted to FCPx right out of the box on the first day seeing it as an improvement.
If the rewrite resulted in a product that took such an enormous leap backwards that it's considered to have reverted to a stage of infancy like you suggest, that's a failure on the part of the developer, yes?
There isn't much I can do or say here that will alter your very negative outlook with respect to FCPx. You see it as a step backwards while many see it as a step forward. I suspect it is the people using it as a productive tool that are right here. Jumping on a mass hysteria bandwagon is never the smart thing to do.
"Probably in most respects I grew up different than many far removed from city life or even small town life by the time I got to my teens it was the mid 1730s. I doubt that anybody would have approved of the drastic curtailment of freedoms we have seen in recent years back then. Sadly patriotism was indeed associated with freedom back then, today if not a ruffian a "patriot" is just an oppressive individual take joy in tormenting others. For the voter though who do you vote for today that actually believes in the Bill Of Rights (1689) and the Magna Carta. Hard question to answer especially with the corruption in the press and the biased reporting associated with it. Take that rabble rouser Thomas Paine where the Crown is to blame for everything and that fellow James Robertson who is nothing more than a Loyalist mouthpiece. Bah! Humbug! I say."
I'm not to happy with current world politics and one reason is just this, everything get overblown in their minds justifying things like the NSA spying. In any event I have to agree.
PCIe slots don't all have the same bandwidth but Thunderbolt 2 is equivalent to a PCIe 2.0 x4 slot. The old Mac Pro had two x16 and two x4 with a GPU taking up the first x16.
This new Mac Pro essentially gives you six x4 instead of one x16 + two x4. It's the same overall bandwidth but distributed differently. A redesigned Mac Pro with PCIe 3 slots would have offered more bandwidth per slot but the extra bandwidth doesn't really get used in practice and if you had two GPUs, you'd be stuck with just two x4 PCIe 3, which is fine speed-wise but some people would run out if they wanted a RAID card too. Audio processing is very low bandwidth. Video is higher but much fewer streams. Thunderbolt 1 might have had some bottlenecks but they didn't really show up much in a whole variety of tests. TB2 shouldn't have any real-world problems.
So what you're saying is that we're getting a PCI slot 'upgrade' in practice. Sure, they're not as fast, technically as PCIe 3? ...but you get a practical upgrade because we're not dealing with only theoretical bottlenecks? eg you have the 'two' gpus taking up what would have been the '16' lane PCI slots. (which is what you would have had anyway in the old design...except that Apple never offered SLI and there was no chance they were ever going to do that...many said...Apple doesn't do 'SLI', right? Apple doesn't even do decent GPUs on their old Pro design shipping with crap gpus as standard but with the new one...oh wait...2 gpus and wow Pro-GPU-ness...) Plus you get 6 external '4' lane slots. In practice, it's more. All external. Add them. Don't add them. At least 80% of buyers won't be sitting with a big ass empty case with no 'kit' taking up the PCI slots... Plus...With the vram on the Ati cards you can run 3x 4k monitors. Want storage? Take it outside, boys...
This sounds like an improvement. Plus. You can keep your external investments if the time comes to get rid of the Mac Pro and buy a 'new' one from Apple. And let's face it. Apple have always wanted you to buy a 'new' machine anyhow. *looks at their computer line up. The new Pro is just the final seal on that. (It's not like we had a vast GPU market for the Pro anyhow. It failed to take off even when Steve and McCarmack were hangin' back in the Blue and White G3 tower days...)
Anyway. Well reasoned post, Marvin.
And there is another link I thought you may like. This time a very interesting interview with OCW boss (I think...)
The average unit price of PCs is under $600 - less than half Apple's average. Apple makes more profit from PCs than the next 5 PC vendors combined. I'm sure they'd convince some PC desktop owners across to the platform but they already own the premium segment because of the iMac and it would be silly of them to sell a quad-i7 with a 7970 for $1250 and just give away a display sale to Dell or HP when they can sell a quad i7 with a 780MX or Radeon and make as much as double that.
You always come back with this idea that they give away something by offering a headless PC. Yet Apple already offers the Mini and the Mac Pro. I really don't see a valid argument here.
The desktop PC market cannot be shaken up. They can't do it with $600 PCs so they can't possibly do it with $1250 PCs. They said they're using Xeons and FirePros, they'd have worded it differently if there was any chance of there being desktop components. From a consumer point of view, it would be a nice option but I don't think it would do anything for Apple.
I'd be the first to admit that such a machine is a wish! As for shaking up the PC market I think Apple has been doing so for the last three years with the iPad. It has successfully sold the iPad while maintaining strong PC sales.
In any event a so called XMac on the same chassis as this Mac Pro to me would offer enough extra sales to bring a bit of stability to the product line. As nice as this new Mac Pro is, I don't see it providing a huge sales boost relative to the old machine at Apples traditional prices. At least not after early adopter sales are done. Considering things like the Airs and some other Apple products there is some hope that the entry level model will come in at a rational price point. That entry Level Mac Pro though still won't be priced in XMac territory.
PCIe slots don't all have the same bandwidth but Thunderbolt 2 is equivalent to a PCIe 2.0 x4 slot. The old Mac Pro had two x16 and two x4 with a GPU taking up the first x16.
This new Mac Pro essentially gives you six x4 instead of one x16 + two x4. It's the same overall bandwidth but distributed differently. A redesigned Mac Pro with PCIe 3 slots would have offered more bandwidth per slot but the extra bandwidth doesn't really get used in practice and if you had two GPUs, you'd be stuck with just two x4 PCIe 3, which is fine speed-wise but some people would run out if they wanted a RAID card too. Audio processing is very low bandwidth. Video is higher but much fewer streams. Thunderbolt 1 might have had some bottlenecks but they didn't really show up much in a whole variety of tests. TB2 shouldn't have any real-world problems.
It is important for people to realize that the two cards that most likely would need a lot of bandwidth are already in the Mac Pro. This takes care of the vast majority of user needs. It does suck though for those users that do have cards that go beyond the bandwidth offered by greater than x4 slots.
Here's a Red Rocket over TB:
1/2 res playback of 5K with real-time export. In workstations, it's the same performance:
"WITHOUT A REDROCKET: I can edit a 5K project without a REDrocket on CS5.5 in realtime by playing footage back between 1/8 or 1/16 resolution and take maybe 45 minutes to export a 3 minute video
WITH A REDROCKET: I can edit with a REDrocket on CS5.5 in realtime by playing footage back at 1/2 resolution and take about 3 minutes to export a 3 minute video."
It will be very interesting to see if Red Rocket cards are even needed in a year or two. I wonder what they will be able to accomplish with GPU compute on this Mac.
One of them runs fine over TB1, so two should be ok in a TB2 chassis.
Running GPUs isn't ideal over TB but shouldn't be necessary with two high-end GPUs internally anyway. With the right drivers, TB2 bandwidth would be enough.
That's the best way to do it because you're a mile away and you have their shoes so what's the worst they can do?
The 6 ports have 3 controllers but bandwidth contention isn't an issue here. This page explains some differences:
"1. PCI is a bus, whereas PCI Express is a point-to-point connection, i.e. it connects only two devices; no other device can share this connection. Just to clarify, on a motherboard using standard PCI slots, all PCI devices are connected to the PCI bus and share the same data path, so a bottleneck (i.e., performance decrease because more than one device wants to transmit data at the same time) may occur. On a motherboard with PCI Express slots, each PCI Express slot is connected to the motherboard chipset using a dedicated lane, not sharing this lane (data path) with other PCI Express slots. Also, devices integrated on the motherboard, such as network, SATA, and USB controllers, are usually connected to the motherboard chipset using dedicated PCI Express connections."
Every one of the 6 Thunderbolt ports should be able to sustain PCIe 2 x4 speed regardless of what any other device is doing. The only bottlenecking that would occur is while daisy-chaining.
I'm not certain this is true. That is I was under the impression that the two ports on one controller could see contention. Maybe not - I forgot where I read that so confusion is a possibility.
Even if I'm right the bandwidth available externally with this machine is pretty impressive. Many <actually most> users will never have a problem with external bandwidth. It might take awhile for the right devices to become available but that shouldn't surprise anybody. It shouldn't but I can see lots of whining one day after the Mac Pro goes on sale asking where are the TB2 devices.
Sadly if you look back through history the shadow of darkness surrounds us. The people in power seldom suffer from their policies. Police states seldom happen all at once.
Yep, 6 ports, but on two busses. Phil said so during the keynote.
Interesting because I heard six ports on three busses. In other words two port share a common TB chip.
I was wrong, Phil said 3 controllers. Though incorrectly naming them FireWire, but he, it was an exciting moment. Clock in at 59'00'' (1080p version, not that this would matter)
Walked into a gallery down my street this week, and I'm not the only one waiting for the new Mac Pro (though my 5.1 is still going through everything "like butter" (oh how I miss him) but I digress.
So what you're saying is that we're getting a PCI slot 'upgrade' in practice. Sure, they're not as fast, technically as PCIe 3? ...but you get a practical upgrade because we're not dealing with only theoretical bottlenecks? eg you have the 'two' gpus taking up what would have been the '16' lane PCI slots. (which is what you would have had anyway in the old design...except that Apple never offered SLI and there was no chance they were ever going to do that...many said...Apple doesn't do 'SLI', right? Apple doesn't even do decent GPUs on their old Pro design shipping with crap gpus as standard but with the new one...oh wait...2 gpus and wow Pro-GPU-ness...) Plus you get 6 external '4' lane slots. In practice, it's more. All external. Add them. Don't add them. At least 80% of buyers won't be sitting with a big ass empty case with no 'kit' taking up the PCI slots... Plus...With the vram on the Ati cards you can run 3x 4k monitors. Want storage? Take it outside, boys...
For most users this will be an upgrade. Well it will be if they accept the transition to TB.
This sounds like an improvement. Plus. You can keep your external investments if the time comes to get rid of the Mac Pro and buy a 'new' one from Apple. And let's face it. Apple have always wanted you to buy a 'new' machine anyhow. *looks at their computer line up. The new Pro is just the final seal on that. (It's not like we had a vast GPU market for the Pro anyhow. It failed to take off even when Steve and McCarmack were hangin' back in the Blue and White G3 tower days...)
I do think people underestimate the value or importance of being able to plug in and go.
Anyway. Well reasoned post, Marvin.
And there is another link I thought you may like. This time a very interesting interview with OCW boss (I think...)
O'Connor has some good points. For example the industry seemingly has glossed over that the new Airs have PCI Express based SSDs in them. This is very significant as they have put high performance in an entry level model that is priced reasonably. Effectively Apple has made SATA a dead technology.
As for the Mac Pro I think some of his points are valid. One interesting comment was that sales are around 50,000 per quarter, that is actually better than I thought. I was thinking sales might be around 100,000 a year so that is twice as much.
What I found perplexing is that he expects sales to go up along with price. I don't see this as. A successful strategy at all as I honestly believe that sales suck due to high pricing for what you get in a Mac Pro. Apple really needs an entry level model that comes in around the $2000 mark for a machine that doesn't suck. If Apple can't do this then I see a sales explosion for a quarter or two as pent up demand is handled and then a roll off of sales to the point that sales are wort than the current model.
He also hits on what a surprise the new Mac Pro is. This is certainly throwing a lot of people, especially those set in the old ways of doing things. Personally I believe Apple has the right concept here but it may take awhile for people to come around.
The one thing that bothers me with this machine is that apparently they have decided to leave off the extra SSD socket on one of the GPU cards. I have to wonder why. Is it management being stupid or did they run out of PCI Express lanes? I ask because that would be the perfect place for a PCI Express based scratch "disk". Such an option would significantly enhance the machine for many users.
Comments
I have to wonder if all of these complainers had everything they needed or wanted in the forts version of FCP or even the second version.
I'm almost 54 years old and I never seen the country as bad as it is know. Probably in most respects I grew up different than many far removed from city life or even small town life by the time I got to my teens it was the mid seventies. I doubt that anybody would have approved of the drastic curtailment of freedoms we have seen in recent years back then. Sadly liberalism was indeed associated with freedom back then, today if not a nazis a liberal is just an oppressive individual take joy in tormenting others. For the voter though who do you vote for today that actually believes in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Hard question to answer especially with the corruption in the news media and the biased reporting associated with it.
Why even post this here? Because forums like this take people's minds off what has been lost.
This is huge, Apple can totally screw up any potential for success here by over pricing the unit. Frankly I'm still wishing for an XMac equivalent. That is a machine with one GPU card and a desktop processor all for $1250 or so. Such a machine would shake up the PC market and almost assuredly get my money.
Quote:
Originally Posted by drblank
I also think that the days of internal PCI slots is over and Apple is just taking the bold step in letting people know that if you REALLY need PCI slots, buy an external Thunderbolt (or maybe Thunderbolt 2?) chassis
I've been told that even Thunderbolt 2 is only about one-THIRD the bandwidth of a PCIe slot, so external boxes are not really suitable for things like super-high-end graphics cards, and that even cards with lower bandwidth requirements may be a problem when you need a few of them. The six ports on the Mac Pro don't necessarily mean that there are six discrete busses, or even more than one.
I've also heard there are issues with drivers for many graphics cards. Is that a situation that's unique to placing them in an external enclosure, or is that a problem that would exist even if the Mac Pro had internal PCIe slots?
Anyone able to confirm or refute this?
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
In suppose this is so. I suspect though that Apple thought they where working with professionals not children.
Y'know Wiz, I've really enjoyed this exchange but I challenge you to back away from your insulting tone towards users until you've walked a mile in their shoes. You sympathize with the developers' challenges but not those of the users, even though the latter are the ones paying the former!
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
I have to wonder if all of these complainers had everything they needed or wanted in the forts version of FCP or even the second version.
Of course not, but what relevance does that have to the discussion? FCPX is not a 1.0 product. It's version EIGHT! The product it replaced was not a first or second generation product either. It was showing signs of neglect and needed refreshing, but it was capable and mature. As such, users had a reasonable expectation that the next version would be an improvement, not a downgrade.
If the rewrite resulted in a product that took such an enormous leap backwards that it's considered to have reverted to a stage of infancy like you suggest, that's a failure on the part of the developer, yes?
Quote:
Originally Posted by v5v
Of course not, but what relevance does that have to the discussion? FCPX is not a 1.0 product. It's version EIGHT! The product it replaced was not a first or second generation product either. It was showing signs of neglect and needed refreshing, but it was capable and mature. As such, users had a reasonable expectation that the next version would be an improvement, not a downgrade.
That's odd. My copy says version 10.0.8.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
I'm almost 54 years old and I never seen the country as bad as it is know.
People have been saying that for 237 years.
"Probably in most respects I grew up different than many far removed from city life or even small town life by the time I got to my teens it was the mid 1730s. I doubt that anybody would have approved of the drastic curtailment of freedoms we have seen in recent years back then. Sadly patriotism was indeed associated with freedom back then, today if not a ruffian a "patriot" is just an oppressive individual take joy in tormenting others. For the voter though who do you vote for today that actually believes in the Bill Of Rights (1689) and the Magna Carta. Hard question to answer especially with the corruption in the press and the biased reporting associated with it. Take that rabble rouser Thomas Paine where the Crown is to blame for everything and that fellow James Robertson who is nothing more than a Loyalist mouthpiece. Bah! Humbug! I say."
Yep, 6 ports, but on two busses. Phil said so during the keynote.
You can see the state of the PC market here:
http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/apples-sales-are-nothing-special-but-look-at-those-profit-margins.html/?a=viewall
The average unit price of PCs is under $600 - less than half Apple's average. Apple makes more profit from PCs than the next 5 PC vendors combined. I'm sure they'd convince some PC desktop owners across to the platform but they already own the premium segment because of the iMac and it would be silly of them to sell a quad-i7 with a 7970 for $1250 and just give away a display sale to Dell or HP when they can sell a quad i7 with a 780MX or Radeon and make as much as double that.
The desktop PC market cannot be shaken up. They can't do it with $600 PCs so they can't possibly do it with $1250 PCs. They said they're using Xeons and FirePros, they'd have worded it differently if there was any chance of there being desktop components. From a consumer point of view, it would be a nice option but I don't think it would do anything for Apple.
PCIe slots don't all have the same bandwidth but Thunderbolt 2 is equivalent to a PCIe 2.0 x4 slot. The old Mac Pro had two x16 and two x4 with a GPU taking up the first x16.
This new Mac Pro essentially gives you six x4 instead of one x16 + two x4. It's the same overall bandwidth but distributed differently. A redesigned Mac Pro with PCIe 3 slots would have offered more bandwidth per slot but the extra bandwidth doesn't really get used in practice and if you had two GPUs, you'd be stuck with just two x4 PCIe 3, which is fine speed-wise but some people would run out if they wanted a RAID card too. Audio processing is very low bandwidth. Video is higher but much fewer streams. Thunderbolt 1 might have had some bottlenecks but they didn't really show up much in a whole variety of tests. TB2 shouldn't have any real-world problems.
Here's a Red Rocket over TB:
[VIDEO]
1/2 res playback of 5K with real-time export. In workstations, it's the same performance:
http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?63827-Why-do-we-need-a-RED-Rocket-card
"WITHOUT A REDROCKET: I can edit a 5K project without a REDrocket on CS5.5 in realtime by playing footage back between 1/8 or 1/16 resolution and take maybe 45 minutes to export a 3 minute video
WITH A REDROCKET: I can edit with a REDrocket on CS5.5 in realtime by playing footage back at 1/2 resolution and take about 3 minutes to export a 3 minute video."
One of them runs fine over TB1, so two should be ok in a TB2 chassis.
Running GPUs isn't ideal over TB but shouldn't be necessary with two high-end GPUs internally anyway. With the right drivers, TB2 bandwidth would be enough.
That's the best way to do it because you're a mile away and you have their shoes so what's the worst they can do?
The 6 ports have 3 controllers but bandwidth contention isn't an issue here. This page explains some differences:
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/190
"1. PCI is a bus, whereas PCI Express is a point-to-point connection, i.e. it connects only two devices; no other device can share this connection. Just to clarify, on a motherboard using standard PCI slots, all PCI devices are connected to the PCI bus and share the same data path, so a bottleneck (i.e., performance decrease because more than one device wants to transmit data at the same time) may occur. On a motherboard with PCI Express slots, each PCI Express slot is connected to the motherboard chipset using a dedicated lane, not sharing this lane (data path) with other PCI Express slots. Also, devices integrated on the motherboard, such as network, SATA, and USB controllers, are usually connected to the motherboard chipset using dedicated PCI Express connections."
Every one of the 6 Thunderbolt ports should be able to sustain PCIe 2 x4 speed regardless of what any other device is doing. The only bottlenecking that would occur is while daisy-chaining.
Wikipedia has an excellent intro to PCI Express.
It should be noted though that few cards saturate a sixteen lane PCI Express slot. However many cards will be performance constrained in a 4 lane implementation.
As to external GPU cards that idea was nuts when it was first offered, up when TB first came out and it is still nuts. Think about why Apple offers up this new Mac Pro with the GPU card built in. They gave those fast PCI Express lanes to the hardware that needs the performance the most.
Now the flip side; do these Max rates make that much difference for many Mac Pro usages? I'd say no because you don't even need 20GBps for many DAW station usages for example.
As to the Mac Pro implementation. The rumor is that the six TB ports are implemented with 3 controller chips, if true this is a good thing and should mean that we will see very good through put on many of the ports at the same time. In the end it looks like Apple has done a very good implementation in this rev one Mac Pro. Well it is good if you can tolerate having no PCI Express slots. In effect the new Mac Pro brings the same frustrations any other technology transition has offered up. Like dropping SCSI and other hardware ports over the years people will get over it.
As to sympathies, I completely up understand the issues here. At the place I work we have just transitioned to some new metrology hardware simply because the vendor of the original hardware no longer wants to support the old machines. Part of that is directly due to an old AT style I/O card. We are talking huge bucks here for the machines plus huge dollars for validation and training. Probably more than $80,000 per machine spread across several machines.
So I really do get this from the users standpoint. Moving to new technologies can be costly. The problem is you simply can't expect your vendors to support hardware from technologies dark ages forever. Think about it, if your where still using an Apple 2 to run a process or do critical work within a process would you still expect to be able to buy hardware for that machine if and when needed?
Now obviously PCI Express is a different story here as there is a certain mass of hardware within the industry that will be around for a long time. Apple could build hardware to support the past but then their ability to innovate goes out the Window. Sure it is, it is a complete rewrite that readiness the concept a bit. Downgrade? That is an opinion not a fact. Many users adapted to FCPx right out of the box on the first day seeing it as an improvement. There isn't much I can do or say here that will alter your very negative outlook with respect to FCPx. You see it as a step backwards while many see it as a step forward. I suspect it is the people using it as a productive tool that are right here. Jumping on a mass hysteria bandwagon is never the smart thing to do.
The big difference I see these days is the general disregard all levels of government have for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Interesting because I heard six ports on three busses. In other words two port share a common TB chip.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
I'm not to happy with current world politics and one reason is just this, everything get overblown in their minds justifying things like the NSA spying. In any event I have to agree.
Lemon Bon Bon
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
Very interesting quote.
The big difference I see these days is the general disregard all levels of government have for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Amen.
A shadow of darkness surround them...
Lemon Bon Bon.
Quote:
PCIe slots don't all have the same bandwidth but Thunderbolt 2 is equivalent to a PCIe 2.0 x4 slot. The old Mac Pro had two x16 and two x4 with a GPU taking up the first x16.
This new Mac Pro essentially gives you six x4 instead of one x16 + two x4. It's the same overall bandwidth but distributed differently. A redesigned Mac Pro with PCIe 3 slots would have offered more bandwidth per slot but the extra bandwidth doesn't really get used in practice and if you had two GPUs, you'd be stuck with just two x4 PCIe 3, which is fine speed-wise but some people would run out if they wanted a RAID card too. Audio processing is very low bandwidth. Video is higher but much fewer streams. Thunderbolt 1 might have had some bottlenecks but they didn't really show up much in a whole variety of tests. TB2 shouldn't have any real-world problems.
So what you're saying is that we're getting a PCI slot 'upgrade' in practice. Sure, they're not as fast, technically as PCIe 3? ...but you get a practical upgrade because we're not dealing with only theoretical bottlenecks? eg you have the 'two' gpus taking up what would have been the '16' lane PCI slots. (which is what you would have had anyway in the old design...except that Apple never offered SLI and there was no chance they were ever going to do that...many said...Apple doesn't do 'SLI', right? Apple doesn't even do decent GPUs on their old Pro design shipping with crap gpus as standard but with the new one...oh wait...2 gpus and wow Pro-GPU-ness...) Plus you get 6 external '4' lane slots. In practice, it's more. All external. Add them. Don't add them. At least 80% of buyers won't be sitting with a big ass empty case with no 'kit' taking up the PCI slots... Plus...With the vram on the Ati cards you can run 3x 4k monitors. Want storage? Take it outside, boys...
This sounds like an improvement. Plus. You can keep your external investments if the time comes to get rid of the Mac Pro and buy a 'new' one from Apple. And let's face it. Apple have always wanted you to buy a 'new' machine anyhow. *looks at their computer line up. The new Pro is just the final seal on that. (It's not like we had a vast GPU market for the Pro anyhow. It failed to take off even when Steve and McCarmack were hangin' back in the Blue and White G3 tower days...)
Anyway. Well reasoned post, Marvin.
And there is another link I thought you may like. This time a very interesting interview with OCW boss (I think...)
See what you (and Wizard, ofc...
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/owcs-larry-oconnor-the-new-mac-pro-is-both-disappointing-exciting
Lemon Bon Bon.
In any event a so called XMac on the same chassis as this Mac Pro to me would offer enough extra sales to bring a bit of stability to the product line. As nice as this new Mac Pro is, I don't see it providing a huge sales boost relative to the old machine at Apples traditional prices. At least not after early adopter sales are done. Considering things like the Airs and some other Apple products there is some hope that the entry level model will come in at a rational price point. That entry Level Mac Pro though still won't be priced in XMac territory. It is important for people to realize that the two cards that most likely would need a lot of bandwidth are already in the Mac Pro. This takes care of the vast majority of user needs. It does suck though for those users that do have cards that go beyond the bandwidth offered by greater than x4 slots. It will be very interesting to see if Red Rocket cards are even needed in a year or two. I wonder what they will be able to accomplish with GPU compute on this Mac. I'm not certain this is true. That is I was under the impression that the two ports on one controller could see contention. Maybe not - I forgot where I read that so confusion is a possibility.
Even if I'm right the bandwidth available externally with this machine is pretty impressive. Many <actually most> users will never have a problem with external bandwidth. It might take awhile for the right devices to become available but that shouldn't surprise anybody. It shouldn't but I can see lots of whining one day after the Mac Pro goes on sale asking where are the TB2 devices.
Sadly if you look back through history the shadow of darkness surrounds us. The people in power seldom suffer from their policies. Police states seldom happen all at once.
I was wrong, Phil said 3 controllers. Though incorrectly naming them FireWire, but he, it was an exciting moment. Clock in at 59'00'' (1080p version, not that this would matter)
[IMG ALT=""]http://forums.appleinsider.com/content/type/61/id/28116/width/350/height/700[/IMG]
Yes, € 1450. But he, it's art.
As for the Mac Pro I think some of his points are valid. One interesting comment was that sales are around 50,000 per quarter, that is actually better than I thought. I was thinking sales might be around 100,000 a year so that is twice as much.
What I found perplexing is that he expects sales to go up along with price. I don't see this as. A successful strategy at all as I honestly believe that sales suck due to high pricing for what you get in a Mac Pro. Apple really needs an entry level model that comes in around the $2000 mark for a machine that doesn't suck. If Apple can't do this then I see a sales explosion for a quarter or two as pent up demand is handled and then a roll off of sales to the point that sales are wort than the current model.
He also hits on what a surprise the new Mac Pro is. This is certainly throwing a lot of people, especially those set in the old ways of doing things. Personally I believe Apple has the right concept here but it may take awhile for people to come around.
The one thing that bothers me with this machine is that apparently they have decided to leave off the extra SSD socket on one of the GPU cards. I have to wonder why. Is it management being stupid or did they run out of PCI Express lanes? I ask because that would be the perfect place for a PCI Express based scratch "disk". Such an option would significantly enhance the machine for many users.