Wow just twigged , this as an old repost, my comments on this thread are way out of date and prior to a rethink.
I don't see that many posts from you on this thread. The other one in which you/Madan/Mel exchanged plenty of posts, that is the good one for nostalgia i guess.
This page 4 has two from me that I immediately saw that made me realize. I did not go back any further. Yes, I eat humble pie regarding some exchanges. My new iMac 5K 27" i9 with upgraded GPU and my own added 64 GB RAM rocks. I simply don't need a workstation now I am retired.
I will add that since then and reading the current Mac pro 2019 post IMHO the nomenclature is wrong and Apple could have avoided all the prosumer angst and envy by naming this Mac Workstation rather than Mac Pro ... just my 2 cents.
Opinions/priorities/choices do change over a period of time. So there is nothing wrong in taking a stance about 6 months ago based on data available at that time and making a change in decision with the passage of time with additional information/other considerations coming into the picture. I just remembered that thread for nostalgia when AI brought up couple of old threads back to life. Glad to know that everything has worked out well for you in the end.
The industrial design is 90% of what I was hoping they would do. That’s not a GPU card. That’s the power supply. It can be changed out like a PCI card or PCIe GPU card. I thought that have the CPU+memory on a riser card would be a good idea too, and they did it for about 3 generations of the Mac Pro, including the 2013 cylinder form factor, but they must have thought long and hard about it and ended up not going with it.
Also, finally found the answer for the connectors at the top of the Vega II duo cards. I’m surprised as why bother? Why not connect them right on the board. Looks like the infinity fabric link needs a physical connector, between the two connectors at the type of the card. And the link has an on off switch!
Lastly, the PCIe slots are: 16, 8, 16, 16, 16, 8, 8, 4, which is kind of odd.
Definitely not for me, but beautiful industrial design work. I was thinking have each of these cards have their old independent cooling system was the right way to go, but I’m just imagining here.
I can't get over what a monster this thing is. Apple's "pro" machines have always been more marketed to prosumers/power users rather than true workstation users. This machine changes everything.
I'm not up on PC workstation class machines, so a question for someone who is: Is there anything even close to this?
Irony is, that being the case, now people are asking for that prosumer desktop again rather than this "true" workstation.
I myself would love a Threadripper 3000 based Mac semi-Pro below this. Less PCI-e slots, less memory channels, but so much more multicore performance per dollar, and overall.
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Also, finally found the answer for the connectors at the top of the Vega II duo cards. I’m surprised as why bother? Why not connect them right on the board. Looks like the infinity fabric link needs a physical connector, between the two connectors at the type of the card. And the link has an on off switch!
Definitely not for me, but beautiful industrial design work. I was thinking have each of these cards have their old independent cooling system was the right way to go, but I’m just imagining here.
Irony is, that being the case, now people are asking for that prosumer desktop again rather than this "true" workstation.
I myself would love a Threadripper 3000 based Mac semi-Pro below this. Less PCI-e slots, less memory channels, but so much more multicore performance per dollar, and overall.