Further, signal can only travel across a wire so fast, hence sending data out to external drives will necessarily slow things down compared to having everything connected to the local bus (especially when you start sharing that bandwidth with ultra high resolution displays). Thunderbolt is awesome, and I'm going to make sure it's in whatever machine I purchase next, but I don't consider it a substitute for being able to have more drives local, and being able to switch them out as my needs increase over time.
You bring up some good points about cooling but the speed of [hard] drives isnt a good point. For starters, Thunderbolt is much faster than SATA3 (6Gb/s). Second, the drive speed of a HDD is a huge bottle neck in and of itself. Even if you had SSDs you still have a bottleneck in the drive.
The only interconnect I can think of that is besting Thunderbolt is PCIe v3 with is 16Gb/s in each direction compared to Thunderbolt which is 10Mb/s in each direction. The beauty of Thunderbolt in a Mac Pro — or any other PC for that matter — is that you aren't confined to the internal space of the case for your cards. Apple could put multiple Thunderbolt controllers in their machines (I would be surprised if the next MBPs get two) and you could have a very scalable and powerful system that you could build out and adapt as your needs change.
Also, don't forget that Thunderbolt is evolving and won't be slower than PCIe v3 for long. Especially after the optical cable comes along. Of course Thunderbolt still has the issue of being limited and costly but that tends to change with technologies that serve our needs well. I think Thunderbolt is such a tech.
The iMac is more than good enough for anyone and cheaper. Stfu already.
I don't understand why people are so threatened by the idea of a new Mac Pro. Why do they care? It's great that the iMacs may actually have a sort of expansion/upgrade path now with Thunderbolt, not to mention the MacBooks. I'm sure users have been asking for this kind of thing forever.
But that doesn't have anything to do with the Mac Pro and the server capabilities built into OS X. The difference between Apple today and Sony yesterday is OS X. The iOS is an offshoot of OS X. The Mac Pro and OS X are the foundation on which the whole Apple hardware + software ecosystem is built, from the iPod to the iPhone to the iPad to the iMac to the MacBook to whatever's next. Developing OS X for Intel's high-end processors is essential for staying ahead of the curve -- Apple needs the Mac Pro to do that.
The bottom line is that it doesn't matter whether you or I need a Mac Pro (and believe me, I do) -- Apple needs it, and that's enough.
Now, that doesn't mean it will stay in the retail stores. Have you been in one of those stores lately? Apple doesn't have the space. I hereby predict there will be a new Mac Pro, and it will be online-only. It will come sooner rather than later, well before the release of Mountain Lion later this summer.
Slots are sooooo 1987. mstone, you most likely will not need slots at all. Many manufacturers are developing external boxes in which to install your existing cards, which attaches via Thunderbolt. For those who do not offer a card recycling solution, or in lieu of upgrades, they will be building Thunderbolt interfaces for boxes which implement the same functionality as cards. Yes it means the purchase of additional hardware, but what else is new?
This "bunch of external boxes linked by thunderbolt cables" idea is kind of what Apple was rumoured to be working on as a MacPro replacement last year, but it makes no sense at all. I have all the slots in my MacPro full at the moment, lots of people do.
How is having four boxes connected together with cables better than having it all in one box?
I have an expensive desk that the MacPro sits in nice and neat, having a bunch of boxes on the dusty floor or on my desktop is better?
These solutions are only "better" if you take as an initial assumption, the desire to get rid of the MacPro in the first place.
If the MacPro disappears, lots of people will go that way and maybe even get used to it or get to like it in the end. But just because as humans we can make lemons out of lemonade and say that such a solution is "okay," doesn't mean the original solution wasn't better.
There is no reason not to have it all in one box. It's a neater, simpler, easier to manage solution.
Cards and slots are actually a great solution to the design problems presented.
Everything isn't always about money. Believe it or not the Mac Pro is a flagship. Without it, many pros would walk away from the platform.
They killed the Xserve, fine, understandable. But killing the Mac Pro in addition to the XServe takes away all pro solutions. Yah the MBP / iMac do alright in most cases, but for real professionals it doesn't cut it.
And for those saying external thunderbolt boxes can replace internal cards... NO. Check your speeds. Thunderbolt is 6.5 times slower than internal pci-e 2.0... that's not even counting pci-e 3.0.
Then comes the question of RAM... at work I need every bit of 32gigabytes in my machine. We handle gigabyte+ sized files in some cases. Could the process be optimized? Sure, but why when the technology is already there.
Most Mac / iOS development shops I've been to are lined with Mac Pros. 19 out of 22 cubicles at our office are Mac Pros. Our team needs the power Mac Pros have to offer. Productivity would plummet if we had to go back to iMacs.
With that being said... I truly don't believe Apple is dropping the Mac Pro. Intel has been in a transition period with their xeon processors. It's understandable, the workstation / server market doesn't need to be upgraded as much as consumer. So they went to a 20 month upgrade cycle for the processors. Then the processors got delayed. What was Apple supposed to build with exactly? In other words, it's coming! Chill out.
Apple doesn't care, and for good reason. They can completely scrap the Mac Pro, and it won't make a shred of a blip on their financial statements.
Not to pick on you particularly, but a lot of people are making statements like this, and further that Apple is "all about the money," or that it doesn't make money for them etc.
First, Apple is definitely not "all about the money" they are one of the very few businesses that has realised that focussing only on profit is actually the wrong thing to do. Apple is "all about the product."
Secondly, the fact that they are a world girdling business and that the profits from the MacPro are "only a blip" means that they could just as easily continue manufacturing it for many years and the loss that they see on their balance sheet is similarly "just a blip."
The real point of this whole debacle is simply this...
There is a small group of professional creatives that kept Apple alive through the dark years. Their core people in fact, many of which have worked at Apple and some that still do. To turn around now that Apple is rich and famous and screw those people over for the sake of a few shekels is an unconscionable, mean, selfish, and traitorous thing to do.
It's also just plain unnecessary given the gajillions of dollars floating around Apple HQ.
When Jed Clampett made it to Beverly Hills, he didn't tell all his kissing cousins to stay back in the ozarks, he helped them out as they helped him in the past.
What if Apple released a Thunderbolt device that could host additional GPUs (PCIe slots)?
I find the idea of an attractive block (with glowing, shifting color logo) of brutal computing power attached to a nice Thunderbolt iMac appealing. Surround it with candles and a real pipe organ playing Toccata and Fugue in D Minor for the full aesthetic effect. Not that I'm a fanboy or anything.
Macintosh II series, Quadra 800/900 series, Power Macintosh 9500, PowerMac G3, PowerMac G4, PowerMac G5, Mac Pro ---- if Apple nixes the Mac Pro, it will be like killing something that has been an important part of Apple for eons. I know the pro market is a 'niche' market, but Apple has traditionally been a 'niche' company and catered well to its Pro customers who demand a highly expandable, customizable power machine. It seems like today Apple just wants to sit you in front of a glass panel and hand you an iToy to suck on, that's the fad these days, so it seems. Sad.
Apple is not the same company it WAS. Profits are more important than providing quality solutions across the board, and expandable and versatile ones that will last you awhile. My PowerMac G4 lasted me six years. It seems Apple wants you to keep a computer and chunk it after 2-3 years and get a new one these days...the iMacs are not expandable worth jack, only the RAM pretty much. Cracking into an iMac is not an easy job, and there isn't that much you can add but one SSD and a hard drive. The Mac Pro is really something special in its PCIe and Graphics card expansion, processor upgrade ability, super-RAM expansion to 128GB, SIX drive bays, etc --- I sure hope Apple doesn't kill the Mac Pro, but I have a strong feeling this is the direction Apple is headed, and I am super-upset about it. An iMac simply won't suffice for a Mac Pro under any conditions.
I just want to comment on another typical usage of the Mac Pro besides video production, 3D production or CAD oriented workflow. I am talking about science and engineering.
For for those who believe that there is no need of a Mac Pro, I should give them an example of a real workflow:
- I work on geophysics, dealing with high performance computing involving the simulation of complex problems.
- Method used: finite element
- Language: C, Objective C , OpenCL and Fortran,
- Platform:
- Several Mac Pros with dual Xeons, 12 cores total.
- Memory on board: 64 GB of memory
- Storage on board: 4 TB
- Workflow: The simulations are run with a custom finite element code written in Fortran (a next generation code base written in Objective C/C is currently under development). The parallelization of the code is done with OpenMPI (as it allows to dispatch work on all machines on the network) so EVERY SINGLE core is being used. The simulation itself eat up above 50 GB of RAM. Yes, only one simulation!!!
- The post processing of the data are done with a custom code written in C and OpenCL which takes advantage of the Radeon HD 5870 to speed up the calculation. So by definition we need to have access to better and more powerful GPUs than what is available on iMacs and are only available on a Mac Pro.
- One simulation generates hundred of gigabytes of data. As a result terabytes of data are produced by successive simulations, data which are stored in large disks connected via firewire 800 to the Mac Pros for backing up the data if the results are acceptable.
Here you have it, this is my workflow. And as we keep studying bigger and more complex problems, we need again and again more powerful Mac Pros with higher processing power and better technology. This allows us to do things that would only be possible with much more expensive hardware, typically a supercomputer of a small size.
Anyone still saying that no one needs a Mac Pro?
Quote:
Originally Posted by muppetry
I agree. We use Mac clusters for problems of comparable complexity, especially 1D, 2D and the occasional 3D simulation. Quicker and cheaper than running on the massively parallel machines if we don't have to. I'd be sorry to lose that option.
Finally someone said it. It's these kind of users who are most affected if the Mac Pro goes away. Look at some of the profiles on Apple's Science page; does anyone really think that the EBI is using iMacs to do sequencing for the 1000 Genome Project? For them, even highest end iMac is not nearly powerful enough to do the job. I've mentioned this before but it bears repeating given this discussion:
Apple has invited people who work in bioinformatics and related fields to speak at WWDC in the past. The one that sticks out in my mind was a year where they had researchers from SBGrid.org talking about how they've used Macs in the lab to do high-performance computing. One of the calculations that they worked on took 10 days just to get results back from the system (on 1 CPU). With Xgrid, they were able split the job up across 10 (possibly more) CPU's and reduced the time down to roughly 5 hours.
Granted, this can still be done with Mac minis, but it requires a lot more hardware (I think they were using Xserves and Power Mac G5's at the time).
Aside from that, many of the applications in that field require a UNIX or Linux environment (A lot is open-source), so it's not as if they have much of a choice. Whether Apple wants to admit it or not, they MUST serve this market in some way because the users simply don't have any other alternative. While it doesn't affect me, it's disappointing to see such indifference towards a market where historically Apple has done so well in the past (They used to actually be PROUD of this stuff).
I am a Mac Pro owner. I have a 2008 model with 2 quad core 2.8GHz Xeons. It is still a relevant and very capable machine in 2012. Therein lies the problem for Apple. These machines really last a long time. My model was really also the last affordable Mac Pro that included two CPU's with 8 cores total. All 8-core models since then have jumped in price to around $3,500. $2,500 now only buys you a 4 core 2.8GHz. Granted it is a Nehalem which is faster than mine, but not by much.
I don't consider myself a power user, but there are a lot of reasons that led me to buy a Mac Pro over an iMac. I like to have my computer separate from the screen. On an iMac out of warranty, if the screen dies, your whole computer is practically dead since repairs would be far too much to warrant it. Second, I want to use my own monitors, two gorgeous screens, one 30" and one 27". I was also easily able to expand my ram economically to 16GB (2GB x 8) since there are 8 slots. On an iMac, to get a lot of ram you have to use larger ram in fewer slots which is way more expensive. $600 all at once when you buy your iMac in fact. I also liked the ability to upgrade my video card which I have done. On an iMac you are stuck with the GPU forever. I have two video cards installed. Last but not least is the hard drives. I have all 4 slots filled with drives which is wonderful for space savings on my desk. Bare internal drives are also cheaper since I did not need to buy an enclosure. The original hard drive that came with my Mac Pro also died and was easily replaced. Replacing drives on an iMac is far more difficult and time consuming not to mention you only have one bay available and have to rely on an external drive for Time machine. I will also be able to by a USB 3 and Thunderbolt card and easily install it to keep it relevant a few more years. Had I bought an iMac in 2008, I would probably have needed to replace it by now. There are a lot of good and valid reason people want to buy a Mac Pro over an iMac that have nothing to do with being a "power user".
The problem with Mac Pro sales is very simple. PRICE! They are too damned expensive. I understand why Apple originally went with Xeon, but there is no reason why Apple can't make an affordable Mac tower with the latest and greatest Core i7 at an affordable price. The i7 in the iMac is not the fastest processor by Intel by a long shot since they have to worry about thermal issues inside the iMac's slim case. Same goes with the GPU in the iMac. I don't see any reason why the entry level Mac Pro couldn't use a Core i7-3770 3.4GHz for example and return to the days when you could buy a tower for under $2,000. If they don't want to corrupt or confuse the "Pro" line, then just drop the "Pro from the name and call it a Mac. Make it slimmer, maybe only 2 hard drive bays instead of 4, 2 PCI slots and sell it for $1,999. Even at that low price Apple could easily maintain their high margins since the i7 is so much cheaper than Xeons. Why are Xeons so much more expensive btw?
But price is definitely the elephant in the room when you want to talk about Mac Pro sales stats. These latest models from 2010 are just way too expensive. And even 2 years later they haven't dropped the price for even adding ram or larger hard drives. I certainly hope they never kill the tower line of Macs for the same reason Chevrolet should never kill the Corvette. But there are a lot more reasons to own one that being a video editor or 3D artist.
For the rst of you content creators: it is highly unlikely that Apple under Jobs or Cook would want to see the creation of the majority of the content they sell move to any other platform. they wont leave us hanging.
Apple has always shown concern/respect for fellow artists.
The petition is a joke! It makes about as much sense as a truck driver demanding that Kenwirth tells him when a new diesel is coming out. On top of that all one needs to do is look at the situation at Intel with respect to Sandy Bridge E.
Great post. Some people here are oblivious to the needs of anyone except themselves. I work in a small post-house with fifteen Macs, 5 of which are MacPros that are desperately in need of upgrading for running AE and DaVinci etc. FCS is struggling with HD, 2K and 4K files. We've already upgraded RAM and GPUs. This is a real need. However ineffectual a petition on FB may be, I can understand the concerns of those who started and 'signed' it.
i would like to see apple do 2 things for its pro customers:
1) bake distributed computing over thunderbolt right into OSX. imagine being able to put together a cluster or render farm simply by connecting a few macs together with thunderbolt cables...and then launching a simple config program, setting a few parameters and then getting right down to work. if apple can offer the "5 minute cluster config", it'll have a ton of business from both media arts as well as the sciences. it will also put pressure on developers to support the new protocols which in turn spurs hardware sales...
2) release a new mac pro which offers class-leading performance in a package that is more cost-competitive with windows machines...and make it rack mountable. offer mac pros with the traditional xeon multi-core processors, but also offer some quad and 6 core i7's too, for those on a budget. offer an SSD as a main boot drive with a traditional 1TB drive for storage. update the motherboard with USB3 and have more than 1 thunderbolt port. have space for a couple of slots and a couple of drives. instant hit.
the beauty about where apple is right now is that as others have said, their pro machines don't currently contribute significantly to the bottom line and now with the rise of iDevices, they don't have to. as long as apple makes enough profit to cover R&D and manufacturing, it can run the pro unit near the break-even point indefinitely if it wants to. whatever the modest costs, it's worth the expense to add more fuel to the mac adoption fire, and give those companies who are interested in going mac the tools they need to do so.
there is no reason why the great work of the next decade should have to be done on windows. apple is in a beautiful position to reclaim its rightful place. it only requires the will to do so.
I know many people using high performance platforms outside of the video production folks. It is actually surprising that you are using a Mac for this though. High performance computing seems to be dominated by Linux.
I just want to comment on another typical usage of the Mac Pro besides video production, 3D production or CAD oriented workflow. I am talking about science and engineering.
For for those who believe that there is no need of a Mac Pro, I should give them an example of a real workflow:
- I work on geophysics, dealing with high performance computing involving the simulation of complex problems.
- Method used: finite element
- Language: C, Objective C , OpenCL and Fortran,
- Platform:
- Several Mac Pros with dual Xeons, 12 cores total.
- Memory on board: 64 GB of memory
- Storage on board: 4 TB
- Workflow: The simulations are run with a custom finite element code written in Fortran (a next generation code base written in Objective C/C is currently under development).
I'm curious here, why would you tie such important code to Objective C?
The parallelization of the code is done with OpenMPI (as it allows to dispatch work on all machines on the network) so EVERY SINGLE core is being used. The simulation itself eat up above 50 GB of RAM. Yes, only one simulation!!!
- The post processing of the data are done with a custom code written in C and OpenCL which takes advantage of the Radeon HD 5870 to speed up the calculation. So by definition we need to have access to better and more powerful GPUs than what is available on iMacs and are only available on a Mac Pro.
you could always implement a new acceleration board.
- One simulation generates hundred of gigabytes of data. As a result terabytes of data are produced by successive simulations, data which are stored in large disks connected via firewire 800 to the Mac Pros for backing up the data if the results are acceptable.
Here you have it, this is my workflow. And as we keep studying bigger and more complex problems, we need again and again more powerful Mac Pros with higher processing power and better technology. This allows us to do things that would only be possible with much more expensive hardware, typically a supercomputer of a small size.
Anyone still saying that no one needs a Mac Pro?
While I understand your needs I just don't see the long term viability in a big box computation machine. Hardware evolves and frankly the Mac Pro has been stagnet far to long. I really think it is in everyone's best interest to see Apple try to expand the appeal of the Mac Pro through a replacement machine that is entirely new. Done right it could be a very powerful platform with a wider range of performance.
I think that at this point in the company's history, we definitely need to look at Apple as a mobile-device company.
The vast majority of revenue, and an even larger majority of profits come from the MacBook, the ipad, and especailly the iPhone.
The desktop computer business is not what it used to be. The high-end desktop market is practically nonexistent.
What was good for Apple in the past is not anymore what is important for Apple in the 21st century. Apple needs to do whatever it takes to grow profits. Concentrating on dying 20th century product lines makes little sense, given Apple's shift in focus.
Apple should do whatever it takes to provide value to its shareholders, and if that means abandoning a dying niche market, then so be it.
Slots are sooooo 1987. mstone, you most likely will not need slots at all. Many manufacturers are developing external boxes in which to install your existing cards, which attaches via Thunderbolt. For those who do not offer a card recycling solution, or in lieu of upgrades, they will be building Thunderbolt interfaces for boxes which implement the same functionality as cards. Yes it means the purchase of additional hardware, but what else is new?
That is fundamentally misunderstanding the problem.
2. Video cards are always 16 lane devices, these can't be put on TB. Any external Video card is going to have a 75% performance penalty if it's on TB and have to compete with the other TB devices for bandwidth.
You're not going to get Mac Pro like performance out of a MacMini or iMac unless they put a minimum of 12 TB ports on the device and external video cards needing triple cables. This runs against Apple's design philosophy of not having a rats nest of cables. Not to mention all the extra power cubes for these external devices. Intel doesn't care about video performance, remember they want you to use their mediocre onboard GPU, they want you to use TB, at most for external storage.
TB does not replace PCIe in the Professional market. It simply can not. If the Mac Pro ceases to exist, there will be more incentive to build a hackintosh among those that have an exclusively Apple workplace, as to not disrupt the workflow, but that's just a stop-gap measure until they can replace everything, including the iMac's, MacMini and MacBook Pro's they have with Windows computers all at once, and you know the bean counters are drooling at the possibility of saving money by not buying Apple's luxury goods.
It's a slippery slope where not supporting the Professionals means entire businesses, and by extension their employees at home have to jump off the Apple Platform because they're not willing to buy two licenses for every software product (one for the Mac and one for the Windows side.) The people switching now, probably bought their Mac Pros in 2006 or 2007. Sure the entire Mobile side may be making money hand over fist now, but as we've seen with RIM and Nokia, people's tastes can change at the drop of a hat. It's rather naive to expect Apple to keep growing at the pace it's at on mobile devices alone.
Everything isn't always about money. Believe it or not the Mac Pro is a flagship. Without it, many pros would walk away from the platform.
Is it really the flagship? It might be the fastest, but is it really the device all Apple users aspire to own? Is it the device that gives Apple it's cool image? I don't think it is. Out of Apple's range of computers the MacBook Pro is the flag ship. It might not be a practical as the Mac Pro, but it has the stronger public image.
Like Lord of the Rings for example CGI rendered on a farm of simple Linux PCs. Again my point stands. Mac Pro or not it doesn't really matter when you really need the juice (the real pro work) you will need some computer farm to do it.
A render farm is doing only one task. A typical use of a Mac Pro might involve having half of CS suite open at the same time. Rendering a video in the background while cutting a mask in Photoshop with a an open project in After Effects and a vector image open in Illustrator that you are switching back an forth and copying from one app to the other. Of course you have your mail and browser open all the time and might be listening to iTunes as well. Anything less than a Mac Pro is going to be a beach ball fest.
Comments
The only interconnect I can think of that is besting Thunderbolt is PCIe v3 with is 16Gb/s in each direction compared to Thunderbolt which is 10Mb/s in each direction. The beauty of Thunderbolt in a Mac Pro — or any other PC for that matter — is that you aren't confined to the internal space of the case for your cards. Apple could put multiple Thunderbolt controllers in their machines (I would be surprised if the next MBPs get two) and you could have a very scalable and powerful system that you could build out and adapt as your needs change.
Also, don't forget that Thunderbolt is evolving and won't be slower than PCIe v3 for long. Especially after the optical cable comes along. Of course Thunderbolt still has the issue of being limited and costly but that tends to change with technologies that serve our needs well. I think Thunderbolt is such a tech.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
1. Facebook.
2. Absolutely. No. Weight. in the real world....
I guess everyone better sell their stock and quit Facebook then. Some anonymous egomaniac on a forum said so.
Apple will be flattered that users care. Meg Whitman is going to be pissed!
Quote:
Originally Posted by pmz
The iMac is more than good enough for anyone and cheaper. Stfu already.
I don't understand why people are so threatened by the idea of a new Mac Pro. Why do they care? It's great that the iMacs may actually have a sort of expansion/upgrade path now with Thunderbolt, not to mention the MacBooks. I'm sure users have been asking for this kind of thing forever.
But that doesn't have anything to do with the Mac Pro and the server capabilities built into OS X. The difference between Apple today and Sony yesterday is OS X. The iOS is an offshoot of OS X. The Mac Pro and OS X are the foundation on which the whole Apple hardware + software ecosystem is built, from the iPod to the iPhone to the iPad to the iMac to the MacBook to whatever's next. Developing OS X for Intel's high-end processors is essential for staying ahead of the curve -- Apple needs the Mac Pro to do that.
The bottom line is that it doesn't matter whether you or I need a Mac Pro (and believe me, I do) -- Apple needs it, and that's enough.
Now, that doesn't mean it will stay in the retail stores. Have you been in one of those stores lately? Apple doesn't have the space. I hereby predict there will be a new Mac Pro, and it will be online-only. It will come sooner rather than later, well before the release of Mountain Lion later this summer.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mac_128
Slots are sooooo 1987. mstone, you most likely will not need slots at all. Many manufacturers are developing external boxes in which to install your existing cards, which attaches via Thunderbolt. For those who do not offer a card recycling solution, or in lieu of upgrades, they will be building Thunderbolt interfaces for boxes which implement the same functionality as cards. Yes it means the purchase of additional hardware, but what else is new?
This "bunch of external boxes linked by thunderbolt cables" idea is kind of what Apple was rumoured to be working on as a MacPro replacement last year, but it makes no sense at all. I have all the slots in my MacPro full at the moment, lots of people do.
How is having four boxes connected together with cables better than having it all in one box?
I have an expensive desk that the MacPro sits in nice and neat, having a bunch of boxes on the dusty floor or on my desktop is better?
These solutions are only "better" if you take as an initial assumption, the desire to get rid of the MacPro in the first place.
If the MacPro disappears, lots of people will go that way and maybe even get used to it or get to like it in the end. But just because as humans we can make lemons out of lemonade and say that such a solution is "okay," doesn't mean the original solution wasn't better.
There is no reason not to have it all in one box. It's a neater, simpler, easier to manage solution.
Cards and slots are actually a great solution to the design problems presented.
Everything isn't always about money. Believe it or not the Mac Pro is a flagship. Without it, many pros would walk away from the platform.
They killed the Xserve, fine, understandable. But killing the Mac Pro in addition to the XServe takes away all pro solutions. Yah the MBP / iMac do alright in most cases, but for real professionals it doesn't cut it.
And for those saying external thunderbolt boxes can replace internal cards... NO. Check your speeds. Thunderbolt is 6.5 times slower than internal pci-e 2.0... that's not even counting pci-e 3.0.
Then comes the question of RAM... at work I need every bit of 32gigabytes in my machine. We handle gigabyte+ sized files in some cases. Could the process be optimized? Sure, but why when the technology is already there.
Most Mac / iOS development shops I've been to are lined with Mac Pros. 19 out of 22 cubicles at our office are Mac Pros. Our team needs the power Mac Pros have to offer. Productivity would plummet if we had to go back to iMacs.
With that being said... I truly don't believe Apple is dropping the Mac Pro. Intel has been in a transition period with their xeon processors. It's understandable, the workstation / server market doesn't need to be upgraded as much as consumer. So they went to a 20 month upgrade cycle for the processors. Then the processors got delayed. What was Apple supposed to build with exactly? In other words, it's coming! Chill out.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Slurpy
Apple doesn't care, and for good reason. They can completely scrap the Mac Pro, and it won't make a shred of a blip on their financial statements.
Not to pick on you particularly, but a lot of people are making statements like this, and further that Apple is "all about the money," or that it doesn't make money for them etc.
First, Apple is definitely not "all about the money" they are one of the very few businesses that has realised that focussing only on profit is actually the wrong thing to do. Apple is "all about the product."
Secondly, the fact that they are a world girdling business and that the profits from the MacPro are "only a blip" means that they could just as easily continue manufacturing it for many years and the loss that they see on their balance sheet is similarly "just a blip."
The real point of this whole debacle is simply this...
There is a small group of professional creatives that kept Apple alive through the dark years. Their core people in fact, many of which have worked at Apple and some that still do. To turn around now that Apple is rich and famous and screw those people over for the sake of a few shekels is an unconscionable, mean, selfish, and traitorous thing to do.
It's also just plain unnecessary given the gajillions of dollars floating around Apple HQ.
When Jed Clampett made it to Beverly Hills, he didn't tell all his kissing cousins to stay back in the ozarks, he helped them out as they helped him in the past.
10 hours ago 4000 Now.....
Notice it also says 2,593 talking about this~ The buzz is certainly buzzing!
That's a gain of 330.8 an hour or 5.5 a minuet approx.
This could go viral! I hope it does....
Quote:
Originally Posted by cwoloszynski
What if Apple released a Thunderbolt device that could host additional GPUs (PCIe slots)?
I find the idea of an attractive block (with glowing, shifting color logo) of brutal computing power attached to a nice Thunderbolt iMac appealing. Surround it with candles and a real pipe organ playing Toccata and Fugue in D Minor for the full aesthetic effect. Not that I'm a fanboy or anything.
Macintosh II series, Quadra 800/900 series, Power Macintosh 9500, PowerMac G3, PowerMac G4, PowerMac G5, Mac Pro ---- if Apple nixes the Mac Pro, it will be like killing something that has been an important part of Apple for eons. I know the pro market is a 'niche' market, but Apple has traditionally been a 'niche' company and catered well to its Pro customers who demand a highly expandable, customizable power machine. It seems like today Apple just wants to sit you in front of a glass panel and hand you an iToy to suck on, that's the fad these days, so it seems. Sad.
Apple is not the same company it WAS. Profits are more important than providing quality solutions across the board, and expandable and versatile ones that will last you awhile. My PowerMac G4 lasted me six years. It seems Apple wants you to keep a computer and chunk it after 2-3 years and get a new one these days...the iMacs are not expandable worth jack, only the RAM pretty much. Cracking into an iMac is not an easy job, and there isn't that much you can add but one SSD and a hard drive. The Mac Pro is really something special in its PCIe and Graphics card expansion, processor upgrade ability, super-RAM expansion to 128GB, SIX drive bays, etc --- I sure hope Apple doesn't kill the Mac Pro, but I have a strong feeling this is the direction Apple is headed, and I am super-upset about it. An iMac simply won't suffice for a Mac Pro under any conditions.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hakime
I just want to comment on another typical usage of the Mac Pro besides video production, 3D production or CAD oriented workflow. I am talking about science and engineering.
For for those who believe that there is no need of a Mac Pro, I should give them an example of a real workflow:
- I work on geophysics, dealing with high performance computing involving the simulation of complex problems.
- Method used: finite element
- Language: C, Objective C , OpenCL and Fortran,
- Platform:
- Several Mac Pros with dual Xeons, 12 cores total.
- Memory on board: 64 GB of memory
- Storage on board: 4 TB
- Workflow: The simulations are run with a custom finite element code written in Fortran (a next generation code base written in Objective C/C is currently under development). The parallelization of the code is done with OpenMPI (as it allows to dispatch work on all machines on the network) so EVERY SINGLE core is being used. The simulation itself eat up above 50 GB of RAM. Yes, only one simulation!!!
- The post processing of the data are done with a custom code written in C and OpenCL which takes advantage of the Radeon HD 5870 to speed up the calculation. So by definition we need to have access to better and more powerful GPUs than what is available on iMacs and are only available on a Mac Pro.
- One simulation generates hundred of gigabytes of data. As a result terabytes of data are produced by successive simulations, data which are stored in large disks connected via firewire 800 to the Mac Pros for backing up the data if the results are acceptable.
Here you have it, this is my workflow. And as we keep studying bigger and more complex problems, we need again and again more powerful Mac Pros with higher processing power and better technology. This allows us to do things that would only be possible with much more expensive hardware, typically a supercomputer of a small size.
Anyone still saying that no one needs a Mac Pro?
Quote:
Originally Posted by muppetry
I agree. We use Mac clusters for problems of comparable complexity, especially 1D, 2D and the occasional 3D simulation. Quicker and cheaper than running on the massively parallel machines if we don't have to. I'd be sorry to lose that option.
Finally someone said it. It's these kind of users who are most affected if the Mac Pro goes away. Look at some of the profiles on Apple's Science page; does anyone really think that the EBI is using iMacs to do sequencing for the 1000 Genome Project? For them, even highest end iMac is not nearly powerful enough to do the job. I've mentioned this before but it bears repeating given this discussion:
Apple has invited people who work in bioinformatics and related fields to speak at WWDC in the past. The one that sticks out in my mind was a year where they had researchers from SBGrid.org talking about how they've used Macs in the lab to do high-performance computing. One of the calculations that they worked on took 10 days just to get results back from the system (on 1 CPU). With Xgrid, they were able split the job up across 10 (possibly more) CPU's and reduced the time down to roughly 5 hours.
Granted, this can still be done with Mac minis, but it requires a lot more hardware (I think they were using Xserves and Power Mac G5's at the time).
Aside from that, many of the applications in that field require a UNIX or Linux environment (A lot is open-source), so it's not as if they have much of a choice. Whether Apple wants to admit it or not, they MUST serve this market in some way because the users simply don't have any other alternative. While it doesn't affect me, it's disappointing to see such indifference towards a market where historically Apple has done so well in the past (They used to actually be PROUD of this stuff).
I am a Mac Pro owner. I have a 2008 model with 2 quad core 2.8GHz Xeons. It is still a relevant and very capable machine in 2012. Therein lies the problem for Apple. These machines really last a long time. My model was really also the last affordable Mac Pro that included two CPU's with 8 cores total. All 8-core models since then have jumped in price to around $3,500. $2,500 now only buys you a 4 core 2.8GHz. Granted it is a Nehalem which is faster than mine, but not by much.
I don't consider myself a power user, but there are a lot of reasons that led me to buy a Mac Pro over an iMac. I like to have my computer separate from the screen. On an iMac out of warranty, if the screen dies, your whole computer is practically dead since repairs would be far too much to warrant it. Second, I want to use my own monitors, two gorgeous screens, one 30" and one 27". I was also easily able to expand my ram economically to 16GB (2GB x 8) since there are 8 slots. On an iMac, to get a lot of ram you have to use larger ram in fewer slots which is way more expensive. $600 all at once when you buy your iMac in fact. I also liked the ability to upgrade my video card which I have done. On an iMac you are stuck with the GPU forever. I have two video cards installed. Last but not least is the hard drives. I have all 4 slots filled with drives which is wonderful for space savings on my desk. Bare internal drives are also cheaper since I did not need to buy an enclosure. The original hard drive that came with my Mac Pro also died and was easily replaced. Replacing drives on an iMac is far more difficult and time consuming not to mention you only have one bay available and have to rely on an external drive for Time machine. I will also be able to by a USB 3 and Thunderbolt card and easily install it to keep it relevant a few more years. Had I bought an iMac in 2008, I would probably have needed to replace it by now. There are a lot of good and valid reason people want to buy a Mac Pro over an iMac that have nothing to do with being a "power user".
The problem with Mac Pro sales is very simple. PRICE! They are too damned expensive. I understand why Apple originally went with Xeon, but there is no reason why Apple can't make an affordable Mac tower with the latest and greatest Core i7 at an affordable price. The i7 in the iMac is not the fastest processor by Intel by a long shot since they have to worry about thermal issues inside the iMac's slim case. Same goes with the GPU in the iMac. I don't see any reason why the entry level Mac Pro couldn't use a Core i7-3770 3.4GHz for example and return to the days when you could buy a tower for under $2,000. If they don't want to corrupt or confuse the "Pro" line, then just drop the "Pro from the name and call it a Mac. Make it slimmer, maybe only 2 hard drive bays instead of 4, 2 PCI slots and sell it for $1,999. Even at that low price Apple could easily maintain their high margins since the i7 is so much cheaper than Xeons. Why are Xeons so much more expensive btw?
But price is definitely the elephant in the room when you want to talk about Mac Pro sales stats. These latest models from 2010 are just way too expensive. And even 2 years later they haven't dropped the price for even adding ram or larger hard drives. I certainly hope they never kill the tower line of Macs for the same reason Chevrolet should never kill the Corvette. But there are a lot more reasons to own one that being a video editor or 3D artist.
For the rst of you content creators: it is highly unlikely that Apple under Jobs or Cook would want to see the creation of the majority of the content they sell move to any other platform. they wont leave us hanging.
Apple has always shown concern/respect for fellow artists.
relax. something wonderful is about to happen.
i would like to see apple do 2 things for its pro customers:
1) bake distributed computing over thunderbolt right into OSX. imagine being able to put together a cluster or render farm simply by connecting a few macs together with thunderbolt cables...and then launching a simple config program, setting a few parameters and then getting right down to work. if apple can offer the "5 minute cluster config", it'll have a ton of business from both media arts as well as the sciences. it will also put pressure on developers to support the new protocols which in turn spurs hardware sales...
2) release a new mac pro which offers class-leading performance in a package that is more cost-competitive with windows machines...and make it rack mountable. offer mac pros with the traditional xeon multi-core processors, but also offer some quad and 6 core i7's too, for those on a budget. offer an SSD as a main boot drive with a traditional 1TB drive for storage. update the motherboard with USB3 and have more than 1 thunderbolt port. have space for a couple of slots and a couple of drives. instant hit.
the beauty about where apple is right now is that as others have said, their pro machines don't currently contribute significantly to the bottom line and now with the rise of iDevices, they don't have to. as long as apple makes enough profit to cover R&D and manufacturing, it can run the pro unit near the break-even point indefinitely if it wants to. whatever the modest costs, it's worth the expense to add more fuel to the mac adoption fire, and give those companies who are interested in going mac the tools they need to do so.
there is no reason why the great work of the next decade should have to be done on windows. apple is in a beautiful position to reclaim its rightful place. it only requires the will to do so.
Thank you!
I know many people using high performance platforms outside of the video production folks. It is actually surprising that you are using a Mac for this though. High performance computing seems to be dominated by Linux.
I'm curious here, why would you tie such important code to Objective C? you could always implement a new acceleration board.
While I understand your needs I just don't see the long term viability in a big box computation machine. Hardware evolves and frankly the Mac Pro has been stagnet far to long. I really think it is in everyone's best interest to see Apple try to expand the appeal of the Mac Pro through a replacement machine that is entirely new. Done right it could be a very powerful platform with a wider range of performance.
I think that at this point in the company's history, we definitely need to look at Apple as a mobile-device company.
The vast majority of revenue, and an even larger majority of profits come from the MacBook, the ipad, and especailly the iPhone.
The desktop computer business is not what it used to be. The high-end desktop market is practically nonexistent.
What was good for Apple in the past is not anymore what is important for Apple in the 21st century. Apple needs to do whatever it takes to grow profits. Concentrating on dying 20th century product lines makes little sense, given Apple's shift in focus.
Apple should do whatever it takes to provide value to its shareholders, and if that means abandoning a dying niche market, then so be it.
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Originally Posted by Mac_128
Slots are sooooo 1987. mstone, you most likely will not need slots at all. Many manufacturers are developing external boxes in which to install your existing cards, which attaches via Thunderbolt. For those who do not offer a card recycling solution, or in lieu of upgrades, they will be building Thunderbolt interfaces for boxes which implement the same functionality as cards. Yes it means the purchase of additional hardware, but what else is new?
That is fundamentally misunderstanding the problem.
1. Mac Pro's have PCIe kit that can't be put into a iMac. TB is only 4 lanes. Devices like http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/decklinkhdextreme use 4 lanes by themselves.
2. Video cards are always 16 lane devices, these can't be put on TB. Any external Video card is going to have a 75% performance penalty if it's on TB and have to compete with the other TB devices for bandwidth.
3. SSD devices require 4 lanes: http://www.fusionio.com/platforms/iodrive2/ if not 16 http://www.fusionio.com/platforms/iodrive-octal/
You're not going to get Mac Pro like performance out of a MacMini or iMac unless they put a minimum of 12 TB ports on the device and external video cards needing triple cables. This runs against Apple's design philosophy of not having a rats nest of cables. Not to mention all the extra power cubes for these external devices. Intel doesn't care about video performance, remember they want you to use their mediocre onboard GPU, they want you to use TB, at most for external storage.
TB does not replace PCIe in the Professional market. It simply can not. If the Mac Pro ceases to exist, there will be more incentive to build a hackintosh among those that have an exclusively Apple workplace, as to not disrupt the workflow, but that's just a stop-gap measure until they can replace everything, including the iMac's, MacMini and MacBook Pro's they have with Windows computers all at once, and you know the bean counters are drooling at the possibility of saving money by not buying Apple's luxury goods.
It's a slippery slope where not supporting the Professionals means entire businesses, and by extension their employees at home have to jump off the Apple Platform because they're not willing to buy two licenses for every software product (one for the Mac and one for the Windows side.) The people switching now, probably bought their Mac Pros in 2006 or 2007. Sure the entire Mobile side may be making money hand over fist now, but as we've seen with RIM and Nokia, people's tastes can change at the drop of a hat. It's rather naive to expect Apple to keep growing at the pace it's at on mobile devices alone.
Is it really the flagship? It might be the fastest, but is it really the device all Apple users aspire to own? Is it the device that gives Apple it's cool image? I don't think it is. Out of Apple's range of computers the MacBook Pro is the flag ship. It might not be a practical as the Mac Pro, but it has the stronger public image.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Povilas
Like Lord of the Rings for example CGI rendered on a farm of simple Linux PCs. Again my point stands. Mac Pro or not it doesn't really matter when you really need the juice (the real pro work) you will need some computer farm to do it.
A render farm is doing only one task. A typical use of a Mac Pro might involve having half of CS suite open at the same time. Rendering a video in the background while cutting a mask in Photoshop with a an open project in After Effects and a vector image open in Illustrator that you are switching back an forth and copying from one app to the other. Of course you have your mail and browser open all the time and might be listening to iTunes as well. Anything less than a Mac Pro is going to be a beach ball fest.