Anyone remember the Cube? Hopefully they don't saddle this with a ridiculous price like they did to the cube (RIP). Price for design is not what pros want: they want power. If they premium charge this because of their aesthetic design they are going to see poor sales-through indeed.
They aren't going to premium charge this for the aesthetic design changes, they are going to premium charge this because it's a premium piece of hardware. I mean just take a look at the hardware and try to price out some of these components. I bought a Mac Pro 5 years ago and it was almost $3000 and that was for a very much low end model. I figure the starting price on this is going to be in the same $3000 neighborhood and that's not going to have anything to do with the aesthetics.
This thing is going to be blow your pants off fast though!!!
The level of stupid at Apple these days is overwhelming.
That has to be the worst possible design for a pro machine that I could imagine. Pros don't want cutesy cylinders, they want EXPANSION. Things like slots, lots of RAM slots, lots of PCI Express slots, and multiple hard drive bays, at least 4 of them. Pros still need optical drives. Pros want to be able to upgrade their graphics cards. Pros want multiple processors.
Think about what they could have done with this in the existing case: Dual 12 core processors. Up to 128GB RAM. 2 solid state drives AND 4 hard drives. And two Blu-Ray drives. And 4 PCI Express slots.
And the design is terrible too. This thing looks like a black aluminum can. Oh, wait, that's what it is.
The new Mac Pro is a brilliant and deceptively simple design. Of course it's not for everyone, but Apple is very wise here... they designed a Mac Pro that is for the vast majority of pro users. What this means is that the new Mac Pro is not designed for those who need it to be rack mountable. It's not designed for someone who needs 24 cores of dual CPU power because 12 cores are more than enough for 99% of professionals who buy Mac Pros. Apple has certainly done its homework, and judging by the outcry from people who are embedded in their tower mentality, Apple has done a good job because they are getting an emotional reaction from almost everyone.
I am a photographer and personally welcome this new, smaller design. For over 90% of customers, this Mac Pro will most likely not ever get "upgraded" and will be sufficient to satisfy the vast majority of computing needs. Apple will sell a ton of these to people like me, who I think represent the more "mainstream" pro user - not a niche user who needs to rack mount, or needs to run a server with 24 cores, etc. The last rack mountable computer Apple sold was the X Serve, and as I recall that was discontinued several years ago. So those who are crying foul because this new Mac Pro is not rack mountable must not really need that because there has been no rack mountable Mac Pro in years.
So many straw man arguments from people who can't embrace change and use hypothetical, theoretical arguments to prove a point that is completely irrelevant.
Our existing Pro has a slot into which we can drop an upgraded video card. We never have. We bought the best the machine could support at the time and have never changed it.
We already have an external Blu-Ray drive (for the two or three times a year we use it) so that's not an issue.
Thunderbolt pretty much solves the last of the cases we had for slots. The Blackmagic Design cards we use for HD-SDI I/O are now available in Thunderbolt versions, as is our Pro Tools controller. There may be a brief awkward period as manufacturers migrate from cards to outboard devices, but it's clear that's the direction things are going.
Storage is via outboard RAID, so lots of slot for conventional drives are no longer necessary. Besides, this thing completely dumps SATA in favor of a storage system that links directly to the PCIe bus. That's why it's so freakin' fast.
The design does LOOK goofy, but it allows for the most ingenious cooling system ever. It's hard to argue just because it ain't pretty.
If an old fart like me can adapt, or more accurately recognize the way the industry is going, you can too!
The Mac Pro video card market is thriving. Those FirePros may be teh awesome today, but in 5 years many Pro users will benefit from newer video cards. That's great that you can do fine with your old video card, but especially with OpenCL advances, video cards are going to be even more vital to pros.
TB solves most cases for slots, but it's an expensive solution. Adding a PCIe card to the iTube entails an expensive PCIe breakout chassis connected with a $50 cable. Much easier to drop a PCIe card into the current Mac Pro. And note that TB2 is not fast enough for all PCIe cards. Most of them, yes, but not all. Also note that many pros have thousands of dollars invested in PCIe cards. New PCIe cards will be developed to exploit the new PCIe 3.0 speeds, making new cards even less compatible with Thunderbolt.
The internal PCIe storage is awesome, but one slot? Why? Because nobody ever needs more solid state storage? The decision to go with ONE SSD blade slot is inexplicable. Somebody should be fired for it.
That's your opinion that it looks goofy, some people dig the design. This would make a great headless iMac: swap in an i7, swap in a desktop GTX 780, remove one video card and use the space for more PCIe blade SSD slots. It would be a killer prosumer machine if Apple priced it as the disposable computer that it is. In my opinion despite the glaring design flaws it's a beautiful machine inside and out.
As a pro machine, it may succeed depending on the price. It had better be damn cheap if Apple expects users to buy more crap just to add a HDD, then throw the whole thing out when next generation video cards are released a few years from now. Somehow I have a sneaky suspicion that Apple will price this thing in a range that destines it to doom, giving them a convenient excuse to bug out of the pro market.
The Mac Pro video card market is thriving. Those FirePros may be teh awesome today, but in 5 years many Pro users will benefit from newer video cards. That's great that you can do fine with your old video card, but especially with OpenCL advances, video cards are going to be even more vital to pros.
TB solves most cases for slots, but it's an expensive solution. Adding a PCIe card to the iTube entails an expensive PCIe breakout chassis connected with a $50 cable. Much easier to drop a PCIe card into the current Mac Pro. And note that TB2 is not fast enough for all PCIe cards. Most of them, yes, but not all. Also note that many pros have thousands of dollars invested in PCIe cards. New PCIe cards will be developed to exploit the new PCIe 3.0 speeds, making new cards even less compatible with Thunderbolt.
The internal PCIe storage is awesome, but one slot? Why? Because nobody ever needs more solid state storage? The decision to go with ONE SSD blade slot is inexplicable. Somebody should be fired for it.
That's your opinion that it looks goofy, some people dig the design. This would make a great headless iMac: swap in an i7, swap in a desktop GTX 780, remove one video card and use the space for more PCIe blade SSD slots. It would be a killer prosumer machine if Apple priced it as the disposable computer that it is. In my opinion despite the glaring design flaws it's a beautiful machine inside and out.
As a pro machine, it may succeed depending on the price. It had better be damn cheap if Apple expects users to buy more crap just to add a HDD, then throw the whole thing out when next generation video cards are released a few years from now. Somehow I have a sneaky suspicion that Apple will price this thing in a range that destines it to doom, giving them a convenient excuse to bug out of the pro market.
This image shows the two GPU boards; on the right hand one we see the SDD blade; on the left hand one we can see the pads where a second SSD blade could be added in…
Over on CGTalk, someone mentioned that the CPU & GPU cards seemed to be just that, cards… As in, connected to a backplane and from there the main logic board. Wondering about BTO configurations if this is true…
Single CPU, dual GPUs…
Dual CPUs, single GPU…
Single CPU, single GPU, dual 2.5" SSDs…
No matter the configuration, the boot flash is still in its socket on the GPU card, and if you look at some of the pics out there, you can see the pads where a second SSD Flash could be installed on the second GPU card…
And if Apple will do such a BTO, then they could also have consumer grade CPU cards, and consumer grade GPU cards…
Maybe a quad-core Haswell i7 CPU card (with 16GB RAM), nVidia Geforce GFX 700 series GPU card & dual SSD card with only a single SSD populated (and NO SSD Flash boot drive on the GPU card); giving us the mythical xMac…!!! Shipping by Christmas time, US$1,500.00…!!!
...Judging by the outcry from people who are embedded in their tower mentality, Apple has done a good job because they are getting an emotional reaction from almost everyone.
I am a photographer and personally welcome this new, smaller design.
Towers are popular with Pros because of their practicality, not because of some weird embedded mentality. It's about function, which is why the current Mac Pro is so amazingly awesome. It's why when most pros set up their first Mac Pro tower, there is a moment of silence while they pause to admire the internals before they replace the side panel and boot it up for the first time.
As for photography, you don't need a Xeon CPU, and FirePro video cards are an utter waste for you. If you're buying this new Mac Pro for photography, it's only because of an embedded mentality. About the only thing a photographer would need the current Mac Pro tower for is the internal storage expansion, but now that Apple ditched that a Mini is a better solution since you can add a second HDD for more storage, lol. Seriously, you could save yourself thousands of dollars by rexamining your computing needs. An iMac is probably Apple's best solution for now, and you don't even need expensive TB storage, plain old USB drives are fine. The upcoming Haswell Mini will probably be an even better fit if it can drive enough displays (questionable).
You're stuck in 2001 if you're buying bleeding edge pro computers for photography. Or maybe you're trying to compensate for the lack of something else.
This image shows the two GPU boards; on the right hand one we see the SDD blade; on the left hand one we can see the pads where a second SSD blade could be added in…
Could have sworn the GPU boards were the two exposed ones and the CPU is the one with the SSD behind it. Apple.com had something like that, but I guess they changed it.
It's why when most pros set up their first Mac Pro tower, there is a moment of silence while they pause before replacing the side panel and booting it up for the first time.
SO. YOU WERE COMPLETELY WRONG ABOUT YOUR FUTURE OF THE MAC PRO POST, HUH. THAT'S GOTTA FEEL GOOD, LYING TO EVERYONE.
This is more unifying the older format to a newer solution that was only warranted due to the popularity of mobile formats which lack the internal room. Forward thinking would have been more like Wizard's concept of arrays of PCI storage, not a move from external (G5 2 bays) to 10TB + possible internally back to external. That is just backwards.
It's not backwards because it's not a good idea to have 10TB+ internally. If you need to move to a new machine, you can't migrate the data easily. You also can't setup a proper hardware RAID internally very easily and you can't hot-swap the drives.
If you need to upgrade the Mac Pro, this is as simple as unplugging the mass storage, migrate the smaller internal at 1.25GB/s and plug the storage into the new machine. Some people have two computers so if you needed to copy something from the storage, again you just unplug it from one and plug it into the other.
Look at the Pegasus raid box. They sell it in the Apple Store with whatever brand of drives. They are using standard drives, which have longer error recovery timings
Do you notice that you keep doing the same things with everything Apple related? You start with the conclusion that you don't like anything besides what you're accustomed to, whether it's internal storage, Eizo/NEC displays, PCI slots, networking or whatever else is a part of the standard tower format + professional display and then try to dismiss anything that differs from it under a cloud of doubt by saying it's 'less than ideal' or 'might have problems' or 'seems to have negative reviews'. People are using these solutions with no problems at all and have been for a while.
If you want to pick your own drives, then pick a RAID box (USB 3 or Thunderbolt) and put them in it. The Pegasus gets much better speeds than you would with internal drives:
This Mac Pro makes the right compromises going forward:
- SSDs will scale up in size over time to as much as 20TB or more
- it focuses on GPUs and OpenCL for compute power; it doesn't matter if software isn't ready yet, the software that uses it will outperform the software that doesn't and they'll get the sale
- focusing on GPUs allows them to offer more compelling upgrades year after year even when Intel is lagging behind
- the storage default means that people buying these machines get the best performance without thinking about it and bulk storage can be handled by people who do it best like the server guys e.g HP:
I wish people would stop comparing this to the Cube. I see why they do it, but they aren't really comparable.
They are a similar size (this new one is smaller) and I'd say follow similar design guidelines but there are a few important distinctions with the old Cube. The performance of the hardware back then was far from future proof and there were no external ports like Thunderbolt that could make up for the lack of slots. I think they are very similar besides that in the sense that they are taking the important core elements of the Pro and applying the design philosophy of their other products. The G4 Cube was marketed as a 'super-fast, super-quiet, supercomputer in an 8" Cube' with heat expelled out the top, that's pretty much what this is. This new Mac Pro is a cylinder that fits perfectly in the cube-shaped hole that existed at Apple for a long time. It could easily have been shaped like a Cube if they wanted but it would have wasted space that way and it's best not to recycle hardware designs when it's a new model, especially if the design isn't beneficial.
I am a photographer and personally welcome this new, smaller design. For over 90% of customers, this Mac Pro will most likely not ever get "upgraded" and will be sufficient to satisfy the vast majority of computing needs. Apple will sell a ton of these to people like me, who I think represent the more "mainstream" pro user - not a niche user who needs to rack mount, or needs to run a server with 24 cores, etc. The last rack mountable computer Apple sold was the X Serve, and as I recall that was discontinued several years ago. So those who are crying foul because this new Mac Pro is not rack mountable must not really need that because there has been no rack mountable Mac Pro in years.
So many straw man arguments from people who can't embrace change and use hypothetical, theoretical arguments to prove a point that is completely irrelevant.
Even assuming that your 90% isn't pulled out of thin air that leaves 10% of Mac Pro users without a replacement machine. But hey, as long you YOUR needs are met I guess we're cool and forward thinking.
You can rack mount the old Mac Pro, it just wasn't very space efficient without using a hacksaw.
This image shows the two GPU boards; on the right hand one we see the SDD blade; on the left hand one we can see the pads where a second SSD blade could be added in…
Over on CGTalk, someone mentioned that the CPU & GPU cards seemed to be just that, cards… As in, connected to a backplane and from there the main logic board. Wondering about BTO configurations if this is true…
Single CPU, dual GPUs…
Dual CPUs, single GPU…
Single CPU, single GPU, dual 2.5" SSDs…
No matter the configuration, the boot flash is still in its socket on the GPU card, and if you look at some of the pics out there, you can see the pads where a second SSD Flash could be installed on the second GPU card…
And if Apple will do such a BTO, then they could also have consumer grade CPU cards, and consumer grade GPU cards…
Maybe a quad-core Haswell i7 CPU card (with 16GB RAM), nVidia Geforce GFX 700 series GPU card & dual SSD card with only a single SSD populated (and NO SSD Flash boot drive on the GPU card); giving us the mythical xMac…!!! Shipping by Christmas time, US$1,500.00…!!!
The two video cards are the same because it's cheaper to manufacture identical cards and then solder the PCIe slot onto one of them. There is only one slot, Apple made that clear. They also made it clear that there is NO internal expansion. Then they insinuated that the problem is not with their hardware, but with Mac users.
Your BTO ideas are awesome, but I'm afraid Apple will never execute them. Still, we can dream. It's not like we haven't gotten plenty of practice dreaming about an xMac since around 2001.
- focusing on GPUs allows them to offer more compelling upgrades year after year even when Intel is lagging behind
Asking pros to throw out their $5000 iTubes to upgrade the GPU isn't what most people would call "compelling". I agree that Apple should focus on Mac Pro GPUs, but using proprietary non-upgradable GPUs is frankly quite insulting to Mac users.
This new Mac Pro is a cylinder that fits perfectly in the cube-shaped hole that existed at Apple for a long time. It could easily have been shaped like a Cube if they wanted but it would have wasted space that way and it's best not to recycle hardware designs when it's a new model, especially if the design isn't beneficial.
Yes, it is the Cube v2. It would have been nice if it had been marketed as the Mac Mini Pro and kept a Mac Pro at the high end with dual CPUs and slots but I guess it might have been more likely to meet a Cube like fate.
By nixing the Mac Pro tower it prevents that. I was hoping for this:
Quote:
Originally Posted by nht
A nice mac mini addition would be a Mac Mini Pro with E3 haswell Xeon 1265L v3, a 750M, 2 SSD stick slots and 4 ECC RAM slots for $1999.
If the base model is a 4 core Xeon CPU (hopefully Haswell vs Ivy) and a single mid grade consumer GPU then essentially I got what I asked for...I just wanted it to be an addition to the lineup rather than a replacement. Heck, maybe we'll even see a $2K price tag. I like the shape...if it HAD been a cube there would have been far worse comparisons to the ill fated Cube.
/shrug
That the reaction here has been very positive that's not unexpected given it's an Apple fan site. The top model should be very fast though not as fast as an Ivy Bridge Mac Pro tower would have been.
The two video cards are the same because it's cheaper to manufacture identical cards and then solder the PCIe slot onto one of them. There is only one slot, Apple made that clear. They also made it clear that there is NO internal expansion. Then they insinuated that the problem is not with their hardware, but with Mac users.
Your BTO ideas are awesome, but I'm afraid Apple will never execute them. Still, we can dream. It's not like we haven't gotten plenty of practice dreaming about an xMac since around 2001.
I see nothing on the Apple Mac-Pro website that indicates there only being one PCIe SSD slot… Nor anything really indicating there could be two of the aforementioned slots either… I guess only time will tell, but the pads ARE there, and adding in a second slot would only be a Good Thing for the end user… Heck, for a lot of users, two PCIe SSDs might be all they ever need…! One for OS & apps, the other for files & scratch…
Asking pros to throw out their $5000 iTubes to upgrade the GPU isn't what most people would call "compelling". I agree that Apple should focus on Mac Pro GPUs, but using proprietary non-upgradable GPUs is frankly quite insulting to Mac users.
The GPUs are connected to a backplane, so who is to say they are not replaceable in the future…?
Or, maybe Apple does have something 'Galaxy-esque' lined up, and that 'old Mac Pro' becomes the first node in your new ever-growing compute cluster…!
The top model should be very fast though not as fast as an Ivy Bridge Mac Pro tower would have been.
Why stop there…? Why not say Apple should have made an even larger chassis and given us a four socket main logic board, 16 RAM slots, 8 PCIe slots & 8 or more HDD slots…!?!
Yeah, I am being facetious, but the point is, it is a faster machine than WHAT IT IS REPLACING… It will NEVER be a faster machine than what someone might DREAM UP for Apple to do…
It is what it is, and what it is looks pretty damned nice…!!!
So far we mostly have speculation based on the limited information Apple has supplied. I have some assumptions, which may or may not be correct. I'm assuming what was shown was the high end model and may not be in its final internal form; there will be other less powerful models in the line up; the entry model will be priced similar to today's entry level Mac Pro; that it will only run Maverick; configurations and prices will be announced in late July, early August; and the machine will appear at the same time Maverick is released with limited availability until November-December. But who knows.
The new Mac Pro isn't what I expected but the more I think about it's sounding better and better. If the entry level price does come in around $2500 I think I'll go that route to replace my long-in-the-tooth 2006 Mac Pro.
Yeah, I am being facetious, but the point is, it is a faster machine than WHAT IT IS REPLACING… It will NEVER be a faster machine than what someone might DREAM UP for Apple to do…
Almost every machine is faster than the machine it is replacing. Especially given that the current one has gone without an update for so long.
It's not "dream up" but simply looking at the same technology applied to a simple spec bump. Same hardware chassis and design, just updated to 2013 specs instead of 2010.
This isn't a hard concept. When you go from a dual CPU design to a single CPU design it's going to be slower than it could have been at the same generation CPU. The competing workstations will be much larger but also much faster from a CPU perspective, handle more RAM and have equivalent or better GPU and GP/GPU compute capabilities or much cheaper using non-ECC RAM and a Core-i7 but with the same high end GPU and GP/GPU options.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by fuzz_ball
Anyone remember the Cube? Hopefully they don't saddle this with a ridiculous price like they did to the cube (RIP). Price for design is not what pros want: they want power. If they premium charge this because of their aesthetic design they are going to see poor sales-through indeed.
They aren't going to premium charge this for the aesthetic design changes, they are going to premium charge this because it's a premium piece of hardware. I mean just take a look at the hardware and try to price out some of these components. I bought a Mac Pro 5 years ago and it was almost $3000 and that was for a very much low end model. I figure the starting price on this is going to be in the same $3000 neighborhood and that's not going to have anything to do with the aesthetics.
This thing is going to be blow your pants off fast though!!!
Quote:
Originally Posted by DarkVader
The level of stupid at Apple these days is overwhelming.
That has to be the worst possible design for a pro machine that I could imagine. Pros don't want cutesy cylinders, they want EXPANSION. Things like slots, lots of RAM slots, lots of PCI Express slots, and multiple hard drive bays, at least 4 of them. Pros still need optical drives. Pros want to be able to upgrade their graphics cards. Pros want multiple processors.
Think about what they could have done with this in the existing case: Dual 12 core processors. Up to 128GB RAM. 2 solid state drives AND 4 hard drives. And two Blu-Ray drives. And 4 PCI Express slots.
And the design is terrible too. This thing looks like a black aluminum can. Oh, wait, that's what it is.
The Mac Pro is for forward-thinking people.
The new Mac Pro is a brilliant and deceptively simple design. Of course it's not for everyone, but Apple is very wise here... they designed a Mac Pro that is for the vast majority of pro users. What this means is that the new Mac Pro is not designed for those who need it to be rack mountable. It's not designed for someone who needs 24 cores of dual CPU power because 12 cores are more than enough for 99% of professionals who buy Mac Pros. Apple has certainly done its homework, and judging by the outcry from people who are embedded in their tower mentality, Apple has done a good job because they are getting an emotional reaction from almost everyone.
I am a photographer and personally welcome this new, smaller design. For over 90% of customers, this Mac Pro will most likely not ever get "upgraded" and will be sufficient to satisfy the vast majority of computing needs. Apple will sell a ton of these to people like me, who I think represent the more "mainstream" pro user - not a niche user who needs to rack mount, or needs to run a server with 24 cores, etc. The last rack mountable computer Apple sold was the X Serve, and as I recall that was discontinued several years ago. So those who are crying foul because this new Mac Pro is not rack mountable must not really need that because there has been no rack mountable Mac Pro in years.
So many straw man arguments from people who can't embrace change and use hypothetical, theoretical arguments to prove a point that is completely irrelevant.
Quote:
Originally Posted by v5v
I used to think that way too, but not anymore.
Our existing Pro has a slot into which we can drop an upgraded video card. We never have. We bought the best the machine could support at the time and have never changed it.
We already have an external Blu-Ray drive (for the two or three times a year we use it) so that's not an issue.
Thunderbolt pretty much solves the last of the cases we had for slots. The Blackmagic Design cards we use for HD-SDI I/O are now available in Thunderbolt versions, as is our Pro Tools controller. There may be a brief awkward period as manufacturers migrate from cards to outboard devices, but it's clear that's the direction things are going.
Storage is via outboard RAID, so lots of slot for conventional drives are no longer necessary. Besides, this thing completely dumps SATA in favor of a storage system that links directly to the PCIe bus. That's why it's so freakin' fast.
The design does LOOK goofy, but it allows for the most ingenious cooling system ever. It's hard to argue just because it ain't pretty.
If an old fart like me can adapt, or more accurately recognize the way the industry is going, you can too!
The Mac Pro video card market is thriving. Those FirePros may be teh awesome today, but in 5 years many Pro users will benefit from newer video cards. That's great that you can do fine with your old video card, but especially with OpenCL advances, video cards are going to be even more vital to pros.
TB solves most cases for slots, but it's an expensive solution. Adding a PCIe card to the iTube entails an expensive PCIe breakout chassis connected with a $50 cable. Much easier to drop a PCIe card into the current Mac Pro. And note that TB2 is not fast enough for all PCIe cards. Most of them, yes, but not all. Also note that many pros have thousands of dollars invested in PCIe cards. New PCIe cards will be developed to exploit the new PCIe 3.0 speeds, making new cards even less compatible with Thunderbolt.
The internal PCIe storage is awesome, but one slot? Why? Because nobody ever needs more solid state storage? The decision to go with ONE SSD blade slot is inexplicable. Somebody should be fired for it.
That's your opinion that it looks goofy, some people dig the design. This would make a great headless iMac: swap in an i7, swap in a desktop GTX 780, remove one video card and use the space for more PCIe blade SSD slots. It would be a killer prosumer machine if Apple priced it as the disposable computer that it is. In my opinion despite the glaring design flaws it's a beautiful machine inside and out.
As a pro machine, it may succeed depending on the price. It had better be damn cheap if Apple expects users to buy more crap just to add a HDD, then throw the whole thing out when next generation video cards are released a few years from now. Somehow I have a sneaky suspicion that Apple will price this thing in a range that destines it to doom, giving them a convenient excuse to bug out of the pro market.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cambo
Brilliant! And revolutionary...Apple has designed another icon. Watch for bad copies in the near future...
What, like a triangle.
This is still my favorite case;
Quote:
Originally Posted by Junkyard Dawg
The Mac Pro video card market is thriving. Those FirePros may be teh awesome today, but in 5 years many Pro users will benefit from newer video cards. That's great that you can do fine with your old video card, but especially with OpenCL advances, video cards are going to be even more vital to pros.
TB solves most cases for slots, but it's an expensive solution. Adding a PCIe card to the iTube entails an expensive PCIe breakout chassis connected with a $50 cable. Much easier to drop a PCIe card into the current Mac Pro. And note that TB2 is not fast enough for all PCIe cards. Most of them, yes, but not all. Also note that many pros have thousands of dollars invested in PCIe cards. New PCIe cards will be developed to exploit the new PCIe 3.0 speeds, making new cards even less compatible with Thunderbolt.
The internal PCIe storage is awesome, but one slot? Why? Because nobody ever needs more solid state storage? The decision to go with ONE SSD blade slot is inexplicable. Somebody should be fired for it.
That's your opinion that it looks goofy, some people dig the design. This would make a great headless iMac: swap in an i7, swap in a desktop GTX 780, remove one video card and use the space for more PCIe blade SSD slots. It would be a killer prosumer machine if Apple priced it as the disposable computer that it is. In my opinion despite the glaring design flaws it's a beautiful machine inside and out.
As a pro machine, it may succeed depending on the price. It had better be damn cheap if Apple expects users to buy more crap just to add a HDD, then throw the whole thing out when next generation video cards are released a few years from now. Somehow I have a sneaky suspicion that Apple will price this thing in a range that destines it to doom, giving them a convenient excuse to bug out of the pro market.
http://cdn.thenextweb.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/06/IMG_8197.jpg
This image shows the two GPU boards; on the right hand one we see the SDD blade; on the left hand one we can see the pads where a second SSD blade could be added in…
Over on CGTalk, someone mentioned that the CPU & GPU cards seemed to be just that, cards… As in, connected to a backplane and from there the main logic board. Wondering about BTO configurations if this is true…
Single CPU, dual GPUs…
Dual CPUs, single GPU…
Single CPU, single GPU, dual 2.5" SSDs…
No matter the configuration, the boot flash is still in its socket on the GPU card, and if you look at some of the pics out there, you can see the pads where a second SSD Flash could be installed on the second GPU card…
And if Apple will do such a BTO, then they could also have consumer grade CPU cards, and consumer grade GPU cards…
Maybe a quad-core Haswell i7 CPU card (with 16GB RAM), nVidia Geforce GFX 700 series GPU card & dual SSD card with only a single SSD populated (and NO SSD Flash boot drive on the GPU card); giving us the mythical xMac…!!! Shipping by Christmas time, US$1,500.00…!!!
Quote:
Originally Posted by AZREOSpecialist
...Judging by the outcry from people who are embedded in their tower mentality, Apple has done a good job because they are getting an emotional reaction from almost everyone.
I am a photographer and personally welcome this new, smaller design.
Towers are popular with Pros because of their practicality, not because of some weird embedded mentality. It's about function, which is why the current Mac Pro is so amazingly awesome. It's why when most pros set up their first Mac Pro tower, there is a moment of silence while they pause to admire the internals before they replace the side panel and boot it up for the first time.
As for photography, you don't need a Xeon CPU, and FirePro video cards are an utter waste for you. If you're buying this new Mac Pro for photography, it's only because of an embedded mentality. About the only thing a photographer would need the current Mac Pro tower for is the internal storage expansion, but now that Apple ditched that a Mini is a better solution since you can add a second HDD for more storage, lol. Seriously, you could save yourself thousands of dollars by rexamining your computing needs. An iMac is probably Apple's best solution for now, and you don't even need expensive TB storage, plain old USB drives are fine. The upcoming Haswell Mini will probably be an even better fit if it can drive enough displays (questionable).
You're stuck in 2001 if you're buying bleeding edge pro computers for photography. Or maybe you're trying to compensate for the lack of something else.
Could have sworn the GPU boards were the two exposed ones and the CPU is the one with the SSD behind it. Apple.com had something like that, but I guess they changed it.
SO. YOU WERE COMPLETELY WRONG ABOUT YOUR FUTURE OF THE MAC PRO POST, HUH. THAT'S GOTTA FEEL GOOD, LYING TO EVERYONE.
It's not backwards because it's not a good idea to have 10TB+ internally. If you need to move to a new machine, you can't migrate the data easily. You also can't setup a proper hardware RAID internally very easily and you can't hot-swap the drives.
If you need to upgrade the Mac Pro, this is as simple as unplugging the mass storage, migrate the smaller internal at 1.25GB/s and plug the storage into the new machine. Some people have two computers so if you needed to copy something from the storage, again you just unplug it from one and plug it into the other.
Do you notice that you keep doing the same things with everything Apple related? You start with the conclusion that you don't like anything besides what you're accustomed to, whether it's internal storage, Eizo/NEC displays, PCI slots, networking or whatever else is a part of the standard tower format + professional display and then try to dismiss anything that differs from it under a cloud of doubt by saying it's 'less than ideal' or 'might have problems' or 'seems to have negative reviews'. People are using these solutions with no problems at all and have been for a while.
If you want to pick your own drives, then pick a RAID box (USB 3 or Thunderbolt) and put them in it. The Pegasus gets much better speeds than you would with internal drives:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4489/promise-pegasus-r6-mac-thunderbolt-review/6
This Mac Pro makes the right compromises going forward:
- SSDs will scale up in size over time to as much as 20TB or more
- it focuses on GPUs and OpenCL for compute power; it doesn't matter if software isn't ready yet, the software that uses it will outperform the software that doesn't and they'll get the sale
- focusing on GPUs allows them to offer more compelling upgrades year after year even when Intel is lagging behind
- the storage default means that people buying these machines get the best performance without thinking about it and bulk storage can be handled by people who do it best like the server guys e.g HP:
http://www.amazon.com/HP-658553-001-ProLiant-Server-System/dp/B005KKJPCO
If you need the speed for a project, move the data to the 1.25GB/s SSD, when you are done with it, dump it onto the RAID.
They are a similar size (this new one is smaller) and I'd say follow similar design guidelines but there are a few important distinctions with the old Cube. The performance of the hardware back then was far from future proof and there were no external ports like Thunderbolt that could make up for the lack of slots. I think they are very similar besides that in the sense that they are taking the important core elements of the Pro and applying the design philosophy of their other products. The G4 Cube was marketed as a 'super-fast, super-quiet, supercomputer in an 8" Cube' with heat expelled out the top, that's pretty much what this is. This new Mac Pro is a cylinder that fits perfectly in the cube-shaped hole that existed at Apple for a long time. It could easily have been shaped like a Cube if they wanted but it would have wasted space that way and it's best not to recycle hardware designs when it's a new model, especially if the design isn't beneficial.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AZREOSpecialist
I am a photographer and personally welcome this new, smaller design. For over 90% of customers, this Mac Pro will most likely not ever get "upgraded" and will be sufficient to satisfy the vast majority of computing needs. Apple will sell a ton of these to people like me, who I think represent the more "mainstream" pro user - not a niche user who needs to rack mount, or needs to run a server with 24 cores, etc. The last rack mountable computer Apple sold was the X Serve, and as I recall that was discontinued several years ago. So those who are crying foul because this new Mac Pro is not rack mountable must not really need that because there has been no rack mountable Mac Pro in years.
So many straw man arguments from people who can't embrace change and use hypothetical, theoretical arguments to prove a point that is completely irrelevant.
Even assuming that your 90% isn't pulled out of thin air that leaves 10% of Mac Pro users without a replacement machine. But hey, as long you YOUR needs are met I guess we're cool and forward thinking.
You can rack mount the old Mac Pro, it just wasn't very space efficient without using a hacksaw.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MacRonin
http://cdn.thenextweb.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/06/IMG_8197.jpg
This image shows the two GPU boards; on the right hand one we see the SDD blade; on the left hand one we can see the pads where a second SSD blade could be added in…
Over on CGTalk, someone mentioned that the CPU & GPU cards seemed to be just that, cards… As in, connected to a backplane and from there the main logic board. Wondering about BTO configurations if this is true…
Single CPU, dual GPUs…
Dual CPUs, single GPU…
Single CPU, single GPU, dual 2.5" SSDs…
No matter the configuration, the boot flash is still in its socket on the GPU card, and if you look at some of the pics out there, you can see the pads where a second SSD Flash could be installed on the second GPU card…
And if Apple will do such a BTO, then they could also have consumer grade CPU cards, and consumer grade GPU cards…
Maybe a quad-core Haswell i7 CPU card (with 16GB RAM), nVidia Geforce GFX 700 series GPU card & dual SSD card with only a single SSD populated (and NO SSD Flash boot drive on the GPU card); giving us the mythical xMac…!!! Shipping by Christmas time, US$1,500.00…!!!
The two video cards are the same because it's cheaper to manufacture identical cards and then solder the PCIe slot onto one of them. There is only one slot, Apple made that clear. They also made it clear that there is NO internal expansion. Then they insinuated that the problem is not with their hardware, but with Mac users.
Your BTO ideas are awesome, but I'm afraid Apple will never execute them. Still, we can dream. It's not like we haven't gotten plenty of practice dreaming about an xMac since around 2001.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
- focusing on GPUs allows them to offer more compelling upgrades year after year even when Intel is lagging behind
Asking pros to throw out their $5000 iTubes to upgrade the GPU isn't what most people would call "compelling". I agree that Apple should focus on Mac Pro GPUs, but using proprietary non-upgradable GPUs is frankly quite insulting to Mac users.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
This new Mac Pro is a cylinder that fits perfectly in the cube-shaped hole that existed at Apple for a long time. It could easily have been shaped like a Cube if they wanted but it would have wasted space that way and it's best not to recycle hardware designs when it's a new model, especially if the design isn't beneficial.
Yes, it is the Cube v2. It would have been nice if it had been marketed as the Mac Mini Pro and kept a Mac Pro at the high end with dual CPUs and slots but I guess it might have been more likely to meet a Cube like fate.
By nixing the Mac Pro tower it prevents that. I was hoping for this:
Quote:
Originally Posted by nht
A nice mac mini addition would be a Mac Mini Pro with E3 haswell Xeon 1265L v3, a 750M, 2 SSD stick slots and 4 ECC RAM slots for $1999.
If the base model is a 4 core Xeon CPU (hopefully Haswell vs Ivy) and a single mid grade consumer GPU then essentially I got what I asked for...I just wanted it to be an addition to the lineup rather than a replacement. Heck, maybe we'll even see a $2K price tag. I like the shape...if it HAD been a cube there would have been far worse comparisons to the ill fated Cube.
/shrug
That the reaction here has been very positive that's not unexpected given it's an Apple fan site. The top model should be very fast though not as fast as an Ivy Bridge Mac Pro tower would have been.
And it's all you're ever going to be doing. So give it a rest.
Stop the FUD, please.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Junkyard Dawg
The two video cards are the same because it's cheaper to manufacture identical cards and then solder the PCIe slot onto one of them. There is only one slot, Apple made that clear. They also made it clear that there is NO internal expansion. Then they insinuated that the problem is not with their hardware, but with Mac users.
Your BTO ideas are awesome, but I'm afraid Apple will never execute them. Still, we can dream. It's not like we haven't gotten plenty of practice dreaming about an xMac since around 2001.
I see nothing on the Apple Mac-Pro website that indicates there only being one PCIe SSD slot… Nor anything really indicating there could be two of the aforementioned slots either… I guess only time will tell, but the pads ARE there, and adding in a second slot would only be a Good Thing for the end user… Heck, for a lot of users, two PCIe SSDs might be all they ever need…! One for OS & apps, the other for files & scratch…
Quote:
Originally Posted by Junkyard Dawg
Asking pros to throw out their $5000 iTubes to upgrade the GPU isn't what most people would call "compelling". I agree that Apple should focus on Mac Pro GPUs, but using proprietary non-upgradable GPUs is frankly quite insulting to Mac users.
The GPUs are connected to a backplane, so who is to say they are not replaceable in the future…?
Or, maybe Apple does have something 'Galaxy-esque' lined up, and that 'old Mac Pro' becomes the first node in your new ever-growing compute cluster…!
Quote:
Originally Posted by nht
The top model should be very fast though not as fast as an Ivy Bridge Mac Pro tower would have been.
Why stop there…? Why not say Apple should have made an even larger chassis and given us a four socket main logic board, 16 RAM slots, 8 PCIe slots & 8 or more HDD slots…!?!
Yeah, I am being facetious, but the point is, it is a faster machine than WHAT IT IS REPLACING… It will NEVER be a faster machine than what someone might DREAM UP for Apple to do…
It is what it is, and what it is looks pretty damned nice…!!!
So far we mostly have speculation based on the limited information Apple has supplied. I have some assumptions, which may or may not be correct. I'm assuming what was shown was the high end model and may not be in its final internal form; there will be other less powerful models in the line up; the entry model will be priced similar to today's entry level Mac Pro; that it will only run Maverick; configurations and prices will be announced in late July, early August; and the machine will appear at the same time Maverick is released with limited availability until November-December. But who knows.
The new Mac Pro isn't what I expected but the more I think about it's sounding better and better. If the entry level price does come in around $2500 I think I'll go that route to replace my long-in-the-tooth 2006 Mac Pro.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MacRonin
Yeah, I am being facetious, but the point is, it is a faster machine than WHAT IT IS REPLACING… It will NEVER be a faster machine than what someone might DREAM UP for Apple to do…
Almost every machine is faster than the machine it is replacing. Especially given that the current one has gone without an update for so long.
It's not "dream up" but simply looking at the same technology applied to a simple spec bump. Same hardware chassis and design, just updated to 2013 specs instead of 2010.
This isn't a hard concept. When you go from a dual CPU design to a single CPU design it's going to be slower than it could have been at the same generation CPU. The competing workstations will be much larger but also much faster from a CPU perspective, handle more RAM and have equivalent or better GPU and GP/GPU compute capabilities or much cheaper using non-ECC RAM and a Core-i7 but with the same high end GPU and GP/GPU options.