OS X 10.8.3 beta supports AMD Radeon 7000 drivers, hinting at Apple's new Mac Pro

15678911»

Comments

  • Reply 201 of 211
    especially if the new MacPro is smaller and lighter

    Are you hoping to be able to take the new MP back to the UK for the summer? Because that'll be quite the cargo!
  • Reply 202 of 211
    MacProMacPro Posts: 19,718member
    philboogie wrote: »
    Are you hoping to be able to take the new MP back to the UK for the summer? Because that'll be quite the cargo!

    haha that would be true, nooo not UK ... between Florida and New Hampshire. I just throw everything in my Jeep and drive, no planes no ships. I took a MacPro and two 30" ACD's many times but it is a hell of a lot of space taken up. It always used to nag at the back of my mind that in the event of a crash that MacPro might make it through most of the Jeep and me included! :(
  • Reply 203 of 211
    MacProMacPro Posts: 19,718member
    Marvin wrote: »
    The SSD can be upgraded but not the RAM. OWC has the neatest little external USB 3 drive for the blade SSD:


    http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/OWC_Envoy_Pro

    A bit pricey for the enclosure by itself at $80 but that would make a cool little backup drive. It would be nice to be able to upgrade the RAM but 16GB will probably last until DDR4 arrives and you'd just upgrade the machine. DDR4 RAM will likely bring 16GB mobile DIMMs i.e 8 gigabit memory chips so the laptop limit should become 32GB and the iMac 64GB. This should arrive next year or the year after. It would raise the Mac Pro limit to 256GB but they might still just support 96GB. If they don't plan to exceed 96GB, they would be able to use fewer RAM slots.

    I was wondering what the Radeon 7000 drivers were actually for now, reading the thread title but it looks like AMD is rebadging the 7000-series GPUs:

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/6570/amds-annual-gpu-rebadge-radeon-hd-8000-series-for-oems

    and the 8000 series won't be out in retail until Q4 this year:

    http://www.guru3d.com/news_story/radeon_hd_8000_series_wont_arrive_soon.html

    NVidia is similarly rebadging their GPUs:

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/6579/nvidias-annual-gpu-rebadge-begins-geforce-gt-730m-and-geforce-710m-partial-specs-published

    Some Adobe software won't run nearly as well if they go with AMD in the Mac Pro but it'll pretty much be last year's GPUs whatever they do.

    Great info, thanks. I am inclined to wait a few more months after waiting this long and see if WWDC does indeed reveal a new power beast.

    I know the newest MBPs are almost as 'fast' as an 8+ Core Xeon was but I wonder about the multi tasking. I was able to be uploading to FTP, downloading from another, be compressing, rendering, mailing, surfing and even video capturing ... all at once without a blink on my MacPro. My MBP i7 simply grinds to a stand still if I over task it and that just takes asking it to do two things ... even Time Machine kicking in (wirelessly) can cause things to break such as an FTP transfer. I am not very good at waiting ... ;) So I want to get back to a machine that works how I do ... able to to do ten things at once! :smokey:

    EDIT: It occurs to me that I was not using Lion or Mountain Lion back then. Can someone confirm MacPros can still chew through multitasking with such grace on later OS X versions, I was last using SL on a MacPro I seem to recall.
  • Reply 204 of 211
    haha that would be true, I think I said Mountains of New Hampshire not Hampshire (not too many mountains there lol). If I did my bad.

    LOL. You only wrote NH (IIRC) and I remember you being British, or coming from the UK, so I presumed. Shouldn't do that - my bad.
    I just throw everything in my Jeep and drive, no planes no ships. I took a MacPro and two 30" ACD's many times but it is a hell of a lot of space taken up. It always used to nag at the back of my mind that in the event of a crash that MacPro might make it through most of the Jeep and me included! :(

    I used to take my MP to the skiing resort for the Christmas holiday. It once fell from the shelve in the back of a van we were driving but the 4 feet drop didn't break it. And that model was the liquid cooling one - LOL.
  • Reply 205 of 211
    MacProMacPro Posts: 19,718member
    philboogie wrote: »
    LOL. You only wrote NH (IIRC) and I remember you being British, or coming from the UK, so I presumed. Shouldn't do that - my bad.
    I used to take my MP to the skiing resort for the Christmas holiday. It once fell from the shelve in the back of a van we were driving but the 4 feet drop didn't break it. And that model was the liquid cooling one - LOL.

    Yes, I spotted the lack of reference to Mountains of NH in the OP and edited my reply but too late! I had written that somewhere else recently and my brain misfired!

    You could have used the MP as a sledge! LOL.

    I wasn't worried about damage to the MacPro ... I was thinking how far that mass would travel if the Jeep came to a sudden stop and I was in the path. It was always behind me as my wife had the same thoughts!! LOL
  • Reply 206 of 211
    Of course you are correct. I had hoped / convinced myself a 2010 MBP i7 fully loaded would at least be a third or even half as fast as a 2008 8 Core MacPro. I really wanted portability as I was working between summer and winter homes 2,000 miles apart. I was deluding myself I now admit. :(

    I'd say the i7 is a tenth as fast for my use, HD editing and Aperture work, or seems like it and worse, the multi tasking is non existent in comparison. I realized the mistake within hours and banged my head against several walls.

    You're aware you could've returned it right???

    Mountain Lion is great. No performance issues here. The only thing I tend to notice is the disk read speed after a reboot (no SSD here) :(. OS X memory management is quite good though so this becomes a non issue after everything's loaded. I've been waiting for 1 TB SSDs that don't require me to sell a kidney.

    I don't have one, but since the MBPs went quad-core I imagine performance improved dramatically. A lot of people say that multiple cores are only of benefit to professional multi-threaded (parallelised) applications and power users but this isn't true. Just about everyone can benefit from having more cores and total processing power, even if they only run single-process applications.

    I've noticed how the general public use computers and found that they don't bother to quit applications and can easily have a dozen or more running but still expect to be able to switch between them instantly, seemingly unaware or the memory requirements of multitasking like this. So more cores and memory benefits most people, not just power users.

    Of course, even a quad-core MBP can't compete with an 8-core desktop. It's worth checking Geekbench results to get an idea of the performance of new (and existing) Apple hardware before making purchasing decisions.
  • Reply 207 of 211
    jrcjrc Posts: 817member

    Hrmm... trying to delete...

  • Reply 208 of 211
    jrcjrc Posts: 817member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Fran441 View Post

     

    What's funny here is that you could make the exact same post back in late 1998, early 1999 and it would be just as relevant.


    Where is Fran441?

  • Reply 209 of 211
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,309moderator
    jrc wrote: »
    fran441 wrote: »
     
    What's funny here is that you could make the exact same post back in late 1998, early 1999 and it would be just as relevant.
    Where is Fran441?

    He hasn't visited since January last year and before that post, it was another year or so.
  • Reply 210 of 211
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    jrc wrote: »
    Where is Fran441?

    Wow, you woke up a year old thread to ask that question!
  • Reply 211 of 211
    hmmhmm Posts: 3,405member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by wizard69 View Post





    Wow, you woke up a year old thread to ask that question!



    yes.... and now the thread zombies hunger for brains.

Sign In or Register to comment.