Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Any Interest in a New Modular Mac Pro Design?
- Thread starter Radiating
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
All this Thunderbolt 2 business is a diversion. The OP's question was would there be any interest in a modular Mac Pro, and the simple answer is it doesn't matter, because there won't be a modular Mac Pro. Just look at the work of Ive over the last Umpteen years, and observe the common thread - simplify. A modular anything is not simple, not "Ive", not Apple and not the solution to anything. To consider that Ive wouldn't have a major role in the design is silly - nothing gets out of the door without his blessing, and there's no way he'd consider anything as complex, messy and non-Ive as something modular.
No - it'll be another fabulously designed monolith, or something that no-one has thought of yet, 'cos he's Johnny Ive, and we're not.
No - it'll be another fabulously designed monolith, or something that no-one has thought of yet, 'cos he's Johnny Ive, and we're not.
Yes, almost everyone is. The main need for hardware that can handle more is in online/finishing, dailies, color grading, and VFX. But editing is almost all 1080 these days.
New Mac Pro
Again, we will just have to wait until Monday to see what our beloved machine will consist of. If and ONLY IF the new incarnation of Mac Pro DOES have tremendous internal expansion and is open to anything put inside, I will then sell off my 6-core 2010 for it.. IF on the other hand the new Mac Pro or whatever it is to be called offers little to no real internal expansion, and is only using thunderbolt ports for EXTERNAL only, i will probably not even bother and I am sure many of you won't either.
Apple's direction is pretty cut in dry.. Limited to no expansion in all of their mac systems. Examples of this are with the current iMacs where you can't even get to the hard drive should a problem occur. Memory is barely reachable and even more so with those machines.
I hope I am wrong, but given Apple's direction thus far with consumers and prosumers, but not PRO USERS, I fear the next mac pro or whatever its called is going to be a real disappointment.
Again, I hope I am wrong.
Again, we will just have to wait until Monday to see what our beloved machine will consist of. If and ONLY IF the new incarnation of Mac Pro DOES have tremendous internal expansion and is open to anything put inside, I will then sell off my 6-core 2010 for it.. IF on the other hand the new Mac Pro or whatever it is to be called offers little to no real internal expansion, and is only using thunderbolt ports for EXTERNAL only, i will probably not even bother and I am sure many of you won't either.
Apple's direction is pretty cut in dry.. Limited to no expansion in all of their mac systems. Examples of this are with the current iMacs where you can't even get to the hard drive should a problem occur. Memory is barely reachable and even more so with those machines.
I hope I am wrong, but given Apple's direction thus far with consumers and prosumers, but not PRO USERS, I fear the next mac pro or whatever its called is going to be a real disappointment.
Again, I hope I am wrong.
I'm aware of that. It was a bit of a joke poking fun at the idea of basing professional hardware expectations on nearly obsolete requirements. We moved on from 1080 years ago and only encounter it occasionally at export for web delivery or broadcast.
I think you're coming from a higher level. I worked until just recently as a developer and an artist in the film industry. 2k is for folks working with ECP-2 developed formats either in transfer or in all digital emulation with products like RED and etc. And I mention RED only because many here might recognize the name but there are more than a few makers now capable of supplying the tools and equipment for an all digital 2K production pipeline.
These pipelines are extremely costly! Pretty much any production company equipped so wouldn't be using DTV systems - thus there's almost no call for 2K DTV yet. I guess most people reading these forums are DTV if they're editing video at all, and that's pretty much all 1080P. Therefor I argue that 1080P is the proper format to cite in this discussion. Unless things have radically changed in the past 8 months or so this remains my presumption.
I suppose the OP could add a poll or a new thread be started polling how many folks here work with 2K or higher and how many use 1080p or even 720p...
Yup!
Me too.
Last edited:
I worked on the LightWave3D product in the design phase of the Node based shading system used in LW9, 10, and 11 product cycles. It was fun, they even flew me out to Texas from Japan - great company! I also produced a few introduction videos for that system as well. This is me and as you can hear I'm not much of an orator.
I think this was my third video in the series or something. This is LW9... we're on version 11.5 presently.I work in feature film editing and even though people are shooting on RED, they're not finishing in 4k because it costs more and it's not a common exhibition format -- yet. Plus a lot of people prefer the Alexa, which is 2k at best. So the change isn't here yet. I'd bet that by the time computing power and storage technology make it easy for anyone to do 2k uncompressed real time color correction at home, the industry will have moved on to 4k. Always just out of reach...
Um, almost everyone. Unless you're doing VFX maybe you're working at 2K, but even if you're editing a feature or indie film, you're not working in 4k, that's just dumb.
And just to make up for my previous OT post here's the throughput (capacity) of PCIe busses:
Per lane (each direction):
- v1.x: 250 MB/s (2.5 GT/s)
- v2.x: 500 MB/s (5 GT/s)
- v3.0: 985 MB/s (8 GT/s)
- v4.0: 1969 MB/s (16 GT/s)
- v1.x: 4 GB/s (40 GT/s)
- v2.x: 8 GB/s (80 GT/s)
- v3.0: 15.75 GB/s (128 GT/s)
- v4.0: 31.51 GB/s (256 GT/s)
I alluded to some hypothetical numbers before so I thought I'd offer the actuals.
A test:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-graphics-thunderbolt,3263-6.html
"As you'd expect, the card plugged straight into a motherboard performs better. But the magnitude of the impact depends on the GPU's performance, it seems. AMD's Radeon HD 6970 runs 14% faster plugged straight in to a 16-lane PCI Express slot, whereas Nvidia's GeForce GTX 460 is only 5% faster."
This is only running one GPU over thunderbolt, not a fully modular setup. Also, it works better if it is a weaker GPU.
I still don't think a modular setup would work. You would be limited to like 2 GPUs or something (for 2 thunderbolt connections). And they wouldn't be quite as fast as having it internal. And it would become a worse solution as you increase the strength of the GPU. That doesn't seem to be what pro people would want.
Let's see what they show Monday.
Jon
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-graphics-thunderbolt,3263-6.html
"As you'd expect, the card plugged straight into a motherboard performs better. But the magnitude of the impact depends on the GPU's performance, it seems. AMD's Radeon HD 6970 runs 14% faster plugged straight in to a 16-lane PCI Express slot, whereas Nvidia's GeForce GTX 460 is only 5% faster."
This is only running one GPU over thunderbolt, not a fully modular setup. Also, it works better if it is a weaker GPU.
I still don't think a modular setup would work. You would be limited to like 2 GPUs or something (for 2 thunderbolt connections). And they wouldn't be quite as fast as having it internal. And it would become a worse solution as you increase the strength of the GPU. That doesn't seem to be what pro people would want.
Let's see what they show Monday.
Jon
I'm fine with them adjusting the shape of the Mac Pro case a bit, if it has a purpose, like making it fit on racks easier. I am not fine with a mess of cables or less functionality (expandability is a key functionality, cool and quiet is a key functionality). The Mac Pro case is how it is for many very good reasons. There has to be a compelling reason to change it, which I just don't see.
I work for broadcast sports. In our company we are one of the only 100% HD facilities. Quite a few big names throw SD at us and act like it's HD. I couldn't tell the difference a few years ago. Now I can see it from across the room.
We aren't even looking at 4k yet. More of our resources are going to shortening up workflows and putting in paths to facilities we work in regularly. 4k will get here, but the laggers need to catch up to HD first.
Besides, many people are happy to live with 720 as the best their Netflix or Hulu can serve. 1080 maybe. 4k over the internet? Not until we have FIOS in more homes!
Those aren't certifiable as they aren't hot pluggable. One reason I call it asinine is because none of these vendors have developed such a solution so far, when it is such a notebook oriented solution, assuming they can sell enough. Pushing something like that on a desktop makes zero sense as a primary solution, as it can be an integrated part for less money. If a suitable percentage of users requires discrete graphics, it's even sillier. Right now they use Xeon EP in the mac pro. With that you don't have an integrated option. Assuming any kind of non integrated gpu by default, this solution is creating its own problem.
Even the article just invents problems.
This is completely illogical. Bring the price down to use it in a desktop. They really mean an all in one. The point of an all in one is reduce desk clutter, so if you need a lot of extra peripherals, it makes little sense. At least the notebook is portable.
We have had whisperings about Thunderbolt being a way to daisy chain multiple Mac Pros but who knows..
So the question I have is:
If you have multiple GPU's in your tower, and added say 2 more to an external PCIe (or TB) module, wouldn't you still have a performance improvement?
In terms of CUDA or Open GL/CL.
If you are rendering a movie and add CPUs over the network does that improve rendering time?
Yes - in almost every case. Certainly any case where the frames require more time to compute than to transfer - and with transfers occurring at 100/MB/s over even lowly gigabit ethernet, that's pretty much anything longer than real-time.
At the same time however, adding external coprocessors (even such as CUDA Cores) would be best addressed over PCIe either located on the main-board or in an expansion enclosure.
I'm curious if it would work the same running 2 gpus. Their setup there looks like a $400 card shoehorned into a $700 enclosure. That they mentioned it was almost plug and play is a fairly positive thing, but they had to remove the top of the enclosure and use an auxiliary power connector as mentioned in the article. Having to Frankenstein an $1100 solution for something adequate seems kind of extreme to me unless you're actually using your notebook away from home or office and need that on the go. Even then if there is really a market, I would expect a company like EVGA or Sapphire to provide a complete out of the box working solution with full thunderbolt certification rather than a chassis that can be altered to work.
Again assuming such a thing becomes a real market, I would expect it to become part of the displayport spec as well. Daisy chaining and bandwidth for peripherals are part of the base displayport spec that Apple never fully supported with mini displayport. In a lot of ways it adds minimal features at high cost. As of right now it doesn't support displayport 1.2. The next revision is supposed to add that, but displayport 1.2 is actually a better general standard in a lot of ways.
Common sense refutal? Looks like the completely modular Mac Pro is still a pipe dream. The bandwidth required for CPU/Memory/GPU is beyond what TB 2 provides, as I stated. I am not sure which part of your post was common sense. It's great for storage.
Nobody else laughed...
A lot of tv broadcasting is still in heavily compressed 1080i.
Apple hopes that there is interest in a new, modular Mac Pro design. That's all there is going to be in a few months once the refurb 5,1s sell out.