Anyone else impressed by the new Mac Pro?

[slughead]

I'm glad to see Apple realising that lower power usage will be essential in the future, not limited to mobile. Our laptops are already incredibly power efficient, time will come when our workstations will be as well. I want to see the days of being able to charge a laptop and use it for a year. I hope in a decade or so, the workstations we use will have 50W power supplies.

If computer history has taught us anything, it's that as technology gets better, people find a way to use it. When more efficient chips become available, the clock will go up and/or the core count will grow.

Apple's basically used 2 year old GPU technology that's binned, underclocked, and put into a small form-factor--as you say, like a laptop. It doesn't use more than 450watts because it can't use more than 450watts without overheating. The same GPU on the D700 is doing 35% faster clocks (1100Mhz Vs 850) in other systems with the ventilation to accomodate it.

You say the future is small form-factor machines and you're wrong: the present is small form-factor machines. The Mac Mini is 9 years old now, and laptops are ubiquitous, that doesn't mean workstations of the future will be this way. As they get faster, some workstation users will adopt smaller form-factors, but the only reason people run the workstation-sized boxes is because instead of using new technology to go smaller, they use it to go faster. This has been a trade-off for decades now. If my computer uses 200 extra watts but I can get a days work done 30 minutes to an hour earlier, the extra space it takes up isn't going to bother me much. On the other hand, for some use-cases it wont affect the work-flow at all, why not use something that takes up less space and power? There will however always exist a demand for the larger boxes with tons of stuff in them, just because there's always a demand for more power (insert Tim Allen grunt here).

 

[Gav Mack]

Impressed:
Very powerful in a very small package. Pricing is good for what you get. Beautiful inside and out.

Depressed:
I prefer internal drives rather than external. I like PCIe. I don't like the dual GPU situation where you are forced to buy two of them even if one would suit you. Pricing sucks if you can't take advantage of dual Fire Pros. The GPU upgrade options are going to be extremely limited and expensive, assuming they can be upgraded at all. Number of CPU sockets and memory slots has been halved.

I'm just not the target audience for the nMP. I understand why other people like it.

Pretty much how I feel - only adding that acoustically/thermally its totally and utterly awesome. A very desirable gadget for me only though, I would only use it in my kitchen as an ultra fast & quiet rig. I need a tower with drive sleds as a primary multi OS workstation in the office so it's out of the question as a cMP replacement for my uses.