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How many would have preferred the old form factor with upgraded parts?
- Thread starter slughead
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I voted for the new model but in reality I don't care. Either way is fine. Either it's $4k for a big box with SATA bays and PCI slots or it's $2.6K and I'll buy the bays and slots when and if I need them. So either is fine. In my case as i guess it is with over 80% here, I only need PCI slots for the GPU and the MP has that covered so all that's really missing in my case is the SATA bays. And I have buttloads of eSATA enclosures all ready and pluggable to the MP so no problems there.
Again, either way is fine. I do find the new design appealing tho - I mean a mini dark R2D2 tube shaped computer... How cool is that!?!
Again, either way is fine. I do find the new design appealing tho - I mean a mini dark R2D2 tube shaped computer... How cool is that!?!
My understanding is that TB requires a GPU integrated with the main board. And from what I've read, you can use MDP displays on TB ports, but TB displays require TB ports. And no Apple display made in the last 4 years has supported DVI. Hence, this new Mac Pro with custom integrated GPUs and multiple TB ports is not unexpected in order to support TB.
Bottom line... the PCIe bus has moved external. Anyone that did not see this coming has not been keeping up with current events. It's the beginning of the end for expansion cards. The future lies in TB peripherals that have the enormous benefit of being usable on a Mac Pro or a Mac Air with equal performance and simplicity.
While TB is certainly a great technology, it will never actually replace PCIe, simply because it is ridiculous for most users to run a cord outside their case to another case for devices that could've been in their original case.
Why have more than 1 PSU and case for all these devices? It's a smaller footprint to put them in a single box.
And this is what is so odd. So many people claiming TB has "replaced" PCIE, when even in the "new improved" 2.0 version, it is still 1/4 the speed of what it is trying to replace.
Since when do we call things that run at one quarter of original speed an improvement? If Apple was introducing a "NEW Xeon Squared" that was running at 700Mhz would they be telling us this was an upgrade for superior tech just because Apple said so?
there's also the much higher latency of thunderbolt vs PCIe, and I don't think the memory access will work quite as well.
Anyway, you can use off the shelf video cards with thunderbolt, but it requires using something like Optimus to share the framebuffer with an IGP....
and that brings me to wondering why thunderbolt would be that big a boon on a desktop anyway. I have a hard time seeing how they couldn't have just kept the displays and data separate.
OTOH, it's not the biggest travesty, really. Getting an official Mac Pro video card was a rare and expensive upgrade.
Anyway, you can use off the shelf video cards with thunderbolt, but it requires using something like Optimus to share the framebuffer with an IGP....
and that brings me to wondering why thunderbolt would be that big a boon on a desktop anyway. I have a hard time seeing how they couldn't have just kept the displays and data separate.
OTOH, it's not the biggest travesty, really. Getting an official Mac Pro video card was a rare and expensive upgrade.
Apparently this isn't true. Apple could've released a system that allowed for any off the shelf card to output through the TB bus.
http://youtu.be/O1t7Rc9qFgI
So far...
70.24% votes for OLD design and only 29.76% for the trash can LOL
JUST GIVE US ONE OF THESE IN JULY 2013 UNTIL THE BIN COMES OUT NEXT YEAR!!
Why do you think the new Mac Pro is going to be delayed so long? I think it will be released later this year as advertised. I suspect it will coincide with Mavericks' release.
I don´t care about the form factor, I actually like the new design, but it should have been bigger, so it would have been at least dual 16-core or dual 12-core. One CPU? Gimme a break. Also inside storage would have been needed! At least 4 SSD hard drives inside!
I´m kind of ok, that they dropped PCIe. Although it will take forever for 3rd party manufacturers to make Thunderbolt products. So waiting for those will be pain.
But as always, form over function.
I´m kind of ok, that they dropped PCIe. Although it will take forever for 3rd party manufacturers to make Thunderbolt products. So waiting for those will be pain.
But as always, form over function.
- Is there? I've been looking for info on that but haven't found any. In fact what I have found claims it's about the same. Got a source?
- Why? What??? What would make you think that? And what exactly do you mean? Can you elaborate a little? Thanks!
I wonder if some fanboys will band together and stack the poll with ghost accounts. So far it's been 2 or 3 to 1 against the new design
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Even TB 2 is still only PCIe 4x at 3.0 speeds. Bottlenecks have been shown with similar bandwidth over PCIe, I don't see how they'll escape that. I'm also concerned about latency, but the theoretical limits of the interface are reason enough to say PCIe hasn't been replaced yet
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Even TB 2 is still only PCIe 4x at 3.0 speeds. Bottlenecks have been shown with similar bandwidth over PCIe, I don't see how they'll escape that. I'm also concerned about latency, but the theoretical limits of the interface are reason enough to say PCIe hasn't been replaced yet
I voted for the new model but in reality I don't care. Either way is fine. Either it's $4k for a big box with SATA bays and PCI slots or it's $2.6K and I'll buy the bays and slots when and if I need them. So either is fine. In my case as i guess it is with over 80% here, I only need PCI slots for the GPU and the MP has that covered so all that's really missing in my case is the SATA bays. And I have buttloads of eSATA enclosures all ready and pluggable to the MP so no problems there.
Again, either way is fine. I do find the new design appealing tho - I mean a mini dark R2D2 tube shaped computer... How cool is that!?!
You Mean your not interested in a PCIe SSD?
Dude, conspiracy theories over a forum poll? LOL
OK, that would be approximately 3.5GB/s per TB2 connection. Tho the TB2 spec is 20Gb/s which is about 2GB/s. So like I said with three of them each having 3 or 4 SSDs connected up you should be able to get somewhere between 5 and 6GB/s total.
I think you're passionate about this topic so maybe I should let it go? But as a last stab there's currently almost nothing that is severely stifled by the speeds of a 3.0 4x PCIe bandwidth. Remember, we're talking 7 times faster than SATA III for each of the six TB2 connections. That's a total of over 40 times faster than a single SATA III connection. The average person just doesn't have a need to surpass that kind of speed yet - even if editing 4K video. And I guess by the time we do there will be TB3 ready and waiting for us - based on PCIe v4.0.
Me? No... Not till I can get 1TB for $150 or less. Then I will be.
We're getting there.As it is my 12TB 4-HDD RAID0 is about the same speed as a fast SATA III SSD doing 4k benchmarks, and 700MB/s sustained sequential. I really don't have a need for more than that. I'm not doing anything that needs it. Loading projects, large video files, thousands of RAW images at a time - the difference is like between 5 and 2 sec. 5sec. on my $500 12TB system and 2sec. on a $3k 1TB system. I can totally live with the extra 3 seconds per massive project load.
Heck, just today I spent the difference of about 10,000 project loads just typing in the last three messages here. I think the over 2GB/s times are great if someone is disk-recording 4K video or something like that. Typically, even with 10GB/s I/O the average user will only hit that rate a few seconds per day and the vast majority of I/O will occur for them at speeds well under 250MB/s. 99% of it is just bragging rights and benchmarks.
The old form factor with updated components would have been immediately charged to my credit card, and would have been a little slice of heaven for me. With a 3rd party optical bay unit I have six hard drives in my 2008 Mac Pro (3 1TB RAID-0, one 3TB WD Green backup, one SSD for boot, one 750GB for audio/loops.
For drives that's clearly plenty, but for external GPUs there's that bottleneck. Sorry, I should've specified, I was between tasks on my iPad at work.
Edit: So reading the combination of the articles below, the 7970 bottlenecks at below 8GBps, which is roughly 4 times what TB2 can provide. TB2 is the basically the same as PCIe 3.0 at 2x. Bottle necks were seen in testing at PCIe 3 at 4x and especially at 2x.
Benchmarks
PCIe
Therefore, TB2 will be woefully inadequate for external GPUs, even if you ignore latency issues (which we will find out via benchmarks later, likely to the howls of fanboys everywhere). I know you weren't making that argument, but I wanted to let you know what I found.
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We know Hitler did not like it
We know Hitler did not like it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3XcUUZQqd0
We know Hitler did not like it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3XcUUZQqd0
Just tell me the price of the darn thing and the cost of adding TB enclosures for my drives THEN I can give a realistic opinion.
If the new MP starts over $2k for the base model (low end dual AMD cards, 128GB SSD/Blade, Quad Core and 4GB Ram) then no. Plus there still aren't many viable options for TB enclosures and if I have to spend upwards near $1k for a TB RAID enclosure again no.
Video pros can swallow that cost but I just can't see myself spending $4k for a mid-level MP + Enclosures.
Again, all speculative until we get more info from Apple.
If the new MP starts over $2k for the base model (low end dual AMD cards, 128GB SSD/Blade, Quad Core and 4GB Ram) then no. Plus there still aren't many viable options for TB enclosures and if I have to spend upwards near $1k for a TB RAID enclosure again no.
Video pros can swallow that cost but I just can't see myself spending $4k for a mid-level MP + Enclosures.
Again, all speculative until we get more info from Apple.
For drives that's clearly plenty, but for external GPUs there's that bottleneck. Sorry, I should've specified, I was between tasks on my iPad at work.
Edit: So reading the combination of the articles below, the 7970 bottlenecks at below 8GBps, which is roughly 4 times what TB2 can provide. TB2 is the basically the same as PCIe 3.0 at 2x. Bottle necks were seen in testing at PCIe 3 at 4x and especially at 2x.
Benchmarks
PCIe
Therefore, TB2 will be woefully inadequate for external GPUs, even if you ignore latency issues (which we will find out via benchmarks later, likely to the howls of fanboys everywhere). I know you weren't making that argument, but I wanted to let you know what I found.
But the extra PCIe slots in the current form factor are also woefully inadequate for GPUs so the "limited" 20Gbps performance of TB2 is not a good reason to prefer the current form factor. The six TB2 ports in the new machine are really competing with those two x4 PCIe slots in the current Mac Pro. It's hard not to argue you come out ahead with the new MP in this regard.