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Mac Pro 2011 Specs
- Thread starter -BigMac-
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You asked for it...
ATTO Technology's 6.0Gb/s SAS/SATA controller page (only ones that are internal and boot for the moment, and I'm not sure this will change due to the Mac Pro's market share).
Warning: they're not cheap (cheapest model = H608, and it sells for $399USD - here). But it is bootable once it's been flashed with EFI firmware ATTO provides (disk that comes with it or off of the support site).
Use fan-out cables to connect it to the drives. You'll still need to figure out power, but it's doable via readily available cables.
EDIT: Found it cheaper here (about $100USD less).
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Excellent, thats even better news
PS: Given that the Mobile Sandy Bridge chips are essentially on par with the top end 4 cores (W3570/W3580) chips anybody with a quad Mac Pro would benefit from going to the Late 2011/Early 2012 Mac Pro.
I was thinking of putting a W3580 in my W3520 Mac Pro but I don't see the point in spending £300 or so to get it up to the performance of the MOBILE chips. The Xeon Sandy Bridges are going to kick serious backside and I recon even the six-core would see benefits upgrading.
What bout those w/ 6-Core and 12-core mac pros? I don't think it warrants a change for those to go to the 2012 mac pro just for a few mhz or ghz of speed.
Excellent, thats even better news
PS: Given that the Mobile Sandy Bridge chips are essentially on par with the top end 4 cores (W3570/W3580) chips anybody with a quad Mac Pro would benefit from going to the Late 2011/Early 2012 Mac Pro.
I was thinking of putting a W3580 in my W3520 Mac Pro but I don't see the point in spending £300 or so to get it up to the performance of the MOBILE chips. The Xeon Sandy Bridges are going to kick serious backside and I recon even the six-core would see benefits upgrading.
"The Xeon Sandy Bridges are going to kick serious backside and I recon even the six-core would see benefits upgrading.[/QUOTE]"
I seriously doubt your claim of this.. The 6-core and 12-cores are pretty powerful, and looking at the clock speeds off the sandy bridge processors, they are pathetic, even with turbo boost the processors might slightly be on par with the 6 and 12-cores. No thank you.. I don't believe in spending 8000 dollars for more just for a couple of ghz or mhz.
Pathetic? I wouldn't call 3.5GHz stock speed + a turbo of 3.9GHz "pathetic".
Even a 4-core is very likely to violate a Westmere 6-core and now image what the 6-core or even 8-core SB processors would do to current machines!
Excellent, thats even better news
PS: Given that the Mobile Sandy Bridge chips are essentially on par with the top end 4 cores (W3570/W3580) chips anybody with a quad Mac Pro would benefit from going to the Late 2011/Early 2012 Mac Pro.
I was thinking of putting a W3580 in my W3520 Mac Pro but I don't see the point in spending £300 or so to get it up to the performance of the MOBILE chips. The Xeon Sandy Bridges are going to kick serious backside and I recon even the six-core would see benefits upgrading.
I just don't think there will be enough there to justify 6 and 12 core owners from upgrading, thats all.. Even nano makes it perfectly clear that the new mac pros should they come out won't have really anything different that can be gotten via 3rd party: SATAT III - PCIe card can be gotten for this. 1600 mhz DDR3 is not that faster than 1333 mhz memory.. At least for my purposes, the SB mac pro won't provide any thing different than what I have now.
Yes, and that is exactly the point here!
For YOU it won't make a difference, but YOU aren't all people.
If the machines makes a difference should be decided by everyone himself, there is no general "buy or buy not" recommendation to be made here.
And just btw: 6Gb/s is not easy to add to existing machines. The few 6Gb/s cards that are available today are either extern or don't boot OS X. The one card that boots (ATTO) most likely suffers from sleep issues as other controllers that attempt to boot OS X do as well. But that's just a quick guess. If it doesn't, it still is a $300 upgrade, which makes me think if a simple machine upgrade wouldn't be the wiser choice, but that's just my calculation for my current machine and the machine I'd probably buy next.
And what mac pro do you have? Just that nano told me that its not going to be really a significant upgrade which would warrant those with high end mac pros(12 and 6 core) to abandon them.
It would for a few GHz. Also SB chips are quite different than westmere/ nahalem. Not just a overclock bump.
If SB speeds it up enough, then you'll see as many 4/6/8/12-core creative pros as-can-afford-it jump to newer machines. Simply as even a 10% increase in system speeds equates to 10% less time spent rendering, so you can get more done and make enough to cover the machines cost. As soon as I can afford it, Id jump up to the high-high-end and stay there as much as possible, just doing Motion/AE/FCP and the extra 10% makes a massive difference, and for other applications (Scientific especially) - the difference will also make enough of an impact to justify an upgrade.
You also barely use your Mac Pro apparently, since you claim to do nearly everything on a G5 Quad. Something nearly all of us couldn't manage, just in terms of getting stuff done.
Yes, it is true for now that I don't use pro apps at all and only got the mac pro for prolonging the machine.. since I don't do video editing or rendering I guess the above post does not apply to me.. If it makes any sense I plainly treat my mac pro as a everyday machine for everyday normal tasks.. but because of its expandability this is the reason why I got it. Also 10 percent increase isn't much, at least in the PC World.. like I would notice 10 percent increase writing a novel, or writing email, video chatting through ichat, etc.. Or even running MS Office or Windows 7 under bootcamp.. Seems the 10 percent would be justifiable for those running pro-apps.. but those who are non-pro app users, 10 percent is really nothing.
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And last time I checked you are in a massive minority by being one of the very few Mac Pro owners who doesn't use it for heavy duty computation. Nearly every Mac Pro owner uses Pro Apps of some form, and its for those that 10% matters a great deal (Even to lowly students like me, who can only afford the Bottom-Of-The-Line model).
I agree with Jester ... there's no way that Apple embraces a new standard like Thunderbolt and does NOT implement it on the new Mac Pro.
Ok, but what about those who freelance, meaning do some video work just for the fun of it? Surely, they have all the time in the world to wait, though not that long.. Other uses for my 2010 mac pro include:
DVD Encoding - I rip dvds and am learning how to use imovie.
I also burn two dvds simultaneously as well as cds when I am in a sort of a rush.
I also use my mac pro as a file and print server for when my powerbook G4, G5 and gateway laptop need to access the printer, or if I need a file on one of those systems.
So, yes I guess I fit in that 10 percent minority.. I suppose I could go to an apple store and take one their courses on how to use ilife 09, 11 to get better use of my mac pro.
It was with a proviso if you recall, and that's to do with your specific usage (enthusiast/home user).
Not much software is actually true n core multi-threaded, but those that use such software, particularly professionals, moving to a newer system has merit (where I see Transporteur coming from). In such cases, particularly when getting paid for the work done on such a system, moving to a newer one can be financially justified by using the time savings to increase their bottom line, which is chrismacguy's point (i.e. if the financial math works out in favor, it's a good move).
All points are valid within their particular context.
So every case has to be examined for the potential buyer make the right decision for themselves, as what's applicable to one person, may not be to another (no matter if it's the system, upgrades, or software purchases).
Unfortunately, the market share for bootable products for Macs is small. The fact the XServe's been dropped doesn't help matters either IMO.
The only real reason there's any 3rd party alternatives started with the Itanium (and more recent systems' to shift to EFI/UEFI firmware, such as Intel's server boards). If this wasn't the case, there wouldn't be enough reason for companies like ATTO or Areca to develop EFI or EBC based firmware at all (for some reason "chicken and the egg" comes to mind
). But as this should actually ramp up as more systems move to EFI/UEFI, this could actually improve matters for Mac Pro owners (only need to develop drivers if they're inclined to do so).The main push for EFI/UEFI is more to do with HDD capacity limits rather than any other advantages. One such example is the lack of GUI access to EFI/UEFI systems that use it (still resembles what you see with BIOS - text). I've only seen an experiment from MSI that used a GUI, and AFAIK, it's still not made it into production boards (expect there'd be some press over that if it had).
For GHz, absolutely.
As per architecture, they've built on Nehalem/Westmere (i.e. added more cores, added another memory channel on the LGA2011 parts, and increased the IO bandwidth <QPI channels are faster>). It's less extensive for the LGA1355 parts (3 memory channels). Please understand, this isn't meant to be all-inclusive to the differences, but should be enough to give you an idea.
There's also improvements in the chipset (X79 = separate chipset + ICH of past systems on a single part) that are desirable in the enterprise market (i.e. SAS support, more SATA ports <14>, most of which are 6.0Gb/s <10>, they've included the RAID engine from the ICHxR parts of the past for example).
There may be limitations we're not aware of yet, but we'll just have to wait and see (i.e. SATA limited to ~660MB/s in past generations of the ICH).
All in all though, it will be an improvement technically speaking. Now whether or not it will benefit users, will depend on what they're doing with their systems (i.e. browser, word processor,... type of usage vs. say a animator on the workstation front, or rack of systems in a cloud for oodles of users or cluster for serious heavy lifting on the server side).
They will if they can (get a DisplayPort output to the TB chip at a reasonable cost, since the GPU isn't soldered on the logic board but a PCIe card). It's technically possible to do this, but it could be costly if they have to come up with a proprietary solution.
That said, I do think it's likely, as using a flexible PCB to the GPU card (i.e. edge connector similar to an SLI or Crossfire bridge) is cheap. Better yet, if Intel and GPU vendors can agree to an open specification, it will definitely keep such a solution cheap (economy of scale kicks in).
Oh great news! I will have a look at this when I get home. Thanks!
NP. 
It is plausible that the processors replacing those currently used in the Mac Pro will be clocked slightly higher and have two more cores. If that happens then I would expect 30-40% more performance for a highly multi-threaded task or work-flow. For example a 3.5Ghz 8-core Mac Pro replacing the 3.33GHz 6-core should be 30-40% faster for encoding and rendering based on what the LGA 1155 Sandy Bridge processors have shown so far.
I do freelance, "for the fun of it" Final Cut Pro editing (Why do it if it isnt fun?) - and I sure as heck could do with things going as fast as possible, as even us freelancers have more important things to get done in general than wait for things to render, especially since even if your having fun doing it 10 - 40 hours a week freelance (Gotta make money), you still want to spend as little time as possible waiting around for computers to crunch numbers and as much time as possible practising your art, instead of suffering for it.
This. I do freelance too, 3D Art Creation and Animations, and like Chrismacguy says, even us freelance guys could benefit of faster processors, even if it is a slight bump that would yield in only 10% performances increase... hell I take it.
Assuming the price is 8000.00? Would you then go with it? I am sure the 2012 refresh are going to be expensive and close to stratospheric prices as Apple is trying to push the mac pro away from everyday laymen who just want a box with expansion capability.. I see the next refresh starting around the 3500-4000 range.
If it will allow me to do more in less time, hence being more productive, I would certainly consider it. Time is money
I am referring to those who just use the mac pro, say for gaming mostly and or NON-PRODUCTIVE uses. I know video editors and video editing companies of course.. because the revenue is there.. but for say someone who is into gaming or just uses non-pro apps.
Then seriously the Pro is an overkill. For gaming?? You can put together a better gaming rig for far less money. For non-productive uses a mini should cut it.
Ok, am I then wrong to say the reason why I got the mac pro is because I thought it was as upgradable as when I got a Power Mac G5 back in the day? In other words, when the bulk of consumers bought the power mac towers back in the day?
You don't see 90 percent of the consumers buying mac pros like they did the Power Mac G4 or G5, Right?