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New Mac Pro Misconceptions

GermanyChris said:
I'll ask again what problems did this new MP solve?
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I'm not sure if you meant that at me as it was right below my post. If so I meant that they ported the lack of internal space problem upwards along thunderbolt as the "solution". It only (in some cases) solves a problem that the design inherently creates, specifically inability to expand on storage.

theSeb said:
This is my playground on the weekends

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That looks awesome.
 
Tesselator said:
John Deere? Cool beans!

Here's mine with my brother and a load of freshly inoculated logs - on the mushroom farm in Texas:


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You need a grab for picking up those logs. :D

theKev: I love computers and computer science, but there is no satisfaction like spending a hard day of mucking about on your land.
 
thekev said:
I'm not sure if you meant that at me as it was right below my post. If so I meant that they ported the lack of internal space problem upwards along thunderbolt as the "solution". It only (in some cases) solves a problem that the design inherently creates, specifically inability to expand on storage.



That looks awesome.
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No it was general
 
my 2 cents

Oook, Let's go. About the mac pro itself: i am so excited i can hardly wait to see the full details about it(price; upgradable parts) AND TO BUY ONE. I see a LOT of INOVATION and VERY GOOD SIGNS from Apple regarding pro users. First the changes within OSX: OpenGL 4.1 and OpenCL!!! Yeaaaah baby, finally moves for pros not just eye candy! I see huge benefits on the new pro: the ultra fast flash memory and FINALLY after YEARS AMD PROFESSIONALS GRAPHICS CARDS for all budgets. All this huge positive changes, but somehow folks still complaining. I am not sure i fully understand this. For those who want/need more power. Try to build render farms out of mac minis or just buy several mac pros. My only concerns at this point are: price and upgradable parts(and price for). But i need to say this: Apple had only 2 choices ahead of them. Either they killed the line, or they do it less upgradable so we buy more often. Otherwise the line will be unprofitable. Just how many of us change the graphics card and postpone a new machine? Let's face it: Apple needs to sell a machine to us every 2 years or less to maintain the line productive. My guess is we will not be able to upgrade much onto the machine, but we will see an amazingly low starting price.... Think of under 2K. I am so excited that i started to save for one! Yuuuuupiiiii!
 
So, I've been reading through the forums across multiple discussions of the new Mac Pro (or whatever name you want to give it) and I've yet to form an opinion of my own as to whether or not this machine is a worthy successor to the beautiful silver tower or even if it does, in fact, represent the "wave of the future" or whatever. By itself it is a beautiful, powerful piece of machinery. But is it a Mac Pro? I don't know. I think we should all attempt to reserve judgement until such time as the final product is announced and until we see prices and options. Also, I have heard whispers on the wind that there might be "one more thing."

More to the point of this post: I've seen a lot of numbers thrown around about Thunderbolt speeds and PCIe speeds and so on and so forth and the one thing that keeps ringing clear is that the numbers are a bit fuzzy, especially when math is involved (converting gigabits/s to gigabytes/s, for example). The problem with this is that numbers don't tell the whole story. The system itself is only going to have so many PCI express lanes available, some of which have to service the GPUs and ans some of which have to service the TB ports and the SSD. Now, looking at the Mac Pro 4,1 and 5,1 the PCIe slots were hardwired to provide two 16x ports and 2 4x ports. So the argument that the new Mac Pro does not have internal slots and so is crippled is actually a little bit specious; like the old MPs you still have 2 hardwired 16x ports serving the first two graphics cards. An old MP with more than 2 graphics cards is going to provide at most PCIe 4x to each of the remaining two cards. Not to mention that without external power support your options for that were limited anyway. And then at 4 PCIe cards you had to go external anyway.

My point is that one can go and look at all the workstations in the world, including the old Mac Pros, and see that no matter how many internal PCIe slots you have you are still only going to have a couple at full 16x and the rest have to share the remaining lanes. That is the same thing the new MacPro is doing... just making those lanes external on the TB bus.
 
Radiating said:
#1 It has no optical drive, you can't instal anything on it

Incorrect, it has room for 100 seperate optical drives with all thunderbolt and USB 3.0 splitter installed, with the advantage of placing the optical drive wherever you need it on your desk. Each additional drive can be bough for $20 from amazon.

#2 It has no expandable storage.

Incorrect, it has room for 100 seperate external drives with all thunderbolt and USB 3.0 splitter installed, with the advantage of placing the optical drive wherever you want out of the way or on another desk. And you don't have to open up your machine to change your storage options.

#3 But external sotrage is slow.

Incorrect, platter based hard drives to not push the limits of USB 3.0 remotly, and there is no sotrage medium that exists which can push the limits of USB 3.0. You can get 200 MB/s from an external platter drive, with USB 3.0 enclosure, 500 MB/s with a good SSD USB 3.0 enclosure, and 1.5 GB/s with a ramdisk through thunderbolt.

Except you can now have 60 seperate ram disks through daisy chained thunderbolt, which you couldn't do on the old Mac Pro, and 100 drives of all kinds.

#4 But you're stuck with the dual fire pro video cards, which don't have CUDA cores.

Incorrect, you can now add 12 or more external video cards through thunderbolt. That is far more than the last Mac Pro could even conceive of. If you wanted you could run 12 GeForce Titans.

#5 But Thunderbolt 2 is a bottle neck and is so much slower than an internal video card.

Incorrect, I've run a GeForce Titan through thunderbolt 1 on a Mac, and saw only a 5% performance drop compared to a custom bult PC with a 3770k . Video cards don't need all the speed of PCI express, even PCI express 1x will work for a GTX 680 with around a 15% drop.

#6 But Thunderbolt PCI express enclosures are expensive or you have to do some DIY work.

Correct, but this basic board that will connect a thunderbolt cable to a 16x PCIe slot is $140.

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If you want something pretty, it can run over $300, but...

Prices will come down for the non DIY enclosures the parts are not expensive as shown above, and prices will come down very quickly, I see thunderbolt 2 enclosures coming down to less than $150 for a full 15" long 500w enclosure in 18 months. Currently for a high powered full length pci express card you need a $700 enclosure (echo express pro) + a $50 external 450w power supply (Visiontek ATX12V).

However, Blu Ray players were $1000 when they were introduced, and those were far more complicated to make inexpensivly.

Thunderbolt 2 external PCI express cards are the way of the future, especially with their extreme ability to be daisy chained for literaly hundreds of possible cards on one machine. It's more convenient, more portable, more flexible, and while yes it would suck to have to pay $50-$150 for every card, it's better to do that than pay $5000 for a new computer if you want more than 4 cards.

I also can't see Apple NOT releasing their own enclosure for the Mac Pro at a competetive price, to help move progress along.

Hopefully that reduces some anxiety for everyone. The new Mac Pro is an amazing leap forward, but it really pains me to see short sighted people complain about short term growing pains when the future benefit is revolutionary. Cheaper smaller, better, more flexible, lighter, with way more expandability than anyone could ever dream of.
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Expandable is a stupid term and misleading. What this Mac has is not what is commonly called expandability but rather a larger assortment of connectivity. A fair analogy would be an AVR or receiver. No one in their right mind would say that the the more inputs and outputs means it can be expanded but rather refer to it as connectivity or ability to communicate with other devices.

What we have is a Mac Pro turned inside out. It is the core base and then everything else is merely access to external devices. Call a spade a spade.
There is no real expandability in this new machine but one can do rather limited "upgrades" to RAM, PCIe storage etc.

If this Mac had empty slots, or something similar on the inside where additional parts/items could be installed then perhaps one might be able to properly use the word "expandible." --- Until then, it is a somewhat closed system with a large array of options for connectivity to outside devices.
 
phrehdd said:
If this Mac had empty slots, or something similar on the inside where additional parts/items could be installed then perhaps one might be able to properly use the word "expandible." --- Until then, it is a somewhat closed system with a large array of options for connectivity to outside devices.
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The New Mac Pro "There's an adapter for that"
 
When I said that I've heard rumors that there might be "one more thing" I meant that I have heard speculation from sources that may or may not even be reliable that there will be other anouncements forthcoming that will make this new Mac Pro into something greater than it is. As for what that might be, I don't know. I have heard specualtion that Apple will be building their own expansion chassis, I have heard speculation that nVidia cards will be forthcoming, all kinds of things. I have even heard speculation that Apple plans to either introduce yet another model, something like the "Mac" with consumer parts in it (read i7s and GTX cards) or keep the old Mac pro tower around as a server. This is all specualtion and unsubstantiated rumors so don't read too much into it. The point of me mentioning it as I did is that nobody has the full Mac Pro picture so stop being so angry about it.
 
deconstruct60 said:
Probably not (unless push TB 2 into a corner case). Not so much that the difference in TB protocols and configuration ( TB 2 is just remapping same aggregate bandwidth), but pragmatic fact that TB2 will be implemented on a smaller , faster process technology. Intel is going to do a shrink to get cost down and put some more hardware ( so cost won't radically drop. )

The switching latency though should go down a small amount. (going to be easier for them to design something that switches incrementally faster).

Now if throw a traffic jam onto the TB 2 network ( mega 4K video streams with concurrent high PCI-e data streams ..) then probably would go up in some configurations. In contrast though when no traffic jam the now larger TB 2 network backbone bandwidth should allow more transparent x4 PCI-e v2 data transmissions.
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That makes sense. Thanks.


theSeb said:
You need a grab for picking up those logs. :D

theKev: I love computers and computer science, but there is no satisfaction like spending a hard day of mucking about on your land.
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Can't use a grab. Gotta keep the logs undamaged and the bark in tact. We're growing Shiitake mushrooms and they need the bark in tact as well as the preservation the bark offers to the wood just below. If I start marring up the logs I'll have to replace them sooner than I'd like.

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Tesselator said:
That makes sense. Thanks.




Can't use a grab. Gotta keep the logs undamaged and the bark in tact. We're growing Shiitake mushrooms and they need the bark in tact as well as the preservation the bark offers to the wood just below. If I start marring up the logs I'll have to replace them sooner than I'd like.

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Ohhh. I see. I love mushrooms, especially Shiitake. Yum.
 
Good points on PCI and TB...

jaxhunter said:
So, I've been reading through the forums across multiple discussions of the new Mac Pro (or whatever name you want to give it) and I've yet to form an opinion of my own as to whether or not this machine is a worthy successor to the beautiful silver tower or even if it does, in fact, represent the "wave of the future" or whatever. By itself it is a beautiful, powerful piece of machinery. But is it a Mac Pro? I don't know. I think we should all attempt to reserve judgement until such time as the final product is announced and until we see prices and options. Also, I have heard whispers on the wind that there might be "one more thing."
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I feel the same. It's like; What the heck is this thing. It's not a Workstation (IMO), it's way out of spec for a Desktop, Someone mentioned that it's specs are in line with a custom development and content creation platform for Apple's iOS devices. So I've been kinda rolling that around in the noggin. Seems to fit - but then again I've never done any iOS development nor would I ever want to. So, I dunno exactly how accurate this is. <shrug>
 
peabo said:
Pretty sure the dual GPUs included will blow away a single gaming card anyway, and they look modular so Apple will likely offer upgrades in the future.
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I think I remember hearing that they're soldered on, so no, if that is the case.
 
jaxhunter said:
When I said that I've heard rumors that there might be "one more thing" I meant that I have heard speculation from sources that may or may not even be reliable that there will be other anouncements forthcoming that will make this new Mac Pro into something greater than it is. As for what that might be, I don't know. I have heard specualtion that Apple will be building their own expansion chassis, I have heard speculation that nVidia cards will be forthcoming, all kinds of things. I have even heard speculation that Apple plans to either introduce yet another model, something like the "Mac" with consumer parts in it (read i7s and GTX cards) or keep the old Mac pro tower around as a server. This is all specualtion and unsubstantiated rumors so don't read too much into it. The point of me mentioning it as I did is that nobody has the full Mac Pro picture so stop being so angry about it.
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FWIW I have also heard (unsubstantiated) rumors of an Apple expansion chassis. I can't see it myself, but hey.

The pricing of this new MP will be crucial. Personally I'm pretty sure it will both be overkill for my needs and far too rich for my blood.

I like the sound of the prosumer level entry model. I think that could be a winner.
 
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There was mention of "expansion chassis" in the keynote. It was carefully worded so that it might be third party or Apple-made. It's not something that we can rule out and dismiss.
 
Is anyone else here sick to death of seeing the stupid trash can pictures posts? :rolleyes:
 
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