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The Mac Pro Criticism
- Thread starter Simplybetter
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Dang, with all this complaining it's going to be interesting to see how many people will pre-order this thing'. As I said earlier I'm in unless the entry price is something ridiculous. 
This thing has innovative packaging, which is great for a consumer desktop but irrelevant to pros, the very buyers Apple is aiming this at. I've dealt with a lot of Mac Pro users who could be called "pros" and not one of them complained about the Mac Pro tower not being pretty enough or needing to be smaller. A few complain that the handles are more form than function since they cut into one's hand when carrying the beast. The innovative packaging seems like a solution to a problem that didn't exist, unless...
Unless, as a result of making the Mac Pro so light in the arse, Apple can drop the price. Shifting PCIe and storage into other enclosures could be called innovative in the sense that fewer buyers will pay for expansion they don't need. The problem with this strategy is that buyers would be better served by offering an i7 iTube as a headless iMac and a real tower with dual socket Xeon options for pros. Surely Apple is a rich enough company to offer such a lineup?
If the price is the same as the current towers, Apple are asking pros to invest an awful lot in TB peripheral solutions that won't do anything faster or better than the PCIe solutions they would need to throw out. Maybe it could work, but that's an awful lot of hardship for the sake of a pretty cylinder. If this iTube is cheaper though, then this could work well. By all rational thinking it SHOULD be considerably cheaper, but this is Apple we're talking about, so we'll see.
Unless, as a result of making the Mac Pro so light in the arse, Apple can drop the price. Shifting PCIe and storage into other enclosures could be called innovative in the sense that fewer buyers will pay for expansion they don't need. The problem with this strategy is that buyers would be better served by offering an i7 iTube as a headless iMac and a real tower with dual socket Xeon options for pros. Surely Apple is a rich enough company to offer such a lineup?
If the price is the same as the current towers, Apple are asking pros to invest an awful lot in TB peripheral solutions that won't do anything faster or better than the PCIe solutions they would need to throw out. Maybe it could work, but that's an awful lot of hardship for the sake of a pretty cylinder. If this iTube is cheaper though, then this could work well. By all rational thinking it SHOULD be considerably cheaper, but this is Apple we're talking about, so we'll see.
Wanna make a bet on numbers sold to the big studios vs. "johnny filmmaker"?
And if it REALLY was made for "bulk" use, it have been make rackmountable.
It's style, plain and simple.
I find it slightly irritating, but, not as irritating as the lack of a full-size xServe
(rackmount server). If you view as desktop system as a system that will display the physics and graphics that you are computing elsewhere, a closed design that you won't mess much with for two years is sort of OK. (As long as it will do 4K.) And, it solves the GPU integration problem. But, Apple needs to reinstantiate the xServe line with 2 CPU (or even 4 if Intel could bring itself to bring the cost down a little) 4 GPU, 12 drive bay monster.
Dang, with all this complaining it's going to be interesting to see how many people will pre-order this thing'. As I said earlier I'm in unless the entry price is something ridiculous.
Same here.
But as someone pointed out there was a lot of complaining the last few upgrades too. I think it's just spoiled westerners. The "Game Society" - I want it NOW and I want it MY WAY or I'm going postal!
To me, it's all about the price. If the price is right, then the new Mac pro will be a winner. If it's more expensive than people expect or want to pay, then it will be hard to swallow the lack of internal expandability etc.
And as much as I like the fact that the new Mac Pro will be assembled in the US, this will most likely add to the cost and makes it less likely that it will be priced where people want it.
And as much as I like the fact that the new Mac Pro will be assembled in the US, this will most likely add to the cost and makes it less likely that it will be priced where people want it.
Hi AlikGriffin. As far as I know SSDs should have longer life spans than SATA HDs because of less moving parts. I think the SSD in the new 2013 MP can be replaced by Apple. On another note, I am just speculating though I could be wrong. I think the new 2013 Mac Pro was designed for users to keep buying new Mac Pros every 2-3 years from a marketing view as Apple is streamlining their Mac Minis, iMacs, Mac laptops and Mac Pros to be in "one system" for production and repairs. So they made this new MP less expansion. This may work for some with extensive budget and may not work for other pros that would "dent" the bank. In my case I was hoping for the option to still have internal expansion.
Hope in a few months we'll get to know the pricing and more infos as this may affect and change the mixture of comments.
People had the right to complain about that 2012 upgrade disaster.
I love to know what Apple was thinking on that one. It was like they had something in the works but decided to pull it and brought out the 2012 upgrade as a token Mac Pro.
You've got my number.
I give Apple credit, they put some thought, time and effort into the new Mac Pro.
But I am disappointed. It won't work for me at all.
On the bright side, I am getting a PC with an oc'd 4770k and a GTX Titan. This will save me a lot of money.
I am keeping my 2008 Mac Pro as well. I'll be a two computer man.
Also on the bright side, you need not worry about glitches on a new hardware and new OS 10.9. And you hit 2 birds with one stone by having 2 good machines with less money spent.
I have a burning feeling given the prices for thunderbolt peripherals, this will be a deterrant to the New Mac Pro. Unless thunderbolt can come down SIGNIFICANTLY to the mid-consumer/pro-sumer level, very few will be buying this Mac Pro.
USB 3.0 does not cut it compared to SATA. My 4 HDDs inside my Mac Pro are a lot faster than USB 3.0 could ever possibly provide. I know for me I won't be getting the iCan due to the expense in thunderbolt peripherials, such as drive enclosures.
USB 3.0 does not cut it compared to SATA. My 4 HDDs inside my Mac Pro are a lot faster than USB 3.0 could ever possibly provide. I know for me I won't be getting the iCan due to the expense in thunderbolt peripherials, such as drive enclosures.
This is only currently true. Like USB enclosures were TB ones will be high at firse and then soon found for $20 or so.
If that's true for you then your USB3 interface and/or devices suckass. Sorry, USB3.0 with the proper gear (not a $19 hong-kong card) is about the same as SATA III and actually much better than SATA II.
I replied to your message because I hear this a lot and it's just not the case. I think this misinformation has it's roots in two gardens. One is the grounds of USB2 which is sloooow. And the other stems from all the folks (especially here at MR) who went out and bought $19 cheap-ares hong-kong-phooey cards just for the v3 connectivity and the little boost they offer with single devices connected. Ya get what ya pay for...
True.. but given my situation and I have gone over this with Nano many times. I have 4 HDDs in my 2010 Mac Pro.. running on SATA II bus. If you can point me in the right direction for a 4 drive USB 3.0 enclosure and it indeed is much faster than built in SATA II or even SATA III on a PCIe card, then I will trade up my 2010 for the new iCan Mac Pro..
If and ONLY IF..
If and ONLY IF..
How to configure USB3.0 for about the same speed as SATA III
4 HDDs... USB3.0 will be the same speed as SATA III and also the same speed as SATA II. The fastest rotational drives right now are like 200 MB/s ± 30 MB/s and that's well within SATA II's bandwidth.
To achieve this in USB3.0 you need to use at least two USB3 ports (which together totals 10Gb/s). You could use a single enclosure for each drive and hub ("port multiply") 1 connection into two for needed 4 enclosures. But of course in your internal array you are using one port for each drive too.
The most economic configuration I can think of would look like:
Total cost would be about $75 including tax and such:
Example One
Example Two
Or you could just get 4 bare adapters and run then into just any old case or no case at all.
Something like this or maybe search for a little longer one? This might actually be better if the case you use has a fan in it.
Yet another option is to use two dual-bay docking stations. Tom's hardware seems to be under the impression that Thermaltake makes the fastest ones but I think they're probably all about the same - if it's not a knock-off cheapy. Here is it at Amazon. I get 320MB/s for a two-drive RAID0 running in a Marshal brand dual dock using two HDDs which individually clock at 170MB/s when internally connected to the SATA II bus on my Mac. I tested the dock on my Dell XPS -12. I also tried it while playing 1080 youtube videos through a USB3 --> LAN adapter connected to the same USB3 hub and there was no difference - still 320MB/s. In such a configuration USB3 should be able to maintain about 450 to 480MB/s per connection.
If you run them open or in a dock (like I do) I would recommend using a single USB fan running off one of the HUBs to keep them cool. I use this one:
If you use SATA III SSD drives you will have to use one USB3 port per drive just like SATA does. And in that case the USB3 setup will be just a tiny tiny bit slower - assuming the SSD models you choose are capable of fully saturating SATA III (I guess most aren't).
If you want to test any of these claims on your current MacPro 4,1 or 5,1 you can do so using this card and one of the configurations above. (I'll buy the card off you when you're done assuming I haven't already purchased it for myself yet - currently unavailable in Japan.) The MacPro3,1 may be the same as well but I keep forgetting the PCIe spec on the 3,1 - which slots are which version/speed - old age I guess.
4 HDDs... USB3.0 will be the same speed as SATA III and also the same speed as SATA II.
The fastest rotational drives right now are like 200 MB/s ± 30 MB/s and that's well within SATA II's bandwidth.To achieve this in USB3.0 you need to use at least two USB3 ports (which together totals 10Gb/s). You could use a single enclosure for each drive and hub ("port multiply") 1 connection into two for needed 4 enclosures. But of course in your internal array you are using one port for each drive too.
The most economic configuration I can think of would look like:
Total cost would be about $75 including tax and such:
Example One
Example Two
Or you could just get 4 bare adapters and run then into just any old case or no case at all.
Something like this or maybe search for a little longer one? This might actually be better if the case you use has a fan in it.
Yet another option is to use two dual-bay docking stations. Tom's hardware seems to be under the impression that Thermaltake makes the fastest ones but I think they're probably all about the same - if it's not a knock-off cheapy. Here is it at Amazon. I get 320MB/s for a two-drive RAID0 running in a Marshal brand dual dock using two HDDs which individually clock at 170MB/s when internally connected to the SATA II bus on my Mac. I tested the dock on my Dell XPS -12. I also tried it while playing 1080 youtube videos through a USB3 --> LAN adapter connected to the same USB3 hub and there was no difference - still 320MB/s. In such a configuration USB3 should be able to maintain about 450 to 480MB/s per connection.
If you run them open or in a dock (like I do) I would recommend using a single USB fan running off one of the HUBs to keep them cool. I use this one:
If you use SATA III SSD drives you will have to use one USB3 port per drive just like SATA does. And in that case the USB3 setup will be just a tiny tiny bit slower - assuming the SSD models you choose are capable of fully saturating SATA III (I guess most aren't).
If you want to test any of these claims on your current MacPro 4,1 or 5,1 you can do so using this card and one of the configurations above. (I'll buy the card off you when you're done assuming I haven't already purchased it for myself yet - currently unavailable in Japan.) The MacPro3,1 may be the same as well but I keep forgetting the PCIe spec on the 3,1 - which slots are which version/speed - old age I guess.
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cramming a display into a smaller case using a new manufacturing process is not the same as a chipset revision.
Sure Intel is "beyond Apple's control", but as one of Apple's largest vendors Intel can be leaned on, influenced, begged and if need be yelled at.
We do it sometimes at my job, but then we are in Broadcast so we have immutable deadlines.
Of course I do not know anything going on behind the scenes at Apple and Intel. However it is a valid scenario to think Apple would insist that one of their vendors get up to speed to enable their product launch.
Whether or not they can move units in the moribund EU economy is of little importance. The US economy is where the money is at and where the standards are set for production workflows used in most of the creative industries that have relied on Mac Pros in the past.
No crotches were grabbed in the making of this post.
Not. USB 3.0 ports aren't additive. They are also measured in 10Gb/s (small 'b' : bits ; not bytes -- big 'B' ) .
USB 3.0 ports are typically provisioned off of a 1x PCI-e v2.0 link. That maxes out at 500MB/s or 4Gb/s (i.e., slower than USB 3.0's theoretical top end bandwidth: 5Gb/s. ).
There is no way in the world you are going to get 10Gb/s out of that let alone 10GB/s.
You'll get maybe round 300MB/s after dealing with USB 3.0 overhead and sharing bandwidth between the two ports being leveraged in the desisng.
That is more than enough for 4 HDDs because typically can't sequentially stream for average files. Throw even a small amount of random access at the drives and the throughput drops from 200MB/s to > 100MB/s (i.e., at least 50%. Typically much more for non-10K RPM drives ).
That would depend on the design. You seem to be assuming that all the USB 3.0 ports are driven off one controller. You could easily build a multi-controller setup with multiple PCIe-3.0 lanes and get full bandwidth from each USB 3.0 port. I have no idea what Apple plans to do with the new Mac Pro.
Still, that's 10X what you get off USB 2.0.
Depends on the setup. If you had 4 of the Seagate XT drives with built-in flash, or, just flash drives, you wouldn't want more than two of them on a single USB 3.0. I'm somewhat of a fan of USB 3.0, but, only because it is so much better than 2.0, not because of how well it will compare against 8 SATA III channels with 8 SSDs.
Yeah, I've already tested this thoroughly. It absolutely works the way I described - including the 450 to 480MB/s sustained throughput. You need only two controllers totally for the configurations I outlined - thus you can hub 2 ports from one connection or put one dock with 2 drives on each dedicated port. I'm also going to assume Apple wasn't completely stupid and supplied 4 dedicated USB3 ports on the MP6,1 - and did not port-multiply 2 or 1 controller - like hong-kong manufacturers do with those $20 cards.
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I'm going to assume Apple didn't do something stupid, but, engineers make different assumptions. It wouldn't be unheard of to drive two such ports off the same controller, just because of some glue chip limitation or other. We won't really know until the details come out. So, I would assume they wouldn't drive all those ports off one controller. But, I wouldn't assume each port would get its own dedicated link, either. Wait and see.
JUN 14 2013 Life After Slots: What the Mac Pro, External Hardware Mean for Production
A really good article on the new Mac Pro. http://createdigitalmusic.com/2013/...ac-pro-external-hardware-mean-for-production/
A really good article on the new Mac Pro. http://createdigitalmusic.com/2013/...ac-pro-external-hardware-mean-for-production/
Pretty safe assumption since the Mac Pro is oversubscribed on PCI-e lanes. Also pretty safe because more controllers would take more space which the Mac Pro doesn't really have alot of.
1x PCI-e lane 4 port USB controllers are pretty standard off-the-shelf parts these days.
http://www.frescologic.com/products_show.php?ms=2
http://www.via-labs.com/en/products/vl800/
http://am.renesas.com/products/soc/usb_assp/product/upd720201/index.jsp
Even the disconnect that Renesas has had with USB attahed SCSI (UAS) it doubt it is there part in there. Given Fresco works without "out of the box" on newest OS X it is more likely one of those with more support.
Err no.
1. USB controllers are PCI-e v2.0 not 3. ( the IOHub/PCH/Southbridge chips have v2.0 links on them not v3.0. in Intel's current core chipsets. )
The C600 chipset that is used with the Xeon E5 series has x8 v2.0 lanes for I/O controllers.
( wifi/bluetooh , two Ethernet ........ and there goes another 3 1x links )
2. Using v3.0 lanes isn't good because there are only 40 v3.0 lanes.
Two x16 for the GPUs ---> 32
2-3 TB controllers ---> (3 x 4 ) x8 or x12
PCI-e SSD ----> x4 v2.0 or x2 v3.0
Which all adds up to more than 40.
If you put the USB controllers on a PCI-e switch you are not increasing bandwidth. You are diluting it.
It has nothing to do with the Mac Pro. It has to do with now what the respective component parts needs in terms of requirements for any system (Apple built or not).
There is a finite fixed number of available PCI-e lanes. If you add up all the controllers that are evident and the number is higher than lane budget then don't have bandwidth. It is arithmetic, not psychic connection with Apple HQ.
Whoop-di-doo. And it is faster than 1990's vintage EIDE.
Corner cases don't really address the initial disconnect with the facts.
Two thumbs drives.... (flash based) aren't going to make a difference either. See the above case still stands even while whittled down slightly.
Non HDDs were not mentioned. You can drag them in but don't really address the core issues. USB ports are still not additive.
Oh dear. Are you actually barking?! There are good FW / USB interfaces for mobile and small rigs, but bigger studios and production facilities are almost entirely PCIe.
As for DSP, I take it you're unaware of HDX or UAD, let alone Rednet or any of the other PCIe only formats.
Buy a Mac Pro 2013 and a Thunderbolt display (that has been updated to USB 3.0) and you will have two USB 3.0 controllers. But not in the one small box. That is in part what TB is for. Need another USB controller? buy a box that has one ( and probably something else you need) in it. Plug it in.
The folks who need 8 FW800 sockets? That person has zero need for two USB 3.0 controllers hogging up internal bandwidth. They would by a box with two (or more ) FW controllers in them and lots of ports along with something else they needed.
Apple is also not stupid enough to not to know that eventually on the next chipset iternation Intel is going to put USB 3.0 in the follow on to the C600 chipset so having just one USB 3.0 will be the norm amoung all Macs at that point.
Just to point out: The words "oversubscribed PCIe lanes" are being thrown around here and I'd like to point out that's complete and total BS. It's being just made up by the people using them and hold no meaning. No one can know if the lanes are "oversubscribed" unless they already know how many lanes there are in the first place - and they don't! Peroid, end of story. Apple themselves said or alluded to, the fact that there are 4 [dedicated] USB3 ports and I seriously doubt they would lie, mislead, or rip us off by delivering port-multiplied ports.
Their very history in both advertising and manufacturing should tell us this. Or can someone show me where they advertised 2, 3, or 4 ports of any kind (TB, SATA, FW, LAN, anything) and yet delivered the device with port multiplication? Have they ever used port multiplication of any kind in any of their devices at all? I suspect not, no.
So this entire line of thinking is just self promoting an unfounded opinion and in reality complete BS!
Their very history in both advertising and manufacturing should tell us this. Or can someone show me where they advertised 2, 3, or 4 ports of any kind (TB, SATA, FW, LAN, anything) and yet delivered the device with port multiplication? Have they ever used port multiplication of any kind in any of their devices at all? I suspect not, no.
So this entire line of thinking is just self promoting an unfounded opinion and in reality complete BS!
We know that it uses LGA 2011 and there are two series of processor in this category. Sandy Bridge-E and Ivy Bridge-E. There is also Haswell-E but we don't know if that will use the same socket yet. The point of bringing these up is that the PCIe controller is in the processor and we already know how many PCIe lanes each of these series of processor have available.
That answer is 40 x PCIe 3.0 lanes. Each lane has a maximum throughput of 985 MB. So if we take that and multiply it by 40 we get 39,400MB/s or in Mb terms 315,200Mb/s aka 307Gb/s
Now lets consider that both of the AMD FireGL cards are connected via PCIe Gen3 8x which they likely will be (That is the equivalent of x16 PCIe 2.0 for each card) that takes 16 PCIe Gen 3 lanes out of the system leaving 24 lanes. Looking at the PCIe SSD card used in the MacBook Air it would appear that it uses a single PCIe lane. If that is Gen 3 which it very well could be then that is 985MB/s of bandwidth. The Mac Pro is claiming slightly faster than that so it may use a 4x PCIe Gen 3 or a 4x Gen 2. Either way we are comfortably over the 1.25GB/s quoted by Apple.
So lets be conservative and say it uses 4x PCIe, that leaves 20 Lanes for Thunderbolt. That's 19,700MB/s aka 157.6Gb/s more than enough for the 120Gb/s demanded by the six Thunderbolt ports (6 x 20Gb/s = 120Gb/s) being used simultaneously. If we deduct that we are left with 37.6Gb/s of bandwidth for the USB 3.0 devices.
So lets go over those, it has 4 USB 3.0, if they follow the specification that is 5Gb/s per port. Simple math dictates we need 20Gb/s of bandwidth for those, we already had 37.6Gb/s left so now we deduct that and we are left with 17.6Gb/s of overhead bandwidth.
Now obviously that PCIe bandwidth left over won't really be left over, audio, system controllers, Dual Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi and Bluetooth will use some of it and some devices will use the slower PCIe 2.0 bus, probably the SATA drive, Bluetooth and WiFi module. But expect Bluetooth and WiFi to share the same PCIe Lanes with a bridge chip and the SSD to only use 4 PCIe lanes and in these modern systems you can run PCIe 1.1, 2.0 and 3.0 devices simultaneously and in fact devices that use the PCIe bus can dynamically clock down to PCIe 1.1 or 2.0 from PCIe 3.0. They do this to enter low power states but not only when the system is sleeping, just being idle can make the PCIe bus decrease in speed. I have an example of that on my own PCIe 3.0 system I can show you if you want with screenshots as I am running an LGA 2011 system with 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes and two PCIe 3.0 compliant graphics cards which clock down to PCIe 1.1 when the system is idle.
TL;DR So in closing. The system has more than enough bandwidth for every port it has to be fully saturated while simultaneously fully loading both graphics cards.
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