What could have been the current equivalent would have been 2x more powerful. Dropping the second CPU option was a kick in the nads.
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Will there be a new Mac Pro in 2015?
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What could have been the current equivalent would have been 2x more powerful. Dropping the second CPU option was a kick in the nads.
OK, I'm not gonna argue if it looks good or if underpowered.
It's obvious that it's a pretty cool machine for some (me included) but lacking for others.
If you really, really need the extreme power, well you better go with HP, Dell or whatever makes your day.
If you want some power but also enjoy the looks and the quiet, then the nMP is the WS for you.
Some guys here are still nuts about tinkering with their systems, and that is ok and all - I was like that too, but some other people prefer the stability and quietness over all, and that is what the nMP is for.
Unfortunately, Apple left those other guys in the dark, without the xMac for them to have fun with, which is in fact too bad, but that was surely a business decision we need to live with.
Still, there's always the MP 5,1 or earlier for that, although it's showing it's age I guess.
Regarding Tonga, I sure hope it won't come with just 2GB, but 4GB would equal Grenada D510, which is not likely. They might enable the full Tonga with 384bit and throttle down to meet the power envelope. With the lossless color compression featured in Tonga, maybe they'll really stick 2GB on it.
It's obvious that it's a pretty cool machine for some (me included) but lacking for others.
If you really, really need the extreme power, well you better go with HP, Dell or whatever makes your day.
If you want some power but also enjoy the looks and the quiet, then the nMP is the WS for you.
Some guys here are still nuts about tinkering with their systems, and that is ok and all - I was like that too, but some other people prefer the stability and quietness over all, and that is what the nMP is for.
Unfortunately, Apple left those other guys in the dark, without the xMac for them to have fun with, which is in fact too bad, but that was surely a business decision we need to live with.
Still, there's always the MP 5,1 or earlier for that, although it's showing it's age I guess.
Regarding Tonga, I sure hope it won't come with just 2GB, but 4GB would equal Grenada D510, which is not likely. They might enable the full Tonga with 384bit and throttle down to meet the power envelope. With the lossless color compression featured in Tonga, maybe they'll really stick 2GB on it.
Yeah, see, there is the problem. If your "design" means you need to down clock a mid-grade GPU then your design is the problem.
I'm sure this has already been discussed, but, is there a next generation of Xeon (or equivalent) processors available? Something that would help the nMP take a leap in performance past the top-end iMacs?
Haswell-EP (E5-x6xx v3) has been out for quite some time, and has up to 18 cores per socket. It also supports 32GiB DDR4 DIMMs, with 64GiB DIMMs starting to show up.
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They're in the classic (no pun) Mac Pro upgrade paralysis - not doing anything because something better is coming. After a while, people will defend them - "it's too late to do a Haswell upgrade, the next CPU is too close".
Meanwhile, HP/Dell and the rest are shipping 36-core 768 GiB workstations and servers using Haswell-EP, and saying that 1536 GiB systems will be here soon.
sure, on a certain level, that's all they did.. still, much easier said than done.
idk, the design is impressive to me.. I don't expect the same for everybody.
Well your average prosumer-professional never ever uses all of that. You're going to need to do a LOT of stuff to even tickle all 36 cores. Hell, most professional programs don't even take advantage of 8-12 cores yet. At some point you'll hit a certain limit where adding more cores doesn't increase the performance any more than 1%. Right now that limit lies at 8-12 cores.
Spend a few moments to look up "Apache/Spark" and then try to defend your core count argument. (My Spark cluster has 192 cores - and spends hours at 100% CPU utilization on some jobs.)
People use workstations for lots more than Photoshop and ImoviePro. Apple chooses to ignore that market.
Apple also chooses to ignore the 10,000+ cpu supercomputing market with petabytes of DRAM. So what? If you need a dual processor workstation, there are several vendors that will sell you a nice unit with lots of slots. Apple left that market a long time ago, just like they left the server market years ago.
This is the "Mac Pro" forum. Some people aren't happy with having to go to one of "several vendors" to get the system that the Mac Pro 6,1 could have been, and aren't happy about being forced into leaving Apple OSX.
The MP6,1 is emasculated compared to the 5,1. No need to bring in irrelevant comparisons to Top500 supercomputers - it's anemic compared to the high end workstations available now from other vendors.
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OK, I get it, for the ultimate hardcore workstation user, the nMP is compromise. (This is also reflected in the pricing, as you could spec a cMP out for like $40,000 if you really wanted to).
For somebody like me, it's a great machine though. I write software, have many apps running at once, sometimes multiple VMs with server environments running, and I might have a game running to boot (sometimes I just stay logged into FFXI in a Windows VM).
My desk is cramped -- I literally don't have room for a giant box. I also find that I often have to move my computers around, something I always loathed to do with a tower.
Yes, it might be a terrible design for you, but that doesn't make it a terrible design for everyone, including myself.
This exactly. I have no space for a huge workstation, nor can I tolerate the noise (I had a MP 5,1 for 2 years), but an iMac or laptop is not powerful enough. The ideal machine for me (and many other academics) is a small, quiet Xeon-based machine with 6-12 cores and 32-128GB of ECC memory. I might be running a simulation in the background for a week, but I also need to live with this thing in my office, so the nMP is really revolutionary for my purposes. I suspect this is true for a lot of people, which is probably why Apple decided to go this route. Now if they would only get on with E5-v3 processors and DDR4...
That's not really fair - you keep moving the goal post. That was NEVER Apple's market, and they have never had any interest in that kind of hardware. Seems a little hypocritical to bring up 192 core Spark clusters running apache, and then shoot down the point on "super computers" as being irrelevant.
How many businesses are going to buy $10,000+ Macs to run Apache or any other applications that really benefit from more than a dozen cores? There's very little value that Apple can bring to that market. Generally speaking, businesses aren't even interested in buying Macs for typical office applications.
As others have said, we get that it would be great if Apple offered that kind of hardware (if for no other reason than to get people to shut up about it already), just as it would be great if they made the infamous xMac. Which by the way, would have a FAR LARGER market audience than 36 core Mac towers. And not just for home users, but a majority of Mac Pro buyers.
You guys continue to operate in your own little bubble. Is there a point to this constant harping on the nMP? It would get pretty annoying if people went off about xMacs in every MP thread, and how the MP sucks because there are no options for an i7-4790K and a GTX 970?*. People would finally say, why do you keep bringing that up in EVERY MP thread? Apple doesn't make that computer and isn't going to make that computer.
(* please save the snarky reply about MVC's hacks for another day - flashing cards, installing web drivers and all the other caveats that come with it is not the same thing as an Apple officially supported seamless "just works" product)
ha.What "anti-nMP Crusade"?View attachment 559019
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that's what it seems like here but it's really just mac vs pc argument in disguise
ssdd
I think all Mac Pro users would be happy if Apple built a tower that was CPU,GPU and memory upgradeable, without fleecing Mac users for underwhelming/overpriced feeble HW options, dont they make enough moolah already from the millions/billions of macentric zombies out in the world. Dont dish up the support issue either, they already con people with Applecare, so whats the difference with supporting higher spec Nvidia/Amd/Intel options. Power Users quickly find out what the best marriage of High end HW/SW is and usually take this route anyway.
Ive been running an i5 3570k with different video cards/ssd/ram/psu(All upgrades) the last 3 years with Windows 7 and it hasnt crashed on me once. Apple could open up and take this route too if they wanted to but they only seriously want your money with the least amount of effort, and not what users actually want. Kudos must go to Microsoft on this front.
Would love a new Mac Pro but it must be what users want not what Apple decides is best for their bottom line.
Ive been running an i5 3570k with different video cards/ssd/ram/psu(All upgrades) the last 3 years with Windows 7 and it hasnt crashed on me once. Apple could open up and take this route too if they wanted to but they only seriously want your money with the least amount of effort, and not what users actually want. Kudos must go to Microsoft on this front.
Would love a new Mac Pro but it must be what users want not what Apple decides is best for their bottom line.
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Since you brought us up....
Want to hear something funny about "just works"? What do you get if you plug a nMP into a modern 4K or 5K display? On most, no boot screen. It "just doesn't work". If there are no OS issues you will finally see an image when the desktop loads, just like running an unsupported, unflashed card or a Hackintosh. However, our 970/980/980Ti/Titan-X can show boot screens and "just work" on those same displays. Pity that you can't upgrade those GPUs to something modern on nMP.
The 2011 era GPUs didn't know that 4K was coming.
I'll tell you something even funnier. We played around a little with 7970, Netkas sent me an EFI for 7970 that enabled 4K boot screen. We stopped development there, but it shows that if Apple gave even 1/10th of a damn about Pro market, they could fix that. But I imagine they want something to move 7,1s out the door when they get announced with warmed over AMD leftovers. (again)
Setting up a whole new U.S.A. based manufacturing facility and supply chain, taking a risk on a new form factor, engineering a pretty amazing cooling solution, and more is "the least amount of effort"? Okay then.
Apples entire MO is manufacturing intricate things that nobody else is willing to invest the same amount of effort in.
Cool of you to give it to the community ...
I mean if you already had an EFI made.
Ah the old defend Apple at all costs syndrome rears its ugly head.......
So Apple spent all that money to make it look pretty so peeps like you would buy it and probably did.
Form over function and you cant argue with that. Just like all their other products!
Apple could have made it look pretty and be upgradeable/functional as well for the future but chose not to.. The cMP proves this and now Apple are rueing the day because people get a longer life out of their old Mac Pro which quite obviously a lot of people love but would ditch in a heartbeat if they could easily upgrade the nMP with better HW. Apple would have got a lot more people onboard if they had done this. Just my humble opinion.
I cant believe how the new gens are such a throwaway society.All this BS about low power consumption being all the rage but then chuck out their electronics as soon as Apple release a new product.
No wonder the planets in trouble.
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Definitely, I’d question whether a new product saves you enough energy to outweigh it’s manufacturing cost/footprint, especially in the case of Apple where they stop supporting things deliberately.
The emboldened section describes me to a tee.
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