Mac Pro launch date, prices announced

I hope that those aren't the only 2 models available and only upgrade options available!

There is just no way that I would spend R50k on that limited hardware capability.

Currently the only people I can foresee going for that new Mac Pro, would be architects / video animators, who require lots of GPU computing power - however, I'm not sure if the applications would support those models very well.

Like with the previous Mac Pro, you could have like 2x Quad core CPU's and tonnes of RAM (24GB), and without an expensive set of graphics cards, which was perfect for high end simulations/development.
 
Pada said:
I hope that those aren't the only 2 models available and only upgrade options available!

There is just no way that I would spend R50k on that limited hardware capability.

Currently the only people I can foresee going for that new Mac Pro, would be architects / video animators, who require lots of GPU computing power - however, I'm not sure if the applications would support those models very well.

Like with the previous Mac Pro, you could have like 2x Quad core CPU's and tonnes of RAM (24GB), and without an expensive set of graphics cards, which was perfect for high end simulations/development.
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The beast of a graphics card that it has is superb for video editing (It can run 3 streams of 4k video) but would be bad for something like playing games.
 
JStrike said:
The beast of a graphics card that it has is superb for video editing (It can run 3 streams of 4k video) but would be bad for something like playing games.
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Uhm... that is what I tried to say: now the Mac Pro is just targeting the video editing profession.

In the other professions you need more CPU, more RAM and more HDD/SSD space and less GPU power.


JStrike said:
Actually, thanks to Thunderbolt, it is crazily upgradeable and expandable
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So how do you upgrade your RAM and CPU via Thunderbolt? :)
 
Pada said:
Uhm... that is what I tried to say: now the Mac Pro is just targeting the video editing profession.

In the other professions you need more CPU, more RAM and more HDD/SSD space and less GPU power.



So how do you upgrade your RAM and CPU via Thunderbolt? :)
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Not those two obviously :) The RAM is upgradeable however. Not sure about the CPU.
For everything else, thunderbolt is awesome

More CPU??? Is a 12 Core Xeon E5 not enough?
 
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It's too reliant on thunderbolt upgrades, seeing as most of the core components ore not upgradable themselves.

So Apple want you to spend R40-50k on the core unit, then a couple thousand more on Thunderbolt peripherals.

For that kind of money, you can build a super computer far more capable!

The only people I see sticking to the new gen Mac Pro's are the guys who invested in software like Logic that only runs on Mac.

We still have 2012 8-core Mac Pro's - replaced them with latest gen quad-core PC's and workstation graphics cards, and they far outperformed the 8-core Mac Pro's for less than half the price.
 
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genetic said:
It's too reliant on thunderbolt upgrades, seeing as most of the core components ore not upgradable themselves.

So Apple want you to spend R40-50k on the core unit, then a couple thousand more on Thunderbolt peripherals.

For that kind of money, you can build a super computer far more capable!

The only people I see sticking to the new gen Mac Pro's are the guys who invested in software like Logic that only runs on Mac.

We still have 2012 8-core Mac Pro's - replaced them with latest gen quad-core PC's and workstation graphics cards, and they far outperformed the 8-core Mac Pro's for less than half the price.
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Most professionals already have existing thunderbolt peripherals (storage, etc) that will just be plugged in. You can read around on the video editing pro sites. They have been clamouring for this for ages now.
But you are right in that for many, the software they use like FCP X, only runs on Macs.

As for building your own machine that will outperform this at a lower price...show me a Windows machine with a Xeon E5 clocked at 3.7GHz and 10 MB L3 cache, Dual FirePro D300s (comparable to W9000 cards), a 256GB PCIe based SSD, and Thunderbolt 2.0 ports that clocks in at a lower price. It might be possible, but I would be very surprised if you manage to
 
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As an aPple hater, I see no problem with this setup. It's a workstation: you buy it to use all day every day, and when it needs an upgrade (in 5 years!), you buy a new one, because the old one has earned you several times more than it cost. There are Windows and Linux based options too, but your software decides what you buy.

Thunderbolt is DOA, except that this machine only has thunderbolt ports (displays can't be connected to USB, and it's only got 1 HDMI port), so you're stuck there (HA Ha.) Even the HDD is fine. If you need more than that get a NAS, since you need at least 5 bays for enterprise grade reliability. If you're running some crazy **** that needs more than 256GB locally, you'll know before you buy this machine and just upgrade when you order.

Everything else made my the eVil eMpire, for iDiots, is another story.

Edit: Oh my sack! As if the base specs aren't enough, you can spend another $6000 upgrading it!
 
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Drunkard #1 said:
As an aPple hater, I see no problem with this setup. It's a workstation: you buy it to use all day every day, and when it needs an upgrade (in 5 years!), you buy a new one, because the old one has earned you several times more than it cost. There are Windows and Linux based options too, but your software decides what you buy.

Thunderbolt is DOA, except that this machine only has thunderbolt ports (displays can't be connected to USB, and it's only got 1 HDMI port), so you're stuck there (HA Ha.) Even the HDD is fine. If you need more than that get a NAS, since you need at least 5 bays for enterprise grade reliability. If you're running some crazy **** that needs more than 256GB locally, you'll know before you buy this machine and just upgrade when you order.

Everything else made my the eVil eMpire, for iDiots, is another story.

Edit: Oh my sack! As if the base specs aren't enough, you can spend another $6000 upgrading it!
Click to expand...

Just a small correction. It works with your existing Thunderbolt Display 27" or old Cinema Display. For other displays, there are Thunderbolt-to-X adaptors. Which you would need to rock your three 4K displays :)
 
JStrike said:
Just a small correction. It works with your existing Thunderbolt Display 27" or old Cinema Display. For other displays, there are Thunderbolt-to-X adaptors. Which you would need to rock your three 4K displays :)
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Point is, like any other piece of capex, this system will be designed, speced and ordered based on a specific need. If you need 3x4K monitors, the system can accommodate them, and price is pretty irrelevant. Even a R 100 000 machine is likely less the 30% of the cost of the complete system, not to mention the operators salary.

In other news, Thunderbolt is dead (as I predicted). Nobody uses Thunderbolt by choice - even those 4K monitors need adaptors. Accessories are ridiculously priced, and alternatives are more customisable and cheaper. The only reason to use it is because you're forced to, or with your crApple notebooks, because the eVil eMpire doesn't make docking stations (HA Ha). Even Intel has left them off all their new NUCs.
 
The Mac Pro lineup has always been a sort of testbench where they create their most forward-looking hardware without consideration of cost. Complaining about cost is really missing the point - it's not for you if you're cost-sensitive, so relax.

But the combination of components here is really quite unique; someone said they could build the same for a PC for cheaper, but I've never seen a PC with dual workstation GPUs where only one is being used for rendering and one for displaying up to 3x4k displays. The bandwidth availability of the new Mac Pro is just staggering. 90% of its use will obviously be for compute environments - Pixar are going to be using them for their new movie iirc.

Kickingbear has a nice piece about this:

This machine fascinates me not because it seems like it’ll make everything I currently do faster. It fascinates me because it’s fundamentally new. There’s only one CPU socket and it bets heavily on the bus and GPU performance. While this looks to software to be just another Mac, it isn’t. Its capabilities aren’t traditional. The CPU is a front end to a couple of very capable massively parallel processors at the end of a relatively fast bus. One of those GPUs isn’t even hooked up to do graphics. I think that’s a serious tell. If you leverage your massively parallel GPU to run a computation that runs even one second and in that time you can’t update your screen, that’s a problem. Have one GPU dedicated to rendering and a second available for serious computation and you’ve got an architecture that’ll feel incredible to work with.
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Drunkard #1 said:
Point is, like any other piece of capex, this system will be designed, speced and ordered based on a specific need. If you need 3x4K monitors, the system can accommodate them, and price is pretty irrelevant. Even a R 100 000 machine is likely less the 30% of the cost of the complete system, not to mention the operators salary.

In other news, Thunderbolt is dead (as I predicted). Nobody uses Thunderbolt by choice - even those 4K monitors need adaptors. Accessories are ridiculously priced, and alternatives are more customisable and cheaper. The only reason to use it is because you're forced to, or with your crApple notebooks, because the eVil eMpire doesn't make docking stations (HA Ha). Even Intel has left them off all their new NUCs.
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I'm going to ignore the childish insults towards Apple (Reminds me of the basement dwellers of the 90's using M$ for Microsoft), but your point it correct. However, I know quite a few people that have Thunderbolt peripherals. I know that is just anecdotal evidence, but combined with the pro's that have been clamouring for this, I doubt that "Thunderbolt is dead" as you say
 
cerebus said:
The Mac Pro lineup has always been a sort of testbench where they create their most forward-looking hardware without consideration of cost. Complaining about cost is really missing the point - it's not for you if you're cost-sensitive, so relax.

But the combination of components here is really quite unique; someone said they could build the same for a PC for cheaper, but I've never seen a PC with dual workstation GPUs where only one is being used for rendering and one for displaying up to 3x4k displays. The bandwidth availability of the new Mac Pro is just staggering. 90% of its use will obviously be for compute environments - Pixar are going to be using them for their new movie iirc.

Kickingbear has a nice piece about this:
Click to expand...

Very interesting
 
cerebus said:
The Mac Pro lineup has always been a sort of testbench where they create their most forward-looking hardware without consideration of cost. Complaining about cost is really missing the point - it's not for you if you're cost-sensitive, so relax.

But the combination of components here is really quite unique; someone said they could build the same for a PC for cheaper, but I've never seen a PC with dual workstation GPUs where only one is being used for rendering and one for displaying up to 3x4k displays. The bandwidth availability of the new Mac Pro is just staggering. 90% of its use will obviously be for compute environments - Pixar are going to be using them for their new movie iirc.

Kickingbear has a nice piece about this:
Click to expand...

Interesting article, but the reality is much more mundane. Users don't care about buses and GPGPUs - they'll chose this machine because they need OSX and this is the fastest OSX machine they can buy. General purpose computing has peaked already; anything that needs more processing power than in i5 is specialised, and as I've said, will be custom speced on a per application basis. If a designer needs something so specialised that he's writing his own software to utilise a GPGPU, then he's not going to be tied down to one platform, on one machine, offered by one vendor.

JStrike said:
I'm going to ignore the childish insults towards Apple (Reminds me of the basement dwellers of the 90's using M$ for Microsoft), but your point it correct. However, I know quite a few people that have Thunderbolt peripherals. I know that is just anecdotal evidence, but combined with the pro's that have been clamouring for this, I doubt that "Thunderbolt is dead" as you say
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Sure, there are people out there using Thunderbolt, but either because they have to, or they're being illogical. aPple notebook users have to if they don't want to play musical chairs with cables every time they dock (unlike PC users who just buy a docking station). USB3 connected storage is as fast as Thunderbolt storage since it's reached the speed limit of the media, and anything faster is high end and would be better served by a NAS. Almost all displays are either HDMI or DP, which can use an adaptor to access one Thunderbolt port, but users would be better off without the wrapper. Even Intel's dropped Thunderbolt from their new NUCs. If it weren't for aPple's tiresome plugging, it would be dead dead. For now it's found a reluctant niche.
 
Interesting article, but the reality is much more mundane. Users don't care about buses and GPGPUs - they'll chose this machine because they need OSX and this is the fastest OSX machine they can buy. General purpose computing has peaked already; anything that needs more processing power than in i5 is specialised, and as I've said, will be custom speced on a per application basis. If a designer needs something so specialised that he's writing his own software to utilise a GPGPU, then he's not going to be tied down to one platform, on one machine, offered by one vendor.
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Lol users don't need...?? This is meant to be a specialised machine for compute intensive environments. It can process 15 4k streams in Final Cut Pro without choking. At least for video editing and graphical users, that's a huge productivity advantage. I can't speak for all your other specialised users, but I would imagine that the same people who bought the original Mac Pro are going to lap this up.
 
Fudzy said:
What a beast, what a price tho sjoe! I wonder how much more this is than a system with the same specs that you built up yourself?
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I've never seen a custom spec PC with a similar configuration. The splitting of the dual-gpu roles is a pretty big deal. Using one to offload display and one for compute means that you can get a high rendering workload while not affecting your routine of work across multiple screens. Unless this is common and I'm just doff.
 
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