Monday, June 10th 2013
Apple Unveils New Mac Pro
During the Worldwide Developer Convention (WWDC) this Monday, Apple presented its radically redesigned Mac Pro which represents a complete and long overdue departure from the shapes, sizes and general design language of its workstations. Personally I can not decide which is the most striking visual aspect of the new Mac Pro, the truly tiny size of this multi-GPU powerhouse, or its curiously cylindrical shape. Alas, my true curiosity lies with the cooling solutions employed by the designers to address the inevitable heat issues associated with densely packing such potent hardware. The monolithic appearance of the Mac Pro is interrupted only by a cutout in the cover that allows access to the back panel, where the entire I/O interface is located. Apart from the usual suspects (USB, RJ45, etc), the user is presented with no less than six Thunderbolt 2 ports, which some might find problematic considering they constitute the entire expansion potential of the new Mac Pro.
The Mac Pro will be launched in Q3 and will make use of the new 12 core Ivy Bridge-EP processors launching in Q3 as well. Two AMD workstation GPUs will be accompanying the Ivy Bridge Xeon E5 processor. Storage will be Flash based and will employ the PCIe bus, doing away with the usual storage bottlenecks. The device comes with 4K display support and also Bluetooth 4.0 and Wi-Fi 802.11ac connectivity. Pricing for the new workstation was not mentioned, however it was pointed out that it will be built in the US.
Source:
The Verge
101 Comments on Apple Unveils New Mac Pro
I'm about as anti-Apple as people get, but I have to hand it to them: this is some beautiful engineering. Unfortunately, I'm not optimistic about seeing one in real life due to the price I'm assuming these will go for.
Still, nice setup!
It looks nifty but I'll reserve judgment to see how it actually fairs as far as performance and temperatures are concerned.
www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g4/specs/powermac_g4_450_cube.html
it was certainly closer to what was out in the year 2000 for PCs but nothing cutting edge in that size case. also, the cooling was nothing compared to what this new mac pro has.
this is an excellent product!! apple leads the way!!
Lets say i had loads of money, i would buy this just to appreciate the technical complexity and how they crammed so many things there.
But this wont change my mind on regular desktops (but we are the 1%), still while not rich i prefer regular resktop.
Is the iPhone 6 going to look like this? :laugh:
Why is this not posted yet?
I have to agree with Phill's statement. This is (sort of) the direction the pc form factor should have moved towards 5 years ago! It's not just better in terms of looks, thermal dissipation, energy efficiency, noise levels and physical volume but it also provides a solution to overall component costs. Wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to pay for new CPU/GPU coolers EVERY TIME we purchased a new component???
IMHO the ATX form factor is just hopelessly outdated and inefficient, and I'm sure I'm not the only one here who thinks that...
1. It will be slow compared to a proper configured Xeon workstation with a roomy case. I'm talking of 2.5ghz-ish ULV or something and I'm not sure if 12 cores will help with that on single threaded performance?! Its supposed to be workstation and not a number cruncher. A number cruncher will probably be equipped with at least 2 xeons, but thats obviously not the case here... (but who knows, maybe Apple sorted it all out and optimized OS-X to a point where each and every workload is fully optimized for parallel execution... :cool:)
2. They have a really powerful turbine in there with an equally powerful woofer for active noise-cancelling (more likely).
So, it's safe to assume that Final Cut will have some heavy duty OpenCL integration, so that the dual GPUs are utilized for processing.
For the people who will use Final Cut Pro, with this new Mac Pro (and I think that there are quite a few companies and independents out there that will), that is a huge selling point, even if it is not upgradable.
The people that frequent this site are not the people to whom this will be marketed. Apples and Oranges.