What to expect when you are expecting - The gathering of rumours regarding the Apple Line up in 2013

these tend to be more used in a workstation environment, especially with the Pro GPU configuration ( last gen came with a Radeon and the Quadro or FirePro was a $1400-2600 / card upgrade, so of very little interest to most large corporations. a Radeon or low end single Fire Pro possibly.

as a workstation it can not be classed as a 3-5 year unit ...... CAD / CAM / 3D rendering, and pro design and editing software now depends heavily on the GPu's now which is why many workstations including laptops do GPU swaps almost annually to suck out an extra 20-80% speed. for my purposes alone I run a GPu Swap cycle of 12-16 months in all stations. without a CUDA option ( Quadro, many applications are sunk as well )

Me either, but Apple does not have any large servers for rackmount since X-serve was discontinued in 2011 in favor of the Mac Pro server ( tower not 4U ) and I have very rarely seen a Mac server in operation except for legacy setups to maintain old systems

 

its already on the mba and will be on the rmbp, cook enjoys economies of scale

 

It's been many years since I've done any VFX related work so I do have a question. Do medium/large VFX or other GPU intensive users (e.g. video editing) actually upgrade video cards? My experience (both personal and professional) is that medium/large corporations are very reluctant to upgrade GPUs because testing and support is very difficult for the esoteric types of problems that you see with this.

It's just easier and cheaper (in the grand scheme of things for a big corporation) to buy a new system from Dell/HP or a specialized vendor like Boxx.

 

If you're upgrading from a lower-end professional (FirePro or Quadro) card to a better professional card, there should be no issues. These sorts of cards are already tested to work (ISV-certified and whatnot). Now, if we're talking about buying a gaming-class card (Radeon or GeForce), then you'd be right; I don't see a respectible business doing that anytime soon with their workstations.

 

So in the end that PCie SSD is going to probably be a proprietary part, I dont understand the why, really dont. they can save much more by going that way, even more than just gouge on the upgrade cost of higher models

 

yes on an average even a small editing firm or independent contractor will upgrade GPU's annually, or run for up to two years because of feature and performance boost. for example my 2009 Mac Pro is on its fourth set of cards because it has increased its performance overall by 120%. I have two later models running on their second set now one with FirePro's for budget for its needs and the other with Quadro's because I have applications that just plain NEED CUDA support.
even my 2012 units are on their third set of cards technically as they came with Radeons and I flipped them to Quadro 4000's. then upgraded to Kepler K4000 boards. again ... 90% speed increase in a 6 month span that makes the unit actually semi productive.

in the grand scheme of things yes going to an HP Z820 will mop the floor with the new Mac Pro ( and I want to see price comparisons ). and Boxx units have been also doing that for a few years as well. much lower COO over 5-7 years, much more upgradable and longer usable lifespan.

the major player is home built units or custom units built off of things like 64 core Opteron server boards from Tyan and others with 256 - 512GB RAM support.

welcome to Mac Pros....... heck up until rather recently the only way to upgrade the GPU was to buy it from Apple and pay a 150% premium .. or flash an Apple certified VBIOS on a generic equivalent card and run that.

 

thats the thing they dont gain anything from that, they wasted money on developing something that is already developed, they are going to waste economies of escale that can be shared with other OEMs not only apple, and several other benefits.

anand posted a non inteligible bit the PCI lanes needing to come from the PCH on the mba, thus it was impossible to be NGFF? really? how? off course the lanes are going to come from the pch on package, thats the only way, the U series dont have the pcie 3.0 x16 on cpu, they only have pcie 2.0 x12 on the pch, aside that the NGFF and sata express papers dont mention anything about a requirement of where that lane must come from.

however one of anand employees got a glimpse on the connector itself and it apparently has 2 groves on the sides which arent supposed to be there, and thats why I said that.

dont ask me why I wrote all this

EDIT: yep its proprietary alright, just saw the teardown pics

 

The New Mac Pro is either

1). A grand step into a future where external devices (this includes cloud based GPU computing and encoding) rule the world.

2). Apple providing a token device for Professionals while reducing their (Apple's, not the customers) hardware/support costs, and also pushing away the people who didn't really need a Mac Pro but wanted one anyway.

Oddly enough, this reminds me a bit of when SGI moved to Intel and Windows NT 4 with their 320 and 520 Workstations. Technologically speaking, it was way ahead of its time. At least on paper, reviewers and people were drooling at things like total video memory bandwidth.

SGI Visual Workstation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

What really happened was people realized SGI was finished. SGI switched to Intel/Windows because there was no value in their older MIPS and IRIX based systems. As far as Intel and Windows, it was cheaper to get a new system from Dell or HP every year or so. Thanks to funky new companies like NVIDIA, hardware for video/2D/3D graphics was faster and cheaper than ever.

This finally pushed people to say goodbye to SGI.

I'm not saying this is going to happen to the Mac Pro. But I do have the feeling that Apple sees an end to the dedicated "Pro" hardware market for a personal device (as opposed to running things on a remote server), and this is the type of device that will last just long enough until they can say "Nobody is buying this type of device anymore. It's over. You know we gave you a sexy new device and gave it our best shot. But it's over - the market for it is dead."

 

Cloud-based computing for professional tasks, what the Mac Pro was meant to do? Unless this business has a super-duper-stupidly-fast fiber connection or something like that, performing extremely-demanding computing tasks will be quicker when performed natively than off-loaded elsewhere. And remember that many places in the world still have dog-slow internet, or only "okay" internet available to them.

 

I didn't mean to imply that doing things on remote servers was practical today, or will be even in the next 5 years. But there are some really interesting things (e.g. running statistics calculations on the DB servers) occurring in "cloud" computing and I'm just curious how Apple envisioned the future when the designed the new Mac Pro.

 

Well, so is every other major OEM, if that's how we're looking at it. But to me though, the new design doesn't say "Envisioning the future" in a positive tone more than it says "More reliant on servers and external devices" in a less-than-positive tone. Not sure why people are so excited about "the almighty Cloud" anyway; we're just going back to the dumb terminal and mainframe days from several decades ago.

 

It seems they pulled out all the stops to miniaturize the Mac Pro for a market that cares a lot more about performance, upgradeability, and expandability than size. Just 6.6x10 inches. Does it need to be that small?

At least the Macbook Air refresh is a nice surprise. 9-12 hour battery life is wonderful.

 

its no surprise at all, Intel has been touting the battery efficiency of Haswell for almost a year. I was actually expecting more yet on the new ULV chips.

 

The introduction of a smaller unit means that corporations/businesses can now spend less on electrical operating costs along with managing space better. Four of the new Mac Pro units can now fit in the same amount of space as one older Mac Pro. That kind of stuff matters when you are using these things as a server or in a corporate setting (i.e. a bunch of employees using different units all in a limited amount of space). I wouldn't really say it needs to be that small but Apple had to upgrade the dated design especially considering workstations from Dell and HP have long been smaller and more efficient than the Mac Pro.

 

Isn't the Mac Pro typically seen in an environment where people have multiple monitors and external devices (e.g. external RAID box)? Is space really a premium in that situation? Is the new Mac Pro really going to save them space, especially considering even more external devices will be needed?

 

I'd imagine if space-saving was the true goal, especially in a business environment, wouldn't they instead make it a rack-mountable computer? A second Xserve, maybe?

 

true that, small light client (something like a mac mini) and with some units in 4U shared among everyone

 

looking at the size... you could probably fit 1 to 6 of these Mac Pros on a shelf in a rack and only take up 6U of space...

 

Equipment designed for rack mounting takes cool air in the front and exhausts hot air out the back, and racks are designed for that flow. These new Mac Pros are designed to flow air vertically rather than horizontally and they need open space above them, so I don't think putting them in a rack would make any sense. Even the old Mac Pro was a better design for use in a rack.

As for saving space in a workstation environment, I just don't see the necessity.

 

dont put them in racks, place them were there are exhausts in the ceiling

 

Space is always a premium when it comes to corporate and professional environments. An inch gained is an inch earned. Companies can squeeze an extra person (or even more) into a workstation area depending on the area where their employees work. Not only that but the new Mac Pros can be networked together on a shelf-like system and each unit will be individually cooled. This means that a powerful server can be created using smaller space than a rack system along with an appropriate cooling system for that rack setup (the racks take up about 1/3 the space compared to their networking options and cooling systems).

In a corporate/pro environment, the new Mac Pro can literally be put behind a monitor and remain hidden whereas the older Mac Pro was too big to accomplish this. There are many reasons why drastically decreasing the size of the Mac Pro makes sense. Apple could have reintroduced the Xserve system but I think it makes more sense to come out with a new, smaller Mac Pro that can be used as a server or server setup while taking up less space than both options.

 

But if we're talking about saving space in a business environment, wouldn't it be more cost-effective to use existing technologies, rather than to just design some weird shape and expect businesses to figure out how to use that in the office? I mean, if the idea was to "stuff it behind a monitor", in my mind it'd make more sense to make the Mac Pro VESA mountable, seeing as that's a standard on many monitors today. As for racks, I can't think of a way where building/buying a custom 6U (or whatever size needed) rack system and Mac Pros would be a more cost effective solution than bringing back Xserve and using pre-existing rack systems.

Of course, Apple doesn't really cater to the corporate market anyway, so this is all thinking out loud. Trying new ideas in the consumer market isn't all that bad, but then again a Mac Pro isn't exactly something an end-user buys anyway (that being more of iMac/Mac mini space). Just in my mind, but this new design just yells at me, "try different stuff, see what sticks". I can't imagine the costs of repairing one of these things either.

 

I just sat and figured out how big true size is in MY production environment. now on the assumption that you need a minimum of 9" of headroom for venting above it. ( I know first hand w9000 GPUs are bloody hot running and the E Xeon chip is too at load ) with the old Mac pro I have I need roughly 7 cubic feet of space in a footprint of 19" by 19" ( mac pro tower plus a RAID tower beside it ).

with this contraption I need the Mac Pro. ( roughly 2 cu/ft for venting and clearances ) a breakout box for another GPU or two since CUDA is still needed in many Pro environments to add about .75 cu ft. at least one more for mandatory PCIE cards such as Fiber channel, AVID and Protools interfaces ). the RAID storage unit is still needed. going this route I may save 1/2 cu/ft but have gone from a single cable running from a PCI card to a storage tower to multiple TB cables and a spaghetti nightmare of power adaptors and adaptors and dongles. I now also have by my count an additional 17 points of possible failure added and do not honestly even know IF| I can run an eGPU configuration for my CUDA needs in a few applications.


and with the Fire Pros in by default ... this thing will rarely see light of day as an application, storage, web server or similar. the GPU's add too much cost for those applications. those cards in standard desktop configuration are $3000 each retail on newegg.

and I have never seen Apple discount a GPU that much so I would gusstimate we are looking at about a $11K-14K+ MINIMUM BASE price which is unreasonable for anything but an editing or design workstation .... where all of us are all literally going " what the heck are they smoking??? "

crunching numbers and using the 11K as a base then upgrade RAM to semi usable levels ( 64GB Maximum ASSUMING standard ECC server DIMMS ) adding in the needed K20's, external enclosures and storage. I am looking at a meger $20,000


the Z820 configured with DUAL 12 core E5 3.1Ghz Xeon, 64GB ( up to 512 )RAM, Dual K5000's with SLI interconnect, and a single 960GB PCIE workstation SSD ( 1000MB/s Sequential Read, 925MB/s Sequential Write, 130,000 IOPS 4k Random Write ) and 5/5/5 warranty........ $16,500. I really hope Apple can do something VERY good pricewise or it is a flop IMO.

 

I'll gladly admit that I am not knowledgeable about office spaces, cost of square footage, monthly building expenses, etc. At the same time, the cost of the Mac Pro (or any other equivalent Pro workstation) fits into a fairly high price bracket once you include software, additional hardware (including external servers if you have something like a VFX studio), and whatever else is required in a situation where somebody needs that type of machine. The salary/benefits of the employee using that machine are probably also quite high given the level of expertise required to to that job well.

Somehow a company spending all that money is fighting for a little extra room so they might be able to fit one extra person in a space? I guess if your office is located in the heart of a major city, every square foot counts.

I'm not disagreeing with you - just trying to wrap my head around Apple's design decisions.

On a totally different note, I was hoping to see the rMBP upgrades at WWDC. I'm not overly disappointed, because this gives Apple a little extra time to incorporate things like IGZO displays (hopefully this this year, but probably not?), Thunderbolt 2 (probably not this year), 4K output (HDMI only if no Thunderbolt 2?) and whatever other optimizations they need in OSX Mavericks (Sea Lion would have been better!) to maximize battery life.

I'm planning to upgrade my laptop this year and it would be nice if it had 4K output since I don't upgrade very often.

I was impressed with their switch to PCIe SSDs in the MBAir. If you are going to make virtually non-upgradable device you might as well go all out to maximize performance since a SATA connector doesn't matter anymore. I'm 99% sure nobody will notice a difference in the real world, but at least it looks nice in benchmarks