2013 Mac Pro Announced at WWDC

[TurbineSeaplane]

The key problem with Thunderbolt as the means of expansion is the extremely limited supply of options and the cost of those options..

...and they just announced Thunderbolt 2, when TH 1 has barely gotten market traction as it is!

Then there's the concept of all these boxes laying around that need power, cables all over, etc.

Just gets "inelegant" quickly and I'm not sure why it's needed.
Do desktop users frequently complain that their desktop isn't "portable enough"?

I don't, but that's just me.

MacPro looks awesome....and then it gets put under the desk to rarely be seen..
..except when checking on all your plugged in expansion items... ;-)

 

[TurbineSeaplane]

I very much agree with this sentiment from Ars comments:

"All the Pros I know would have been thrilled with an updated "old" tower. A real update. This cylinder is great for a keynote and really revs up a crowd, but it just doesn't seem practical in a work environment. I don't want three or four peripherals dangling off a room full of workstations."

 

[ccmdav]

Are people honestly upset by this? This is everything we could have hoped for if not more. I was uneasy about the form factor and non-PCI graphics at first glance too, but after going through apple's preview site for it I can say that this is easily one of the most impressive pieces of hardware I've ever seen come out of Cupertino. This isn't the half-assed slight-redesign-with-a-newer-CPU-before-we-kill-it-off I was expecting, this shows that Apple still a vested interest in pursuing the professional market longterm and are looking to innovate instead of doing the bare minimum to keep that slice of the market in their pocket.

The more you look at the new design the more you understand how much sense it makes. Need an external RAID enclosure? Thunderbolt. Blackmagic Intensity or Red Rocket? Thunderbolt. Old PCI and PCI-E cards from your old Mac Pro or PC desktop? Thunderbolt with a card adapter. The CPUs look like they can be easily swapped (along with the flash storage) and the standard dual-FirePro GPU setup is sure to make a big push for OpenCL and other GPU compute technologies for professional applications on the Mac. The redesign only seems less flexible until you realize you can daisy-chain up to 36 (!!!) Thunderbolt devices to it, each chain on a dedicated 20GB/s bus, and it only seems unnecessarily small until you realize it's size is what allows it to follow the thermal core design. Now, if I only had the money to buy one... .

Finally, someone who speaks English. I couldn't agree more. Some more things to consider:

1. This is APPLE people. Period. Exclamation point! Apple is about being the first to leave established technology in the dust in favor of what comes next. At this point in their company development, they can afford to do this. They want to push the technological envelope, more than they want to sell lots and lots of machines, as Tim Cook very pointedly remarked in his keynote. So leaving behind PCI expansion makes perfect sense. It's an old way of doing things. Why have a separate card for an audio/video interface? Put the interface in the hardware itself and connect it with a cable. Think UAD Apollo. This is the future, folks.
2. The target market here is the professional user. The kind of user who needs this kind of power is not going to bat an eye at spending $4-6K on a computer when they are heavily invested in auxiliary equipment that costs much more than their computer. Cost is clearly not the issue. It's a computer that can DO something really fast. It also helps that it makes a design statement that can add to the clout they want to generate with a clientele.
3. Notice that Apple has not made any great effort to come down on the Hackintosh community (as far as I can tell), when they have every right to. These forums are populated mainly by enthusiasts who like computing for it's own sake, as well as a few small-time AV folks (like myself) who usually can't afford to pony up the Apple bucks to have their fastest, most powerful, most expandable machine.
4. And if I'm to be honest, as an audio guy, I could easily do my work with room to spare on a MacBook Pro or iMac, provided I was willing to update some of my hardware. But I also like to tinker around, and can afford to since I am not doing anything mission critical. So I Hackintosh and enjoy it very much. If I was making more money doing my hobby/side trade, I would without a doubt upgrade to the iTrashcan.
5. The point is - people who want legacy support for old hardware/old ways in a new machine are not on Apple's radar.

Looking at the bigger picture, rather than the moaning of a small enthusiast community, makes it perfectly clear why the Mac Pro has been designed the way it is. And I think Apple did an excellent job. The desktop workstation market needs a kick in the pants. Here it is.

 

[TurbineSeaplane]

All fair points...

The hardware specs are wonderful on the MacPro!

But what is accomplished by making it so small?

It's a shame they don't make a slightly larger (optional) version that still retains a touch of internal expansion options (be it PCIe or HD's or whatever)

 

[Spiegelei]

I leave the design comments to someone else. Hardware-wise, I am wondering the following relevant to us:

Xeon E5 as cpu, which is Sandy-Bridge E based. Does this mean i7 Sandy-Bridge E will get sleep and power management support? If so, I might just build a socket 2011 setup with a i7-3930k rather than a Haswell 4770k in the future.

 

[sylar828]

Here are some pics.

Looks nice, but I enjoy fiddling with the components.
That said, all PC's are following suit and tablets are taking more market share.
I would love to build a duel CPU E5 V2 Hacintosh, any one know if that would be possible?

 

[Mate94]

They will use mobile processors too like the Air, so maybe we will remain without proper support for HD4600 this year.

But we will see.

 

[djblastyfone]

The key problem with Thunderbolt as the means of expansion is the extremely limited supply of options and the cost of those options..

...and they just announced Thunderbolt 2, when TH 1 has barely gotten market traction as it is!

This is the great thing about Thunderbolt though, the increase in bus width is retroactive. The ports and cable are the exact same (this is the reason Apple opted for non-passive cables, in fact) so the the bottlenecks of older hardware don't follow the new version of thunderbolt.


As for the rest of what you've said, you've made some very valid points, but I'm guessing as it nears release we'll see some great third-party Thunderbolt expansion solutions. Dual 5.25" slots, 4 to 6 3.5" drive bays and 2 to 4 PCI/PCI-E slots all contained in a unified and similarly-shaped expansion tower? If someone designs that they'd be funded in within hours. Even quicker if it's modular .

 

[Maryus3D]

The new design of the Mac Pro is absolutely ASTONISHING!!! The build, the power, the, the, the... everything. But there is one more thing ... thad budders me badly. I'v been working in CGi industry for many years. As a pro artist I need (and not just me) one special requirement from a computer in general and that is nvidia GPU.

Premiere mostly uses CUDA, After Effects is CUDA, Nuke (there is no compositing software like nuke right now) is CUDA, iray in 3D Max, Catia, Bunkspeed and Cinema 4D is CUDA, RTT DeltaGen is CUDA, Octane Render is CUDA, Arion Render is CUDA, 3D Coat have CUDA Voxel Sculpting, Maya, 3D Max and Softimage uses Physx, etc.

There is one software that uses both CUDA and OpenCL and that is Vray. Well OpenCL version of Vray works terryble bad on GCN architecture (because AMD is so good in OpenCL...). It crashes when you load a bit more complex scene and the performance is not that good. Also on OpenCL it takes longer to load scenes in vram than CUDA.

I don't believe in synthetic benchmarks like luxrender and other OpenCL crap stuff. Believe me absolutely nobody uses Luxrender and other useless OpenCL benches in production. So some good results with AMD GPUs on those useless apps are totally irrelevant. On real world 3D pro apps nvidia is far more better.

Kepler is a better architecture for GPGPU also better geometric power inside 3D OpenGL and DirectX viewports for DCC and CAD apps, better drivers, better frame rates and frame times, better technologies like TXAA, 3D stereo, v-sync, 4k rez, ECC mens, larger software support, more energy efficient and so on.

Mainly the new Mac Pro is build more for Final Cut Pro & Motion and there OpenCL standards which is way too little in both CGI and mechanical/industrial CAD industries.

PS: Seriously do you really need dual GPU for Final Cut?

Tooooo bad... really too bad . The new Mac Pro could be a great success if it also have nvidia Quadro option.

 

[MAD AUDI SCIENTIST]

WOW...a few months back as a joke I said "watch them go cylinder on us" and my bad joke came true.

I mean at a glance it looks cool, but like many already said its not a machine for a professional. I guess when your a billion dollar company you can try to change what the standards of a professional machines are but then again many would argue this is a step backwards. Have to see how this plays out.

I won't go as far as call it a Trash can, even though we all feel the frustration of doing away with our beloved rectangular shaped MacPro.

So far I'm just seeing the stock price drop, iOS7 help please help them all.