Apple Updates The Mac Pro | Hacker News Reader

Apple Updates The Mac Pro

techcrunch.com

61 pointssalimmadjd97 comments

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"Can't innovate anymore, my ass".

Uh... what exactly is being "innovated" here?

- light at the io jacks

Innovation means to change and advance -- the word doesn't really set that high of a bar:

- Its a different design

- Its new hardware

- It advances over the current generation

That's pretty much every computer out there. Is innovation such a low bar now that a new case and the newer Intel CPU is suddenly deserving of innovation praise because it has a fruit logo?

Also am I the other one bothered by the case mentioning being built in the US but designed in California, like California is now its own nation?

Apple stuff has been saying "Designed in California, made in China" for years now.

I get that, my point is that you could just say "Assembled and designed in the US" and be done with it. Does mentioning California really give them so much more culture cachet?

It's pretty precious, yeah.

Why alter the current pattern? I imagine they like it.

Turns out it's more than that. They really really care about this tagline:

http://www.apple.com/designed-by-apple/

Please show me a device that's comparable to the new Mac Pro... So much performance in this small of a form factor is pretty innovative

You could build something much more powerful for cheaper, and still be able to upgrade/change out individual internal components. I've bumped the RAM capacity/speed twice since I built this machine three years ago. Upgraded the video card once, and CPU once. When I decide to do a more thorough re-vamp, I can re-use the power supply, the case, the video card, and a bunch of other components.

What you're really paying for is a very expensive and moderately beefy machine that can run OS X legally. Or you need Final Cut Pro in some serious capacity. Oh, and it has an Apple logo on it.

i do a lot of audio recording. having a machine that is near silent even at full load is incredibly useful.

It's OK if you didn't want to, but you can build something cheaper and even more quiet than this new Mac Pro yourself. There are some excellent cases and cooling systems, and you can choose your components with your needs in mind.

With these Mac Pros, I don't think people who buy them are necessarily concerned about specs or cost-effectiveness. I think they are enthusiasts that need Mac OS, and find the Macbook Pro or iMac underpowered.

A person can build something cheaper and more quiet. That is not necessarily the person you are talking to though. Many people don't have that skill set, but say, work in music.

They're premium computers that aren't the highest end specs, but have a pretty good set of specs for the size and noise especially and can be serviced quickly at apple stores across the country pretty easily.

Also, people like myself who would use this for work, and could build one, but just don't want to.

I agree and you'll have to pry my self-built pc from my cold dead hands but my computer is super huge and hard to take with me, the design of the new Mac Pro is super neat

For the Pro market, expansion and user customization far outweigh form-factor. I have a 2000 sq ft lab space and 500 sq ft office, what do I care about the form factor of the Pro if I can't throw in my stock NVIDIA GPUs and any arbitrary hard drive?

Hmm...

If these things are Thunderbolt 2 devices... it really does open up some different possibilities for you.

I know that everyone doesn't need it... but connecting a few of these together via TB 2 would be kind of interesting for me. I mean being able to see one machine with even as few as 24 or 36 cores.

A Xeon here a GPU there... pretty soon you're talking about real capability. Again, it's not for everyone... but there are a lot of areas where you get some real benefits.

Thinking about buying 4 and just writing the software myself if it's not supported. But I'm pretty sure it probably is. Probably just tcp/ip though :(

Oh well... that'd be enough.

Anyway... not many other devices you can do things like that with and still keep good bandwidth between devices. It is thinking a bit outside the box. I can't think of another machine that would let me conveniently do that, and still take up 1/2 the volume of the current mac pro???

Can you???

(Not snark. Genuinely interested. I'm in the market, and would be willing to write the connecting software myself).

In fairness, check out the "Thermal Core" section on this page:

http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/

It's a pretty sweet design. Huge central fan in the middle of the column, and three big aluminium plates to conduct heat away and into it.

Not thrilled with "all the expansion is external". I wonder how clean it will look with external storage, external PCI cases, etc.

They didn't talk much, but hopefully the RAM is easy to upgrade. I have the sinking feeling the GPU won't be, and the onboard SSD will be...pricey.

I'm glad to see someone finally making the obvious form factor changes we've been needing for a long time at the high end. An ATX style case just doesn't make sense anymore. ATX gives you lots of volume for cooling the CPU and lots of room to add PCB area in the form of expansion cards. But hardly anyone needs 7 expansion cards, and everyone needs more room for the GPU heatsink. Completely throwing out internal expandability may be a bit ahead of its time (like ditching the floppy drive with the iMac), but it does allow for a compact and efficient system layout. I do wonder about being stuck with your original GPU(s).

So what happens now for the Mac Mini Server?

I don't imagine much changes for the Mini server; nobody buys those things for compute workstations, so there's really no competition.

as far as i know, mac pros have never been in ATX form factor.

intel tried to create a new case standard, BTX, years ago. but it seems no one likes change..

The Mac Pro wasn't ATX, but it followed the same general principles of being a large tower case with a lot more expansion slots than anyone needed, and not enough space between the slots for a GPU to have good cooling, and expansion slots that were several inches longer than any PCB that ever needed to be put in there.

Yeah - I think the subsidy of the high end from the low and middle end of the market is coming to an end.

I know this is a bit off topic but part of the same hardware presentation: does the new Macbook Air have retina display? I couldn't tell from the keynote.

Don't think so.

I think they would have mentioned that.. so: no. :)

Agreed. That sucks =(

kind of surprised to see an update, i genuinely thought it was getting scrapped. however..

case aesthetic appears to be a regression. the previous one was almost perfect.

no 16 core ivy-bridge option. i assume haswell might be an option later.

no expandable internal storage.

no pci-e slots (?) is beyond ridiculous.

i'll reserve final judgement for when i actually see one, but right now, but things aren't looking good right now..

Well, it looks like I'm done using Mac Pros for CUDA development.

are the GPUs not upgradeable?

also, why are you using CUDA? sure it has more features. but then new hardware comes along made by someone else..

Highly doubtful it's going to be upgradeable.

The Mac Pro has always been just about the worst platform for CUDA/OpenCL development. Lack of power, hardware driver support, and underperforming GPGPU (especially OpenCL) APIs have made it more of a prototyping environment than a production environment.

4096 stream processors just reinforces Apple's lack of interest in pursuing that market segment. It's good today (although they'll be clocked down compared to, say, a 7990) but I suspect that's what we'll be stuck with for "the next ten years."

I'll probably mistake mine for my wastepaper bin at some point and set it on fire. :-)

The case reminds me of old SGI hardware; I'm glad to see that it's not just another box full of cards.

It's also "greatly expandable"! In the Apple Store. :)

Huh? The case looks exactly the same as the old case. Are you seeing a different version of the article than I am? The photo I see is this: http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/img_9182...

The black one on the right is the new Pro. The silver one is the old model

The website hasn't updated yet. See for instance Ars' brief about it.[1]

[1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/06/at-long-last-apple-anno...

The black one on the right is the new one. Contrasted to the old one on the left.

the one on the right is the new mac pro

Braun KF 20

http://goo.gl/fNfU8

No expandable storage?!

External only, via TB2.

At 1/8 the size will it even have any of the internal storage capacity that I love my current MacPro for?

Seemed like they were really focusing on external expandability via Thunderbolt 2.

With Thunderbolt 2 / USB 3 support, I suspect some enterprising manufacturer will come up with a stackable storage enclosure that matches the design of the Mac Pro. That would meet all your storage requirements while keeping the size down for those who only need the additional performance.

They said it's all external via TB2 (they put in 3 TB2 controllers driving 6 ports)

So cords everywhere then. I do a lot of photo editing an have close to 10 TB storage internal (I repurposed the optical drive bays). I can keep all of my working files internally and only have external drives for archiving and backup and aren't connected all of the time.

Yes. Though considering the volume reduction you can probably get more storage in an external enclosure without going above the footprint of the old Pro.

So cords everywhere then

Sounds like marketing gold for Drobo and Drobo-style solutions.

I think most people who use the MacPro (video/image editing people) probably already use external storage because the 4 drive bays from the old MacPro simply are not enough. I'm guessing they analyzed their users produced something that fit users' needs.

Looks slick, but I was really hoping for something more modern that could drive lots of displays. A limit of three is pretty mediocre; you can do that with other already-available mac hardware. Oh, well.

I think they were talking about maximum of three 4K displays; if you have lower-resolution displays, you're likely able to hook up more of them.

I expect it's 3 4K displays, likely more "normal" resolution displays.

I wouldn't be surprised if you turn out to be right, but wouldn't be surprised if you're wrong either.

It appears to be limited to 3 4K displays at a time with the built in graphics. Graphics is expandable, and presumably onboard can drive more than 3 non-4K displays (We don't know yet, so let's not jump to conclusions)

It's 3 4k displays, not 3 displays. It's probably able to drive more "standard" displays, I expect each 4k saturates one of the controllers (which would be why it has 3 controllers on 6 ports)

It would be sufficient bandwidth for 12 1080p displays. That's not bad.

Wait, 1/8 th the size, or 1/8 th smaller?

1/8th the size.

Auuugh, I thought it said MacBook pro...

Very impressive specs... Curious to see how soon it will be possible to build your own machine with the same capabilities.

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, you could already blow this thing away at its price point by building your own. It wouldn't be as pretty looking, but you could do better (if specs are the primary concern).

This is certainly true; but I wonder for how much longer it will be -- it doesn't seem that economics really favor the build it yourself model nearly as much as they used to.

I guess I haven't ran into this. I've been able to re-use some of my components through different incarnations of this desktop, and it's saved me a ton of money.

For example, I don't need to upgrade my entire desktop to upgrade my video card. I can toss something nasty in there, and even if my motherboard doesn't support the latest and greatest PCIe spec, my next one will. Ditto for SATA.

I've got a ton of mileage out of my case, as well. Spent a little more to get something nice, and ended up liking it so much that I've held on to it for close to five years now. Ditto for my modular power supply.

It is very nice; the model of 'everything is soldered down' is really annoying wherever you find it (my BMW, my Mac, &c.) But I think that the difference in cost between standard expandable hardware and custom stuff is shrinking really rapidly, meaning that designers can now do more things with e.g. thermals or layout that are not feasible using PC style standard hardware.

The age of swapping out parts is coming to a close, I fear.

Yeah, internal interchangeability without a soldering iron is coming at a real cost these days.

External buses are faster than ever though, so many things go quite quickly through those for expansion capability.

> The age of swapping out parts is coming to a close, I fear.

Wat? TigerDirect, NewEgg, Amazon, and many others have something to say about that. This stuff is cheaper than it EVER has been. Want a bunch of RAM? Get it for under $100. Want a decent 500 GB hard drive? Under $100. Decent processor? Under $100. Decent motherboard? Under $100.

Or are you talking about swapping parts out of pre-assembled computers?

When will Mac OSX support OpenGL 4.x?

Next release (Maverick).

Good. They took their sweet time to start supporting it. Linux and Windows got it way earlier.

Mac OS X Maverick...

Yeah, Mavericks supports opengl 4.

I just hope this new design doesn't make it difficult to mount in a rack in a datacenter.

I missed the event. Are there any better pictures, than this article?

http://live.arstechnica.com/wwdc-2013-keynote-liveblog/

Scroll down to about halfway through.

Thought it was wicked, until I heard how big it was.

Are the Xeons in question Haswells (that is, E3 v3)?

No, they are Ivy Bridge-E. Haswell-E doesn't ship until 2014.

Oh? I had been under the impression that Haswell Xeons (at least the E3 v3 series) were available "now" [1]:

"Twelve of the chips are available now, but the 13 watt E3-1220L that will be particularly interesting for microservers is not going to be available until the third quarter..."

What am I missing here? Presumably the 12-core option would be an E5, is that it?

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/04/intel_haswell_xeon_e...

The Haswell Xeon E3 series is quad core, single-socket. It uses the same die as desktop Haswell CPUs. The Mac Pro is six core, double-socket, so it must be a "-E". Based on the availability date (later this year), it must be Ivy Bridge-E. Intel will almost certainly call it an E5.

Thanks. That was my vague suspicion--that the 12-core option would be an E5.

Presumably the specs they announced are the top-end specs. Perhaps the lower tiers would use E3s.

They're advertising quad-channel DDR3-1866. That entirely rules out the desktop-class processors, which have never been used in a Mac Pro anyways. The Xeon E3 and E5 lines use completely different die configurations and motherboard sockets, and the E3s don't have enough PCIe lanes to feed all the peripheral connectivity the new Mac Pro will have.

how comes there are no 16-core mac pros? :(

Sounds like there's not enough room to cool 16 cores. (BTW, Ivy Bridge-EP supports 20 or 24 cores in a 2-socket machine.)

Nice!

But ... will it run linux?

Looks like a trash can.

then don't get one

And the old one looked like a cheese grater (to many complaining at the time).

I hope it's quite or fanless. Looks like it's a giant heatsink design.

According to Apple it's quiet. It uses a single fan at the top to draw air in from the bottom and exhaust it out the top.

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