9 ms·

bangs head I'm sorry, but there are only two things that are new with this mac: 1) its a funny shape 2) it comes with two GPU boards by default. I'm glad tha

bangs head I'm sorry, but there are only two things that are new with this mac: 1) its a funny shape 2) it comes with two GPU boards by default. I'm glad that you are enthused by a new platform, but there is really nothing new. Really. If you want to start writing GPGPU programmes, I congratulate you, its going to keep you busy for a good few months. But you can do that now, without a $10k mac "pro" Over the next few months, we'll be hearing about how the CPU is dead and that all you need is GPU. However much like the initial flash/iphone argument it over looks the main point. The Mac pro only has one CPU because that's all they could fit in. It wasn't a bold visionary move, it was a compromise because of the form factor. (much like the original iphone, to get the battery life up, they had to use a tiny(by the standard o the time) CPU, which meant no flash) There is one large elephant in the room when it comes to GPGPU and that is bandwidth. Getting stuff from main memory to GPU memory take a lot of time. Yes PCI3 is wonderfully fast, but compared to RAM<=>CPU its like reading a floppy disk. That asside, there is really nothing new or special about the macpro. In fact for VFX land, its rather a disappointment. Yes Mari runs really really fast on it. But then its got two large GPUs and a stonking SSD. Everything other programme is going to be CPU constrained(unless they've been pushing stuff to the GPU). Please excuse my rant, I've been inundated with people wanting new macpros, despite them already having a far more powerful z620 with fusion IO cards and quadro k5000s. cult of the shiny and new I suppose.

everyone 13y ago
Why would anyone waste their money on this!??
- everyone 13y ago
  It actually makes me mad! If you really need mac software then why not built a far more powerful and cheaper hackintosh. But why would you even want that? what software is there for mac OS that there is a not an equivalent to for linux or windows?
  - dagw 13y ago
    what software is there for mac OS that there is a not an equivalent to for linux or windows Most professionals don't want equivalent software, they want the software that they know and that is supported by all their plugins and hardware.
    - everyone 13y ago
      Yes. So it is a combination of laziness/lack of time to retool and learn a new program, and, a case of, well I've already thrown X amount of money down this hole so I'll just keep going, to stop now I'd have to admit I made a bad choice.
      - dagw 13y ago
        Most pros I know will happily swap software if it will give them access to new features they need or will make them more efficient and productive. They won't switch just to save a few bucks. Even saving $10000 on hardware isn't enough to compensate for even a small drop in productivity.
      - cscurmudgeon 13y ago
        You think a Mac is a bad choice? You probably do very little dev. Of all the development environments I have seen so far, nothing beats the Mac. Even Emacs for Mac is light years better than plain old Emacs. http://aquamacs.org/ http://aquamacs.org/
        everyone 13y ago
        Developer is a very broad term. What kind of developer are you? I'm a games developer. Emacs is great but it is essentially a text editor. there are literally 1000's of similar things of varying complexity depending on your preferences available for linux and windows.
        cscurmudgeon 13y ago
        I develop a lot on Common Lisp. SLIME is Aquamacs beats any other so called IDEs and REPLs. If you think Emacs is just a text editor, you should come out of your shell (snicker, snicker).
- cscurmudgeon 13y ago
  You are naive if you think high-end professionals value their money more than their time.
  - everyone 13y ago
    Yeah! I'm a "high-end professional" I dont need to understand things!
    - cscurmudgeon 13y ago
      Yep. Count Paul Graham in that. http://paulgraham.com/mac.html http://paulgraham.com/mac.html
Luc 13y ago
> The Mac pro only has one CPU because that's all they could fit in. It wasn't a bold visionary move, it was a compromise because of the form factor. Where did you get that? It sounds entirely implausible that a company renowned for its design would decide on the form factor first, and then try to fit stuff in there as well as possible...
- jhasse 13y ago
  Sounds plausible to me.
- KaiserPro 13y ago
  Because that's how design works. The end goal of the iPhone, (to take a very good example) was designed to fit in your hand. Everything else had to be crammed in to accomplish this. to give a non technical example, the london underground map sacrifices geographic accuracy for simplicity. A very large, and successful compromise. Also, where could they fit another CPU? Each one kicks out almost 180 watts of heat, and must have RAM and power to make it work. It also complicates GPU<=>CPU and GPU<=>GPU communications. You either have to shove all the GPUs on one CPU and waste lots of QPI cycles on moving RAM back and forth, or have one GPU on each CPU and build some very clever glue to allow the two GPUs to share memory. Ergo, compromise.
  - l33tbro 13y ago
    You talk specs I know little about. But I got to say I'm just surprised they actually even released the damn thing. Many seem convinced (me included) that Apple would go the way of Sony, producing pithy consumer electronics and diluting their brand values of being 'forward-thinking'. I thought VFX world was mostly PC/Hackintosh based?
    - KaiserPro 13y ago
      Naa, hackintoshes are far to hard to maintain. Its either real Macs, Dell optiplexes (although I've seen a few of those hackitoshed) and HP z series(win/linux) Most of london is HP. Macs are still needed because of quicktime, and final cut (plus a few other niche products) People use the Laptops a lot, because they are actually quite good. Certainly longer lasting than anything from Sony or Toshiba.
objclxt 13y ago
> much like the original iphone, to get the battery life up, they had to use a tiny(by the standard o the time) CPU, which meant no flash I think you might be misinformed. The first-generation iPhone shipped with a 620 MHz ARM CPU that was under-clocked to 412 MHz. Even at the under-clocked speed, it was considerably faster than most other smartphones released in 2007. For example, the Nokia N95 (322 MHz ARM, which admittedly was dual but took very little advantage of that), Palm Centro (312 MHz XScale), HTC Touch (200 MHz), and the BlackBerry Curve 8300 (312 MHz XScale) all had slower clock speeds, and were all released around the same time as the iPhone. A 620 MHz ARM chip, even one that was underclocked, was in 2007 speedy. It was certainly not 'tiny by the standard of the time'. I remember a lot of people complaining about various deficiencies in the iPhone back then (such as the lack of 3G, which was a battery saving measure), but I really can't recall anyone complaining about the chipset.
- KaiserPro 13y ago
  I stand corrected. It appears that the n95 was an omap2420 http://www.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?contentId=4671&navigationId=11990&templateId=6123 http://www.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?c...
Kerrick 13y ago
> Over the next few months, we'll be hearing about how the CPU is dead and that all you need is GPU. I've been saying that for years. http://chris.pirillo.com/are-gpus-the-future-of-cpus/ http://chris.pirillo.com/are-gpus-the-future-of-cpus/
_pmf_ 13y ago
See, you don't get it. IT'S ROUND, FOR FUCK'S SAKE! That means that Apple is amazing and once more advances the state of personal computing. Somehow. In some way.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- brador 13y ago
  Well it's more innovation than the 30 years of beige box we had. The shape and style is nice, and I think innovative in how it allows for better cooling of the system. But what do I know, I still run xp :P
  - pavs 13y ago
    For a pro computer, where performance is absolutely the most important consideration, do you really care about the shape of the case? Another thing most of people are not bringing up and driving me nuts, is for pro computer, being able to upgrade components at will is one of the most important considerations. From the looks of it, this looks like its not going to be possible with the macpro. With the old Macpro, it was possible to upgrade components. As a matter of fact, being able to upgrade was a big part of the design.
    - Samuel_Michon 13y ago
      > For a pro computer, where performance is absolutely the most important consideration, do you really care about the shape of the case? It’s a tiny 10"×6"×6" workstation. That means you can take it anywhere in a backpack. Lots of pros are going to love that, from photographers to DJs to forensic detectives to doctors without borders. The new cooling system (and thus the case’s round shape) is what allows the new Mac Pro to be so ridiculously small.
      - MetaCosm 13y ago
        I love carrying around my computer with no monitor, no mouse, no keyboard, no power cables and no accessories. I like even more if it is in a delicate housing with an exposed and breakable fan. I think I will throw that in my bag! Screw The Macbook pro, I am on board with this new and massively inconvenient alternative. No one is going to carry this around with them.
pmjordan 13y ago
The Mac pro only has one CPU because that's all they could fit in. I suspect the real reason is that Apple still {can't be bothered|can't figure out how} to add NUMA support to OS X. The existing 2-socket Mac Pros have been crippled by the interleaved-mode NUMA. (which, interestingly enough, is even hardcoded in the firmware, so when running OSes that support NUMA on a Mac Pro, you can't benefit from that support, presumably so the benchmarks don't shine a bad light on OS X - of course it's blindingly obvious when compared to a same-spec workstation from HP, Dell, etc.) In fairness, adding NUMA to xnu is probably quite an undertaking. I wouldn't be surprised if they've previously tried and got in a terrible mess. The task/thread management is scattered across the Mach and BSD subsystems, and the virtual memory system handles some conditions (such as low memory) terribly, and seems to scale badly to large amounts of RAM and 64 bits.
- leoc 13y ago
  Getting rid of user-accessible PCI has a similar benefit for Apple - no more hassle having to support a zoo of PCI cards.
  - pmjordan 13y ago
    Except there are Thunderbolt-to-PCIe enclosures, which come with their own set of problems (latency, hotplugging, I/O memory range allocation, bandwidth, not to mention cost). But I guess Apple can just say "we don't support those, take it up with the enclosure manufacturer". Drivers for Thunderbolt devices still are necessarily kexts and can thus take down the system without an obvious culprit. For this reason alone I'm surprised they went with it rather than supporting USB3 early on or that they didn't come up with something similar but altogether new, like they did with Lightning. They seem to be trying to cut down third party kext development, and aren't opening the sources for most of their own new kexts. Of course, with IOMMUs available in all Thunderbolt systems, they could have brought back the microkernel aspect of Mach for device drivers, but that would have been even more work.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  What does NUMA have to do with SMP setups? NUMA would be about CPUs with separate physical memories acting as one weird processing resource, not a Mac Pro with multiple processes connected to the same memory. What am I missing here?
stiff 13y ago
The fanboyism in the article is just ridiculous, but I think new chasis deserves more credit than just being a "funny shape", I think it is genuinely innovative in a space that hasn't seen much innovation for a long time. Just like the MacBook finally shook up the "ugly grex box" status quo of laptops the new MacBook Pro finally shakes up the "big ugly grey box" status quo of workstation computers. I am curious how many watts/m^3/dB will Apple be able to pack with this approach, it seems to a be a very interesting direction.
- myko 13y ago
  > MacBook finally shook up the "ugly grex box" status quo I think you mean the Vaio?
leoc 13y ago
Yes. It's strong in GPU terms, but no stronger than (some) currently-available PC workstations. At the same time it's irremediably weaker than (some) currently available PC workstations in terms of CPU, RAM and bandwidth to specialised hardware. Presenting this as a new paradigm of GPU computing seems a bit spinny. EDIT: However, if the Mac Pro (despite the name and the heritage) is really priced and sold as something more like a high-end desktop than a full-blown workstation, then the new-GPU-centric-paradigm thing might be borne out to an extent - it would be an unusually GPU-heavy machine compared to PC desktops, if not to the workstations of VFX professionals.

everyone 13y ago

Why would anyone waste their money on this!??

everyone 13y ago
It actually makes me mad! If you really need mac software then why not built a far more powerful and cheaper hackintosh. But why would you even want that? what software is there for mac OS that there is a not an equivalent to for linux or windows?
- dagw 13y ago
  what software is there for mac OS that there is a not an equivalent to for linux or windows Most professionals don't want equivalent software, they want the software that they know and that is supported by all their plugins and hardware.
  - everyone 13y ago
    Yes. So it is a combination of laziness/lack of time to retool and learn a new program, and, a case of, well I've already thrown X amount of money down this hole so I'll just keep going, to stop now I'd have to admit I made a bad choice.
    - dagw 13y ago
      Most pros I know will happily swap software if it will give them access to new features they need or will make them more efficient and productive. They won't switch just to save a few bucks. Even saving $10000 on hardware isn't enough to compensate for even a small drop in productivity.
    - cscurmudgeon 13y ago
      You think a Mac is a bad choice? You probably do very little dev. Of all the development environments I have seen so far, nothing beats the Mac. Even Emacs for Mac is light years better than plain old Emacs. http://aquamacs.org/ http://aquamacs.org/
      - everyone 13y ago
        Developer is a very broad term. What kind of developer are you? I'm a games developer. Emacs is great but it is essentially a text editor. there are literally 1000's of similar things of varying complexity depending on your preferences available for linux and windows.
        cscurmudgeon 13y ago
        I develop a lot on Common Lisp. SLIME is Aquamacs beats any other so called IDEs and REPLs. If you think Emacs is just a text editor, you should come out of your shell (snicker, snicker).
cscurmudgeon 13y ago
You are naive if you think high-end professionals value their money more than their time.
- everyone 13y ago
  Yeah! I'm a "high-end professional" I dont need to understand things!
  - cscurmudgeon 13y ago
    Yep. Count Paul Graham in that. http://paulgraham.com/mac.html http://paulgraham.com/mac.html

Luc 13y ago

> The Mac pro only has one CPU because that's all they could fit in. It wasn't a bold visionary move, it was a compromise because of the form factor. Where did you get that? It sounds entirely implausible that a company renowned for its design would decide on the form factor first, and then try to fit stuff in there as well as possible...

jhasse 13y ago
Sounds plausible to me.
KaiserPro 13y ago
Because that's how design works. The end goal of the iPhone, (to take a very good example) was designed to fit in your hand. Everything else had to be crammed in to accomplish this. to give a non technical example, the london underground map sacrifices geographic accuracy for simplicity. A very large, and successful compromise. Also, where could they fit another CPU? Each one kicks out almost 180 watts of heat, and must have RAM and power to make it work. It also complicates GPU<=>CPU and GPU<=>GPU communications. You either have to shove all the GPUs on one CPU and waste lots of QPI cycles on moving RAM back and forth, or have one GPU on each CPU and build some very clever glue to allow the two GPUs to share memory. Ergo, compromise.
- l33tbro 13y ago
  You talk specs I know little about. But I got to say I'm just surprised they actually even released the damn thing. Many seem convinced (me included) that Apple would go the way of Sony, producing pithy consumer electronics and diluting their brand values of being 'forward-thinking'. I thought VFX world was mostly PC/Hackintosh based?
  - KaiserPro 13y ago
    Naa, hackintoshes are far to hard to maintain. Its either real Macs, Dell optiplexes (although I've seen a few of those hackitoshed) and HP z series(win/linux) Most of london is HP. Macs are still needed because of quicktime, and final cut (plus a few other niche products) People use the Laptops a lot, because they are actually quite good. Certainly longer lasting than anything from Sony or Toshiba.

objclxt 13y ago

> much like the original iphone, to get the battery life up, they had to use a tiny(by the standard o the time) CPU, which meant no flash I think you might be misinformed. The first-generation iPhone shipped with a 620 MHz ARM CPU that was under-clocked to 412 MHz. Even at the under-clocked speed, it was considerably faster than most other smartphones released in 2007. For example, the Nokia N95 (322 MHz ARM, which admittedly was dual but took very little advantage of that), Palm Centro (312 MHz XScale), HTC Touch (200 MHz), and the BlackBerry Curve 8300 (312 MHz XScale) all had slower clock speeds, and were all released around the same time as the iPhone. A 620 MHz ARM chip, even one that was underclocked, was in 2007 speedy. It was certainly not 'tiny by the standard of the time'. I remember a lot of people complaining about various deficiencies in the iPhone back then (such as the lack of 3G, which was a battery saving measure), but I really can't recall anyone complaining about the chipset.

KaiserPro 13y ago
I stand corrected. It appears that the n95 was an omap2420 http://www.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?contentId=4671&navigationId=11990&templateId=6123 http://www.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?c...

Kerrick 13y ago

> Over the next few months, we'll be hearing about how the CPU is dead and that all you need is GPU. I've been saying that for years. http://chris.pirillo.com/are-gpus-the-future-of-cpus/ http://chris.pirillo.com/are-gpus-the-future-of-cpus/

_pmf_ 13y ago

See, you don't get it. IT'S ROUND, FOR FUCK'S SAKE! That means that Apple is amazing and once more advances the state of personal computing. Somehow. In some way.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
brador 13y ago
Well it's more innovation than the 30 years of beige box we had. The shape and style is nice, and I think innovative in how it allows for better cooling of the system. But what do I know, I still run xp :P
- pavs 13y ago
  For a pro computer, where performance is absolutely the most important consideration, do you really care about the shape of the case? Another thing most of people are not bringing up and driving me nuts, is for pro computer, being able to upgrade components at will is one of the most important considerations. From the looks of it, this looks like its not going to be possible with the macpro. With the old Macpro, it was possible to upgrade components. As a matter of fact, being able to upgrade was a big part of the design.
  - Samuel_Michon 13y ago
    > For a pro computer, where performance is absolutely the most important consideration, do you really care about the shape of the case? It’s a tiny 10"×6"×6" workstation. That means you can take it anywhere in a backpack. Lots of pros are going to love that, from photographers to DJs to forensic detectives to doctors without borders. The new cooling system (and thus the case’s round shape) is what allows the new Mac Pro to be so ridiculously small.
    - MetaCosm 13y ago
      I love carrying around my computer with no monitor, no mouse, no keyboard, no power cables and no accessories. I like even more if it is in a delicate housing with an exposed and breakable fan. I think I will throw that in my bag! Screw The Macbook pro, I am on board with this new and massively inconvenient alternative. No one is going to carry this around with them.

pmjordan 13y ago

The Mac pro only has one CPU because that's all they could fit in. I suspect the real reason is that Apple still {can't be bothered|can't figure out how} to add NUMA support to OS X. The existing 2-socket Mac Pros have been crippled by the interleaved-mode NUMA. (which, interestingly enough, is even hardcoded in the firmware, so when running OSes that support NUMA on a Mac Pro, you can't benefit from that support, presumably so the benchmarks don't shine a bad light on OS X - of course it's blindingly obvious when compared to a same-spec workstation from HP, Dell, etc.) In fairness, adding NUMA to xnu is probably quite an undertaking. I wouldn't be surprised if they've previously tried and got in a terrible mess. The task/thread management is scattered across the Mach and BSD subsystems, and the virtual memory system handles some conditions (such as low memory) terribly, and seems to scale badly to large amounts of RAM and 64 bits.

leoc 13y ago
Getting rid of user-accessible PCI has a similar benefit for Apple - no more hassle having to support a zoo of PCI cards.
- pmjordan 13y ago
  Except there are Thunderbolt-to-PCIe enclosures, which come with their own set of problems (latency, hotplugging, I/O memory range allocation, bandwidth, not to mention cost). But I guess Apple can just say "we don't support those, take it up with the enclosure manufacturer". Drivers for Thunderbolt devices still are necessarily kexts and can thus take down the system without an obvious culprit. For this reason alone I'm surprised they went with it rather than supporting USB3 early on or that they didn't come up with something similar but altogether new, like they did with Lightning. They seem to be trying to cut down third party kext development, and aren't opening the sources for most of their own new kexts. Of course, with IOMMUs available in all Thunderbolt systems, they could have brought back the microkernel aspect of Mach for device drivers, but that would have been even more work.
seanmcdirmid 13y ago
What does NUMA have to do with SMP setups? NUMA would be about CPUs with separate physical memories acting as one weird processing resource, not a Mac Pro with multiple processes connected to the same memory. What am I missing here?

stiff 13y ago

The fanboyism in the article is just ridiculous, but I think new chasis deserves more credit than just being a "funny shape", I think it is genuinely innovative in a space that hasn't seen much innovation for a long time. Just like the MacBook finally shook up the "ugly grex box" status quo of laptops the new MacBook Pro finally shakes up the "big ugly grey box" status quo of workstation computers. I am curious how many watts/m^3/dB will Apple be able to pack with this approach, it seems to a be a very interesting direction.

myko 13y ago
> MacBook finally shook up the "ugly grex box" status quo I think you mean the Vaio?

leoc 13y ago

Yes. It's strong in GPU terms, but no stronger than (some) currently-available PC workstations. At the same time it's irremediably weaker than (some) currently available PC workstations in terms of CPU, RAM and bandwidth to specialised hardware. Presenting this as a new paradigm of GPU computing seems a bit spinny. EDIT: However, if the Mac Pro (despite the name and the heritage) is really priced and sold as something more like a high-end desktop than a full-blown workstation, then the new-GPU-centric-paradigm thing might be borne out to an extent - it would be an unusually GPU-heavy machine compared to PC desktops, if not to the workstations of VFX professionals.