The 2013 Mac Pro. Opinions?

I'd really like to know what Logan and the crew think of the redesigned Mac Pro.

I think the idea behind it is very Apple-like (duh), but I also think they're going away from what some pros really need, and that's an expandable workstation.

Even though they've somehow managed to fit dual xeons and dual firepro GPU's in a 9.9x6.6" tube, there's no room for anything else. I know they like to make things small and easy to use, but I don't know how many professionals really want something like that.

They've removed any space for serious storage exept for there proprietary SSD PCIE stick thingy. Unless they've managed to fit 4tb of space on that stick, I don't see many editors being to happy with this.

They mention editing 4k video and other things in there "slide show", and I feel like that's a perfect example for this problem. To store and edit 4k video you're going to have to buy an external thunderbolt raid enclosure that's probably going to be the same size or bigger than the system itself just to be able to store and edit that stuff at a reasonable speed. Right there it seems like the concept is already falling apart.

Not only do you have to drop all of the extra money on this little tube with all this power, now you have to drop another $1k to get a 4-bay thunderbolt enclosure when if it was anything like a PC you could've got a decent RAID card for less than half that price.

I know they're all for simple-to-use, and being able to daisy chain a few thunderbolt enclosures and a monitor to a single port is pretty simple to figure out, but why not give users some room for internal storage to make things more simple?

I think including space for 4 traditional 3.5" drives hooked up to a decent built-in raid controller would be great. Have it so that out of the box users have the choice between more speed (raid 5) or more security (Raid 10) and be done. That way the even less tech savvy can get great performance without having to figure out what a good raid enclosure is, and the more tech savvy can look at it and say, "No wonder this thing is so overpriced they have this stupid proprietary raid controller that you can't even configure yourself, this is why I don't own a mac, I'm going to just build a PC like I always do."

All in all I think Apple has really shown there true colors as an overpriced option for the people who either have more money than sense or for those who don't know any better. And yes, I do own an iPhone, I'm a hypocrite.

For anyone interested in seeing what the new Mac Pro 2013 looks like/etc, check out Apples "Slide Show" thing.

Just built a dual Xeon E5 2630 12 core workstaion (turbos to 2.9 I think) and it was about $5k. If intel comes out with a single-chip 12 core xeon clocked faster than 2 ghz it'll probably be $3000 for just the chip. 

The FireGL cards are crazy fast, but on PC side w/adobe Cuda is better supported than OpenCL at the moment. I wonder if you can have two socket 2011 cpus + 1 gpu or if you always have to have two gpus with the mac. I suspect there is no dual socket option since they mentioned 12 core at the keynote. A lot of software is 'not there yet' for gpu acceleration on the mac pro side, either. 

In our case, testing adobe AE, adding cuda cores only helped with sfx that were cuda accelerated. Unfortunately, even with CC, we still have a lot of files that can't be cuda accelerated for one reason or another. In that case our heavy cpu renders take 15-20 mins per 3 mins of footage. Or about 35 mins w/a single Xeon enabled. (Our Old 1366 dual-socket 2009 macs take like 2.5 hrs for the same job.)

 

 

Adobe Creative Cloud has supported Open CL over CUDA for a while now, and in all honesty. If I were to get the new mac pro, I wouldn't stop stuffing garbage into it.

OpenCL on CC: Yes, for Premiere. No for AE. At least I could not get it to work w/raytracer, at all, with a 7970. Source?

 

Not the person you asked but AE CC only requires a CUDA card for GPU accelerated Ray Traced 3D renderer.

I agree that if intel makes a single 12 core CPU it will cost a fortune. Do you think they're refering to a 6 core/12 thread CPU instead, or do you really think by the end of this year there will be a 12 phyical core chip released and the word has been leaked through this Mac Pro slide show?

As for FireGL I have yet to have the chance to use it, and as for configurations I think you could be on the money as far as you can get a single CPU and two GPUs or two CPUs and a single GPU, making the 12 cores easier to achieve.

As for your CUDA/openGL conclusion for the cards I have not personally seen this though I don't use AE extensively, and I'm not working on exeptionally amazing equipment (3770k/GTX660).

 

you guys are probably talking windows, but this being a mac thread, i'm fairly certain (too lazy to get sources) open cl has been fully enabled in mac for quite a while (mac pros comming with amd cards as long as i can remember), just been too lazy to make it available in windows until cc, and too lazy to release patches to those who don't want to/can't upgrade

What makes you think they are talking about a single CPU, as opposed to a dual Xeon configuration similar to the old mac pros?

I have a couple things to say

1) Apple makes good quality products with a simple and sturdy design

but I will never buy them because

2) the hardware is overpriced and the overall package is not as good because the mac OS is too simplified for my use and is not compatible for many of the things I want to do with my PC.

3-ish) Apple has format incompatability problems. They are also overcontrolling with media transfers to different devices. There are ways around these, but its a major annoyance for me.

 

They only said up to 12 cores of processing power. That doesn't mean 12 cores are there

Simply because this is such a small form factor system, I'm leaning more towards the idea that it's a 6 core with 12 threads or you have to lose one of the GPU's to add the second CPU, otherwise you'd have to have a mITX-like mobo with dual 2011 sockets and I'm not sure that's even possible.

Yeah I mentioned it could be a 6 core/12 thread CPU which isn't anything special, but the fact that they offer dual CPU's now it seems like they'd continue to offer that in some form.

Exactly, which is why I don't get there move with this all-new Mac Pro. They're gearing a product towards professionals and taking away features serious professionals usually need. It's just like the whole thing with Final Cut X, except instead of turning into an affordable editing suite geared towards lesser users, this is a very expensive computer with very little overall functionality that anyone who doesn't know better would just say, "well I'll just get an iMac since it already has a screen."