Posted on 06/11/2019 11:46:04 PM PDT by Swordmaker
Apple's been teasing a redesigned Mac Pro for years now -- in fact, it's been well over a year since the company said it would be shipping the computer at some point during 2019 after originally promising it would arrive in 2018. Well, today, we're finally getting a look at the successor to that beautifully-designed trash can that Apple introduced in 2013 and then basically failed to upgrade for years. And guess what? It looks a lot like the old, cheese-grater style tower that Apple sold for years.
The Mac Pro has a stainless steel frame built around modularity and easy access to the components, something that should make it a lot easier to upgrade than the older model. The entire external case can be lifted right off after you unlock it.
There's a new Intel Xeon processor on board that has up to 28 cores, and the computer supports a positively insane 1.5 terabytes of RAM. And Apple is bringing PCI expansion back, finally -- there are four double-wide slots, three single-wide slots and one half-width slot that Apple populates with its I/O card. That card features two Thunderbolt 3 ports, two USB-A ports and a 3.5mm audio jack. There are also two ethernet ports, as well. As for graphics, Apple will support up to two Radeon Pro Vega II GPUs, though that's not the default configuration.
For video editors out there, Apple is including its own custom hardware called Afterburner. It'll make the Mac Pro capable of playing three simultaneous 8K RAW video streams, or 12 4K streams. The card is capable for processing 6 billion pixels per second. To keep things cool, the Mac Pro has three fans and a blower that Apple says shouldn't be any louder than the iMac Pro when it's under load. (We'll have to hear that to believe it.)
Oh yeah, the Mac Pro has wheels! And Apple is even making its own display to go along with it, a 32-inch LCD display that Apple is calling a 6K Retina display with HDR and 6,016 x 3,384 resolution.
The base Mac Pro will include an eight-core Xeon CPU, 32GB of memory, a 256GB SSD and the Radeon Pro 580X graphics card and will start at $5,999. It'll ship this fall... start saving your couch change.
Better than some of our older Suns
To put thing into perspective, one of the new Mac Pro has more computational horsepower than the entire Cray supercomputer network at NASA Ames combined back in the day and a high resolution 32” Retina flat screen display was the stuff of science fiction (literally) and could not be bought for any money back then, but a 21 in Radius RGB minister with 32 bit color video card was going for 7k.
An SGI graphics workstation went for 40k at the time .
Remember breathlessly following the RISC benchmark wars the new HP Apollo takes on all comers with a floating point of an astounding 60 mega flops. LOL!
FWIW, did an integrated system that was a forerunner of your custom fit prosthesis work on a Mac II back in the day and it was awesome. Decades ahead of its time and the Mac performed amazing, even the integrated FEM module for small models
Nice.
I would love to have a modular, expandable Mac like I had in the G3/G4 era, and the G5/first-gen Mac Pro design was a thing of beauty. But looking back on how I actually used my Macs, I liked the idea more than I used the reality of all that expandability. I went with an iMac in 2010, and just replaced it this year. I squeezed a few more years out of it by replacing the 500GB HD with a 2TB and replacing the optical drive with an SSD. It’s still fast enough for most stuff, but it won’t get any more OS upgrades, so I’m using it as a file server.
Take a look at how often, and for what, you have replaced internal components in your Mac Pros. External expansion is a lot better than it used to be, and the Mini has four Thunderbolt-3 ports. The iMac adds discrete video and a great display, but I made the call that those weren’t worth the price difference for me, and I went with a 6-core i7 Mini.
A computer that is supposedly designed and built to be the top-of-the world powerhouse, working with massive video files.... comes with a 256GB SSD? For $5999, I don't care how brilliant the design is, or the "modular" expandability... A 256GB drive is stupid. Period. And 32GB of RAM, again, for a $5999 monster? No. While I think the modular concept was crucial to bringing the Mac Pro back into the serious tool category, by cheaping out on the base model like this - Apple is going to tick some folks off - The base configuration, if they insist on keeping it at this announced level, should be no more than $3999. I just cannot see the justification for anymore (and even then, it would seem on the high side of pricing). Or better - start at $2k for a shell and configure it exactly how you want it when ordering - at least then you can see the justification for the price you end up paying. Or I might be totally wrong and the pros will scramble to buy these as fast as they can be made. But I would be shocked.
Video editing... with a base SSD of 256GB? Ummm... right.
People who are going to be doing video editing will add another much larger drive or several, interior to the case. The 256GB high speed SSD is for the core system components. They also have available to them six 40Gb per second Thunderbolt 3 ports capable of connecting 36 peripheral drives including raid arrays and video servers. The processors have 64 lanes of PCIe data transfer available, even on the base configuration, while the top end Intel i9 has only 16.
They aren’t “cheaping out on a base model like this,” Batttman. I went to HP and put together an HP workstation using the same specs, only with LAST YEAR’S XEON processor as their only close match, and it priced out to over $9,700! A Dell, which couldn’t come close (no XEON to to match speed and caches and still a 2018 version), was $6400, and was missing major components. A Xeon capable logic board alone with only four (not 8) PCIe slots, is $1800, not to mention a 1450W power supply. A super fast SSD is not your off-the-shelf $100 jobby either. . . Nor is the price of high speed ECC RAM in two sticks to allow future expansion. This machine is a bargain for those it’s targeted toward.
I’ll be getting one the moment they’re available.
Thank goodness they haven’t left the Pro market!
Thanks, Sword!
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