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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.

> 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.

I stand corrected. It appears that the n95 was an omap2420 http://www.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?c...
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.

Getting rid of user-accessible PCI has a similar benefit for Apple - no more hassle having to support a zoo of PCI cards.
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?
Am I the only one curious as to what NUMA stands for?
> 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...

> 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...

Design has nothing to do with specs, and something to do with form factor. So yes, it sounds plausible that a company renowned for its design would focus on the design over the specs.

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.

That's pretty much how every Apple product since 1998 was developed.
Sounds plausible to me.
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.

Considering its shape, location of its fan, I see no reason why Dyson cannot come out with a air multiplier extension that mounts to the top.

Silly aside.

I don't care what the hardware inside the Mac Pro is because I cannot upgrade it from what we have seen already. If I am bound by what I buy then its not a traditional "Pro" machine. Its a design statement and nothing more.

Let alone I don't want a family of these enclosures on my desk, I do fully expect the after market to come up with matching towers you can tbolt connect all across your desk. Perhaps one or two will double as monitor stands.

guys, Apple has always operated with the ethos that design matters. Clearly there are a lot of people who don't care about design, who don't care about the way things look. Apple does and it has made the bet that there are a lot of people out there who do too, and who are willing to pay for good design. I would say Apple's bet has paid off, wouldn't you?

If you don't care about design, about the way things look, if you don't believe that form can facilitate function, then that's OK dude. You don't have to buy their stuff. Just stop criticizing others who do. Lots of people care about form and function, lots of people are willing to pay for good design. It doesn't make them naive or stupid or sheep or shallow... it just makes them happy.

If you don't believe in the premise that good design, well-thought out form+function can have an impact on mood, emotion, workplace (or home) atmosphere, etc, then dude, I have to say, you are mistaken.

Also remember that Apple is a for-profit business, and they are not selling "computers" any more than BMW is selling "personal transportation devices".

and that's OK.

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

I think it's cute. Mac Pro "poubelle" edition.
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.
> MacBook finally shook up the "ugly grex box" status quo

I think you mean the Vaio?

> 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/

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.

Why would anyone waste their money on this!??
You are naive if you think high-end professionals value their money more than their time.
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?
> One of those GPUs isn’t even hooked up to do graphics.

Not true, the GPUs are connected with a bridge and so share the workload efficiently.

> "New"

New to mac maybe but my desktop has 3 GTX 670s which provides some pretty serious computational power.

OSX has been moving progressively further from desktop beasts and towards tablet/phone fusion. The hardware for the mac pro does have a striking design, but I suspect it will wind up being the same red-haired step-child Mac Pro's have been for years unless Apple does a huge about-face on the development of OSX. This certainly wouldn't be the first time Apple produced a cool-looking desktop machine that turned out to be a sales-dud (see G4 cube).
Eh, not really. That's just a popular delusion. Mavericks just further cements that Apple has no plans whatsoever of unifying OS X and iOS on a UI level. To me it even looks like OS X and iOS are moving further apart.
+1

I think sometimes people confuse interoperability with some sort of codebase merge. It makes sense for each release of osx and ios to be more interoperable, and even take lessons learned from one back to the other. It doesn't make sense to merge them, because they are different platforms with different needs.

When it comes to GPGPU there is one big problem with the Mac Pro: Lack of CUDA support. CUDA is the de facto standard for GPGPU programming in HPC. Software support for it is years ahead of OpenCL. I doubt the new Mac is going to change that, if anything it might give some impulse into new workstation design for the likes of Dell and HP, sporting NVIDIA cards. Of course there is still hope that Apple recognizes this and that it offers an NVIDIA configuration. A dual Titan Mac Pro could be a very compelling HPC workstation for those who prefer this to working on a cluster. Even more so since Unix/Linux is the standard OS for HPC and most software tools therefore have OSX/darwin support.
Apart from the initialization code which I'd agree is significantly less painful for CUDA, I haven't seen that much difference in terms of exploiting a GPU's compute units. I never wrote complex applications though, so am I missing something?

The bulky initialization is no longer a problem with a library like PyOpenCl - everything becomes much more elegant...

First of all, nobody is going to port few KLOC of CUDA to OpenCL or vice versa because of one developer's whim. Hence no choice of GPU is bad for developers.

And there are some differences which may be relevant for large projects: CUDA supports ahead-of-time compilation of GPU code down to the lowest level assembly (compilation of several KLOC project takes minutes), direct data transfers between GPUs or even GPUs and network adapters, some subset of C++ (classes without virtual methods, function/class templates, operator overloading) and probably few more useful features I haven't listed.

I think that the "target audience" of this new Mac Pro is snobs, not HPC developers. With almost everything soldered down it's hardly a good machine.
I am not interested in a Mac Pro, but I hope it marks the beginning of widely available computers with Cell-like architectures where a moderately powerful, general purpose CPU acts as a frontend scheduler for other parallel or specialized chips with negligible context switching costs.
> One of those GPUs isn’t even hooked up to do graphics.

Who says that? For all I know the cards are using AMD CrossFire.

It is definitely the workstation to dream about, we've been waiting for a tech leader in the high-end professional space even if the market is not that significant anymore (relative to the $$$ Apple makes on consumer, anyways).
I know its not fashionable, but HP really still is the tech leader when it comes to workstations: http://www.hp.com/united-states/campaigns/workstations/z620_...

When the next gen Xeons come along with the release of the new macpro, it'll be literally twice as fast. in side by side comparisons*

*there maybe some apple GPU special sauce for inter GPU communications

The other awesome thing about the z series is that they have a three year next day engineer on site warranty.

No, there is nothing really special here with respect to performance. It just makes me think back to the SGI O2, Next Cube, the iCube, the Amiga 2000...when computers were more works of art than they are now and not just built from a boring specifications. I'm being a bit sentimental here.

If you want the best bang for the buck, or even the best bang, it still makes sense to go with a boring HP box and not a Mac Pro. Honestly, the only ones who will probably go with the Mac Pro is the high-end photoshop/toaster crowd, or those who want big bangs in small spaces (e.g. Japan), as well as those with too much money and some amount of sentiment, but this is not even mainstream for the workstation market.

We have both z620s and Dell T7600s (http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-t7600/fs) at work. Apart form the badge you'd be hard pressed to tell them apart. Certainly neither one is better than the other.
Too bad you can't run Mac OS X on it.
I find it easier to think of it as an upper mid class workstation. It's not a high end workstation. Exciting and weird thing about is that all extensions to it are planned to be external, we'll see how that works out. Also, my concern is about the cooling design, looks like it will suck dust from below, like a really inefficient vacuum cleaner. Doesn't matter it's supposed to go on desk and not on the floor. Dust is always an issue, no matter where you are. Also, ATI graphics is not something I am excited about.
All Apple really had to do was produce an HP Z820 equivalent machine running Mac OS X, and everyone would have been happy.
Again, always be careful with buying the first iteration of any hardware. Especially at that price.
> at that price

No price has been announced. Apple may surprise us. Before they came out with the iPad, journalists and analysts thought Apple’s tablet would cost $1000 or more[1].

The current entry level Mac Pro costs $2500, while the most expensive iMac costs $2000. I expect the new Mac Pro to cost between $2000 and $2500.

[1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/10/01/19/minor_issues_could...

I agree with the idea, this is Apple having a radical rethink of what it means for a pro level workstation going forward. The majority of criticisms have been levelled at the lack of expansion, not at what the potential for the machine is.
Is this a Mac fanboi's idea of writeen(1) porn? It reads like a diary of a boy about to go out on a first date, while already dating... Actually, it's kinda cute. Or is it creepy? Lets hope the writer doesn't end up, er, "injuring" his or her self on this new computing phallus.

Anyway, I think the writer needs a cuddle.

(1) Well, yes, initially it was a typo, but on second thoughts I like how it worked out.

pointless and tasteless
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