The cube flopped. Let's try a cylinder.
and then sphere? or a cone?
Hypercube. "No computer has been built this way before."
Mac Pro
441–450 of 571 posts
Re: Mac Pro
#442The more I look at this design, the more I think it's absolutely brilliant. Increasingly we're seeing fantastically small form factors for mid-ranged desktop computers like the Intel NUC and the Mac Mini, yet high end workstations are still stuck in massive, ugly ATX towers. This seems to elegantly solve the problem of squeezing components that tend to run very hot, into a relatively small space. The shared heat sync…
that is because most people using high end workstations dont care about how it looks or how big it is.
Re: Mac Pro
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
nah, dyson fans have used similar bases for years. I kid, I kid. Honestly though I do not care for an integrated "pro" machine. This is form over function. Fail a component and its off to the shop. Combined with, if I want to upgrade them I need to replace the unit. If they are going to integrate everything then they need to drop the price. Integration implies lower costs as having all the support needed to drive use…
> Fail a component and its off to the shop. Oh, so it's exactly like the laptop, tablet, and phone you have now. Gotcha.
I dunno what laptop you're using - the screen failed on mine and I replaced it on my floor, not even a fancy workstation.
Re: Mac Pro
#444I love this new device. I suspect I will buy one. But it doesn't solve my "need a new mac pro" problem. Right now my 2009 octo mac pro, with six displays attached, plays three roles: - it is my high end desktop workstation, with three primary high resolution (2560x1600) displays. - it is my HTPC, with one of the six monitors strung into another room entirely. - it is my office NAS, with four internal 3TB disks So, th…
> But it doesn't solve my "need a new mac pro" problem. Yes! Totally yes! I held off buying a MBP just so mine would be one generation better than my coworkers'. I just know there's a MBP in the pipeline, because the inventory has been allowed to dry up. Why wasn't a new model announced?
Probably a minor refresh for Haswell. I wouldn't expect too much.
Pure speculation, but maybe they had some integration difficulties and didn't want to commit to a specific timeline, or they couldn't release it /right now/ like the MBA so they wanted to hold off to fill out their fall event. There are a ton of other things that could have held it back; perhaps Intel isn't ramped up enough on volume production of the quad-core Haswells and they didn't want to just update the dual-cores first.
Re: Mac Pro
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
Welcome to the era where you process all in the cloud. You don't need 30 HD on your machine anymore or 200gb ram. I was a bit shocked at the beginning but then I realized most of the studios are using cloud solutions to make intensive renders or local hardware farms with plenty of processing power. I think the Mac Pro still exceeds on power, but you know you will always find someone else more hungry of power :)
Heh, I bet you're somewhere with high bandwidth, no data caps and very low latency. Here, I'm 30-60ms away from the big datacentres, and 200-400ms away from the US. Data is capped at ~500gb per month on the high end plans, and that's both upload and download. I'm lucky to get 10 megabits down, 1 megabit up on a good day. Coupled with the fact our country's going to head back to the 1950s with the inevitable change of…
South Africa here - we're also suffering from the fact that geographically "in the middle of nowhere". As for government, don't get me started.
But I'm curious - what's happening in Australia that makes you say that it's about to back to the 50s?
Re: Mac Pro
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
because you're in Siberia, it's 1:00 am, it's dark, you are drunk and need more time to plug that damn thing into the right whole. Genuine answer as I see it.
In that case it's a given that you will continue to shake the thing, intentionally or not, and the ports will continue to be lit.
I'm sure someone will come out with a tweak tool to let you muck with the lighting settings once this thing is on the market.
Re: Mac Pro
#447Personally I couldn't care less about the design, it would be sitting behind several large screens anyway and the thermal ideas sound interesting.... That said.... 4 ram slots???? Really? 12 cores, 2 GPUs and I get 32GB of ram? Maybe 64GB if 16GB dimms in standard sizes become a thing? That kills it completely in my book.
That paucity of slots is what got me to thinking... I was wondering if the idea would be to daisy chain these together via TB 2 and see one workstation with... say ...36 cores or whatever. I'm trying to determine if that would be a possibility. In essence, is the Mac Pro a Thunderbolt 2 "processing" device? Or could it be made to be one? If it were... Man... put me down for a couple of them. I mean you could potentia…
I was thinking about this as well. It would make sense to cluster these with a front-end node. The improvements to the scheduler, among other things over the past few years, would indicate a simpler way to build the equivalent of a VAXCluster.
Re: Mac Pro
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like a plea for LED illuminated ports... like the Mac Pro will have.
They can't make the proper port glow when you get the cable close to it?
My Dell U2410 has buttons that detect when your finger gets near them (they start lighting up) which is pretty slick. Maybe it's just a bit more expensive / harder to integrate and wasn't considered worth it. Not exactly sure how it works but I think it uses the same physical phenomenon as a theremin. Again it's mostly pointless, but it is pretty slick.
Re: Mac Pro
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
The linked dimms have 43% lower bandwidth than what Apple has specced (PC1866 vs PC1066) and are over twice the $ per GB.
I can't think of a single app that's RAM-speed-bound. Pretty much everything is CPU- or GPU- or disk-bound.
If that were the case, we wouldn't have multi-level CPU caches and we really wouldn't care about misses stalling the processor.
Everything is RAM speed bound when it comes to CPU and GPU.
Re: Mac Pro
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't see any way a 'prosumer' will be able to afford it considering what's going inside. I think these things are going to run $3000+, but maybe I'm wrong. Or maybe I'm mis-defining 'prosumer.'
Dual FirePro cards, mini PCI-E SSD, and up to a 12-core [single] CPU? I feel like this will start north of $3500, but they might have a cheaper base config. Maxed, it'll probably top $5k.
Sounds about right. It's nice to imagine them doing a version with a single socket and a nice-but-consumer-level GPU -- that would finally be a worthy embodiment of the mythical "xMac" -- but they've been actively disinterested in releasing a headless mid-range machine for years, and I can't see that changing now.