Apple reveal new 4K equipped Mac Pro suitable for uncompressed raw editing. Not just pro but genius!

[Andrew Reid]

The new Mac Pro is the height of a bottle of wine, with the diameter of a small cookie jar. Cutting edge in terms of technology it's also a radical departure from the old models in terms of design and in my view it is going to be a huge success though I'm expecting a huge price tag.

[url=http://www.eoshd.com/content/10562/apple-reveal-new-4k-equipped-mac-pro-suitable-for-uncompressed-raw-editing-not-just-pro-but-genius]Read the full article here[/url]

[Dale Campbell]

Grant says it works very well - http://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=8898

Seems to have got a pre-production to play with? 

[AaronChicago]

This looks really awesome, minus the AMD part. I can't live without Premiere, and AE! I'll bet we see 4K panels from them in the next year as well.

[peederj]

Certainly breaking the NVidia monopoly will be good for all of us.

 

One thing to note is the difference between GBps and Gbps, conveniently confusing for the benefit of marketing. A Byte is 8 bits. So even if you have a PCIe expansion chassis linked with not one but four Thunderbolt 2 cables to the Mac Pro, you still only get 10GBps which is 1/4 what the 3rd gen PCIe bus can do internally (40GBps). Still that will be a very fast configuration, I doubt there is any limit on duplexing or quadruplexing T2 connections if the drivers are written accordingly.

 

Cue sad cases who compain about the lack of firewire. People, that's a $30 adapter. Geddovahit.

 

The internal PCIe slots for the thinline cards may offer some interesting expansion options at some point, though they aren't heat-sinked. You would only need one for the boot drive, all bulk storage would be external RAID, and SATA is currently just 6Gbps and not threatening to make T2 the bottleneck anytime soon. Few people ever upgraded the CPUs of Mac Pro's anyway, better to upgrade the whole machine at once to take advantage of better bus speeds etc. 3x 4K screens should be an immersive enough wall of pixels for anyone in the near future (a seamless wraparound cyc would be a nice touch, finally). Mix and match your peripherals based on external open standards is an improvement to having a massive and noisy cheesegrater that you have to struggle to upgrade even if many of those upgrades fit in the chassis.

 

I think the critics of this coffeemaker Mac just want to be contrarian and heroic in their use of hackintoshes that they build themselves. I will be very happy with this replacing my old cheesegrater. I think Resolve, RED, Adobe, etc. will conform to this new standard pretty quickly because it's far sexier than anything they've ever done. I think expansion chassis workarounds will appear fairly quickly too because there's a lot of money for e.g. Magma that they might never get to see again once the transition away from internal cards is done for good.

[peederj]

Grant Petty on Resolve 10:

 

http://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=8898#p56608

 

 

We have been testing with DaVinci Resolve 10 builds and this screams. Its amazing and those GPUs are incredible powerful. I am not sure what I can say as I am only going off what Apple has talked about publicly here in the keynote for what I can say right now, however there is a whole new OpenCL and DaVinci Resolve 10 has had a lot of performance work done to integrate it and its really really fast. Those GPUs are very powerful and have lots of GPU memory so this is the Mac we have been waiting for! We have lots of Thunderbolt products too so video in and out is taken care of. 

We will have more details once the guys get back from WWDC and we get some more info from Apple on what we can talk about etc.

Overall we could not be happier!

 

[Giovanni Bertani]

DaVinci Resolve 10 is already optimized and running on OpenCl at BlackMagic on this Mac Pro:
http://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=8898#p56608

Adobe Premiere Pro will be optimized too:
http://www.dslrfilmnoob.com/2013/06/10/adobe-premiere-pro-creative-cloud-supports-opengl/

CUDA is now obsoleted as not standard proprietary technology will matter less and less. OpenCl is the future.

SSD and Ram are user upgradable.

This is the first true 4K RAW fully integrated editing workstation.

Soon I will be able to switch from my MacBook Retina setup to a 4K workstation in a way as easy as plugging the cables. Future will be about plugged modular components. FCPX with its OpenCl integration, project management and files management was built exactly for these future machines from scratch. Plug a module (Storage, GPU, Dsp, Monitor, video I/O etc) , auto recognize and start working.

[Julian]

Nice design :)

 

You can already buy PCI-Express SSD's btw. For example the OCZ RevoDrive: http://ocz.com/consumer/pci-express-ssd

The 'X2' version goes upto 1500/1300 MB/s speeds: http://ocz.com/consumer/revodrive-3-x2-pcie-ssd

 

Although I think a 'normal' Sata III SSD is plenty fast currently for video editing.

 

Interesting move on Resolve and Premiere going OpenCL.. I bought a GeForce GTX660 and felt kinda 'forced' I had to buy Nvidia to make it work (Resolve 9). Not unhappy with it, but In the same price range I have the feeling AMD is more competitive. Curious how AMD cards will perform!

[AaronChicago]

Adobe Premiere Pro will be optimized too:
http://www.dslrfilmnoob.com/2013/06/10/adobe-premiere-pro-creative-cloud-supports-opengl/
 

Good news.

[mtheory]

It looks like an IKEA dustbin.

[TC]

Disappointed that it has gone from dual CPU to sIngle CPU. Disappointed that the GPU cannot be swapped. The design is interesting, but I don't think this is what the high-end (ie 'pro') market was looking for.

[peederj]

The emphasis will be on crunch migrating out to those 7 teraflops dual GPU's rather than the CPU. This will work very well for rendered DSP like photo/video though less well for realtime DSP like audio. But audio is generally not compute-intensive enough to challenge even a single modern multicore CPU. What else do you need crunch for, and how much more would you pay for it?

 

If you need more than this, an outboard hardware accelerator is an option (some of them run via gigabit Ethernet now) but who does in practice? By the time 6x T2s driving 3x 4K displays and more looks shabby you will be in line to upgrade the whole machine, which will be cheaper because it's smaller and modular and built on open standards.

 

This certainly isn't the weapon that will win yesterday's war.  :)

[Bruno]

This looks really awesome, minus the AMD part. I can't live without Premiere, and AE! I'll bet we see 4K panels from them in the next year as well.

 

I'm sure the Adobe apps will be supporting it in no time. Also, rumors say both the next 27" iMac and standalone display will support 5k resolution.

 

 

The design is interesting, but I don't think this is what the high-end (ie 'pro') market was looking for.

 

Was the high end market not looking for evolution? Well they should! :)

With 6 Thunderbolt ports, there's plenty of upgrade possibilities, including CPU, though it might take a while for 3rd party products to catch up.

[Andrew Reid]

Disappointed that it has gone from dual CPU to sIngle CPU.

 

12 cores not enough? I think it is. The GPU matters more, and that is brutally fast. It is just waiting for the software to catch up (proper optimised OpenCL support).

[Andrew Reid]

With 6 Thunderbolt ports, there's plenty of upgrade possibilities, including CPU, though it might take a while for 3rd party products to catch up.

 

I don't think it will be possible to upgrade core stuff like the CPU and GPU via Thunderbolt 2, as it doesn't run on the PCIExpress generation 3 bus.

[Giovanni Bertani]

As usual Apple plans for the long term. First to drop floppy, first to drop optical and now first to drop internal expansion with external modular approach.

Totally agree with Apple. No way they can build a strategy in which the pro apps are running proprietary acceleration like CUDA. A modern OS must be open.

Seams to me that a lot of developers were heading on the wrong direction while Apple has been promoting fo quiet some time OpenCl as the open standard for for GPU accelaration and now they are running to update their app to support this new machine.

The bigger failure is Red with the new rocket that has no new computer to be installed on.. They probably should have just invested in OpenCl, whith such installed double GPUs I think they could be more than safe in supporting their codecs in realtime.

[peederj]

Well one way to upgrade the CPU via T2 would be...getting another Mac Pro! You can have as many of them as you want as render/transcode tanks, we don't know the price yet but it will probably be around the typical $3000 point, and that will be an awesome value given what a comparable system would cost today. Just because it isn't a single-chassis solution doesn't mean it's worse in any way overall. I imagine Apple will want pro's to have two or three of these humming away behind their displays and the grid and NAS support will be a lot better and easier than it is now.

[theSUBVERSIVE]

But how about the hardware upgradability? Will people end up being hostage of Apple's SSD, Apple's RAM, etc. and all the price tag that it brings with it? It has been an Apple's trend with their latest hardware, making it less and less upgradable in favor of getting things as tiniest as possible I wonder how is this gonna work with this black can.

[peederj]

But how about the hardware upgradability? Will people end up being hostage of Apple's SSD, Apple's RAM, etc. and all the price tag that it brings with it?

 

No. That is a PCIe slot (with virtually no length allowed for the card...only one slot is pictured right now but more could be added by Apple at some point) hooking up the flash drive and industry standard DDR3 slots for the RAM. Apple itself has to buy commodity parts for economies of scale, especially with a niche machine like this.

[tomekk]

As with all apple products: nice design. Knowing the history of apple I wouldn't be getting excited until they release it. Their marketing has always been top notch.. and their products overpriced and crippled in some way. Maybe they've changed, who knows (not likely though ;)).

[PAVP]

Apple isn't for everyone, but if you don't want to fuss around with things and just want something that works... this will do the job.  Of course barring any issues that are unforeseen, but really Apple has been extremely successful with their products, with only a few missteps along the way.  This system looks like a very serious turnkey solution for many users out there.  I've never understood the MacBashers out there myself, but that's their problem.  It took Apple some time to develop their new MacPro but it's as expected a serious product with a ton of thought put into it. 

 

People complain about Apple, but they don't respect what Apple has done from it's beginning to push personal computing over the years.  It seems like too many younger tech users don't know the history and so can't appreciate Apple for being the driving force for all the Desktop Publishing, Audio and Video editing we do today.   In fact a lot of the things we take for granted now in terms of use and design comes from Apple crafting better ideas and PROVING to the marketplace the validity of their philosophy.  This new MacPro is just another part of that process.  In time it will become clear that Apple was right with regard to OpenCL and the general direction they've set for how we handle media etc.  

 

This is a more modular approach and it makes sense for how most people tend to use their computer.  No need for the Bulk of the case if most people just connect peripherals rather than cram stuff inside anymore anyway.   Just a tuned up box of CPU/GPU processing and fast Ram and Storage.  Crazy thing is that it's darned near portable.  It's so small that there's no way I won't take this thing with me if the location makes sense.  It used to be just too much to drag my desktop around, but this thing... :D