It looks amazing, love the design they made for it. But of course its still apple so it will be overpriced for what it is... But thats an other debate I guess
For all the marketing promises of 2 times this or gigaflips that, there remains one burning question. I think it's one we all know and it needs answering with unquestionable authority. I'm also disappointed, nay shocked to the core, that it has remained even unasked thus far. So to you, I pose the question that will ultimately decide without a shadow of doubt whether this is a beast or a donkey. That question is: Can it.. play... Crysis?
@kenco_uk: Yes and no. It is a OS X computer, so no. With Windows and Bootcamp, yes : http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Ultra-HighEnd-Workstation-Graphics-Card-Shootout/?page=13 I know it was not a serious question, but you have a serious answer from me .
I want one. And then I realize the situation with the wire management would suck. And I wouldn't mind having changeable graphics cards. The Dual GPUs might not be optimal..
ImACMT qualified so have GSX access, can't wait to see the take apart guides for this thing! Doubt ill ever get to work on one thought : (
I'd keep turning it round to see the IO ports light up. It looks seriously slick. I love it. The size of it compared to the previous Mac Pro is just daft. This is going on my wish list (and staying on there I should think, at the price it'll be!)
Engineering masterpiece. Leave it to Apple to change the design game. That is some serious hardware in a very small space and its probably very quiet too. It doesn't look like an Apple product though. I am not sure I even like the look. Now I wanna see how much its gonna cost.
You got to love the optimists thinking 650W TDP (Xeon E5 6core, 2x FirePro W9000) can be cooled quietly using one fan and triangle shaped aluminum block. And i still wonder where that power supply will be - seems like it will be behind the CPU board, between CPU board and the back IO ports... One can only hope it will be effective enough not to overheat the CPU.
Or a seperate power Brick. You can be sure that they're going to be ULV or mobile parts. Hence the inclusion of Crossfire amongst other things.
There is no mobile or ULV 6-core Xeon E5 with Hyperthreading, that is 130W TDP right there - that is one of your ideas out of window . And the idea about the mobile FirePro ? The top of the line FirePro W9000 has 4TFlops performance, new Mac Pro claims 7TFlops performance with 2 cards - it doesn't look they are using mobile FirePro either. Actually, the only two cards which meets the specs (one with closed eyes and very rough rounding) are : FirePro W8000 with 3.225TFlops performance and 189W TDP, two of them give 6.45TFlops (hence the very rough rounding up to 7TFlops) and 378W TDP. FirePro W9000 with 4TFlops performance and 274W TDP, two of them give 8TFlops and 548W TDP.
Hmm, that then is a very interesting prospect we have. I would surmise that the Mac pro would be quite the round monolith then. If the 548W TDP is to be true (which judging by your much more succinct analysis), then there is most likely going to be a bit of a height extension to ensure the power supply fits. Color me entirely trounced. I was impressed as it is, and now am even more impressed. Wait, if they are using Fire Pro cards...isn't there a probability it's just a bunch of PCI-E risers? If that's true, does it not follow that once could hypothetically replace them with other cards?
They won't be using PCIe risers, there is no physical space to fit a card on there. Apple will have a custom deal from AMD, with the GPUs directly soldered on to the logic board.
No PCIe riser. If you pay good attention, the SSD connector is located on one of the firepros. This is very likely to be W9000's, since it is the only FP with 384bit memory bus. I guess they underclocked / undervolted them since the performance is somewhere near 12% down (thus limiting the TDP). About the xeon, this will proly be a low clocked one (2GHZ me thing). For example, the Xeon E5-2650 is an 8 cores @ 2.0GHz for 95W and the Xeon E5-2687 is an 8 cores @ 3.1GHz for 150W.
Even if they will use such tricks, i don't think they can get bellow peak power usage around 450W. And i still don't see how can be that cooled by one huge triangle aluminum block with one 16cm radial fan at acceptable noise levels. I have a 2600K and GTX670, peak power usage is 240W, yet i can still hear the fans at that load to keep the temps around 55C with water cooling. Even worse, that fan is not blowing air in, but sucking air out - and pull configuration is usually less effective than push. So either the system either run superhot (80C) with fan at medium speeds, or they have a second fan at bottom, or severely cut back the performance and heat produced (by lowering clocks and voltages) or maybe Apple just simply broke the laws of physics .
Apple have spent the best part of two years, minimum, developing this computer. It isn't going to overheat, or be that noisy, because they wouldn't accept a product for production that was. Without systems being in the hands of owners, we can't really understand how the cooling works, but it will. I have no doubt that the W900s will be slightly slower than a stock card, but the CPU will be a full-fat, no compromises, Xeon. Don't forget this is Apple's sole truly professional offering in the desktop market, and it is trying to take the position of the previously excellent towers, they cannot afford to release something that is underpowered and hot/noisy/unreliable.
I'm sure they have handled the noise issue - at that price you can develop custom fans and fan mounitng/housing to reduce the vibration from the fan. When you design a hole system rather than individual components and have lots of money/time you can do lots of development to reduce the noise.
