Apple plans turbocharged Mac Pro speedster

The Mac Pro is the Big Mac, with up to two Nehalem processors and 32GB of RAM producing great graphics processing performance. But it's a pussy compared to what might be coming. Early next year we could see a 12-core Mac with 128GB RAM that just screams: a Mega Mac, if you will. A Mac website reports that Apple will launch a …

[Anonymous Coward]

Great News

That will please the Macturds.

[A. H. O. Thabeth]

Surely all the big players are in the doing the same.

From www.hardmac.com "According to one of our sources, Apple is finalizing the future Mac Pro models. They are currently testing the last evolution of Xeon CPU, known as Gulftown, that Intel only demoed a couple of times so far."

I would guess that HP are currently testing the last evolution of Xeon CPU.

I would guess that Dell are currently testing the last evolution of Xeon CPU.

I would guess that IBM are currently testing the last evolution of Xeon CPU.

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[E 2]

It is 6:20 AM

and I thought the headline said Macbook Pro, and I was thinking OMG now that's a laptop!

[Bilgepipe]

@Anonymous Coward 12:17 GMT

"That will please the Macturds."

Absolutely. Imagine how quickly a machine like that could invent new childish, offensive terms to describe people who make different choices to the ones I do.

[Tim Spence]

OSX

"It'll delete all your user files up to 8 times faster than on older hardware!"

[Anonymous Coward]

@Great News

"Macturds" hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha, I see what you did there.

So, if the Macturds are pleased then presumably the Winturds will be upset in equal measure? From your post. it seems at least one already is.

Bored Bored Bored

[IanPotter]

Overkill?

I may be as fascinated by big numbers as the next geek but the pricing for this monster is likely to be well out of reach for an average user. Even the current Mac Pro is well outside most budgets. When is Apple going to introduce a mini/mid tower machine with a measure of expandability. I don't want an iMac, all in ones do nothing for me. Until they get their act together on this I'll be sticking to my Dell Mockintosh...

[Lee Shields]

Hard Drives?

Surely there will still be huge bottleneck with drive access?

CPU and ram can only do so much for normal users who are accessing networks and drives all the time

Yeah batch processing Raw files in Capture One or something will be like lightning, but I dont know any photographers with money to buy hardware like this, most are on their arses. Same for many designers.

So it will be bought by fanboys with too much cash to web browse, sync their iphone 3gs's and post on blogs about how much better than a PC their new mac is.....

[Joey]

Not Overkill!

Contrary to popular beliefs, there are people who do serious work on MacPros instead of playing games. What they do earns good money so 'most budgets' do not apply. They will pay for themselves in no time and even have a decent residual value after four years.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Lee Shields

" but I dont know any photographers with money to buy hardware like this, most are on their arses. Same for many designers.

So it will be bought by fanboys with too much cash to web browse, sync their iphone 3gs's and post on blogs about how much better than a PC their new mac is....."

Not a sensible conclusion to draw, based on a sweeping generalisation that follows from your own limited sample and considerable prejudice.

Apple will not aim to sell many of these and are skilled enough to make a profit if they do produce them, I expect. Consider too, the "BMW effect" - desire for the top of the range models leads to a lot of sales of the more lowly models. But I expect you resent those kind of fanboys too?

128GB of RAM (or thereabouts) in the hands of a well written application will save a lot of disk/network accesses. Obviously, it will drive the uptake of Snow Leopard running in 64bit mode - probably another Apple objective.

[Sarah Baucom]

@Surely all the big players are in the doing the same

The news isn't really that the next Mac Pro will use the Gulftown, but that it might be available to Apple before other PC vendors and consumers. It wouldn't be the first time Apple got first dibs on a new Xeon. The 3.0GHz Clovertown (Xeon 5365) was available in Mac Pros more than 3 months before anywhere else.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon#5300-series_.22Clovertown.22

While I do think that Apple needs to have a headless midrange offering, I don't think the new Mac Pro will be overkill for what it's meant for. The problem is since there is no midrange offering, it IS overkill for many people who will buy it. I ended up having to get a Mac pro 18 months ago after years of waiting for a midrange option. I don't really need that much power, and definitely don't need Xeons and fully buffered ECC memory. I just wanted something expandable that would let me upgrade the components separately rather than having to replace an entire iMac. Apple still doesn't have any desktop computers using a desktop CPU. The mini and iMac both use laptop CPUs, and the Mac Pro uses a server/workstation CPU.

[Lee Shields]

@ Anonymous Coward

"Not a sensible conclusion to draw, based on a sweeping generalisation that follows from your own limited sample and considerable prejudice."

My 'limited sample' includes supplying macs into design/print and photography for almost 20 years and seeign the steady decline over the last 8 years or so. I still deal with a primarily design and print client base and they are now taking the cheaper option and buying imacs as they just cannot justify the premium for mac pros.

As for prejudice I still own 2 macs, although I confess they rarely get used now, and my current phone is an iPhone 3G.

So neerrrr

[Sarah Baucom]

@Lee Shields

"My 'limited sample' includes supplying macs into design/print and photography for almost 20 years and seeign the steady decline over the last 8 years or so. I still deal with a primarily design and print client base and they are now taking the cheaper option and buying imacs as they just cannot justify the premium for mac pros."

I think that's partly because graphic design and print no longer need top of the line machines like they used to. Remember the hoopla about the first Mac that could use a 100 pixel brush in Photoshop without slowing down? These days the only thing that would really benefit from a faster computer is the filters, and that's only if the filters can take advantage of 4 or 8 cores (which they probably can't). With so much that can be done in real time these days even on iMacs, top of the line workstations like the 8 core and soon 12 core Mac Pro are only needed by people who still have to sit around waiting for something to render/compile/compute.

[Jesse Dorland]

Nice

Seriously, in three down the road. If I am where I am planning to be than I would buy this monster.

It's look pretty cool -- assuming it cost around *$1500" canadian collars...

Imagine running Linux, and XP on this baby.

[Jesse Dorland]

Nice

Seriously, in three down the road. If I am where I am planning to be than I would buy this monster. I just gave away my last desktop to someone -- had two until last week P4, and P3. It's good for ppl like me -- computer admistrator, technican.

It's look pretty cool -- assuming it cost around *$1500" canadian dollars...

[magnetik]

@Lee Shields

"I still deal with a primarily design and print client base and they are now taking the cheaper option and buying imacs as they just cannot justify the premium for mac pros."

And you're surprised about this? Five years ago an iMac would have struggled to do any hardcore photo / graphics / pro audio work. Now you can comfortably run pro apps on an iMac. Hell, my three year old 2ghz iMac runs circles around my 2.5ghz G5 PowerMac in Logic or Photoshop.

The MacPros will now be used more for intense purposes like HD video editing and 3D rendering. Photographers can save the price difference and spend that on lenses. (Mind you they do tend to replace camera bodies fairly regularly and a D3S is what, $5,000+?)

[wsm]

Not enough

It'll be outdated in two years. Better get started on the 128-bit code for OS XI

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the point?

I have a Mac Pro used for video editing day in day out. The thing is that it's impossible to max it out. In fact much of the time it sits there barely ticking over because most applications can't take advantage of all the cores.

This may change but even the new Final Cut Pro can't push more than a couple of the cores at any one time.

Snow Leapord goes some way towards addressing this but we now need applications that can actually use the power of the hardware. Otherwise all these new machines will be are big white elephants.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: what's the point?

It's the sort of thing we use in the lab for shotgun assembly of genome fragments. I assume it'll appeal to the protein modelling boys too.

So, not a white elephant.

[Chris iverson]

my my....

all fanboi-ish stuff aside. it looks like apple might be having a go at the old SGI space. at least the lower end of it.

Grenade cause I like the hardware. but have no need for it

[JEDIDIAH]

Feed the monster, ignore the housecat.

While there is certainly a contingent that is interested in "launching sputnik" from the home office, it remains a relatively meagre part of the market. Meanwhile, the middle ground is being all but ignored by Apple. An expandable PC with greatly improved specs (compared to a mini) can be had for the same price as a mini. So for the contingent that might want an expansion slot or an extra full size drive bay there is this gaping chasm in the Mac lineup between $600 and $2400.

[Anonymous Coward]

Memory advantage

With that much memory, the page file is almost unnecessary. Once a program and its data are loaded into RAM, they can stay there until it terminates. That improves performance, especially when switching between programs.

Now, if you could make one that properly utilizes all those cores and has an independent bus for each memory slot, that would have amazing parallel processing power.

[Giles Jones]

@Surely all the big players are in the doing the same

Yes, others will have the same processor. Have you ever owned or used a Mac Pro?

They are quiet, well designed and very weighty. Open a typical rival and there's wires all over the place, flimsy plastic clips holding in the hard disks etc...

It's a workstation aimed at professionals and people who don't care about the price (if you have to ask you can't afford).

A workstation is only as good as the software it can run, you can run Windows and OSX on a Mac Pro legally, can't do that on a rival brand.

[Edward Noad]

Re: What's the point?

This is not a machine for the masses. This isn't a system intended for even the vast majority of creative pros. CS, Photoshop, Quark, InDesign etc are all used interactively for one operation at a time, so they can't really take that much advantage of parallel processing beyond CUDA-style GPU usage, and the iMac really is the best option for that.

The Mac Pro is more a heavy duty processing workstation-cum-server. Anything that's embarrassingly parallel, like rendering 3D animation or physics simulations or password cracking or the aforementioned protein folding, will eat this machine right up and love it, given software that's capable of running that many threads (which is slowly but surely becoming more and more common).

I can envision exactly how these things could be used "properly". You get a few of them packed out with GPU's, stick them on a shelf in a server room running aggregated network connections and configured as an X-Grid cluster (which all takes about 10 minutes per machine) and then give all the academics in the building an iMac or Mini in their nice comfy offices and bingo - one serious amount of easily shared, uber-simple to support supercomputer power that's a mere few clicks away.

And lets be honest, who wouldn't drool all over the mere possibility of having one of your own? Even the entry-level model would last a ridiculously long time as a desktop machine, and this is from someone typing this on a Powerbook G4.

[Anonymous Coward]

I want one

OK - my old MAc desk top is a bit long in the tooth - a 533 MHz G4 (purchased new more than 8 years ago!) Given the way I use hardware - this could easily be the last desktop I would have to buy - and I am in my late 40s. In light of that a $3k+ purchase price would be easily justifiable.

(Think long term costs - or TCO.)

[Stephen 10]

The other market is music

If you're running a DAW (Logic, Cubase, Pro-Tools etc) with a largish number of plug-ins you want as much CPU and RAM as you can throw at it. It's also a market where 64bit matters immensely. I've currently got a Mac Pro quad core 2.66 with 12 Gigs of RAM and it's pretty easy to max it out if I'm not careful with reverbs and plug-ins.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What's the point?

I'm still using my 2006 (first edition) Mac Pro, and it still performs elegantly (and still boots as fast as it did on day 1!).

I use it almost exclusively for Final Cut Studio and some programming (tend to use a macbook more and more for the latter now), and I still can't see the day when I'll need more.

But as Edward Noad has pointed out, if I did get one (and sure, I'd love one), at least I can rest assured that it will last and last and last.

I will concur however, that machines like Mac Pros, they don't get used properly by the software that's out there, not outside the academia anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

Guff Town

Im not going there!

[Another Anonymous Coward 1]

The main reason why stuff like this gets bought...

Tax-deductable.

Either as a business expense, or as purchased by someone who's self-employed and uses it for work.

If they're earning enough to put them in the higher tax bracket then they effectively get 40% off the shiny new gear. I'll consider one if I ever start earning that much, beats paying the 40%.

For recreational use though? You'd have to be nuts. Not that you're not permitted some recreational use out of a business purchase of course. :)