What are your opinion on the new mac pro

Question

I feel while radical its too limiting thereby loosing fuctionality. But I also knw how the iSheeps would follow their iSheperd blindly. There making this kind of thunderbolt for everything the norm. I also know that the PC companies brought this on themselves they failed to innovate followed intel and nvidia to blindly with there xeons and quadro. The 3 major pc makers market professional workstations that you would probaly sell ur kidney to get one we have the z820 while very powerful its just 2 xpensive. Let's take for example the imac is the best bang for d buck most beautiful all in one if hp had used say a normal 3770k and a gtx 680m 4gb dat would have brought the price of the z1 down drastically. Let's say d average joe wants to be an editor, compositor, colorist. if u goole pc workstations hp z820 and dell T7600 would pop up but they are dam so xpensive hp consumer PCs are garbage. If there is onething apple knows the average pro does not want to be bothered with specs. I think the pc industry brought this on themselves. Wat of the smaller custom builder they focused so much on gaming big megatron design like cases with all the talk of FPS is every thing. My only prayer is that asus, msi gigabyte should stand up aganist apple and start releasing sexier designs, unless I fear even adobe is not safe cos most editors would gradually drfit back to FCPX sad wen inferior products triumphs a superior one. Pls drop ur thoughts also ur opnions as editors in your location the general trend. I hate to be locked in a garden where I am told this is what I need. I love choices.

Answer 1

The 2 biggest problems with the new Mac Pro are the complete reliance on Thunderbolt for expansion and the Proprietary GPU modules. What happens when those Fire Pro cards are EOL and new GPU's are available. Will Apple go to any of the GPU manufacturers and get newer modules manufactured. Considering the applications that are moving to GPU processing, that was really a very bad idea simply because of the Minimum order quantity Apple will have to make to run another module. Apple will not be able to pull from the general video card supply which means they will be solely responsible for any production numbers required to manufacture to begin with. I personally expect this to be a major limitation as time goes on.
The complete reliance on Thunderbolt for expansion really was bad idea and not ready for prime time. TB2 has the total bandwidth of a PCI-E Gen 2 5x. That is the entire pipe available to pump any video output data, high performance storage, I/O devices, and any number of devices available as time goes on especially video cards. Those trying to GPU process through that pipe are going to find that latency is way to much a problem to get that done. If Lightpeak was out and had the bandwidth of PCi-E Gen 2 or Gen 3 16X then I would say great. There is just to small a pipe and to much device moderation at the TB controller to do this now. The major problem that will develop from this later is when Lightpeak is out for the PC and devices start moving there. Where will Apple be with the Mac Pro when it's entire expansion is legacy in 1 to 2 years. As a final note Thunderbolt 2 is just Thunderbolt 1 with 1 bidirectional channel in stead of 2 unidirectional. This is not a major improvement over the original.
The final consideration though not a major problem yet is the limit to 6 Core Xeons. This is likely due to the heat the 8 Core Xeons generate combined with a centralized cooling design. One of the major reasons to get a Dual Xeon is the 8 Core CPU options. Without that then there really is far less reason to get a Dual Xeon over a single 6 core and eventually 8 core workstation. This is a sacrifice that will reveal more later than now.
Considering the Mac Pro is meant to be the flagship platform for Apple's Pro market, there are really way to many limitations on this one to compete with the PC equivalents. There is only so much OSX will add to any system.
Eric
ADK