WWDC: The New Apple Mac Pro

2013-06-10 • SEND FEEDBACK |
Related: 2013 Mac Pro, bandwidth, Mac Pro, memory, PCIe, SSD, Thunderbolt, USB, USB3, weather events

2013 Apple Mac Pro

What I heard from the WWDC keynote presentation: (might have missed something as it moved quickly):

• Coming later this year (“first glimpse”), built in USA.
  As of 11:34 AM, existing Mac Pro with old specs still on Apple Store, suggesting a release months away. September?
• Tiny compared to existing Mac Pro: 1/8 the volume.
• In general, seems to be oriented to heavy-duty video processing, but should prove highly attractive to general photography use also.
• Uses latest Intel Xeon E5 chips, details on clock speeds offered TBD.
  A 12-core with slow CPU speeds is not so great for most uses. I hope Apple offers the fastest available clock speeds (never has traditionally), so that PC users don’t snicker.
• Memory is 1766MHz DDR3, 60GBps bandwidth.
• Only 12-core mentioned as “up to”.
  My concern here is slower clock speeds that might be fine with 12 cores in use for video work, but slow for only a few cores used for photography use). A fast 6-core or 8-core?
• Four (4) USB3 ports, 6 Thunderbolt 2 port, Gigabit ethernet, HDMI out.
  Four USB3 ports is a bit meager, but the Thunderbolt ports are probably enough to manage the cable mess.
• Cylindrical design, but seems to be beautifully accessible.
  Well, I’m a sucker for the indisputable quality look and feel of aluminum, and maybe this is anodized aluminum, not plastic.
• Fast memory with 60 GB/sec bandwidth.
  Did not hear any description of how many slots or max memory of if OS X memory limit bugs are fixed.
• PCIe SSD flash, ~1200 MB/sec flash drive.
  OWC Accelsior E2 offers high performance on existing Macs.
• All expansion is external. Thunderbolt 2 with 20Gbps throughput, 6 devices per port, backwards compatible. No mention of any Apple external cases for drives.
  Seems to imply a rat’s nest of cables and potentially an unpleasant auditory environment (fan and drive noise in multiple external boxes. Cost issues for high quality external boxes might raise total system cost considerably.
• Graphics: dual AMD FirePro GPUs, 2.5X performance of last model: 7 teraflops over OpenCL, 528GBps total bandwidth.
  GREAT for video, total yawn for general photography use .
• Supports up to three 4K displays.
  GREAT for 4K video as well as photographers.