What a beast of a machine, and in such a tiny package! Me want.
Hi,
My concerns are:
1. Are the graphics cards user upgradable? This is very important because we are finally getting Nvidia to create native drivers for Mac OS X for cards like the gtx 780 and the K5000.
Looks like everything that isn't the flash storage and ram is soldered onto the core.
2. The selection of fireGL cards, this will probably rise the price big time, but more important, for adobe users, adobe applications are optimized for CUDA. OpenCL will work, but it's not as fast.
Mostly just Adobe though, Black Magic and other video-centric apps are quickly switching to OCL and there's a quote from a Davinci Resolve dev going around the net, saying he's never seen Resolve run so fast on an early Mac Pro that he's received.
Considering that they are claiming that three 4K displays can be run at once, while playing back 4K footage AND rendering in the background, "not as fast" is more like "not so fast" until we start seeing some hard numbers when these things start hitting the test benches.
This is well more power than most people will ever know what to do with for a long time.
3. Whats with only 4 RAM slots? is the machine is a 12 core single ship? If so, I am concerned about clock rate.
As someone wrote above: "The 4 RAM slots worries me, but then again they make 16GB ram per stick now." I don't think Apple would have all this time and all those engineers on their hands just to release a flawed product. Who the needs more than 64GB ram unless you do some insane pano stitching or run several video apps?
4. Some people need high performance cards from AJA and the like, but they seem to work fine with Thunderbolt 1. It seems to me that Apple and Intel want to do, with Thunderbolt and the Mac Pro, what apple did with USB1 and the iMAC. If they want to succeed price is key.
If I think of my normal use, my only concern will be price, and long time upgrades.
I really don't need the PCIe slots. In my opinion they should have target a machine a tittle bigger and gave people an open PCIe slot even a half size one, but that is what I will do.
Best regards,
James
TB2 is claimed to be somewhat faster than PCI-E, so with proper hardware support, there is no reason to ever keep expansion cards in-chassis anymore.
Even with a second enclosure that can house things like PCI cards and card readers and drives and what not, at 1/8th the size of the old MPs, it's still a heck of a lot smaller and lighter. You could fit it in a backpack with accessories.