New Mac Pro

I have a couple thunderbolt promise pegasus arrays and I gotta say they are wicked fast. Thunderbolt is great technology - not sure why some folks are calling it bunk.

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Originally Posted by R01

I'm actually with Polygon on this one.

Anyone using audio DSP cards looks to be left out in the cold. Which is pretty much anyone using large Pro Tools I/O's or other pro level audio converters. It really is quite a bummer because I was looking forward to seeing a more powerful Mac Pro that would add to the processing power of utilizing DPS cards.

I'm not excluding the options of adding something like the Silverstone PCI-E expansion chassis to this product. We'll just have to wait and see how that ends up working out. If anything I'm just a little disappointing that this Mac Pro has lost this built-in functionality.

In terms of audio, all I really care about is latency + processing. I'm sure thunderbolt is a great transfer method, it just lacks the power you get from DSP cards. I'm only saying this because I've mixed movie scores that have 100+ tracks, and then processing + latency becomes pretty crucial. Chiming in because I consider that pro level work if anything.

In all honesty I was just expecting to see the same old Mac Pro design with beefier CPU, Memory and HD options.

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http://www.dv247.com/news/Pro%20Tool...%20Avid/133280

Boom.

Thunderbolt is external PCI-E, it's basically NO different to having an internal PCI-E card.

Just for comparison a 1x PCI-E 3.0 card has a theoretical throughput of 980MB/s; Thunderbolt is 10Gbit/s, aka 1.25GB/s.

The RME HDSPe AIO, a £400+ DAW card is only a 1x PCI-E 1.1, which means 250MB/s of bandwidth (and 2.5GT/s vs Thunderbolt's 8GT/s).

To say that Thunderbolt isn't capable of doing everything PCI-E can is just bollocks. And it doesn't even remotely compare to USB.

With that said, don't be a moron and buy a Mac Pro; buy a PC case, a Xeon bundle, and some RAM. Job done for a fifth of the price.

You'll be forking out a ton for dual workstation graphics cards too.

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Originally Posted by makar1

You'll be forking out a ton for dual workstation graphics cards too.

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That's not the base configuration, that's just an additional configuration option. Specifically, that configuration is dual W9000s which are £3k a pop. It's almost certain that the base model will ship with the £500 V7900.

And you can be damn sure that the upgrade to the W9000s will be far, far more than their OEM cost.

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Originally Posted by mdcdesign

That's not the base configuration, that's just an additional configuration option. Specifically, that configuration is dual W9000s which are £3k a pop. It's almost certain that the base model will ship with the £500 V7900.

And you can be damn sure that the upgrade to the W9000s will be far, far more than their OEM cost.

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Oh look yet more unsubstantiated speculation ...

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Originally Posted by mdcdesign

It's almost certain that the base model will ship with the £500 V7900.

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The V7900 gets up to 1.8 TFLOPS per card. The new Mac Pro's Fire Pros are rated at 7 TFLOPS.

Edit: Where are you getting all this information about a cut down base model?

The fact that at the keynote, they specifically stated that you could "configure the Mac Pro with up to 4096 stream processors", which is 2x W9000s.

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I re-watched the stream just to make sure I didn't get it wrong.

Phil said, UP TO. Did not say that was the base configuration graphics, but the top.

There will be much lower, maybe even a single card.

The biggest issue I see is that we're back to waiting for apple to give us the upgrade graphic packages in order to get a new card, I was getting used to popping any PC card in.

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http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1593470

Are you ever going to stop fucking arguing, makar?

No

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Originally Posted by makar1

No

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Fair enough. Be aware, however, that your behaviour is literally now bordering on just plain trolling.

How would you describe your initial posts to the thread then?