A1186 Mac Pro Intel Xeon Quad 3.0GHz Dual Core 4GB 250GB-Pre owned. MA356 Mac Pro Intel Xeon 2.66GHz Core Dual 6GB 250GB-Pre owned. Brand Apple Product Type Desktop Product Line Mac Pro Product Series Cylinder Model MQGG2LL/A Year Late 2013 Processor Speed 3 GHz Processor Type 8-Core Xeon E5 RAM 64GB Hard Drive 1TB SSD Accessories Included Power Cord: Rounded Mac Pro Graphics.I have 2 16gb sticks of ram (32 GB 1866 MHz DDR3) and my graphics card is a AMD FirePro D700 6 GB.Apple's latest product, the 16-inch MacBook Pro, is the best MacBook in year, but only power users without a budget should go with this one. I was looking at the new models and they are crazy expensive so was considering how far I could take my old mac pro. By being so large, Apple could spin it more slowly than the smaller fans found in other Macs, helping keep the machine quiet, even under load.I am a video editor and I have owned a Mac Pro 3 GHz 10-Core Intel Xeon E5 (late 2013)since it came out. The internals were built around what Schiller called a “unified thermal core.” It was all cooled by one large fan at the top.In the individual tests that make up our Speedmark benchmark, the iMac actually beat the new Mac Pro in a Finder test, the iMovie test, the iTunes test, the Aperture test, the Parallels test, and the Cinebench OpenGL test. All of the ports were around the back, with labels that illuminated when the machine was turned around.In October 2013, Apple gave additional details about the Mac Pro.Once the machine started shipping at the end of the year, reviews started rolling in.Dan Frakes at Macworld pointed out that the Mac Pro wasn’t always the fastest Mac in the room:We published our first benchmarks of our review model, and the results were in some ways surprising: The eight-core 2013 Mac Pro was only 8 percent faster in our Speedmark 9 benchmark suite than a CTO 2013 iMac maxed out with a quad-core 3.5GHz Core i7 processor, a 3TB Fusion Drive, 8GB of RAM, and Nvidia GeForce GTX 780M graphics (a $2699 configuration). The Mac Pro could deliver seven teraflops of computing power thanks to those graphic cards and could push 4K external displays.All of this technology was packed into a tiny chassis that was just an eighth the volume of the previous design. Every Mac Pro shipped with two AMD FirePro workstation GPUs. Expansion was external via Thunderbolt 2 and its 20 Gbps throughput gone were the internal PCI slots that helped defined Apple’s towers for so long.The big story was on the graphics front.I had two of them on at one point and, because the monitors weren’t on, I didn’t know they weren’t asleep—the new Mac Pro is that quiet.Anand Lal Shimpi wrote more about how that was possible:The Mac Pro’s thermal core makes a lot of sense from an area efficiency standpoint as the chances that you have all three processors in the system (Xeon CPU + dual AMD FirePro GPUs) running at max speed at the same time is highly unlikely. If you’re browsing the Web or doing something that isn’t pushing the CPU or GPUs, it’s almost completely silent. I had to turn off my quiet Lacie 2big external RAID just to get an idea of what kind of noise it makes, and the drives are sitting much farther away. It also crushed most other Macs in GeekBench 3’s multi-core benchmark.These results came down to the massive multi-threading the Mac Pro was capable of, something that makes the iMac Pro stand out today.David Girard at Ars Technica wrote this about the Mac Pro’s noise levels:IFixit reported a ridiculously low noise level of 12dBA for the 4-core 2013 Mac Pro, so I’ll have to go with their measurements—I don’t own anything that can measure below 30dBa.
Apple had bet big that executing computational tasks on the GPU was going to be a big deal, but it never really took off on the Mac. In fact, the case for the Mac Pro for anyone but advanced video editors, 3D modelers, and heavy OpenCL users is now weaker than ever.That comment about OpenCL is an important one. In that time frame, the Retina iMac came out and complicated matters, as Marco Arment wrote:The 5K Retina iMac is out, and it looks incredible so far on paper — so incredible that I’m seriously considering selling my new Mac Pro to get the Retina iMac instead. Stagnation and GPU IssuesDespite those reservations, the 2013 Mac Pro began to show up in video editing bays, on developers’ desks and behind monitors used by graphic designers, audio engineers and more.2014 came and went without a revision to the machine, then 2015 did the same. People were impressed with how much hardware Apple had packed into a small space, but most were skeptical that Thunderbolt 2 would take off as a meaningful way to expand the capabilities of the machine. Best Processor Pro Late 2013 Update With NewI have great news to share:Apple is currently hard at work on a “completely rethought” Mac Pro, with a modular design that can accommodate high-end CPUs and big honking hot-running GPUs, and which should make it easier for Apple to update with new components on a regular basis. John Gruber was there and wrote:Let’s not beat around the bush. A Thermal CornerThen in April 2017, news broke that Apple was working on a new Mac Pro. Customers felt stranded without a path forward, and many opted for maxed-out Retina iMacs when their Mac Pros aged out. Apple lists a turnaround time of about 3-5 days.Even with the GPU issues, Apple failed to revise the computer in any way. In February 2016, Apple opened a Repair Program for the machine, as Joe Rossignol reported:Apple today launched a new Repair Extension Program that addresses video issues on some late 2013 Mac Pro models, according to an internal notice obtained by MacRumors.Apple has determined that graphics cards in some late 2013 Mac Pros, manufactured between Februand April 11, 2015, may cause distorted video, no video, system instability, freezing, restarts, shut downs, or may prevent system start up.Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider will repair eligible Mac Pro models affected by the video issues free of charge until May 30, 2018. At the same time, so many of our customers were moving to iMac that we saw a path to address many, many more of those that were finding themselves limited by Mac Pro through a next generation iMac. And so it became fairly difficult to adjust. But workloads didn’t materialize to fit that as broadly as we hoped.Being able to put larger single GPUs required a different system architecture and more thermal capacity than that system was designed to accommodate. We designed a system that we thought with the kind of GPUs that at the time we thought we needed, and that we thought we could well serve with a two GPU architecture… that that was the thermal limit we needed, or the thermal capacity we needed. This time around, Boger was succinct: the promised Mac Pro will be a 2019 product.“We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community, so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product. The Present and FutureWe now know that the new Mac Pro is a product destined for release in 2019, thanks to a report by Matthew Panzarino, who met with Apple a year after the Mac Round Table event:After an initial recap in what they’d done over the past year, including MacBooks and the iMac Pro, I was given the day’s first piece of news: the long-awaited Mac Pro update will not arrive before 2019.When we got the news that it wouldn’t arrive in 2017, there was some implicit messaging that 2018 was not guaranteed either (we were told “not this year,” but not “definitely next year”). While that system is going to be fantastic for a huge number of customers — we want to do more.That “upgraded iMac” is the iMac Pro, a multi-threaded monster trapped in the expansion-less iMac chassis. Visual studios express 2015 for macThe iMac Pro outscores the Trashcan on Geekbench in both single and multi-core benchmarks.I have to imagine Apple is bleeding money on building this computer today. This meant that a maxed out Mac Pro with a 12-core Xeon, 64GB RAM, 1TB flash SSD, and dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs was now $6,999 instead of $9,599 like before.As I write this, the Mac Pro is still on Apple’s website, and can still be purchased.That blows my mind a little. Gone was the 4-core system, with the 6-core and 8-core SKUs coming down in price to hit that $2,999 entry price point.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorTavon ArchivesCategories |