Apple announces new Mac Pro, ends cylindrical design
77 replies, posted
It's not really possible to increase the power delivery of PCIe without changing the slot design.
Electrical power delivery tends to induce noise in nearby signal pins, through various electromagnetic effects. To counter this, all of the power pins on PCIe are on one side of the notch, and almost all the data pins are on the other side. The only data sent on the small side of the notch is the SMBus management stuff, and even that needed some ground pins to space it away from the power lines, even the 3.3V ones. And 5.5A is already pushing it for a simple edge connector like this - that's the limit for standard PCIe, any more than that is supposed to require a power cable, though IIRC Nvidia's shipped some cards around 90W without them.
So trying to use any of the unused pins in the data section of the edge is impossible, and you can't get nearly the power you'd need with the existing power pins.
What Apple has done is have basically a second edge connector, behind all the data lines and separated by a rather wide notch to prevent signal interference. It reminds me a bit of VLB, a very old pre-PCI slot that consisted of an ISA slot with a new second slot behind it, which carried high-bandwidth data for video cards. Likewise, this one is a PCIe slot with a separate power slot behind it, so you can still use a plain PCIe card, powering it with the pair of 8-pin power connectors they include.
I don't see why this couldn't become standardized but I also expect Apple has some sort of patent or trademark on it, specifically to prevent it from being used with PCs. And I don't think many of us particularly care - it might be nice, to clean up a bit of clutter, but it's hardly worth dealing with Apple.
(It's also not the first time Apple's done something about PCIe power delivery. The 2006 Mac Pro I'm typing this on has the power routed through the motherboard, going to a miniature PCIe power connector right in front of the PCIe slot, similar to that on a modular power supply. From there you need to use a proprietary cable to connect the power to the card. Fortunately it's far easier for unlicensed third parties to make cheap unofficial cables than to make whole video cards.)
I also note that, from the pictures shown, only two slots on the new Mac Pro have this extra connector. The other six don't have it, implying they're limited to 75W, or potentially 25W if they don't support PCIe's high-power mode (as many PC motherboards do not, on some slots).
$1000 for a stand. Fucking hell, are Apple fanboys this deluded? Who the fuck is going to pay a 600%+ premium when you can buy PCs with the same damn specs for a sixth of the price, Commercial or otherwise
The price is very much in line with other OEM workstations with server grade parts, or with a bit of a premium. But far far far from a 600% premium.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the guy do anything other than MacBooks, but I’m sure he’ll get a laugh.
ya but you seem to think apple has any of those features, and that they should massively jack up the price. Even the xenon processor and the special hardware for it shouldn't necessitate such a ridiculous price, especially when all the other components are minimized, like what's the point of such a powerful computer if you have a skimpy 256gb ssd, you will be struggling to actually fit the massive files om your expensive machine to even edit them even with a file server
I don't really get the hate (Pricing for the display stand aside). It's an enterprise-grade station, its main use case is going to be being hooked up to massive NAS servers. No shit you can do better by building it yourself, you always could, this has been the case for almost as long as modern computing has existed. In most cases, corporations want their stations to Just Werk™, have someone else deal with assembly, QA and setup, and in a bunch of cases they'll be content to plop down the premium markup.
Honestly, if anything this is more reasonable than half the shit they've been putting out in the past decade.
corporations worth their salt will have an IT department who's job is to create solutions that work with their setup, not to buy $16k prebuilt cheese graters that require a ton of setup to work with the existing solutions
it guy make me a final cut pro machine
Genuine question for people with experience with Apple's Pro devices in either personal or commercial applications:
I assume these top-of-the-line $+10K devices come included with at least some support. How are the aftermarket services? Given that you can buy a trolly for the new Pro (and the older bulky Pro wasn't a lightweight either) does it generally come with on-site service? Are problems fixed within the day/week?
I'm aware of the horror stories of Linus and Rossman but I assume that is just the minority of the issues, so how are the more common problems generally handled?
And if possible, how does it compare to after market service of other common workstation brands like HP / Dell / Lenovo just to name a few?
if you're doing video editing, a hackintosh will always be better
It's not the same. You or I might be fine fiddling with a computer for an hour or so to fix some trivial issue but in a professional environment having a production machine go down for 2 hours due to some unheard of wifi driver bug with hackintoshing.
Here's a pretty balanced take
https://youtu.be/PPiEpSMkzoo
Mac 'n cheese?
Correct answer. The enterprise world is far far different than the end user world. They will gladly pay a huge premium if the hardware "just works". And if it doesn't "just work", they are also paying for the privilege of the manufacturer bending over backwards to resolve the issue ASAP. And we aren't talking 24/7 phone support or RMA within a couple days. They will personally dispatch a technician to your site to fix the issue with any replacement parts if necessary, sometimes within the hour.
I still remember that guy who matched the budget on an old iMac on pcpartspicker with newegg and ended up being able to buy the max amount of poptarts allowed on newegg before hitting the target cost
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.
