Is the Mac Pro dead?
Semi Pro
A rumor surfaced yesterday in Japan that Apple would by the end of the year introduce a radical new kind of Macintosh computer. That was it — new Mac, radical — yet dozens of sites ran with this non-information simply because Apple is a hot company and, who knows, it might be correct. In that same spirit, then, here’s my guess about what might be correct: I think Apple’s Macintosh Pro line of computers is dead.
Mac Pro’s are Apple’s big box PCs. They haven’t been refreshed since last summer and new models were expected this month with the new Minis, but for some reason the new Mac Pro’s failed to appear. Apple said nothing because, well, because Apple never says anything, instead relying on dopes like me to write non-stories like this one. But while the Mac pundits are generally still waiting for new Mac Pro’s to appear, I don’t think they are coming at all and will be replaced with a whole new approach toward high performance computing from Apple. Maybe this is what the Japanese writers are picking up on.
Mac Pro’s were Apple’s most powerful computers, though the new Mac Mini I7 servers get pretty darned close, and that’s part of my point in making this prediction. Apple likes a simple product line and eliminating the Mac Pro’s, just as Apple last year dropped its xServe line, would certainly simplify things.
Dropping xServe, an Apple move that was wildly unpopular in some IT quarters, was I suspect some sort of Steve and Larry each bargaining with the Devil thing in which Apple steered even more clearly away from the enterprise in exchange for who knows what from Oracle/Sun. But I think dropping the Mac Pro, if it indeed happens, is a very different move intended to simplify the computer line while boosting the display line.
Mac Pro’s are dinosaurs in many respects. That big beautiful aluminum case with its clever air ducting is eight years old and enormous compared to most PCs. It exists primarily to allow users to pack their Macs with extra drives and third-party graphics cards for high-end gaming. But Apple is changing its whole approach to storage, presumably moving as much of it as possible to that big North Carolina data center. Apple hates foreign cards (or indeed cards at all) installed in its machines. And then there’s those new 10 gigabit-per-second dual-channel Thunderbolt ports; where do they come in?
I expect Apple to move to a modular architecture where the building blocks for high performance computers are generally Mac Minis. Start with a new Mini or with a Thunderbolt iMac and expand both storage and processing by adding a stack of up to five more Thunderbolt-connected Minis. A maxed-out system would have six I7 processors with 24 cores, 24 gigabytes of DDR RAM (expandable to 96 GB!) and at least six terabytes of storage. And at $6000, it would be half the price of an equivalently tricked-out Mac Pro.
Yeah, but what about the Graphics Processing Units (GPUs)? What real gamer wants to be limited to the somewhat lame integrated Intel graphics found in the Mac Mini line? That’s where the displays come in.
Apple’s Cinema Displays, while still lovely, have fallen way down the price-performance curve. They are too darned expensive for what you get. But Apple can hardly be a PC company without displays. They need to either (shudder) start to compete on price or more likely find us a new flavor of Kool-Aid, which I think we’ll see in upcoming Apple Thunderbolt displays.
There are only two Light Peak displays on the market right now. I use the term Light Peak, which is what Thunderbolt is called in the non-Apple world, because while one display comes from Apple the other is from Sony and uses a different connector. I think that Sony display gives us a hint to Apple’s plan, because the Sony screen features an integrated GPU. The new Apple Thunderbolt display may include a GPU, too, but nobody seems to know.
There are good reasons to put the GPU in the display. All those zillions of calculations, after all, are being performed specifically to drive the display. And putting the the GPU inside the screen allows the highest possible bandwidth connection between video memory and display pixels. In some ways putting the GPU in the screen may actually make the screen cheaper to build at such a high performance level. Whether that is true or not, I am sure it is what Apple will tell us.
When Apple announces a 27-inch or 30-inch Retina Display, you can bet it will have an integrated GPU.
POW! Apple will be back in the business of selling $3000 displays and Hollywood, New York, and San Francisco will be back in the business of buying them. Mac Minis will become the Boeing 737 of performance computers. And Apple can at that point probably drive enough connections on its own to create a vibrant market for third-party Thunderbolt accessories.
Or I’m wrong.
Maybe the Japanese will know.
Forget iCloud. This looks to me like Apple truly intends to demote/decimate the “PC” by fully embracing virtualization through Thunderbold. Average consumer buys a new TV with a thunderbold connection and video chip on-board. Could be embedded iOS or XoIP? Need some computtional horsepower or local content, keep stracking mac-minis. Could this explain the enormous facility Apple is building?
Thunderbolt.
You, sir – replying to the original article, I haven’t read the comments – are someone who obviously does NOT work in a creative field – either TV/Film, or ESPECIALLY music.
“…exists primarily to allow users to pack their Macs with extra drives and third-party graphics cards for high-end gaming…”
I am an audio engineer and producer – professionally, working almost (but not completely) in digital audio, and this statement just struck me as SO WRONG that I wanted to do something I never do – leave a comment on a blog.
You see, there’s this company out there, let’s call them “Avidigi”, who dominates the digital audio market at the top end. They have this funny tendency of making all their pro-quality interfaces based upon PCI-or-related standards. There is a reason for this – not only was it [until recently] the only way to get high enough bandwidth for true pro audio (meaning 32+ channels at 24/192, or god help us DSD), it is a mature, stable technology that has been well explored. Thunderbolt is actually the first external interface standard that could even come close to what PCI can do – and it is too new, too unexplored, to be usable in mission-critical applications (such as the primary recording environment in a pro studio).
Macs dominate – well, not so much dominate as monopolize – the recording world (both in audio and video – note I’m not even getting into AMC’s hardware, as I really don’t know much about it), and Apple knows this. Even with their trend at moving towards a more “prosumer” level of technology (see FCP-X), they can’t just abandon support for the most used hardware/software platform in [my] business – they have too much invested in that sector to do so. If they dropped all PCI-supporting Macs, they would piss off way too many of their corporate partners – notably companies like Avid, Apogee, UAD, Focusrite, and many others who have partnership deals with them.
Note that this is only one issue – you also managed to imply that the new “server-grade” Mac Mini’s are in some way comparable to a Mac Pro in performance – and this is true enough, for simple operations like being a file or web server. You seem to be under a (common, to those who don’t work professionally in audio or video) misconception that games are the only reason to have a very powerful computer. But, there are other NON-GAME processor-intensive tasks out there which make having a powerful workstation necessary – notably, so-called Native Audio processing and offline video editing. For instance, that i7 Mac Mini you imply to be “powerful enough” could run less than 30% of the number of audio plugins on a complicated mix that even a lower-end Mac Pro could. I’m leaving DAE/TDM out of this – in my experience, it is a dying format, going the way of old Mix systems, just more slowly – since that complicates things further; suffice it to say, all your arguments as to why the Mac Pro is dead are based upon fallacies in your fundamental understanding of WHO THE MAC PRO IS FOR.
I’m still waiting for my Thunderbolt-equiped Mac Pro to come out, to FINALLY update my audio workstation rig – I need PCIe on there, so that my PT-HD cards will work, so that my Apogee Symphony cards will work, and so that if I chose to use the UAD-2 plug-ins, I could. I’d also like to have enough processor performance to run all my ridiculous convolution-based plugins without resorting to freezing or bouncing tracks…
“You seem to be under a (common, to those who don’t work professionally in audio or video) misconception that games are the only reason to have a very powerful computer”
Well, not the only reason, obviously, but by far the most important one. The sort of stuff you talk about (like Pro level audio and video editing, pro level 3D modelling etcetera) are tiny niches compared to gaming.
That said, not even gaming is a reason to keep big fat desktop boxes for the future, since gaming is rapidly moving to other platforms. Finally, those gamers that do stick with a desktop computer for their hobby are not going to buy a mac anyway, so this whole argument is moot.
Regardless, the point is that Apple don’t need to keep specialized groups of fanboys happy any more. The niche markets of “creative” professionals (read graphic designers) kept Apple afloat when everything else they did sucked. Now everything else they do is great, and they don’t need “creative” life support.
Maybe there will be another round or two of Mac Pro, but I think Bob is correct in the assumption that the traditional PC design is not in Steve Jobs vision of the future. Come to think of it, they aren’t in anyone else’s either. It’s not a question of IF desktop computers of the traditional “PC” design will become extinct, it’s just a matter of WHEN. It follows then, that Mac Pro is low on the priority list.
“It’s not a question of IF desktop computers of the traditional “PC” design will become extinct, it’s just a matter of WHEN.”
Very true across the board for Macs, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, etc. The big box PC is a dinosaur and is rapidly disappearing for most consumers- frankly an iPad has all the computing power that 75% of computer users need, a laptop has all the computing power 90% of computer users need, and only about 10% need more. Some solution will remain available for them, of course- those 10% (hardcore gamers, scientific users, creative industry users) are vocal about advocating for their needs and while all are niche markets there’s enough of them that someone will cater to their needs.
We’ve been down the “you can’t be obsoleting my expansion architecture” road before. It was called NuBus.
The transition will likely incorporate PCI/PCIe expansion chassis with Thunderbolt I/O. It’s such an obvious concept that I guessed there would be a thread about the topic or a vaporware product and a quick search reveals that to be the case.
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1203179
By the way, I have a Radius VideoVision/Telecast card in pristine condition if anyone is interested…
[...] what if the replacement is a new, modular Mac system. A stackable system, using the Mac Mini form factor, and sewn together with Thunderbolt — or [...]
Would it be possible that Apple could use A5, A6 etc. chips in multiples to run a new Mac? If you had many of these chips running in parallel it would seem to be a very fast machine.
It would also take intel out of the picture unless the fab’d the chip.
Apple designed the processor for the iPhone, the iPad, why not a next gen mac?
Surely the main reason there has been no new Mac Pro yet is that Intel’s new dual-socket capable Sandy Bridge Xeon chips are not available yet, and aren’t due till Q4 2011? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Bridge#Server_processors
To date the Mac Pro has always used workstation-class Xeon chips, which is the only way to build 8 or 12 core systems.
I work in a group that does various forms of numeric modeling in hydraulics. The reality is that the people who do this sort of work, or any sort of number crunching, are a vanishingly small demographic. What drives high performance computing on PC’s is gaming. So when we go looking for power, we start by looking at what gamers use, and go from there.
Serious gamers will move to wherever sufficient numeric power is, and we will follow. You may view it as ironic that gaming is determining the path being followed by people doing number crunching. I am just thankful there is a large demographic that moves the hardware forward.
You got it right (which many in the “serious” computing camp don’t). Gaming have been driving PC hardware for a long while.
It’s coming to an end though, since gamers have been in the process of moving (back) to consoles for a good while. So the PC is on the way to become a dinosaur in gaming as well. There are several reasons for this, one is that the most “number-crunching” bang for the buck one can get right now is a PS3 (since Sony sell them at a loss). More importantly there are social factors that drive the abandonment of the PC as a gaming platform and of course that the game companies prefer hardware that they can control.
Neither of which spells a bright (or any) future for the Mac Pro.
[...] una torre clásica? Sebastian Anthony, amigo y redactor de la web ExtremeTech, va más allá: apoya la idea de Robert Cringely y propone la idea de un mac modular, algo moldeable a nuestras [...]
[...] torre clásica? Sebastian Anthony, amigo y redactor de la web ExtremeTech, va más allá: apoya la idea de Robert Cringely y propone la idea de un mac modular, algo moldeable a nuestras [...]
I’ve been saying for years… that scalable/networked computing was the way forward. (Well since Atari was poised to dominate the computing world with the Atari Transputer Workstation in 1989) want more power? Just keep adding CPUs! We do it with After Effects and 3D render farms so why not all CPU/GPU tasks.
I’m all for this idea. However, I sincerely hope that Apple release a kind of MacPro rack-mountable “control hub” that allows connection to far higher bandwidth peripherals than Thunderbolt eg: 16 lane 128Gbit PCIe 3.0 GPU arrays, HD and 4K Video Processing Cards, High Performance RAID arrays, etc. That is until Thunderbolt/Lightpeak is widely available at 100Gbits.
Coupled with a set of MacMinis (or better still – cheaper cut-down MacCPU blocks that click together like lego) all connected via one or preferably more 10Gbit Thunderbolt channels for scalable processing.
Bob – It’s worth noting that Sony don’t actually have the GPU in the monitor but rather in an external case [Sony Vaio Z Power Media Dock] that can connect to 3 external monitors. This is a great idea as long as we can add multiple GPUs for SLI gaming or GPU processing of Data!
I’m not sure where the idea came from but I personally hate the idea of having GPUs in the monitors – the extra heat and noise that Pro’s like to hide away in racks would be negated…
…I’m sure the accountants would also make sure they shipped as sealed units with no easy way of upgrading the processing power without the changing the whole display each time you want more GPU power!
The display idea ignores the increasing use of general-purpose graphics card programming.
“When Apple announces a 27-inch or 30-inch Retina Display, you can bet it will have an integrated GPU.”
I’ll be against it: the GPU needs to be close to CPU and memory – with a faster interconnect than Thunderbolt or anything similar can offer. Consider that the current interconnect speed of a decent GPU is 16GB/s in full duplex – more than 10 times that of current Thunderbolt. Yes Thunderbolt will advance (if it doesn’t die – I kinda hope it does) – but so will GPUs – probably at a faster pace.
That said, I think you’re right on target with the impending demise of the Mac Pro.
I much prefer informative articles like this to that high brow leitrtuare.
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