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by rbanffy 3444 days ago
Using two standard full-length cards is just lazy design (even if he made it a point to use standard components). The GPUs should be on boards like they are on the current MacPro and attached to the monumental heatsink. This add two fans to a design that absolutely doesn't need them. The SATA disks also seem misplaced - it should extend PCI-E storage or, even better, DIMM flash modules: big Xeons have 4 memory channels per socket, enough for letting a couple of those go to storage. Having one single bus for everything makes the machine much neater.
2 comments
intoverflow2 3444 days ago
> The GPUs should be on boards like they are on the current MacPro and attached to the monumental heatsink

This is the exact problem with the trashcan, it's a computer made for GPU computation (one of the trashcans GPUs isn't even hooked up to the display it's purely for computation) yet you are stuck with proprietary versions of GPUs that run the wrong sort of code.

Almost the entire GPU computing community works on CUDA, the trashcan cards don't run CUDA and because they're proprietary they can't be upgraded.

The right solutions are either this design or one where there is a heatsink+liquid cooling bracket system where you can attach a GPU after taking the stock cooler off to. Which is also very common thing to do for people in GPU computing. The latter invalidates your warranty so this design actually makes sense.

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galacticpony 3444 days ago
Just like the designers of the current Mac Pro, you don't get it.

This design (even though it doesn't work in reality) is about creating something that is functionally like the earlier Mac Pros. That means commodity off-the-shelf hardware can be used, not just specialized or outlandish components that are going to be very expensive, if anybody bothered to produce them at all. The current Mac Pro still ships with the outdated GPUs it originally was introduced with, with no upgrade path foreseeable.

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runamok 3443 days ago
And all of the performance improvements are in the GPU space. A 2 or 3 year old CPU is not that big a deal but a 2 or 3 year old GPU? I believe it's an order of magnitude slower (or more).

Here is an example of GPU improvements vs. CPU (although this is an older article) http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/...

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