[alwaysinshade]

> I think Apple has really dropped the ball with the new Mac Pro

Guy English made some great points about potential for the new Mac Pro:

"The CPU is a front end to a couple of very capable massively parallel processors at the end of a relatively fast bus. One of those GPUs isn’t even hooked up to do graphics. I think that’s a serious tell. If you leverage your massively parallel GPU to run a computation that runs even one second and in that time you can’t update your screen, that’s a problem. Have one GPU dedicated to rendering and a second available for serious computation and you’ve got an architecture that’ll feel incredible to work with."

http://kickingbear.com/blog/archives/349

[Steko]

Guy says it's not about benchmarks but the innards seem to be entirely designed around generating a ridiculous Cinebench score for a keynote demo.

Right now it's trendy to criticize the new Mac Pro for boxes it doesn't check that the current version does; mainly a lack of enclosure space. That's something Apple can easily address with their in store setups. But when the thing releases all anyone will be able to talk about is how much Apple is charging for the high end version with the E5 2697 and 2 W9000 Firepro cards.

[alwaysinshade]

> Guy says it's not about benchmarks

I think what he meant was that the current benchmarks are unable to quantify the benefit to users of having a GPU for computational power while the other is driving the displays. The new Pro configuration suggests you'll be working in real-time when doing graphically intensive tasks rather than waiting for something to render. Animators & video editors will benefit from this in ways that are difficult to slap a technical benchmark on.

These machines are probably aiming to scoop up some high-margin high-end workstation business, hence the demo by Pixar at the last WWDC.