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Apple Ships 8-Core MacPro
ivan1024 writes "The Apple website is announcing the availability of an 8-core Mac Pro. The machine will ship with two 3.0 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5300 processors. Older models with the Dual-Core chips remain available. Base model with two 3.0 GHz Quad-Core Xeon processors start at $3997, (albeit with unacceptably minimal RAM or HD space; fully spec'd with dual 30" monitors and tons o' RAM/HD still over $10K... bummer)"
I was really hoping there would be price drops on the quad core configurations. Or at least upgraded video cards.
Never buy anything from Apple that you can't install yourself. For the Mac Pro, Apple charges $700 for 4GB (4x1GB) of RAM. You can get the same amount of RAM from DealRam for $500. The same goes for hard drives. Apple charges you $329 for a 500GB SATA drive, which you can get from NewEgg for around $200. Granted, these aren't covered by your warranty, but they often have a manufacturer's warranty
I've often though the lack of user serviceable parts in the Mac Mini was designed to sell more RAM at Apple's hugely inflated prices.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
The front end is usually Avid or Apple software - and the Apple software only runs on OS X, and the Avid software can run on OS X. Linux boxes are often used for rendering farms. IRIX? Didn't SGI just discontinue IRIX?
...but they hardly own it. For one, they're still missing a killer 3D app. Yes, Maya is on the Mac - but you'll be hard-pressed to find many companies using Maya on said Mac. Nevermind that it's not an Apple app (unlike Shake (by acquisition), FCP, Logic Pro (by acquisition) etc.) If Autodesk hadn't grabbed it up, I would have expected Apple to do so.
Similarly, for editing/post, there's a ton of flint/flame/inferno/etc./etc. out there which are nowhere near Apple.
And that's completely ignoring everything hardware that you'll find in a typical broadcast facility. Avid, Thomson/Grass Valley, et al would have a chuckle at your post. So would Apple, for that matter - Apple isn't interested in replacing them at all... they're more on the software side and helping to sell Apple hardware.
Pretty much any heavy developer work can benefit from such a system. When you're running databases, messaging applications, appservers, webservers, clients, etc, it can add processes quickly, not to mention the DB alone could use all 8 cores.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
From the beginning of the year, but still an interesting read:
Adobe and the Multi-threaded Client
http://www.illuminata.com/perspectives/?p=251
The de facto video editing app for professionals these days is Adobe Premiere. In fact, since Adobe Creative Suite 3 has support for universal binaries, the latest iteration of Premiere will be again be available on OSX.
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
No sign of 8-core machines in the UK Apple Store. Just a glitch or are we going to have to wait a bit longer over here? Lets hope Apple doesn't make us wait as long for their 8-core machine as Sony did for theirs (the PS3).
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
You've got $3,600 in displays alone - that's more than 1/3 of the price. Also, Apple is notorious for overpricing hard drives and memory. Buy the fastest CPUs and get everything else from someone else, including the displays (get'em from Dell), and you'll save 20%+.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Note that RAM and drives purchased from Apple are covered by their extended 3-year warranty. (And I always buy this... it's worth the peace-of-mind.)
ron lussier / lenscraft / fine art giclee prints/ sausalito / ca
Yes, Maya is on the Mac - but you'll be hard-pressed to find many companies using Maya on said Mac.
w ww.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm%3FNewsID%3D14619+ macworld+maya+mac+sales+autodesk&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd= 1&gl=us
http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:pfgF8E0i5C8J:
20% of Maya sales are the Mac version, according to Autodesk. (Google cache since Macworld UK is apparently down.)
The coolest voice ever.
plenty of shops run avid systems on macs. Admitedly a lot of the large scale newsroom stuff is currently only on windows but all of that is fairly new. Stand alone editors (as used in TV show and movie editing) can be done just as easily on an avid PC as an avid mac.
Im not sure exactly what the breakdown is right now out in the field but these things are just fine for running Media composer and editing up your latest blockbuster movie (although I'm not sure if these actual machines have yet been certified by avid)
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
4d? Are you sending your rendered images into the past, or the future?
CG animation uses a timeline as well as three dimensional coordinates, so 4d is technically correct.
Blank until
Premiere? Well first off, it is available for the Mac, secondly Adobe stopped making it for the Mac for a while because Premeire has always been a low-end program for prosumers and multimedia professionals.
Only low end shops use Final Cut? So do you consider:
The BBC
CNN
David Fincher
The Washington Post
Pixar
Weta
ILM small shops? Cold Mountain and Lost in Translation were cut solely on Final Cut Pro, and for compositing tools don't forget Shake is what Weta used to make the Lord of the Rings movies and King Kong.
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
You have 14 days to exchange the machine for the newer one at an Apple Store and pay just a restocking fee. Better get on it!
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
Symphony high end? The output from FCP is better these days. We run Flint/Smoke, Symphony, Media Composer, FCP, Editbox and DS Nitris here. You'd be surprised how much FCP can do - it craps on the others for file and format IO, for example, and the MacPro is a shit-hot workstation, better than the typical HP xw8400 that those WIndows and Linux apps run on.
add to that Comedy Central and CBS.
Both have a huge number of FCP editors.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
...in hopes that they would finally offer a more "standard" RAM and hopefully a 8k Nvidia card. (This mac uses weird slow RAM that is very expensiveEvery machine running this generation of Xeon processors needs the type of RAM Apple uses and calling it "slow" does not really help your credibility here.
I thought it "might" be possible to upgrade the video card myself, but found out you can't do that.Umm, you can't? Since when? You've been able to swap the video cards in Apple's towers for about 8-10 years now.
It makes little to no sense to me that Apple chose to not use the same freaking graphics cards as a standard PC.Apple uses standard video cards, but as usual are a little ahead of the curve. Not all cards support EFI yet, since Vista is the first version of Windows to support it on the desktop properly. You're probably one of those people who complained about Apple's nonstandard choice of using USB for keyboards and mice instead of PS/2. Now many years later the bottom end of the PC market is finally catching up but my 8 year old mac is still working fine because they included USB and firewire instead of what was "standard" at the time.
Apple, you almost had a Windows/Linux user switched, but your RAM and Video card selection lost you one.Personally, I'm glad Apple is forward looking and pushes current standards instead of decade old ones. If they lose a few sales from people who can't wait 6 moths for the Windows crowd to play catch up and for more widespread support from third party vendors, I think it is a small loss.
dell has had dual quad core systems = 8p for several months. see their precision workstation line up. it just never made it to the front of /. . The only thing related to dell that makes it to /. is when they get sued by some customer or when they decide to start selling preconfigured linux boxes to regular desktop customers (not enterprise). basically if it's not not linux or apple or any company that mass markets linux products to consumers then it should be shot down.
t seems you are under the mistaken impression that you can't drop any old modern nVidia PCI-E video card in a Mac.
Considering I find half a kazillion posts about said video cards not working under OS X, and the few that do need to use some beta driver from here and any new graphics cards will be a hit-or-miss thing too because the PC cards lack EFI support, yes I'm under that "mistaken impression". If you got any sources to back up your claims, I'd love to see them.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
An 8-core 2.67 GHz model from Dell runs $4907 with no monitor. For roughly the same price, you can get a Mac Pro with 8-cores at 3.0 GHz, 4 GB of FB-DIMM RAM (4x as much as on the Dell), 500 GB SATA disk (2x as much as on the Dell), and a pair of 7300GT graphics cards.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It's still gouging, but not as bad as you think. In order to keep the Mac Pro from sounding like a Jumbo Jet, Apple made its own standard for heat sinks on DDR2 667 RAM. If you get DDR2 667 with normal heat sinks, it won't be able to lose heat fast enough under normal conditions, and will have errors. This isn't FUD, I'd been planning to get a Mac Pro for weeks (just ordered one, too; dual core 3 Ghz) and studied up on the RAM. Any RAM not using the better heat sinks has been tending to cause problems in Mac Pros. If you google it, you will find plenty of accounts of RAM not up to the standard Apple set failing in Mac Pros. However, you can (as I am doing) get 3rd party RAM with adequate heat sinks for reasonably decent prices. Just look around for "Mac Pro RAM" and you'll eventually find stuff that's been tried and tested, but isn't expensive. I found a place I can get 4 GB for less than $500, so I'm happy.
Getting the right RAM 3rd party is a smarter buy than getting it from Apple, but make sure you get the right RAM!
Again, from what I've seen, _be very careful_ getting RAM for the Mac Pro. Make sure it's been thoroughly tested first and had no problems before getting any given brand, and without the proper heat sinks, it seems like you're going to get slowdowns of the RAM and dramatic increases in the use of fans in the Mac Pro. (From what I've seen, though, it's more likely to have errors than just do that, unfortunately.)
Then again, you could probably get away with standard heat sinks if you know how to tweak the fans to run fast enough to keep them from going wonky.
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