Slashdot Mirror
Apple's New Mac Pro Gets High Repairability Score
iFixit has posted a teardown of Apple's new soda-can-shaped Mac Pro. Despite the unusual form factor, it earned a relatively high repairability score: 8/10. iFixit said, "For being so compact, the design is surprisingly modular and easy to disassemble. Non-proprietary Torx screws are used throughout, and several components can be replaced independently." They say it's easy to access the fan and the RAM slots, and while the CPU is buried a bit more deeply, it's still user-replaceable. The Mac Pro doesn't get higher than an 8 because its uses some proprietary connectors and the cable routing is cramped. They add, "There is no room, or available port, for adding your own internal storage. Apple has addressed this with heaps of Thunderbolt, but we'd personally rather use the more widely compatible SATA if we could."
Methinks if you can afford the new Mac Pro that you're not at all concerned about Thunderbolt vs SATA.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
you fucking retards.
Still like to have more then 1 port in side the system and 1TB max is not really that much and the 256 GB base is a joke for an pro system.
Who takes apart their wastebasket, then? :D
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Actually, 256GB base makes perfect sense for a pro system –most of these guys are editing huge videos stored on SANs, there's no hope of storing them locally. All they need locally is their OS, and some very fast scratch space.
Still like to have more then 1 port in side the system and 1TB max is not really that much and the 256 GB base is a joke for an pro system.
I'm pretty sure the assumption is that everyone in the target market for this machine will want external RAID, so the internal is really only for the OS & swap & apps and small files.
As for 1TB being "not really that much", please point me to a source of SSDs larger than 1TB. Uh, yeah, I thought so ;-)
Fish tank was the only way to make that thing useful though.
Too bad my goldfish didn't last long in it.
Maybe I should have removed the electronics.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
From the presence of a PLX chip, it seems they're having to split PCIe lanes.
The Xeon E5-1620 has forty PCIe lanes. Give sixteen to each FirePro card, and you're left with only eight for Thunderbolt and the flash memory. Each Thunderbolt channel uses at least two lanes (they provide four lanes of PCIe 2.0, which is the bandwidth of two lanes of 3.0), so if we assume each port is on its own channel, that's at least twelve lanes. And the SSD is probably using either four or eight lanes as well.
So now not only do we have to figure out how many Thunderbolt buses there are, but we have to figure out how the PCIe lanes are being switched. It could be that heavy Thunderbolt traffic will slow traffic to the graphics cards and/or flash drive, which is a very, very weird symptom. From the positioning I think it more likely that all the TB controllers are being switched, maybe with whatever other PCIe devices are on the I/O board, but I can't say for sure.
It seems that every one of your complaints about the Mac Pro is that it doesn't make a good desktop. Let me repeat for you again: A Mac Pro is not a desktop. It is a workstation for professionals. People who are buying this will need TBs of storage (and this will grow quickly). Now if it was a conventional desktop, that would mean that they would have to buy disks all the time and their cases would be fill up quickly. However most people who are using this system are building (or have) SANs with a backup strategy. Often a SAN is required as their work is collaborative. Think a Pixar animator not a Crysis II gamer.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I don't think mixing "literally" and "legitimately" in the same sentence make sense, since the latter is entirely a determination of opinion.
You may not agree with Apple's position that every single milimeter and ounce matters, but that position is legitimate. There are consequences to that position, such as not being able to replace the battery yourself -- but its not like Apple is hiding that its laptops don't have user replaceable batteries.
Its a perfectly legitimate design decision and trade off. Maybe for you that means the products aren't for you -- that doesn't make it not *legitimate*, let alone not *literally* so.
Except that I have a 512 GB SSD on my current MacPro - which is about 3/4 full of programs and support files. The scratch disk is a 128 GB SSD. Everything else is enormous gobs of spinning glass. I'd consider the trash can (after Rev 2 of course, never buy Rev 1 hardware from anyone, much less Apple), but I'd probably spring for the 1 TB SSD since you have to have the option to have a separate scratch disk. And yes, theoretically, if you have enough RAM you don't need a scratch disk, but various Adobe products haven't quite figured that out.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The same reason why rack servers don't have a lot of USB ports. The Mac Pro is not a desktop. It is not a Mac mini. People who are using a Mac Pro will be working on large files stored on a SAN or TB enclosures because 1TB will not be enough. So Apple decided not to bother with make the Mac Pro larger to accommodate a feature that few of the intended market will use. If you need a small network file server, Apple makes the Mac mini server. This machine is intended for pros to edit 4K video, not a file server.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
it's apple only real non AIO desktop other then the mini.
Again, it's not a desktop. It's a workstation. It was not designed for consumers to play games or surf the web. It is intended for professionals for work. As such it was designed with this in mind. Please stop confusing the two.
the mini lags in hardware and does not offer any better video then laptop based Intel on board chips.
Then don't buy a mini.
The imacs are ok but for stuff but for gameing other then maybe the top of line imac with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4GB upgrade are poor for there screen size.
Then don't buy an iMac.
and for the price of then top imac you can build an high system for about a $1000 less giving you a lot of room to add your own screen as well full desktop CPU's, HDD's, Video cards and more.
Then don't buy an iMac. The crux of your complaint is that Apple doesn't make the system you want them to make. Get over it. Don't buy Apple then. But complaining that Apple hasn't designed a system for you is just complaining to complaining. A Mac Pro was never intended for you. They are intended for professionals. That's like complaining that Mack Trucks doesn't make an 18-wheeler semi truck doesn't that seats 6 comfortably. That's not what it was intended to do.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
And yes, theoretically, if you have enough RAM you don't need a scratch disk, but various Adobe products haven't quite figured that out.
diskutil erasevolume HFS+ "ramdisk" `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://8388608`
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Yeah right! Next you'll be telling us that they didn't have wizards and dragons.
I'll grant you limited choice in video cards, but otherwise, personally, I think you're putting too much emphasis on legacy hardware whose importance is waning.
Standard-sized PCIe as a physical card architecture (as opposed to an internal bus architecture) is basically dead and buried already. With the exception of flash storage, almost nothing uses PCIe cards anymore, even in the pro audio and video space. Everything is external, because external peripherals are easier to deal with—easier to install, easier to replace when they fail, etc. Of course, for the few people who do still need PCIe, you can use a Thunderbolt 2 PCIe chassis, so long as you don't need anything faster than x4 PCIe 2.0 speeds. That pretty much covers 99.999% of non-graphics-card use of PCIe.
And SATA is dog slow compared with Thunderbolt. A single Thunderbolt 2 port is fast enough to hang three of the fastest 6 Gbps SATA drives off of it and still have enough spare bandwidth to handle a half-speed (S200) FireWire device on top of that, all without performance degradation. As a result, there are already Thunderbolt to SATA adapters that run at full SATA speeds, and lots of manufacturers also make RAID enclosures that let you stick several SATA drives on a Thunderbolt bus, with big performance wins over USB-, FireWire-, or SATA-based RAID enclosures.
Of course, in the long run, it seems likely that storage will move towards direct PCIe flash storage (like the internal storage in the Mac Pro) because it is much faster than SATA is currently capable of supporting, because flash is much faster than hard drives, and because in a Thunderbolt world, SATA is an unnecessary bit of protocol bloat that can only reduce performance, not improve it. When flash becomes cheap enough, SATA will likely fade into obsolescence, though for folks who need lots and lots of storage in the short term, that isn't the case yet, hence the RAID enclosures.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Perhaps the most surprising thing to me when reading the iFixit article was that their Mac Pro's PSU was only 450 watts. Granted, most enthusiast PSUs are way over-specced (a hangover from the days when even major manufacturers blatantly lied about their wattage ratings), but that still sounds much smaller than I'd expect for a dual-GPU system. The FirePro D300 is basically a professional version of the well-known Radeon HD 7870 gaming card, and that card has a TDP of 175 watts. This one may be clocked lower, as is the case with the FirePro W7000 based on the same silicon, so let's say 150 watts maximum. Take 300W for both GPUs, and another ~125W for the Xeon CPU, and you're pretty close to the limit.
This also implies that upgraded Mac Pros must have a different, larger PSU. No matter how good Apple's engineering is, there's no way they managed to fit a 12-core Xeon and two power-hungry Tahiti GPUs within a 450W envelope. So if someone is thinking about saving ~$1000 by buying the cheapest Mac Pro and adding the Xeon 12-core themselves, it might not be such a good idea.
Overall this is a very clever and efficient design. Hopefully it will get some PC manufacturers thinking about alternatives to the absurdly outdated ATX form factor. There is no reason aside from inertia (and patents?) why DIY PC parts could not be oriented around a unified thermal core design. You'd have to come up with a new standard for motherboards, graphics cards, interconnects, and PSUs... but it could be done.