Apple’s newly unveiled Mac Pro, at just 9.9 inches tall with a diameter of just 6.6 inches — smaller than most subwoofers — offers up to 7 teraflops of computing power.
10 years ago this month, if it existed, Apple’s new Mac Pro would have been the eighth most powerful supercomputer on the entire planet, beating out the DOE/SC/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s supercomputer which peaked at 6.16 teraflops.
2003 wasn’t that long ago. Imagine, the world’s 8th most powerful supercomputer sitting comfortably on your desk!
What will Apple have to offer 10 years from now?
Up to 7 teraflops sitting comfortably on your wrist?
The next generation Mac Pro will be available later this year. To learn more, visit www.apple.com/mac-pro.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Chas” for the heads up.]
I’m guessing maxed-out you’re talking in the range of $20,000 for this guy. Just a WAG.
I already know what the first Nerd accessories for this thing are going to be..Since all this air is forced out the top I can see mini pinwheels, mesh beanies with propellors, and mini-kites.
Wait one more. A mesh hemisphere with a spinning “beach ball” inside.
this thing has truly got to be the most courageous move in the history of industrial design. I cannot wait to get my hands on one.
lookin’ around at all my equipment in my office..every piece looks stupid and clunky now. That limey bastard did okay.
gotta have redesigned monitors to complement it, yeah baby.
What happened to your position (another thread) that at $5,900 design studios wouldn’t be able to justify it?
Troll.
Bored
it was a joke, Gregg, similar to your life.
and six grand would be an incredible expense for a design studio with five to ten board people.
With your admission you have redeemed yourself in my eyes, not that you care a whit. Not saying anything about Gregg’s life
jeez, no one can read “my god, it looks like a huge, black vagina!” as a joke?
lol I typed that as what was an obvious (I thought) joke and the entire armada of MDN commenters went Jihad on me.
yes, you can fuuckit
I think BLN and I are the only ones immature enough to get and appreciate your jokes.
BLN is a genius.
New “4K” Cinema Displays…!
Very happy to see Apple are still moving forward with 4K support. I think that we are getting tiny hints that we could see a fully fledged iTV within the next year or two. 4K support for monitors and iOS now supports third party game controllers – surely this is a move to take the living room.
4k all the way!
Now the Apple television set make a little more sense.
4K TV sets? Over expensive overkill much?
There is no point in having a higher resolution on your TV than your retina can actually resolve. Maybe if you want to turn your living room into a theatre with a gigantic TV. That would be kewl!
It’s not resolution that’s the problem. It’s the content. We’re just getting over the switch to 720/1080.
How are any consumers going to get any 4K content? Not over broadcast channels: ATSC only goes up to 1080p, and zero channels are even broadcasting *that* yet. Not on Blu-Ray: the standard only goes up to 1080p so far (though they’re working on ways to extend it, which will likely involve waiting for everybody to buy a new Blu-Ray player). Not over the internet: most people don’t have the bandwidth for it, nor an HTPC that supports 4K video output. Not over cable: most set-top boxes don’t support 4K video output, and there’s no channels broadcasting it yet, anyway.
The way 4K is going to arrive is if Sony/Microsoft push 4K games/updates to their latest consoles, which millions of people already have in their living rooms.
Adding to my usual complaints about shoving 4K into the consumer space:
Q: WHERE is the US Internet going to get the BANDWIDTH for 4K? Where I live, which is a hub of the Internet with well known good bandwidth, I run into bandwidth traffic jams every single day. There are times it is impossible to adequately stream a 480p video off YouTube, let alone 720p. Totally forget about 1080p.
A: NO WHERE. NONE of the parasitic ISPs that I know of are investing a cent into new bandwidth. Instead, their bad attitude is turning to THROTTLING.
IOW: 4K has not-a-prayer for adequate Internet streaming. Give up on that dream, not until such time as the parasite ISPs are overthrown.
That’s the least cantankerous, most genuine sentiment I’ve heard from you in a month of Sundays. Has novelty trumped your terminal skepticism?
I always admire courage, don’t you?
If you’d quit that bad habit of responding to yourself, maybe you’d receive more valuable input. Talking to yourself in a mirror doesn’t prepare you for a confrontation with the ravenous jackals that patrol these territories. Then again, you may identify with them, in which case, never mind. In any case, think twice before denigrating women. We too understand war, love, and chess. We differ in that we don’t care who earns bragging rights, only who survives.
I simply will not respond to such a ridiculous accusation. You have a nice evening.
You just did
I’m not quite sure how that estrogen-charged diatribe was a thoughtful response to “I admire courage, don’t you?”
You are determined to alienate everyone on this forum, aren’t you? You are a sad, sad, little man.
no, Melvin, just you.
Reminds me of the cube, hopefully it doesn’t go the same way the cube did! I think the cube died because it was advertised with the monitor for $1799 or whatever it was and then you go to buy one and find out the monitor didn’t come with it. In those days you usually got a package deal.
I’m impressed and then I’m not. Not sure what to think! I was hoping for a rack mountable version of something with internal storage of 8 drives, etc. Can’t do much with this thing, guess its Mac Mini all the way now with not redundant power, NIC, etc.
Why in the world would you think Apple would make the Mac Pro rack mountable with 8 bays for internal storage?!? That is the complete opposite of everything Apple has done with hardware design over the past 10 years.
Yes 1990s thinking too such a computer would fail embarrassingly. This will be for power players only in various specialisations, most design studios haven’t needed such a machine for a decade. Things change and this is a change for the better, the big box concept is dead some just don’t see it yet.
Well, the announcements where great. The stock went down. It’s a sure sign.
AAPL didn’t go down much. I think the day trader sheeple are tired of being herded by the Wall Street wolves. It could happen!
Interestingly, the Power Mac G5 cluster at Virginia Tech was created in 2003, and it peaked at 17.6 teraflops. It’s #3 on the list from six months later
http://www.top500.org/list/2003/11/
It had 2200 core from 1100 Power Mac G5 computers.
Now you just need 3 of these suckers to top that 🙂
Pretty cool.
That was Rpeak, not Rmax.
Even if the new Pro’s putative 7Tflop performance is Rpeak, it’s still frighteningly impressive.
I think Apple have just given us more cowbell 🙂
=:~)
I remember the Power Mac G4 being marketed as “the world’s first personal supercomputer” as it technically satisfied the criteria.
As for Pentium PCs, well, they’re harmless.
But it was fast in its day. And it wasn’t that long ago. Nothing else was close.
I still got one of them.
case is too nice to throw away.
I still use 3 of them to run old scientific research equipment that need boards that won’t work in later machines. Maxed out the RAM, new larger drives, and OS X Tiger is still an excellent OS.
Did they paint the circuit boards and chips black for more dramatic effect or is it just a black-and white photography/artist rendering?
Black is better for heat radiation.
Wow!, impressive, Samsung will copy soon in no time, sheww, keep secret you guys. lol.
That big, round Galaxy S5 will be hard to put in your pocket!
The sad thing is you are probably right, plagiarism seems to be a way of life for Samsung. Did anyone see the Mac mini copy they made?
Probably one reason for keeping as much of it as possible in the States.
The new building and this new mac pro look great together!
Sexy! Geez I want this. 🙂
It can drive “4K” displays (up to three of them). Apple doesn’t have such a display. So there is obviously going to be a new high-end display product coming from Apple “later this year.”
NOTE: The current 27-inch cinema “only” has horizontal pixel count of 2560 (2.5K).
Not necessarily.
However, ASUS have announced or are shipping a 4K display for $5000 which is a chunk of change. Presumably there are other professional visualisation solutions, like projectors, that will do 4K natively and using a videowall processor on each channel would enable you to drive three separate walls of 3×3 16:9 displays with each display running 1280×720.
If you have $500K knocking around, you could order three of Panasonic’s 4K2K 150″ plasma displays.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, “The reports of Apple’s death have been greatly exaggerated.”
What I saw today was Apple firing on all cylinders, even (or maybe especially) without Scott Forstall. Federighi seems to be a huge improvement in the role. I especially loved Schiller’s side comment, “Can’t innovate any more, my ass!”
Apple is going to be just fine.
I liked all the anti- “skeuomorphism” references, like “we completely ran out of green felt and wood… this must be good for the environment.” Or the “amazement” that iCal pages didn’t fall off, when they removed the bindings. Craig Federighi was probably the best presenter this time.
I agree…..no one can replace Steve Jobs. Something about his presentations just brought you in and amazed you. Today Craig did an excellent job and I think he needs to be on stage more at these events. The comedy added some humor that Jobs did once in a while. Tim is great and doing a great job, but boring to listen too.
Agreed. Craig seemed to really enjoy his time on stage, and he played off the audience very well. Eddy Cue was obviously uncomfortable and ready to get off the stage.
Federighi seems to be a star in the making. Great presentation.
I’m glad the rich apple executives who designed this can afford to purchase it. So long entry level Mac Pro configuration.
We don’t even know the prices yet and even the entry level before was expensive! Still have Ram, HD, Keyboard/Mouse and Applecare options to choose. Who knows if you will be able to pick a different processor, I would assume so, but who knows. Not much different than before besides internal storage is lacking severely!
The “limited” storage consists of an SATA-based solid-state drive … up to 10 times faster than a 7200-rpm SATA hard drive. It’s plenty different than before….
The sort of people who will buy the new Mac Pro are power user professionals that work in hd video and post production.
These companies store all their work on servers/raid arrays not on the hard drive.
Lack of hard drive space isn’t an issue if your in the desired target market for this mac, if it is then your not the customer for this machine.
The “entry level Mac Pro” is called the iMac or the Mac Mini.
Exactly! If you’re not using your Mac as your primary source of income, you don’t need a Mac Pro and haven’t for quite some time. I upgraded to a Mac mini earlier this year. It’s the most powerful computer I’ve ever owned, and I carried it home in one hand. (My first Mac in 2001 barely fit in my little car.)
This Mac Pro is mind-blowing, but I’d never buy one. It would be like using a thermonuclear warhead to kill ants.
So if you’re not a professional, don’t worry about how much this thing is going to cost. You don’t f***ing need one! (Unless you feel inadequate if you don’t own the fastest Mac on the market.)
——RM
Two corrections:
1) 7 TGLOPS references to 32-bit calculations, not 64-bit ones which are required for Top-500 calculations measurements;
2) 7 TFLOPS only include videocard; 12-core Intel CPU is not included in the count.
Look up OpenCL, please.
It is the size of a human head. It will fit nicely in their robot when the robot comes. http://www.blackledge.net/BSL/Papers/Entries/2011/11/13_Where_Are_We_Going.html
Looks like a Black Trashcan. I wonder how long before someone tosses a was of paper in the top.
I can appreciate the engineering work that went in, but it is in no way a Mac Pro other than in name. Call it anything that you will other than a Mac Pro. I cannot wait till pictures start popping up with a sea of cables like an Octopus.
You are just a ray of sunshine, you know that?
——RM
It’s that vision thing and Apple does not have it since one Steven Paul Jobs left the building. Wish it were not so, but Apple is becoming the antithesis of the Think Different company.
Yeah, yeah, we all get it. Jobs was Apple, Apple is dead. What the hell do you want? If this is truly what you think, what do you accomplish by kvetching and moaning on this website? Go somewhere else, invest in Windows or Android or Linux and leave Apple to die in peace. In the meantime, we’re all going to be enjoying the hell out of our iPhones with iOS 7.
——RM
Obviously you have no idea what a pro’s workstation can look like now. My cables are all tied up and tubed but it still looks like an octopus war behind and underneath. Too many raids, drives, monitors (broadcast and computer), scopes, input devices, microphones, near field monitors, breakout boxes, mixers, decks, switchers, etc. to count.
This new form factor changes little. Most work goes directly to an external raid. This is actually closer to the way most pros I know in medium to large shops already operate. It all looks nice and tidy on the surface. The complicated tangle of cables and connections are just better hidden, labelled and organized than the average consumer might be used to.
When the ‘sneak’ video was on, I immediately thought – wow, this is a mini-Cray. My only peeve at this time is the color- shiny black shouts ‘plastic’ to me every time. It’s more than likely that cover is not plastic, but metal, but, sorry, shiny black ain’t working for me.
Apple’s new Mac Pro features an enclosure made of machined (impact extrusion) polished aluminum.
How would this be as a game machine. I know that was stated to be some sort of issue with Macs. Now, will this end up on some front page of a magazine in conjunction with a teenager holding some gaming software while scratching his / her head?
Many mac pros have sat almost empty over the years with no added cards and perhaps an extra HD or two.
I think this new design with what I expect to be few build to order options will help Apple keep their cost down. It will also allow those who need additional cards or storage to tailor that to exactly what they need.
There was a time when anyone earning their living from a Mac needed a Mac Pro, I am now happily earning my living from an iMac and it is all the computing power I need.
The one thing I would like to see Apple bring back, and don’t expect them to, is grid computing. With the speed of Thunderbolt 2 you should be able to interconnect a few of these macs for a truly mind boggling experience. I think this is only a software limitation would love to see it solved.
Xgrid had gotten a bit flaky by the time Apple killed it with Mountain Lion. I would hope that with the new Pros and the possibilities of lightening bolt 2 that they fix it and bring it back in some form, if only for direct daisy chaining.
That is my hope as well could put massive rendering power in the hands of those that need it. Also computational power for scientific and engineering applications.
Keep in mind, this is just the first release. What about the next revision or the 5th revision of the Mac Pro? Will every company or home have one or more of these as the center of their AI connected to the iOS drones and toys? Consider the Mac Pro as the leader feeding the what to do next instructions to the mobile iOS devices, drones and devices? Ladies, will your romance novels be custom developing as you read them? How about your SiFi or cartoons or music? Amazon, see the little AI race cars yesterday. Now do you see the warehouse with fully automated skid jack and iOS drones stocking and shipping without you from orders placed on iTunes cards.
Am I missing it, but where’s the iconic logo on the front of the machine? Is this the first time we’ll have a Mac computer without the logo?? Just seems very un-Mac if it is.
The logo in on the back. Since the front is totally blank with no DVD or other useful controls. I bet people with start leaving it turn around. Once the novelty wears off.
Many who fancy themselves as ‘pro users’ would probably find a couple of Mac minis is all the horsepower required. A few will actually NEED this sucker.
Fantstic design – obviously the ‘Cube’ concept didn’t die within Apple; it was just that the Cube was aimed not at the pro market but at high end consumers with an appreciation for great design – but at too high a price for volume sales.
There has got to be a market for making casings that look like a new pro but contain the guts of a mini – just becasue it looks so cool – the truth is 9 out of 10 would never know the difference in anything but the most demanding scenario.
Stupid article. Who wants 7 teraflops on his wrist if he has to carry a backpack with expensive Thunderbolt peripherals and a daisy chain of overpriced cables running up your arm?
It isn’t 2003 anymore. Meaningless specs and maximum volume concentration don’t count for much in the professional world. Apple would be wise to ATTEMPT to offer features users want at a price they can afford, in addition to styling exercises that shun all the legacy peripherals that pro users currently use.
Judging by Apple’s current sales, I’d say that they already offer features that people can afford.
And as to “legacy peripherals” just get over it, unless you particularly want to go back to using SCSI or that old ISA graphics card. Technology changes—that’s the brutal truth. Apple have never pandered to that particular mentality and indeed have constantly been at the vanguard of innovation and, more importantly, known when a given technology has run its course. This exposes Apple to more than their fair share of criticism because there will always be a coterie of people who will complain because they see their investment in peripherals rendered apparently null and void because of improvements in technology.
Are you seriously suggesting that we should not move forward but live in a technological world of sublime recapitulation? I have no objection to people wishing to maximise the ROI on their ancillary gear but there comes a time when you simply have to move forward.
=:~)
Apple always looks forward? How so?
In this case, they clearly got so wrapped up in Thunderbolt that they’re willing to stake the sales of their Pro machine on it. Sadly, we know what happens when one designs a Cube that doesn’t deliver what the primary customer base wants. Pro customers don’t buy computers based on the shape of the case.
Moreover, if Apple is looking forward to Thunderbolt being the one connection technology that everyone should use, why did it take a step backwards by adding a stupid HDMI port? Why not make that lousy connection use an adapter just like the HUGE population of customers with DVI-connector displays.
In almost all other Mac machines, Apple smoothly transitioned to new connection technologies. Now Apple takes the Mac Pro from ZERO Thunderbolt support to a machine that essentially attempts to force the obsolescence of perfectly usable existing peripheral connection technologies.
Wow…
I has no idea. It amazing to think about how far we have come.