Mac Pro 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As promised, so as suspected for some months Apple has presented at the WWDC in San Francisco the new model of Mac Pro desktops.

With a completely redesigned and innovative model, higher performance and speed, it seems that the new “towers” will be good workstations, or at least better than the current ones.

New design

The new Mac Pro has a cylindrical structure of black aluminum, 9’9 inches high (about 25 cm) and 6’6 inches in diameter (about 16 cm). This size brings us to the first radical change, replacing the large silver towers with a computer that has been compared to the size of a hard drive and is one eighth the size of the current models.

Technical characteristics

The interior contains three base plates that connect to a triangular heat sink, named by Apple as the “thermal unified core”. A low-noise fan located at the top pushes heat from the heatsink upward, drawing it away from the unit.

As the new Mac Pros will be launched during the second half of this year, they will come equipped with the latest generation Intel Xeon E5 processors, in a configuration of up to 12 cores.

The memory will be quad-channel ECC DDR, with speeds up to 1866 MHz offering bandwidth of up to 60 GB/s, double the current capacity.

Instead of spinning hard disks, PCIe-based flash storage is incorporated, at 1250 MBps, which is 2.5 times faster than SSDs (SATA) and up to 10 times faster than SATA hard disks at 7200rpm.

The graphics power will be controlled by two AMD Fire Pro GPUs with up to 6GB of VRAM. Although Apple claims that they will drive up to 3 4K displays while editing at full resolution, this has been news that has not thrilled too much due to the fact that many professionals have lamented the abandonment of Nvidia cards and their CUDA technology.

Connections

The internal expandability disappears completely, but in return the new Mac Pro comes loaded with the connections that were so much in demand.

Four USB 3 ports and six Thunderbolt 2 ports (you can read more about the new Thunderbolt generation here) have been included on the back of the computer, which supports up to 6 daisy-chained devices, so with good planning you should be able to connect up to 36 devices.

There are also 2 Gigabit Ethernet, an HDMI 1.4 port, audio in and out, three 802.11ac Wi-Fi access and Bluetooth 4.0.

One included detail is a built-in motion sensor that illuminates the ports when you rotate the computer so you can properly see the connections.

Distribution and integration

Some companies are already guaranteeing compatibility with the new Mac Pro. An example of this is Blackmagic Design, from where they assure (after performing some tests) that there will be no problems with the integration of DaVinci Resolve 10 (thanks to the use of OpenCL) and that the GPUs are incredibly powerful.

There will also be no complications with Adobe systems or the Mercury real-time rendering engine, thanks to the addition of OpenCL (previously only worked with CUDA) in the Creative Cloud versions.

And of course, Final Cut Pro X will be optimized for these new workstations with a version that will include support for two GPUs and 4K broadcast monitoring.

We will have to wait for the distribution to start to know more details about these new models, their actual performance and their adaptation with the software and hardware (which is likely to be good according to the news received in only two days).

There is no further information about the price or release date, which according to Apple will be “later this year”.

Here you can visit the official website of the new Mac Pro.