Is the New Mac Pro Your Next Editing System?
Apple announced many upgrades to software and operating systems yesterday, but the biggest announcement that professional users have been waiting for was the Mac Pro. We were told that it would be worth waiting for and the new machine is clearly innovative. But is it for you?
GPU Architecture
Gaming computers have been coupling multiple GPU units together for years. So there's absolutely nothing new or unique about this approach. And, as new GPU hardware is always faster, better, and cheaper than last years--or even last month's--the question is whether the GPU cards will be upgradable down the road. With their integration into the centralized heat sink, my bet is that they're not designed to be upgraded.
Many people are talking about Premiere Pro's leveraging NVIDIA's CUDA cores to accelerate video processing, and what that means to Mac users, but the next version, Premiere Pro CC, is also supposed to leverage OpenCL, so Adobe is reaching out to as many people as possible. The choice of AMD over NVIDIA for the GPU is not a critical issue for Premiere Pro CC users.
But the inability to upgrade and/or add GPUs may pose a problem. For comparison, I looked at a middle-range NVIDIA GTX 660 Ti and it packs 4.6 teraflops into one card. Put two in a tower and you have more right now than the Mac Pro will offer later this year. NVIDIA has much more powerful cards, and enables you to put three of them together. This not only already blows away what the Mac Pro will someday offer, but can be upgraded with whatever comes next.
PCIe Flash Storage
"There's flash storage,” Apple says, “and then there's next-generation PCI Express flash storage."
PCI Express flash storage offers speeds double today's SATA SSD drives. Having just upgraded my laptop's HDD to SSD, I can say this is indeed the biggest kick-in-the-pants upgrade that can be done. But with great power comes great cost, if Apple's pricing for the PCIe-based laptops is any indication.
Minimum configuration will likely be costly, and higher-end configuration even more so. Third-party hardware providers are sure to make the high end much more affordable, but there's not going to be a way to get the Mac Pro with no PCIe storage so you'll have to yank an expensive bit of RAM to upgrade it, or pay Apple's premium to max it out at the shop. We've seen this before with the MacBook Air and other Macs.