Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about the new iPhones that Apple announced last week. Actually, even most rock-dwellers probably heard about them – just because your house is made of basalt doesn’t mean you can’t head on over to your local rock coffee shop for some free wi-fi.
However, conspicuously absent from Apple’s big announcement was pricing or a release date for the hotly anticipated Mac Pro.
Source: digitalartsonline.co.uk
Computer and design enthusiasts were expecting (hoping?) that Apple would spill details about it’s re-imagined desktop machine, which will offer a more powerful processor and graphics card, and also look kind of like a bead. But while there was no official announcement of when Macheads will be able to get their hands on Tim Cook’s latest toy, Apple has released some tech specs to further whet their appetites. Full details can be found on Apple’s website, but here’s a little summary from Digital Arts Online (begin jargon… now).
Being from Intel’s ‘Ivy Bridge’ processor line, the Xeon E5 V2 chips give support for up to an as-yet unknown amount of 1,866MHz ECC RAM – up from 1,333MHz in the previous generation of Mac Pros and up from 1,600GHz on the previous generation of PC workstations. ECC RAM uses error correction to be more stable that the RAM used by consumer PCs and Macs – which is important for longer processes such as video encoding and 3D rendering.
No surprise that Apple will try to make it’s machine faster and more stable. It’s a natural step in the Mac’s evolution, just like guy #4 making a spear.
Source: thephoblographer.com
Digital Arts Online also has the pertinent details about how the new Mac Pro will perform under the typically heavy use of 3D designers.
For graphics, the 2013 Mac Pro has dual graphics chips from AMD’s FirePro range. It hasn’t said which cards are included, but from the quoted specs they appear to be the same chips as found in AMD’s top-of-the-line FirePro W9000 graphics card – which feature 6GB of graphics RAM (and ECC RAM at that), a 384-bit memory interface and 264GBps memory bandwidth.
Apple says that the cards will allow you to do VFX and editing work on full-res 4K video – and output the three 4K displays at once. Unlike the PC-based FirePro W9000 though, there are no DisplayPorts on the 2013 Mac Pro – instead the three of the six Thunderbolt 2 ports can be used as mini-DisplayPort outputs that output to DisplayPort monitors using an adapter, as with Apple’s MacBook Pro and iMac.
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The new Mac may be a double-edged sword – it will give digital artists greater flexibility and power, but also potentially leave those who don’t want to drop a few grand for one in the dust. Start getting acquainted with it now to figure out whether you’ll be in the market.
But even if you don’t need a computer, it will offer plenty of other uses.
Source: fstoppers.com
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