by While the old Mac Pro limped along, receiving half-hearted updates (and wasn’t even available for sale in some countries), Tim Cook promised that Apple was “working on something really great” for pros. We expected to see something new and unusual, but the extent to which Apple has reinvented its high-end desktop is astonishing.
We’ve never seen anything quite like it really—the closest thing is possibly the G4 Cube. It’s a workstation-class computer that’s just 9.9” high and 6.6” wide, and it operates almost silently. As a physical object, its shining black aluminum exterior is well into objet d’art territory, and as a computer it is absolutely a thing of gripping, unchecked desire. But is it the pro machine—the tool—that the most demanding users wanted?
The design and functionality go hand-in-hand, as is Apple’s trademark. It’s still the usual PC components, of course, but the balance has changed. It used to be that the Mac Pro offered all the processing power you could ever want, with a dual-CPU beast as one of the standard configurations, but only ever one graphics card as standard. Now, you get one multi-core processor (without even the option for a second), but dual graphics cards as standard, all arranged around a central core that keeps them cool. There’s absolutely a huge amount of power on offer from this setup, but the hardware has to be properly used to unlock it fully.
When software is designed to take advantage of the combination of twin graphics cards and processor, it flies. Final Cut Pro X, Apple’s video-editing software, is the flagship for showing off how everything can work together. On the new Mac Pro, you’re able to edit and apply effects to multiple 4K videos (which is four times the resolution of full-HD 1080p video) in real-time with no stuttering issues (depending on settings). The processor is used lightly by Final Cut, with the huge throughput and computing power of the graphics cards made proper use of. This is the Mac Pro in full bloom, with every part used for the tasks it’s best at.
The only problem is that this is an ideal, and isn’t what performance is like universally yet. Take Adobe Premiere, one of Final Cut’s rivals. It hasn’t been rewritten to take full advantage of the Mac Pro’s new hardware setup yet, relying almost entirely on the processor, and the result is that the new model offers little speed advantage over its years-old predecessor. The new Mac Pro is still extremely powerful when it comes to CPU options, matching its predecessor by offering up to 12 cores. But having something that matches the old Mac Pro isn’t the point. We want to exceed it.
Part of this must come from Apple itself, as it helps developers to use the power with better support in OS X. At the moment, there’s no way for both GPUs to be used automatically for 3D work in OS X as there is on Windows (including on the Mac Pro in Boot Camp, in fact). It’s possible for software to access both GPUs by sending different tasks to each one, but by supporting this at the OS level, Apple can speed up the process of the Mac Pro reaching its potential in more tasks. That said, we expect software that needs, say, the full 12GB of VRAM available on the highest-end graphics cards to be optimized without any input from Apple, where possible. As it stands, there’s power in the Mac Pro that can end up going to waste.
We expect these performance considerations will iron out over time, as software (both on Apple’s side and that of third-party developers) starts to take full advantage of the Mac Pro. For optimized tasks, its performance is astonishing, besting everything else Apple has made by huge margins—have no doubts about that. For Apple’s vision of using huge GPU power to complete many tasks faster than a CPU could, this is a nearly perfect machine. But it’s important to note that Apple is not in total control of its vision here, and indeed needs to do more to fulfill it—an optimized version of Aperture would be a good start!
There has been concern over the expandability and upgradeability of the Mac Pro, thanks to its use of things like non-standard graphics cards and a lack of extra drive space inside, but It turns out that much of it should be upgradeable internally, and we’re comfortable with the raft of external ports for expansion otherwise—six Thunderbolt ports allow for 36 accessories to be attached, and four USB 3 ports bring even more high-speed access. External storage drives can operate easily fast enough through Thunderbolt to not be a problem, so the only issues are of tidiness and convenience; these aren’t worth ignoring, of course, but they’re relatively minor.
