The New Mac Pro

Guy English:

This machine fascinates me not because it seems like it’ll make everything I currently do faster. It fascinates me because it’s fundamentally new. There’s only one CPU socket and it bets heavily on the bus and GPU performance. While this looks to software to be just another Mac it isn’t. It’s capabilities aren’t traditional. The CPU is a front end to a couple of very capable massively parallel processors at the end of a relatively fast bus. One of those GPUs isn’t even hooked up to do graphics. I think that’s a serious tell. If you leverage your massively parallel GPU to run a computation that runs even one second and in that time you can’t update your screen, that’s a problem. Have one GPU dedicated to rendering and a second available for serious computation and you’ve got an architecture that’ll feel incredible to work with.

★ Saturday, 22 June 2013