The new Mac Pro feels very expensive when configured with a few options, and it’s easy to feel that it’s much more expensive than previous Mac Pros.And it is. But the big jump actually started with the 2009 model, when Intel started running out of ways to make the high-end Xeons better except by raising their core count, which drove the price up dramatically.
And that’s now true of the entire Mac Pro line: it’s no longer the fastest Mac at single-threaded tasks (the highest-end iMac is), and the jobs that the Mac Pro does faster than other high-end Macs are becoming fewer and more specialized.You can still find good value in the Mac Pro line (in the 2013 lineup, just like the “2012”, the 6-core is a great value), but it’s pushing further into specialty uses as the high-end iMac and 15” MacBook Pro options keep closing the gap for more people.
In short: despite their advertised clock-speed differences, single-threaded performance in practice is effectively identical between the 4-, 6-, and 8-core models. There’s no “penalty” for going from the “3.7 GHz” 4-core to the “3.5 GHz” 6-core, for instance.Now that the pricing is confirmed, I think the best bang-for-the-buck option is the stock $3,999 configuration (6-core, 16 GB, D500) plus whatever amount of SSD storage you need. That said, I’m going 8-core and D700 on mine: D700 because it’s not that much more, relatively speaking, and can probably never be upgraded (at least for a reasonable price), and 8-core because I do a lot of parallel work but can’t afford the non-parallel penalties of the 12-core.
The 6-core CPU looks like the best choice for Photoshop and Lightroom. I rejected the 8-core for that purpose, because if 7 or 8 cores are actually used, they run at 3.0 GHz. But taking GHz into account, 6 cores on the 6-core at 3.5 GHz is equivalent to 7 cores at 3.0 GHz. Not much of a win for 8 cores by the math.Moreover, the chances of all 8 cores being fully utilized for any meaningful duration are about nil, and then there is software overhead and efficiency, which increases with the number of cores and thus exerts a “core management tax”. It all depends.
We published our first benchmarks of our review model, and the results were in some ways surprising: The eight-core 2013 Mac Pro was only 8 percent faster in our Speedmark 9 benchmark suite than a CTO 2013 iMac maxed out with a quad-core 3.5GHz Core i7 processor, a 3TB Fusion Drive, 8GB of RAM, and Nvidia GeForce GTX 780M graphics (a $2699 configuration). In the individual tests that make up our Speedmark benchmark, the iMac actually beat the new Mac Pro in a Finder test, the iMovie test, the iTunes test, the Aperture test, the Parallels test, and the Cinebench OpenGL test. It also beat the Mac Pro in GeekBench 3’s single-core benchmark.However, the new Mac Pro handily beat the iMac—and every other Mac we’ve ever tested—in our Final Cut Pro X test, the iPhoto test, the HandBrake test, the Photoshop tests, the Cinebench CPU test, the Mathematica test, and several graphics-engine tests. It also crushed most other Macs in GeekBench 3’s multi-core benchmark.
You can see this when you look at our initial benchmarks. A souped-up iMac has just as much horsepower as a new Mac Pro when it comes to many of the things nonprofessional users do on a daily basis. It’s not until you get to specialized applications that the Mac Pro really shines. Which means that this Mac Pro really is a Mac Pro: It’s a computer for professional users who need multiprocessing capabilities and the kind of high-bandwidth capability that only a high-end computer can provide. If you need this kind of performance, the new Mac Pro is for you.
Teardown of Apple's new Mac Pro reveals socketed, removable Intel CPUHardware enthusiasts will likely be pleased to know that the processor powering Apple's new Mac Pro desktop appears removable, meaning that future upgrades of the CPU could be possible.
Do we WANT this new computer? Absolutely.Do we NEED this new computer? That is a much more complex question because there is such a fine line between need and desire.- If you have money to burn – the sheer beauty of the Mac Pro’s construction rivals a fine Swiss watch and will give you bragging rights for a long time into the future.- For the rest of us, though, cost is a factor. If money is tight, a well-outfitted iMac will edit standard-def and HD video easily – provided you have good, high-speed storage attached to the system.- If you are doing video compression, the Mac Pro wins hands down over any other system. The hardware acceleration and GPUs will save you months of time.- If you are editing multicam projects, 4K or larger images, RAW files, or want to position yourself for the future, the Mac Pro is the system to get.Finally, to fully take advantage of the speed of a Mac Pro, you need to also invest money in high-speed Thunderbolt storage to work with it.
Gast
