Additional Mac Pro support has been pledged by Autodesk, Red Digital Cinema, Foundry, SideFx, Otoy, Unity, Pixar, Epic Games, Universal Audio, Cine Tracer, Pixelmator and Serif, Apple said.
For example, Blackmagic Design is supporting Afterburner in DaVinci Resolve, Avid is enabling support for up to six Pro Tools HDX cards in the Mac Pro, and Maxon said that Redshift will be optimized for the Mac Pro by the end of 2019, and that Metal support is being developed for Cinema 4D. The company figures it can handle up to three streams of 8K 30fps ProRes Raw, up to 12 streams of 4K 30fps ProRes Raw, or up to 16 streams of 4K 30fps ProRes 422.Īpple took pains to insist that it’s taking the needs of pro users seriously, stressing its relationships with vendors. Designed for 4K and 8K workflow, Afterburner is a ProRes acceleration card designed to allow native editing of high-resolution Apple ProRes files in Final Cut Pro X and supported third-party applications. Video editors get their own performance module: Apple Afterburner. Combine that with a second MPX Module and double those numbers again, reaching 56.8 teraflops and 128 GB of high-bandwidth memory in a four-GPU Mac workstation. Configured as the Vega II Duo, the two GPUs combine to deliver 28 tflops of performance and 64 GB of memory.
(That means each MPX Module you install actually increase your access to Thunderbolt 3 ports.) What really differentiates these cards is their additional PCIe connector, which allows them to hold two GPUs connected by something called an Infinity Fabric Link, which Apple said accelerates data transfer between the GPUs by five times compared to the PCI bus speed. Now here’s where that modular design comes in. The Mac Pro can pack some fearsome graphics firepower thanks to the new MPX Modules - basically PCIe graphics cards packing AMD Radeon Pro 580x or Radeon Pro Vega II GPUs and with Thunderbolt 3 connectivity built in. Radeon Vega II Duo graphics on an Apple MPX Module (An optimized version for rack-mounting is also expected to be available.) The system is 20.8 inches high (or 21.9 inches with the optional wheels that let you roll it around your facility), 17.7 inches deep, and 8.58 inches wide. Two 10 Gb Ethernet ports are built in, and the system comes with a 1.4kW power supply. The name of the game this time around is expansion, so the Mac Pro has been outfitted with eight PCIe expansion slots - four double-wide slots, three single-width slots, and one half-length that comes with an Apple I/O card (sporting two Thunderbolt 3 ports, two USB-A connectors and a headphone jack) already installed.
All-flash storage starts at 256 GB but can be configured up to 4 TB all of the data is encrypted by Apple’s T2 security chip. The system supports up to 758 GB of 2933 MHz DDR4 ECC memory via six channels and 12 DIMM slots (1.5 TB is an option on 24-core and 28-core processor systems only). The processor alone has dedicated access to 300 watts of power it’s kept cool by a big heat sink and three fans pushing air through the case. A new Intel Xeon processor with up to 28 cores is at the heart of the new Mac Pro, which has large L2 and 元 caches along with 64 PCI Express lanes to ensure processing bandwidth. The release of the new Mac Pro is part of Apple’s bid to win back pro users that it’s lost over the years, thanks in part to the abrupt way it sprang the redesigned Final Cut Pro X on the industry, but also to the ossified design of its pro workstations, which grew exceedingly long in the tooth as the company seemed to dedicate more and more time to its lucrative business in cell phones and consumer electronics. What it unveiled is a big and beefy new desktop tower, encased in a stainless-steel housing featuring a latticework reminiscent of the old “cheese grater” Mac Pros in their big patterned metal bodies, that can be loaded as needed with an assortment of hardware that takes it from your garden-variety Xeon-packing desktop workstation to a kind of supercomputer for video-editing types who want to play multiple streams of 8K ProRes Raw without a hiccup. Today was the day - at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple finally revealed its long-gestating plans for a new, modular Mac Pro system. The Ultimate Mac Workstation Is Almost Here - But Are Pro Users Still Among the Mac Faithful?