News - Apple unleashes 12-core Mac Pro

[HEXUS]

Dual-chip "Westmere" rig now yours for only £3,999.

Read more.

[scaryjim]

you're laughing; either at the awesome amount of power or the mind-boggling £12,278.99 total.

At both, surely...

[kalniel]

I think I prefer the 48 core AMD boxes that are about the same price (as the cheaper range)

[Terbinator]

Not read the article but [yet], "Dual-Chip Westmere". So is that MCM or just a dual CPU board ?

[Percy1983]

I think I prefer the 48 core AMD boxes that are about the same price (as the cheaper range)

Its amazing how much apple premium tax costs these days.

[nlr]

Its amazing how much apple premium tax costs these days.

I agree but doesn't stop people from buying their products.

[borandi]

I agree but doesn't stop people from buying their products.

Buying Apple is like is like spending £50 on a beer. While the glass looks nice, inside it is no real substance or flavour, and you don't realise it's also full of backwash.

I currently run a dual quad Xeon E5520 with HT at work. Sure, it's got a low end Quadro GPU, but it's whisper quiet, came with a 23" monitor and was half the price of that Apple abomination.

[nlr]

I totally agree but Apple support is fantastic and actually do care about the majority of their customers but I suppose we do pay a premium and it also has a great resell value even after 5 years.

[watercooled]

I don't think it's anywhere near worth the premium you pay. Sure, the customer service might be good but on the subject of support their update policy is terrible, not bothering to patch critical exploits until they are basically forced to, and yet they still go on about how secure the OS is and how it doesn't need AV - yeah right. I've also heard the resale value is good but what idiot would buy a 5 year old Mac Pro which would be outperformed by a modern nettop, yet consumes about 10 times the power? I really don't get Macs. They would make a lot more sense if they were, say, a third of the price? And to reiterate what I've (probably) said before, I'm no fanboy - I like and use lots of different OSes for various reasons, I just don't see a reason to use a Mac...

[aidanjt]

You'd probably get more change from this: http://www.numberworld.org/misc_runs...nounce_en.html

Guess which I'd rather have.

[watercooled]

I stumbled across that Pi app a few days/weeks ago, it's a really impressive app and I was surprised how much faster than superpi it is, and that they broke the record on a single workstation. There's some more benchmarks on this thread if you're interested.

[Spud1]

If I had the money..but i'm happy with my current mac pro (running windows) thank you very much. They are lovely machines, my 8 core model was only £1400 though, much more reasonable.

Not to get to apples defence this time..this generation of Mac Pro's is about £1k overpriced for that 12 core model imo, but comparing the chips to AMD's is a bit silly, the AMD chips are so much slower than intels counterparts..Their "high end" CPU's perform worse than the cheaper intels.

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=25804&page=4

watercooled - that comparison of a G5 mac to an intel mac mini is a bit stupid really - different architecture/performance criteria etc etc, and you can't even buy a PPC mac from new anymore.

The resale value of the intel mac pros is still incredible, that's a good point - mine is worth around £1k after nearly 3 years..thats a loss of about £400 (based on ebay prices)? Your average dell or other consumer PC will lose much more than that over just a year, let alone 3..

[Fraz]

£4k for a machine that doesn't even include an SSD drive. Gotta say, that price is an absolute joke.

[watercooled]

If I had the money..but i'm happy with my current mac pro (running windows) thank you very much. They are lovely machines, my 8 core model was only £1400 though, much more reasonable.

Not to get to apples defence this time..this generation of Mac Pro's is about £1k overpriced for that 12 core model imo, but comparing the chips to AMD's is a bit silly, the AMD chips are so much slower than intels counterparts..Their "high end" CPU's perform worse than the cheaper intels.

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=25804&page=4

watercooled - that comparison of a G5 mac to an intel mac mini is a bit stupid really - different architecture/performance criteria etc etc, and you can't even buy a PPC mac from new anymore.

The resale value of the intel mac pros is still incredible, that's a good point - mine is worth around £1k after nearly 3 years..thats a loss of about £400 (based on ebay prices)? Your average dell or other consumer PC will lose much more than that over just a year, let alone 3..

The AMD chips are much slower at what exactly? Benchmarks today often tell you how well the program is codec towards a specific architecture rather than the CPU performance, and lots if not most benchmarks seem to run better in Intel chips. And I don't see what you're trying to prove with that link, the AMD chips outperform their Intel counterparts in terms of price from what I can see. But I digress and don't want to start a pointless flame war. Also, what do you mean my comparison is stupid? I don't see anything wrong with it, a cheap nettop today (not necessarily a Mac, in fact a proper nettop for the same price would perform miles better) outperforms a high-end Mac from five years ago. I'm not denying they have a good resale value, I'm just wondering why! Anyone with an ounce of sense would buy the nettop out of those two competitors, taking price, TCO (including power usage), reliability (meaning you should get more use out of a new system than a 5 year old one), etc into account.

[Spud1]

With the 5 year old mac comparison, I just mean that its an entirely diffferent computer..its like comparing a ZX spectrum to an x86 computer - pointless as its not a fair comparison.

You'd have to compare a 1st gen intel mac pro to a current net top, in which the mac pro would win out by a huge factor. Macs changed completely when they switched to Intel, its one of the biggest reasons (combined with marketing forces) why their popularity has surged.

The mac pro's in particular have especially good resale value as they are workstations, not consumer computers. Having looked closer on ebay mine is actually worth closer to £1800 these days (and they are /selling/ for that price, not just listed)..totally crazy from a consumer POV but when you consider the fact that mac pro's are workstations, it makes a little more sense, if only because business equipment is nearly always vastly overpriced anyway!

I don't think anyone would disagree that the current mac mini is way overpriced though, or that you can get comparable consumer systems for less..it's different/difficult in the workstation market though.

we'll agree to disagree on AMD then, i don't want to argue it either At least not in this thread.