About Those New Mac Pros…

Thinking Aloud by Alexis Van Hurkman

To be honest, the only reason I’m writing this is because I feel a tad guilty about my first post-Mac Pro announcement tweet. The one where I was really upset about the inclusion of ATI GPUs instead of Nvidia. Understand, for the last three years I’ve been fully immersed in applications for which the messaging has consistently been “we’re heavily optimized for Nvidia and CUDA, and the current version of OpenCL on OS X sucks.”

What Apple did a terrible job of making clear in their initial presentation was that a new version of OpenCL will apparently make it far easier for software developers to achieve stellar performance on this new hardware. And I’m not drinking cool-aid; outside of the various announcements that Blackmagic and Adobe have made, I’ve had several email exchanges with folks I trust who are in a position to know, who are sadly hidden behind multiple layers of NDAs. The responses I’ve gotten have been incredibly optimistic.

So that makes me feel better.

I don’t care about the new Mac Pro being forward thinking or progressive or whatever. I don’t care about it being the future. I care about it being fast, reliable, and affordable. Ideally, I’m hoping that I’ll want to buy it because it’ll have the best bang for the buck in terms of price/performance, a characteristic of the best releases of former generations of Mac Pros.

I don’t care what the thing looks like. They can put the internals in a shoebox if the machine runs quickly, quietly, and reliably. read more...