Last month during Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference, Phil Schiller surprised the world with his bear knuckle language when he stated, “can’t innovate anymore, my ass…” referring to a stream of nagging criticism heading into Apple’s 2013 WWDC that the pressure was on the Cupertino company to prove it can still innovate without the late Steve Jobs at its helm.
When Phil introduced the image of the words “Mac Pro” in his keynote slide, the crowd erupted as the long over-due update for Mac veterans finally went answered. At last! And then during the opening break of the product’s dramatic introduction video Phil offers the moment of bravado old-timers familiar with the Mac’s street fighting days really wanted to hear.
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Indeed, the new Mac Pro recalls the glory days when Apple faught, mano a mano, with the Microsoft-Intel dynasty, promoting its then AIM-based PowerPC architecture over Pentium craft.
To be honest, it’s been a very long time since those days and so much has changed. But those were fun days and the laughter Phil garnered in the audience seemed to reflect both the surprise of the comment–considering his normal demeanor–as much as the slight embarrassment of Apple’s once rebellious years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TahD_vuLMEY
Of course that rebellious, adolescent and non-conforming spirt that is the very heart of who Steve Jobs was is vitally important to how the market expects Apple to be. It has to be in their DNA if the company’s soul is to survive the many years ahead….without its founder and master story-teller.
How The Pro Market Sees It
While Phil doesn’t mention specifically 3D and CAD professionals in his pitch about how much Apple cares about its pro customers, Apple is no doubt aware that architects, industrial designers and 3D animation artists are all important domains of its overall professional “creatives” customer base. We thought we’d speak to some in the industry about what they think of the new Mac Pro given available information and also what they hope for it in the days ahead.
Built to Fly Now
We were curious what one of the world’s leading BIM software makers would think of the new Mac Pro introduced at WWDC. So we spoke to Akos Pfemeter, Director of Global Marketing, at GRAPHISOFT, Hungary. When asked whether a system as powerful as a 12-core Mac Pro (2013) would be taken advantage of by their pioneering BIM package ArchiCAD, the company replied emphatically, yes!
“GRAPHISOFT introduced multiprocessing technology as an industry first for BIM,” said Pfemeter. “We have been pioneering this technology ever since, including but not limited to multiprocessing support for basic sequential processes like photo-realistic rendering.” Pfemeter said GRAPHISOFT’s ArchiCAD 17 will utilize nearly ever drop of those 12 cores in the upcoming Mac Pro. “Multiprocessing support is critical for the BIM database heavy processing, which involves model generation,” says Pfemeter. “And the 12 cores of the Mac Pro will also be utilized for ArchiCAD’s brand new background processing support for both data caching and populating model changes across the BIM.”
“Obviously with the great dynamic scaling of ArchiCAD 17 we will very much benefit from the 12 powerful cores of the brand new Mac Pro,” continued Pfemeter. “and it will also benefit from the advanced OpenGL technologies that the powerful twin 4K graphics cards provide, allowing 3D models within ArchiCAD 17 to just fly.”
[editor’s note: To learn more about the Mac Pro’s guts, strength and possibilities see: Architosh, “Notes on the new Mac Pro — Details We Now Know,” 12 June 2013]
For developers who feel that they have their technology built to take off with such hardware today, it is simply a waiting game for their customers to get their hands on the new hardware. Other developers will likely strive to modernize their code bases to fully take advantage of the new hardware, particularly the twin GPUs.
Working with the Twins
And speaking of those twins… This is the first time Apple has shipped a computer with twin GPUs of any kind. And these are no average graphics cards. The new GPUs are based on AMD’s FirePro W9000 cards, which are AMD’s state-of-the-art and top of the line GPUs. But this is where things get really interesting, as Apple has not yet provided enough detail to address such questions as options and future expandability.
3D industry veteran and LumineTIK co-founder, Akiko Ashley, had this to say about that last issue. “A 3D professional needs reliable hardware with a lot of flexibility to upgrade the hardware including multiple video cards.” “I would like to know,” she writes, “[that] this hardware supports whatever I need to use.” Her LumineTIK co-founder and husband, Kevin Cahill, who is both an architect and 3D studio artist, has moved to PCs over the years because of the issue of flexibility expressed at the very core of Ashley’s question. “Kevin uses a PC with 24 cores to render with,” she adds, “What is the upgrade path for this Mac Pro and will it work for professionals or will it be just a “powerful” consumer machine?”
While the twin AMD FirePro GPUs sound incredibly exciting to think about owning, to power an OS X suite of CAD or 3D apps, many veterans are justifiably questioning how Apple plans to provide for future upgrade paths and flexibility for long-term ownership and even initial purchase. With such stunning power many maybe wondering if they can afford a version of the new Mac Pro?
next page: The Initial Reaction — This Doesn’t Come Cheap
The Initial Reaction — This Doesn’t Come Cheap
Indeed, the initial reaction for many, us included, is this may cost a fortune. Greg Conyngham, an architect and the president of Integrated CADD Services, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a specialized Apple VAR (value-added reseller) put it this way: “Price may be an issue as all of this processor and GPU power doesn’t come cheap.” Optimistically he added, “But I think a moderately configured version of this new Mac Pro will provide the speed and productivity increases that our users have been looking for in an updated Mac Pro and then some.”
Stephane Laroye, an architect and urban designer and once longtime IT director with DIALOG, a large architecture firm in Vancouver, Canada, also expressed concerns about cost and “fit” issues for various segments of the CAD and 3D communities on OS X. “The device [new Mac Pro] tries to capture all of its pro level users, the prosumer, and pro user, into one category,” he said, “but I believe that these are different users.”
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Laroye further clarified: “The Prosumer will likely spend once, keep the Mac Pro for a very long time and wish to upgrade for years, while the pro user will spend as much as they can once, get the fully loaded Mac Pro, and keep it for a year (or one product upgrade cycle) and never upgrade.”
Too Much for the CAD Market
Laroye’s comments are interesting. In our own research here at Architosh we have found over the years that what the vast majority of architects need for a workstation is typically a bit different than what 3D professionals typically need. Those doing 3D rendering work can always make good use of additional power. However, with the transition to Building Information Modeling (BIM) well underway, more and more architects are working in 3D OpenGL views all day long, as opposed to 2D line rendered views common in AutoCAD.
Laroye explains further. “The current iMac fulfills our CAD workstation needs for around the 2,000.USD mark,” he continues. “Years ago, we consistently spent between 4-5,000.USD per workstation but now, we can get so much more for less. Perhaps we have become Prosumers?”
In contrast to that view, it may have been more likely that architects were actually Prosumer users all along back in the days of 2D CAD. It just wasn’t the case that there was a machine like the Intel i7 -based iMac with its luxurious 27 inch display to work on. But we have that today and, for many, it works exceptionally well.
The CAD Market is Changing: How does the Mac Pro Fit
The new Mac Pro 2013 may actually be better positioned for the CAD and 3D markets than people may actually realize. “This was not the Mac Pro I was looking for,” said Greg Conyngham, whose large metro Boston client base includes hundreds of architects, landscape architects and other design and 3D professionals, “but after seeing how the thermal core and single fan work in such a simple design the genius of Apple’s industrial design has grown on me again.”
The CAD market in AEC has been transitioning to BIM (3D, and nD based CAD) where intensive geometry databases need much larger storage while more and more users are accessing pieces of these database models from cloud servers. A lot of data today is being kept in cache files, and this says nothing about the benefits of cache files for 3D.
“The PCIe based flash storage eliminates the bottleneck of previous SATA bus connected storage systems,” adds Conyngham, “and greatly improves the performance of applications that utilize cache based files.” Indeed, many of the improvements in the new Mac Pro are ideal for where the CAD/BIM market is migrating to. Conyingham also noted the importance of multiple displays, a growing and important area of productivity improvement for CAD and 3D professionals.
[see: Architosh, “Product Review: Matrox Dual HeadToGo DP Edition,” 29 Nov 2010.]
“Out of the box ability to connect three hi-res displays will be great for those looking to further increase productivity by working in a multi-display environment,” continued Conyingham, “Users can now have a monitor for the plan view, axon or elevation view and a rendering window all at the same time–if you can afford three monitors.”
Closing Thoughts
Stephane Laroye admitted he watched the WWDC keynote with great anticipation. “Mac OS X is the most modern and, in my view, the most approachable Enterprise operating system for a company,” he states, “who wants reliability, ease of deployment and does not want an IT department.”
The major concerns folks we spoke to about the new Mac Pro have centered around flexibility, future expandability and cost flexibility. With the twin advanced “workstation grade” GPUs, this is the first Mac Pro in the history of the company to be ideally positioned to target high-end 3D CAD workflows in addition to 3D animation artists, film editors and compositors, scientists and other high performance compute users. The trick to success for this machine in the CAD and 3D industries will likely fall in its scalability in price. The pro user, as Laroye has mentioned, will likely buy a new Mac Pro at the most powerful configuration he can afford and keep it for one cycle.
But for this machine to be a large-scaled deployed workhorse within AEC and engineering CAD companies, it will need to beat all rivals in performance-price ratios, and scale down as far as it can on price to tempt those who are today currently very happy with i7-based iMacs.