Unfortunately, that thermal balance is what would ultimately do this design in, but more on that in a minute. By having all three players share one large heatsink Apple can optimize for the most likely usage scenarios where at most one processor is running at close to max TDP. The Mac Pro’s thermal core makes a lot of sense from an area efficiency standpoint as the chances that you have all three processors in the system (Xeon CPU + dual AMD FirePro GPUs) running at max speed at the same time is highly unlikely. I had two of them on at one point and, because the monitors weren’t on, I didn’t know they weren’t asleep-the new Mac Pro is that quiet.Īnand Lal Shimpi wrote more about how that was possible: If you’re browsing the Web or doing something that isn’t pushing the CPU or GPUs, it’s almost completely silent.
I had to turn off my quiet Lacie 2big external RAID just to get an idea of what kind of noise it makes, and the drives are sitting much farther away. IFixit reported a ridiculously low noise level of 12dBA for the 4-core 2013 Mac Pro, so I’ll have to go with their measurements-I don’t own anything that can measure below 30dBa. These results came down to the massive multi-threading the Mac Pro was capable of, something that makes the iMac Pro stand out today.ĭavid Girard at Ars Technica wrote this about the Mac Pro’s noise levels: It also crushed most other Macs in GeekBench 3’s multi-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 beat the Mac Pro in GeekBench 3’s single-core benchmark. 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. 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). Once the machine started shipping at the end of the year, reviews started rolling in.ĭan Frakes at Macworld pointed out that the Mac Pro wasn’t always the fastest Mac in the room: In October 2013, Apple gave additional details about the Mac Pro. All of the ports were around the back, with labels that illuminated when the machine was turned around. The Mac Pro could deliver seven teraflops of computing power thanks to those graphic cards and could push 4K external displays.Īll of this technology was packed into a tiny chassis that was just an eighth the volume of the previous design. Every Mac Pro shipped with two AMD FirePro workstation GPUs. Expansion was external via Thunderbolt 2 and its 20 Gbps throughput gone were the internal PCI slots that helped defined Apple’s towers for so long. The machine was powered by Intel Xeons, coupled with all-Flash, PCIe-based storage and ECC RAM. By being so large, Apple could spin it more slowly than the smaller fans found in other Macs, helping keep the machine quiet, even under load. The internals were built around what Schiller called a “unified thermal core.” It was all cooled by one large fan at the top. It was a push back against critics who were saying Apple had gotten lazy and its products stale.Ī single look at this computer proved them wrong. After playing a very exciting video showing off the product, Phil Schiller quipped, “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass,” as he walked across the stage to applause.
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