September 22, 2006
Mac Pro: Woodcrest goes to work
The fast quad-core Mac Pro workstation sets standards in design innovation that competitors can’t touch
Recommend ThisApple’s $2,499 Mac Pro has little in common with other two-socket Woodcrest systems, apart from the fact that it has the same pair of CPUs and the same chip set.
Mac Pro’s exterior was cooked up for a 64-bit PowerPC, renowned for being fast as hell and twice as hot. Apple stripped the enclosure to bare walls, added three giant fans, and then turned its engineers loose on the ample real estate.
Mac Pro is port city front and back, with five USB, four FireWire (including two 800Mbps), two digital audio, three analog audio, and two Gigabit Ethernet connections. Inside, the system has four full-length PCI Express slots.
As for storage, the deal maker is a four-bay strip of zero-cabling, serial ATA hard drive trays. With 750GB drives, Mac Pro holds a stunning 3TB of storage.
Mac Pro uses 667MHz fully buffered DIMM memory, as is standard with Woodcrest systems. But instead of fixing DIMM sockets to the motherboard, Apple placed the sockets and supporting circuitry on removable riser cards, which are extremely easy to install and remove.
Tricked out with the highest-end graphics card, four hard drives, and 4GB of RAM, Mac Pro idles at about 220 watts. In sleep, that falls to about 7 watts. It takes Mac Pro only four seconds to wake, not much longer than it takes Windows to recover from suspend.
On everyday CPU benchmarks, any Woodcrest box can run as fast as a Mac Pro. But CPU power isn’t all there is to performance. With a three-drive RAID 0 stripe set on Mac Pro, the performance boost is phenomenal. Plus, OS X has several mechanisms for safe backups without parity or mirroring overhead.
As with all Macs, when Mac Pro is running flat out with a maximum compute load, it will maintain top CPU clock speed and voltage beyond what other vendors consider to be the thermal danger zone. But the system is designed for it.
Another unique performance edge stems from OS X’s use of the GPU (graphics processing unit). Mac software can take advantage of the GPU with no extra effort; the precision math libraries that come with Apple’s free development tools natively support whatever GPU is in the system.
With Mac Pro, Apple has done what it always does: design as though there is no competition, treat chipmakers as suppliers rather than keepers of the gospels, and let customers boss the company around. Mac Pro is engineered to satisfy workstation and power users who never expected to be spoiled by a $2,499 computer. And yes, Virginia, it will run Windows. (For a complete review of Mac Pro, click here.)
| Test Center Scorecard | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |  |  |  |  |  |  | |
| 30% | 20% | 15% | 15% | 10% | 10% | ||
| Apple Mac Pro | 10 | 7 | 9 | 10 | 8 | 8 |
8.9
Very Good
|
Tom Yager writes InfoWorld's Mobile Edge blog.
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