Like many others, I have been waiting for an update to the Mac Pro for a while. Yesterday Apple finally announced a refresh of the Mac Pro line based on Intel Westmere processors. ( Apple Mac Pro Tech Specs
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I am surprised to see Apple will not be offering any Mac Pro configurations shipping with NVIDIA GPUs. Actually, the same can be said for the new iMacs too.
Can anyone suggest why the drop of NVIDIA?
Would I be able to install an additional NVIDIA GPU?
More specifically, I would like to install a TESLA card to a new Mac Pro. I understand this was not possible on the last Mac Pro probably due to an EFI firmware limitation. Could Apple have addressed this with the latest refresh? Or is this something that NVIDIA would need to address with drivers?
I’d like to be able to wait a while for this all to be sorted out, but I have to spend budgeted money that goes away at the end of August.
Yes I was quite surprise by this decision too :( Not sure about the relationship between Apple and Nvidia (who knows anyways, except the people at Nvidia and Apple). I’ve noticed that the CUDA SDK on the Mac lacks of cuda-gdb so I had to debug my programs on Linux. When it comes to GPU development I would just use an ordinary x64 box with Linux (or maybe Windows, haven’t tried CUDA on it) since it seems that CUDA on the Mac is not getting the same attention as on other platforms.
I can imagine that Apple wants to push Open CL and is not interested in a solution like CUDA, maybe at the time when Open CL takes off GPU development on a Mac will be fun again…
Yes I was quite surprise by this decision too :( Not sure about the relationship between Apple and Nvidia (who knows anyways, except the people at Nvidia and Apple). I’ve noticed that the CUDA SDK on the Mac lacks of cuda-gdb so I had to debug my programs on Linux. When it comes to GPU development I would just use an ordinary x64 box with Linux (or maybe Windows, haven’t tried CUDA on it) since it seems that CUDA on the Mac is not getting the same attention as on other platforms.
I can imagine that Apple wants to push Open CL and is not interested in a solution like CUDA, maybe at the time when Open CL takes off GPU development on a Mac will be fun again…
Don’t panic guys! There’s still the GTX 285 for Mac and it is an excellent GPU.
I’m sure we will see GTX 460/*** for Mac sometime.
Actually, I wouldn’t want to put in a 480 even if there was one available.
Now, considering OpenCL is an open standard, I find it hard not to use it (instead of CUDA).
Don’t panic guys! There’s still the GTX 285 for Mac and it is an excellent GPU.
I’m sure we will see GTX 460/*** for Mac sometime.
Actually, I wouldn’t want to put in a 480 even if there was one available.
Now, considering OpenCL is an open standard, I find it hard not to use it (instead of CUDA).