The first thing that jumped out at me when unpacking the Mac Pro was its weight – at nearly 40 pounds, it’s a monster. Priced out on Apple’s website, this configuration goes for an eye-popping $31,199 ($10,800 of that is for the GPUs alone). One of these days I need to write about the fun work I did with Richard on vectorization and numerical methods, but today we’re going to talk about the new Mac Pro.Īpple was kind enough to lend me a 28-core Mac Pro, decked out with a 2.5GHz Intel Xeon W (turbo boost to 4.4GHz) having a single 38.5MB 元 cache, 1MB L2 cache per core, 384GB of 2933MHz DDR4 ECC memory, a 4TB SSD, and two AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo 2x32GB graphics cards (each with two GPUs, for a total of four GPUs). Sadly, Richard isn’t around to see it, but I am sure it would have pleased him immensely. Just over 20 years later, the new Mac Pro has achieved a similarly impressive feat, bringing teraflop CPU performance to a desktop Mac. Back then, scientists and engineers usually had to buy supercomputer time (at about $1000/hour) to get gigaflop performance, so having it on a desktop computer was a big deal. They were introducing the Power Mac G4 that day, and the notable breakthrough was that it brought gigaflop CPU performance to a desktop computer for the first time. Those were the words of the late Richard Crandall, former head of Apple’s Advanced Computation Group, on Augwhen he was on stage with Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller at Seybold San Francisco. “In closing, I would like to say that, as far as students and teachers, scientists and engineers, everyone having this supercomputer power, desktop power – I’ve been waiting a lifetime for this, or maybe two lifetimes.”

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