Understanding Workstations

Well, maybe I should put it in the negative: not undertanding workstations...

I read Marco Arment's analysis of the new Mac Pro CPU options with some interest -- not as a potential customer, but as a (Dell) workstation user myself at work -- and I have to admit that I don't really understand where Mac workstation users fit in the range of Intel-based configurations. By and large, workstations deliver three things (in some combination or other, depending on the configuration):

• CPU horsepower (e.g., dual 3.3GHz 8-Core Xeons)
• Memory (up to 192GB RAM on dual-socket machines)
• I/O (in the form of PCI Express lanes or storage bays)

The Dell T7600 I have at work is insanely good at the first two and surprisingly mediocre at I/O (it has PCI Express slots aplenty, but the usable drive bays are tied up with a wonky RAID controller). However, if you look at the new Mac Pro, it is pretty much the reverse: it tops out at a single socket (and not even the very fastest practical CPU option, at that) and just four memory sockets (for a total of 64GB), but the practical ability to expand storage at full speed via the gaggle of Thunderbolt ports on the back of the machine is pretty sweet. No, it isn't as cheap and easy as dropping in bare drives inside the box, but this is a practical solution.

I can understand some of the technical compromises Apple made with the new Mac Pro -- the T7600 at full tilt is like a space heater: hot and loud. On the other hand, seeing the 16 cores (32, if you count hyper-threading) in the top configuration hard at work is a thing of beauty. It is really, I mean, really fast! The Mac Pro would fall far short for the kinds of colossal models the high-end T7600 configuration is intended for in my work world. But, in the real world... Is it? If Apple did their homework, as they tend to do, they built a very different kind of machine that presumably meets the needs of real people. So, does this mean that workstations, at least in the Mac community, are all about GPU and I/O performance?

That's not to say that the new Mac Pro doesn't fit logically in the progression of machines in the Mac lineup: it allows 2 to 3 times more CPU, memory and I/O than the next machine down (the 27" iMac) and you couldn't get to these numbers with the consumer "desktop Mac" people have been asking for all these years. It makes sense in the lineup, but it seems unusually limited at the top end in comparison with other PC workstations. I really am curious...