Bitcoin Forum

For those watching the WWDC keynote... the new Mac Pro has dual GPUs. (I forget the rest of the details, but they highlighted OpenCL support.) How suitable do you suppose this would be for desktop mining?

Let's wait and see.
It will not be available for a while

I'm sure will not be worth the price tag, plus firepros have always been quite weak for mining, don't know why particularly.

That's a pretty decent assumption, but maybe for users who want a Mac Pro for other reasons, it could also double as a high-performance (and possibly quite power-efficient) mining machine.

GPU mining is over, though.  With all the ASIC's coming out, it'll be more or less useless.

Depends to what level, if the thing does say 1000MH/s it's not bad as long as your not paying for electricity, if you were at a company that has a few of them it's even better, OS X I've found is very easy to run a miner on and find it to be stable.

>>>1000MH/s it's not bad as long as your not paying for electricity<<<

Or if you're paying to heat your place electrically, and then only in the winter.

All those watts being turned into BTUs may slightly lower your heating bill but they'll be costly during AC season.

hmm, looks like an ashtray from here:

http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/

Anyway, bitcoin mining with an Apple is a little like coal mining in $500 designer jeans.  Sure you can, but you'll come off looking like an idiot.

There is no way in hell it would ever reach that kind of performance...

It is stated these will feature nVidia graphics, which are not known for good hashing performance anyway even with CUDA.

Mac is probably one of the worst things you could use for mining purposes. At current difficulties you need dedicated rigs to even make it worth your while.

By the time these come out, even if they hit the 1 GH/s you assume they might, you'll only get about 0.01 BTC a day from them at best. And that will continue to drop as difficulty increases. That's only about a dollar a day. Definitely not worth it.

LOLWUT ?! Dude, the new Mac Pros are going to ship with Dual AMD Firepro W9000's. Combined hashing capability of 1GHs is not an unreasonable estimation.

lol from what I hear, Mac Pros have horrible cooling.

Don't burn your GPU out :P

Where did you hear nVidia?  It's shipping with AMD GPU's... says so right on Apple.com

If you already were going to buy one then go ahead but it won't make much more then $100 a month after next difficulty change and even less after that.  And that is with two top GPU's which are probably not standard.

As far as computing (not hashing) performance per cubic inch it will be a top performer. Looks nice but much depends on the price.  I personally would not buy as space and looks are not important to me, I could build a nice hackintosh rig of the same power for less.

I realized I read the wrong thing, they will have AMD at the core.

Though still, this machine is not a mining machine no matter how bad you want it to be. You can certainly mine coin with it, but compared to a proper GPU rig, FPGA, or ASIC, good luck.

Do you guys know that it will have normal GPU?
Once we know what GPU it have then we will be able to answer to you.

In the end this is really the point.

Mac, PC, whatever platform does not matter in the slightest, it is all about what the GPUs can actually do. It is stated the new Mac Pro will have AMD FirePro GPUs. I was unable to find anything out there as to what their hashrate potential is. I imagine as these are very expensive workstation graphics cards not a lot of people have even attempted to hash with them, let alone post the results somewhere.

Oh I completely agree.

It seems like the new Mac Pro will have 2x Firepro w9000s, which is the workstation version of the 7970. 

I will be amazed if the new Mac Pro's cooling system can keep two w9000s cool while hashing.

It will.  Not sure at what MHz the cores can go to but I am sure they will be able to push 300w to 400w of heat out of the unit.

Absolutely 100% a stupid design, put together by someone who has no experience in the real mac pro world.

I.E video & audio........

The pro was the ONLY Apple computer that allowed 3rd party PCI cards to be added, Now Sir I live in a lab environment hand job has destroyed it and the market share it held.

Now you have to 'buy' and expansion chassis, and route all the PCI traffic over some shitty bandwidth limited cable.

WTF are you supposed to do with TWO Network ports  as regards aggregation, or do they expect you to buy an expansion chassis so you can add a 3rd network port, so you can aggregate the other 2 for NAS?

Like all shitty designs it puts the vent on the BOTTOM so that it can act as a hoover for all the cat pubes, flotsam& jetsum on the floor, at least the existing metal case cheese grater traps the crap on the front where it can be wiped off.


Time to buy a 'new' old mac pro cheap, before this crap hits the market.

Let's bring some sanity to this. Anyone who thinks that dual firepro in a $3.000+ machine is ever going to pay for itself mining needs their head checked. Period.

+ 4000.

This is officially the silliest thread on this entire forum and that's saying a lot.

 The thing that irks me most is the lack of internal drive bays :( Not happy about going to need to set up external drive chassis now. Really miss the extra drive bays in this design. My current one is stacked with 4 drives
 
 1 boot + applications volume, 1 source assets volume, 1 projects volume, 1 additional applications and data volume. Don't like the fact I'm now going to need to have 3 of those 4 drives external. Use the RAID as archival and Time Machine backups as well as media server for video material.

 On the network front, it's not so bad as long as you have an 802.11ad capable switch. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004OA721C/ (Cisco 8PORT Sg 200-08 SLM2008T-NA Gigabit Smart Switch) is what I use in my studio to link a few machines together and can't really complain about the speed.

I think it's more of, "Oh hey, I'm going to buy this mac pro anyway, I wonder if it'll make me a little money on the side by mining".

Maybe Apple will sell a matching external drive bay that you hook over over Thunderbolt.  And maybe it will look like C-3PO :P

I personally liked the design its different. 

That being said... most functional no.   Will you ever possible have roi..... no. 

One thing Apple does is embrace change.  A 2013 Mac Pro user will have Thunderbolt drives and not need PCI devices.  Thunderbolt is faster then hard drives so it is not as important that it is not as fast as PCI-E.  Certainly a small subset of Mac Pro users will be disappointed, but not the majority of the market.  There will probably be more users who this is exactly what they need.  I could be wrong but expect the base price of this machine to be LOWER then the old machine.  I am guessing they will have a single entry level GPU option as well as single and double FirePro options in the 4096 core 3GB per card versions.  If this machines  base price is more then $2500 it will be a dud.   

It will be another Cube boondoggle.

Honestly, I was a diehard Mac fan for a long time, but they lost me when they went with the all-in-one designs for the iMacs and the super-expensive Mac pro.

They simply do not have a product for the average power-user who is not a "pro" level video editor, graphic designer jockey. Nothing against those people, but I like to tinker with my machines.

The all-in-one's are basically closed machines, while the pro machine is way too expensive.

Now, they have alienated the power creative users who absolutely HAVE to stick cards into their computers to handle serious audio (96khz sample rates), real time video editing, and possibly others as well.

First they killed off the Xserve, and now they're killing off the big chassis towers. I don't use their stinking phones either. Way overpriced junk.

On the apple website it said between two GPUs there will be 4096 Stream Processors.  So we can expect 1.2mh/s out of this thing.

Not true. Using an RME Fireface UFX plugged into the USB port of my Mac Pro pumping out audio @ 192kHz/24bit

Is there latency involved with using USB though?

 I can live with ~6ms of latency.

https://i.imgur.com/VRCz6o7.png