I have not been quiet about my disdain for the new MacPro. Having Thunderbolt instead of PCI is not a solution.
A single PCI slot at 1x is 8 Gbps, while Thunderbolt is 10 Gbps, and Thunderbolt 2 is 20 Gbps. So Thunderbolt 2 is slower than 3x PCI (24 Gbps vs 20 Gbps). Every MacPro since 2009 has had 2 x 4x PCI slots which are 32 Gbps and 2 x 16x which 128 Gbps (or so much faster than even the next gen 50 Gbps Thunderbolt). So Thunderbolt will never be fast enough for a 16x Graphics card!
And my bigger worry is that without PCI expansion why will anyone write drivers for PCI cards for Macs now that there will be no Macs with PCI cards!
I have been thinking my next Mac will be a custom built PC, as NVIDIA and CUDA are important to me and my work, but I want a Mac! So I was hoping to build a Hackintosh, a custom built PC hacked to run Mac software. You can make a Hackintosh more powerful than the new MacPro (not cheaply as Decent 6x Xeons run around $1400 each, so almost $3000 for 2) and have huge amounts of expansion, but without future PCI drivers it won’t last! Maybe drivers will still work, as they will need to write Thunderbolt drivers which should still go through the PCI bus, but who knows. And why will NVIDIA keep writing universal graphics drivers like they have been doing?
So does that mean a PC is in my future? Maybe. Maybe a Mac laptop and a PC for editing and graphics work? That seems expensive! Of course so does giving up a Mac with all the software I have bought over the years.
Honest I just don’t know! No solution seems cheap, or to really fulfill my needs like a new MacPro with expansion like the current MacPro would have been.
If I had unlimited funds I would probably just move to PC and get a Wacom Tablet to replace my iPad. And replace all my software, and maybe a Retina MacPro laptop, or maybe a Razer gaming laptop. I just don’t know!