The Apple iMac Pro is truly the first of its kind thanks to its T2 chip
Years from now there is a good chance we will remember the Apple iMac Pro very differently from the 2013 Mac Pro.
The Mac Pro, though powerful beyond any Mac of its generation, was hardly unique, in a time when professional graphics workstations were already in their twilight. For the power-hungry PC user, whether it’d be gamers or creative professionals, building a customized workstation from scratch was cost effective, and in many ways the only option to get a truly powerful PC, especially when most apps and games were more likely available to Microsoft Windows users than to Mac enthusiasts.
Coming a long way
True, the Apple iMac was also a viable option, for photographers and designers who use Photoshop and Illustrator the most, but for those in need of a powerful rig for 3D animation and particularly intensive and unique video editing and large format printing design tasks, contemporary iMac models to the Mac Pro with top specs, still were limited.
Fast-forward to March 2016, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey had no kind words to spare for the Mac with regard to another area of neglect, which is the emerging market of VR headsets: “We'll make Oculus for Mac when Apple release a good computer”, he commented, when asked about a possible timetable for the Oculus Rift to eventually support Mac computers. That incident raised questions on whether Apple would ever get back to catering to the high-performance workstation crowd.
Not nearly a year later, Apple released the iMac Pro, blowing away any speculation of catering to casual consumers and business/productivity customers exclusively.
This new iMac may look like the iMac we know, but it’s truly leaps and bounds beyond it, as the G3 was to the Apple Lisa, making any previous iMac, and even the Mac Pro, look like toys in comparison.
This is not the iMac you know
For starters, the iMac Pro’s base price, $4999, is a big clue of the staggering difference between it and the older iMac models.
The iMac Pro comes standard with a 27-inch 5K display, not unlike the 27-inch 5K iMac that preceded it, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. The processor powering the new iMac Pro is an 8-Core 3.2GHz Intel Xeon W with Turbo Boost up to 4.2GHz.
This already powerful CPU can be upgraded with an 18-Core 2.3GHz, that can be boosted to 4.3GHz, and which comes with a 42.75MB cache.
VR ready? You bet.
The base graphics processor that comes with the iMac Pro is a 8GB HBM2 Radeon Pro Vega 56, capable of 8 single-precision Teraflops, or 18 half-precision Teraflops, reminiscent of many comparable Nvidia gaming GPUs.
This graphic processor can be upgraded to a Vega 64, which comes with 16GB of HBM2 memory, and capable of 11 single-precision Teraflops, and 22 half-precision Teraflops.
These types of GPU are not unlike those used for intensive tasks such as scientific calculations, and mining cryptocurrency, as well as graphically intensive VR applications.
More RAM than you can shake a module at
To the average consumer, RAM is relatively unimportant, past a certain point. The most any normal user would require is in the range of 8GB to 16GB. When using graphic applications for photo-retouching or design, like Photoshop or Illustrator, 32GB is recommended, but any more than that is rarely required beyond non-industrial applications.
With that said, graphic professionals who work in the large format printing industry can frequently find themselves running out of memory, when working on images that encompass several hundred feet of artwork, for instance to cover the side of a building, or when designing a particularly intricate graphics for a very large and complex vehicle, such as a custom utility box truck, or a private jet airplane.
This is where Apple truly shines with the iMac Pro. The base model comes with 32GB, which can be upgraded to an unheard-of 128GB of RAM.
If we were to build a custom PC from scratch, with similar specs, it would be extremely difficult to find a motherboard that supports anything past 32GB, 64GB at the most, simply because hardware manufacturers catering to PC builders have never thought this could be a market to exploit. Oddly enough, there are plenty of sectors that could benefit from such staggering amount of RAM.
The spinning drive is dead
Most older iMacs on the pricier side, come equipped with a “Fusion Drive”, which is also somewhat popular with MacBooks. This type of drive is a hybrid between a Flash drive and a spinning drive, which works dynamically with the Mac OS operating system, by moving files between the spinning drive and the SSD, depending on what application needs more speed and performance.
Needless to say, this clunky practice is on its way out, as Apple is embracing SSDs all the way, by incorporating a 1TB SSD drive in its base model, upgradable to 4TB.
What about that T2 chip?
The one major difference that sets the iMac Pro apart from anything else made by Apple, is the T2 chip, which is an Apple-proprietary processor, not unlike the T1 chip found on the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, except that it’s far more powerful. All that power comes with responsibility, and the T2 has plenty of work to do, which is another reason why the iMac Pro is considerably faster and more stable than previous Macs.
The T2 runs all the subsystems of the iMac Pro, including the cooling system, audio, system management, disk drives, internal microphones, and the FaceTime camera, among other things, all by itself.
Another nice thing about the T2, is that as it handles the hard drives, it automatically encrypts every piece of data that comes in, which would make it impossible for anyone to read the data off the solid-state NAND chips, without authorization from the owner of the iMac. All of this happens also at full speed, which is approximately 3GB per second.
Over the past few years, attempt at infecting Apple Macs with ransomware similar to that which has plagued Windows PCs, have yielded foresight in Apple engineers, to fit the new iMac Pro with what Apple calls “root of trust”. When the iMac starts up, the T2 performs a full range of security checks, to verify the bootloader’s signature, as it moves on with the next stages of the booting process.
Different levels of security can be defined in the Startup Security app, available in recovery mode, which puts the T2 in charge of handling different security settings when using the iMac Pro.
The default setting is set to Full, which allows to run only the current version of Mac OS. Those who want to install older versions of Mac OS, or even Windows 10, can do so by lowering the security settings, in a similar way as they would through the BIOS application of a Windows PC.
When using Bootcamp, however, security settings can remain set to Full, even when installing Microsoft Windows 10 Fall Creators Update.
Ready to shop?
Looking for the most powerful desktop created by Apple? PortableOne is where you can buy the All-New Apple iMac Pro a production powerhouse for high-end creative professionals, with endless possibilities, and unprecedented specs.