MAC PRO: SEYMOUR CRAY WOULD HAVE APPROVED
As Macintosh turns 30, here is an unscientific comparison between the 128K Mac and its polished descendant, the Mac Pro. By Jean-Louis Gassée
The original 128K Mac was 13.6” high, 9.6” wide, 10.9” deep (35.4 x 24.4 x 26.4 cm) and 16.5 lb (7.5 kg).
Today’s Mac Pro is 9.9″ by 6.6″ (25 by 17 cm) and weighs 11 lb (5 kg) — smaller, shorter, and lighter than its ancient progenitor. Open your hand and stretch your fingers wide: The distance from the tip of your pinky to the tip of your thumb is in the 9 to 10 inches range (for most males). This gives you an idea of how astonishingly small the Mac Pro is. At 7 teraflops, the new Pro’s performance specs are impressive…but what’s even more impressive is how all that computing power is stuffed into such a small package without everything melting down. Look inside the new Mac Pro and you’ll find a Xeon processor, twin AMD FirePro graphics engines, main memory, a solid-state “drive”, driven by 450W of maximum electric power… and all cooled by a single fan. The previous Mac Pro version, at only 2 teraflops, needed eight blowers to keep its GPU happy. The Mac Pro achieves a level of “computing energy density” that Seymour Cray — the master of finding ways to cool high-performance, tightly packaged systems, and a Mac user himself — would have approved of. (I’ve long been an admirer of
Seymour Cray, ever since the introduction of his company’s first commercial supercomputer, the CDC
6600. In the early nineties, I was a Board member and investor at Cray Inc. My memories of Seymour would fill an entire Monday Note. If you’re familiar with the name but not the supercomputer genius himself, I can recommend the Wikipedia article; it’s quite well-written.) During Cray’s era of supercomputing — the 1960’s to early 90’s — processors were discrete, built from separate components. All of these building blocks had to be kept as close to each other as possible in order to stay in sync, to stay within the same “time horizon”. (Grace Hopper’s famous “one nanosecond equals a foot of wire” illustration comes to mind.) However, the faster the electronic module is, the more heat it generates, and when components are packed tightly together, it becomes increasingly difficult to pump out enough heat to avoid a meltdown. That’s where Cray’s genius expressed itself. Not only could he plot impossibly tight circuit paths to guarantee the same propagation time for all logic signals, he designed these paths in ways that allowed adequate cooling. He sometimes referred to himself, halfseriously, as a good plumber. (Seymour once told me he could fold a suit, change of shirt, and underwear in his small Delsey briefcase, and thus speed through airports on the way to a fund raising meeting while his investment bankers struggled with their unwieldy Hartmann garment bags…) I finally met Seymour in December 1985 while I was head of Apple’s Product Development. The Mac Plus project was essentially done and the Mac II and Mac SE projects were also on their way (they would launch in
1987). Having catered to the most urgent tasks, we were looking at a more distant horizon, at ways to leap ahead of everyone else in the personal computer field. We concluded we had to design our own
CPU chip, a quad-processor (today we’d call it a “four-core chip”). To do this, we needed a computer that could run the design and simulation software for such an ambitious project, a computer of commensurate capabilities, hence our choice of a Cray X/MP, and the visit to Seymour Cray. For the design of the chip, the plan was to work with AT&T Microelectronics — not the AT&T we know now, but the home of Bell Labs, the birthplace of the transistor, Unix, the C language, cellular telephony and many other inventions. Our decision to create our own CPU wasn’t universally well-received. The harshest critics cast Apple as a “toy company” that had no business designing its own CPU chip. Others understood the idea but felt we vastly underestimated the technical challenges. Unfortunately, they

turned out to be right. AT&T Microelectronics ultimately bailed out of the microprocessor business altogether. (Given this history, I couldn’t help be amused when critics scoffed at Apple’s decision to acquire P.A. Semiconductor in 2008 and, once again, attempt to design its own microprocessors. Even if the chip could be built, Apple could never compete against the well-established experts in the field… and it would cost Apple a billion dollars, either way. The number was widely off the mark – and knowing
Apple’s financials wouldn’t matter anyway. We know what happened: The 64-bit A7 device took the industry by surprise.) Thirty years after the introduction of the original Mac, the Mac Pro is both different and consistent. It’s not a machine for everyone: If you mostly just use ordinary office productivity apps, an iMac will provide more bang for less buck (which means that, sadly, I don’t qualify as a Mac Pro user). But like the 128K Mac, the Mac Pro is dedicated to our creative side; it serves the folks who produce audio and video content, who run graphics-intensive simulations. As Steve put it so well, the Mac Pro is at the crossroad of technology and liberal arts: Still, thirty years later, I find the Mac,
Pro or “normal” every bit as seductive, promising – and occasionally frustrating – as its now enshrined progenitor. As a finishing touch, the Mac Pro, like its ancestor, is designed and assembled in the US. –
JLG@mondaynote.com Postscript. At the risk of spoiling the fun in the impressive Making the all-new
Mac Pro video, I wonder about the contrast between the powerful manufacturing operation depicted in the video and the delivery constipation. When I ordered my iMac early October 2013, I was promised delivery in 5-7 business days, a strange echo of of the December 2012 quarter iMac shipments shortfall.
The machine arrived five weeks later without explanation or updated forecast. Let’s hope this was due to higher than expected demand, and that Apple’s claim that Mac Pro orders will ship “in March” won’t leave media pros wanting.