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Bye-Bye, Steel Rectangle: Apple Goes Form-Follows-Function with New "Thermal Core" Mac Pro Redesign
Yesterday Apple unveiled their ridiculously sexy update to the Mac Pro line. The sleek, 9.9-inch-tall, 6.6-inch-diameter cylinder is unlike any other desktop machine you've seen.
At first blush you might assume they're simply playing with basic geometry, as they did with their famously failed Cube design; but the cylindrical shape was not arbitrarily selected, and is pure form-follows-function. The design process began with re-thinking the internal architecture and deciding that each core--the machine can be kitted out with up to twelve--ought receive equal cooling to improve performance. Says Apple of the resultant "thermal core" design:
Rather than using multiple heat sinks and fans to cool the processor and graphics cards, we built everything around a single piece of extruded aluminum designed to maximize airflow as well as thermal capacity. It works by conducting heat away from the CPU and GPUs and distributing that heat uniformly across the core. That way, if one processor isn't working as hard as the others, the extra thermal capacity can be shared efficiently among them.
The form factor also echoes the shape of the single large fan located in the bottom of the machine. Air gets sucked in, blows upwards through the device, and exhausts from the top. And despite the fan's extra-large size, the blades have been tweaked for silence. "By minimizing air resistance throughout the system, we were able to design a fan with backward-curved impeller blades that runs at fewer revolutions per minute, draws air more efficiently as it spins, and creates considerably less noise," says Apple.
As for a release date, we're left with the vague "later this year."
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But after understood how it works, I accepted his design it's exactly form-fallow-fonction. And this mac is not ridiculous, it's really a "revolution".
(I'm sure, we'll see it in the next star wars movie ;))
Which reminds me of something; it seems to be a trend amongst recent graduates that material knowledge is lacking... unless it is 3D printed.
There are no legitimate advantages to this arrangement except perhaps that it looks like a fancy trash can. Apple blazed the trail of PC design with their all-in-one (AIO) desktops, ultra thin laptops, touchscreen phones, and tablet devices. The rest of the industry is now catching up and starting to offer some innovative competition beating Apple on many grounds. It seems Apple decided to juke the industry with this design, but instead created a joke.
Could be a a central post for all of the cabling with the Mac Pros placed on arms radiating out in a circular array around the central post, then stacked into a tower, maybe staggered to allow for better circulation. Could be awesome.