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As Mac Pro stagnates, PC workstations muscle ahead

Aurich Lawson writing for Arstechnica.com:

Like many Mac-based creative professionals, I followed this year's WWDC keynote anxiously, awaiting the "one more thing" that never came: an E5 Xeon refresh of the Mac Pro line. Its absence was brutally disappointing; thankfully, Tim Cook broke his vow of secrecy to reassure us that a new Mac Pro will arrive in 2013. But for filmmakers compressing hours of 4K footage or school labs in need of new Maya machines, that’s a long time to wait—perhaps too long. Since I was also in the market for a machine to help out with my V-Ray renders, I decided that the time had come to evaluate my alternatives. The current Westmere-based Mac Pro line is definitely out of sync with what’s available elsewhere, and it is no longer competitive from a price-to-power standpoint.

For compers the idea of GPU based blurs is great. The next major release of Nuke should have this. A 2010 MacPro isn't up to the task. The Linux box sitting across the room is. It's looking mighty fine.