Edit: Decided to add something to this. There are many valid uses that start to become strained easier than you'd think on lighter hardware, and thunderbolt as it is today can't really fill those voids no matter how much you kick and scream about it. You can hook up a couple displays, storage, backup storage (or keep primary storage internal if speed is less of an issue), faster gpus (not talking about gaming benchmarks either), and whatever else. One of my problems with thunderbolt right now is the desire to push everything onto a single port per computer then say to daisy chain when it hasn't ben proven effective in such setups. The clustering idea doesn't actually work. I've noted on macrumors a few people use imacs for after effects work. The common complaint is that they get blazingly hot. Being within a few degrees of throttling or shutdown isn't really a good idea if it's going to run for hours. The problem is that lately that's what you get with Apple. They don't really design it with these uses in mind. You could play games over a macbook pro, but those fans will max out the entire time. Essentially they're not designed to be run at their full potential for longer periods of time. This is mostly hypothetical, but Apple's solutions break whenever your usage patterns don't line up with their design goals.
By the way, you can't actually use anything beyond 96GB of ram in OSX. It's an OS limitation.
Somewhere down the page they reference a 16 core workstation. They've also mentioned rendering smaller projects on a single workstation in a couple of their videos.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
In the short term, this matters. In the long term, it doesn't. I go back to this often but 10 years ago, I would have said the same thing to you. Today I have a phone that's more powerful than the machine I would have said couldn't be replaced. So now, I'm saying in less than 10 years time, none of this will matter.
That doesn't mean the Mac Pro can be discontinued tomorrow without casualties. What it means is that it's going away very soon and Apple could do it tomorrow with little to no meaningful consequence.
The group of Mac Pro users is not exclusively professional. There are professional digital painters, professional graphic designers, professional developers, professional barristers, professional architects, professional doctors and so on who rely on computers just as much as the high-resource users.
The high resource users tend to need more than a Mac Pro. 3D animation needs a render farm, same with certain scientific fields. The Mac Pro holds the middle ground where it's not enough to render movie quality visual effects on its own but offers better performance than consumer machines albeit at great expense.
These same professionals have gotten by with far worse over the years.
We've all seen or read about it. Mini computers will never replace mainframes. Laptops will never replace desktops. Blah blah. Okay you're missing something here about why people dislike seeing the old thing going away. They're often left with another moving target that's designed for a different market segment. You can make it work, but it's not always ideal. The imacs and macbook pros can run close to throttling temperatures when functioning normally when they're fully utilized. They aren't within spec for use exceeding 8 hours a day in such a manner. Basically they're not built for hours of heavy tasks from a design standpoint, although they might tolerate it (I haven't tried). Imacs are much more prone to downtime. You don't have any kind of LUT based system for display matching or hardware level calibration. It uses a glass panel yet there are no treated glass options. The point is if you designed something as a successor aimed at a similar market, it wouldn't be this. You can argue in favor of abandoning them, but not wanting to take on a leveraged solution isn't really the same thing as holding back progress. Beyond that, who cares if you can pick up the computer and take it with you if you're tied to a lot of other larger stationary hardware already. Further editing 4k on one beyond slip edits doesn't sound like fun, although that's not really my area. Creative Cow had a discussion on this a while back, but I can't find it right now.
Now I've noticed some animators that are independent of big shops do render on single workstations. It's probably also true with motion graphics guys. As to having used far worse in the past, that's pretty meaningless as computing has always been a moving target.
Note the increase in render time hours. Computer hardware keeps getting faster, yet it doesn't always outpace requirements. Better hardware means less animation would need to be done via proxy models with lower poly counts, meaning you'd have better feedback. I don't really care what the computer looks like. I care about design priorities. I don't care if they make it 10 mm thinner if this means I lose half the ports. When you're looking at leveraged solutions, you need to remember that the point of focus of these other solutions is also changing. If they were running in place on their target market, it would probably make the transition easier, but overall no one should buy a computer that doesn't suit their needs.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
All I hear from Mac Pro users is 'don't take away my PCI slots, don't take away my desktop GPU, don't take away my giant metal box, I must be able to use my hypothetical 100GB/s PCI cards and my hypothetical SLI capability and my affordable PCI SSD drives and the 128GB of RAM that I totally bought and almost max out'. And yet at the same time saying it's ok to stick an i7 in there as long as it's cheaper.
I still don't think you get this. While those users exist, the point of a machine is to solve problems. Personally I don't care what it looks like. The form factor difference between mini and mac pro means very little to me. The imac has terrible ergonomics and too many flaws to list. If I ever considered one, it would be about price rather than function, which doesn't say much for the machine. It might also be influenced by some of the terrible scaling at times under OSX. I don't know if I ever mentioned that OpenGL has been terrible since Snow Leopard. Anyway getting off track here, but the reason people don't want to see it go most likely has more to do with the lack of a near functionally seamless replacement. Also please don't reference the base eyesore mac pro again. It's a cheap cop out configuration with an inflated price tag.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
- ah but can the Macbook Pro import a 4k film off a Kona capture card while outputting 128 channels of audio over a DSP card from a PCI SSD and running Metro 2033 in the background connected up to 3 monitors. Didn't think so.
The scenarios are going to get more adventurous as time goes on and all it does is create noise. All people are talking about is raw spec and there's a disconnect between that and practical applications.
Would Apple gain from discontinuing the Pro? No, the same volume of users migrate to lower margin hardware or alternatives.
Would Apple gain from a minor update to the Pro? No, desktop sales have no growth and that update isn't compelling.
Would Apple gain from redesigning the Pro? In a small way, yes as they could increase their market volume in higher margin hardware by offering good value.
Whatever they do, the Mac Pro contributes something like 2% of their profits at most. Sure, it's not about the money but what is it about? Their volume isn't high so they aren't making an impact on any community.
I have yet to see it run something like that well along with an appropriate display. You are pretty lacking on ports with a macbook pro if you ignore the stupid television commercials and actually set out to build a setup around a macbook pro. This was my point. They didn't design it for that, so you're going to run into more gotchas that should be addressed on Apple's end. I still think you just like new shiny gadgets. I don't spite you for that. It's just that the science fiction comment supports it.
thunderbolt as it is today can't really fill those voids
Apple is a rug-puller. They pull the rug out so that people are forced to adapt. I'm sure there are some scenarios where Thunderbolt would fall down but not many and manufacturers would be fairly quick to adapt. Thunderbolt just puts a type of PCI on the outside, same as ExpressCard, it's up to manufacturers to do the rest just as they have with standard PCI.
I've noted on macrumors a few people use imacs for after effects work. The common complaint is that they get blazingly hot. Being within a few degrees of throttling or shutdown isn't really a good idea if it's going to run for hours. The problem is that lately that's what you get with Apple. They don't really design it with these uses in mind. You could play games over a macbook pro, but those fans will max out the entire time. Essentially they're not designed to be run at their full potential for longer periods of time. This is mostly hypothetical, but Apple's solutions break whenever your usage patterns don't line up with their design goals.
If you are maxing out your machine for hours at a time, you aren't using it as a workstation. It's clear Apple's movement is towards real-time. Motion and FCPX using the GPU to render and FCPX doing background rendering, both using OpenCL. That's the best way to go.
I'm in no way suggesting large computing resources (servers/workstations) are at present unnecessary, just that Apple doesn't have to accommodate that market. Apple doesn't even use their own servers in their own data centres. If you are a high resource user, you can buy a headless PC for the intensive tasks like video transcoding, rendering and so on and use the Mac for the real-time tasks. The cases where a Mac Pro can perform real-time tasks that the lower models can't are almost non-existant.
Somewhere down the page they reference a 16 core workstation. They've also mentioned rendering smaller projects on a single workstation in a couple of their videos.
"Although we got a powerful render farm here at Taylor James we aim to keep our render times as low as possible. With the flexibility of V-Ray you can easily tweak your render times. Normally we aim for 30 min per frame for an HD frame on a 16-core machine."
If you used a single 16-core machine to render a 30 second TV commercial, it would take:
30 min/frame x 30 frames/second x 30 seconds = 27,000 minutes = 18+ days.
It'll take 10 years before that is feasible using the iterative approach, probably longer if they target higher resolutions. Stills can be done on single machines and obviously more basic animation but these can be done on lower-end hardware too. The smartest way is to have an efficient workflow that allows full creative control and not having your deadline dependent on transistor count.
You can argue in favor of abandoning them, but not wanting to take on a leveraged solution isn't really the same thing as holding back progress.
I wouldn't say I'm entirely in favour of them abandoning them, I agree with your point about providing the right solutions but I absolutely believe they hold back progress. Necessity is the mother of invention and the Mac Pro tries to satisfy needs by offering raw power. It leads people to desperation for incremental performance when the desperation should be for better solutions. Do people really want to keep clinging onto the hope of a 40% speed bump every 2 years? It's slow torture.
What's the alternative you may ask? Just what you said, use the right solutions for the task. Get a render farm for rendering, get custom hardware for tasks that require it.
Better hardware means less animation would need to be done via proxy models with lower poly counts, meaning you'd have better feedback. I don't really care what the computer looks like. I care about design priorities, the point of a machine is to solve problems.
The iMac GPU is very fast so real-time animation doesn't suffer at all. While the iMac CPUs are 1/3 of the 12-core Pro, the GPUs are almost identical in performance.
Apple is a rug-puller. They pull the rug out so that people are forced to adapt. I'm sure there are some scenarios where Thunderbolt would fall down but not many and manufacturers would be fairly quick to adapt. Thunderbolt just puts a type of PCI on the outside, same as ExpressCard, it's up to manufacturers to do the rest just as they have with standard PCI.
If you are maxing out your machine for hours at a time, you aren't using it as a workstation. It's clear Apple's movement is towards real-time. Motion and FCPX using the GPU to render and FCPX doing background rendering, both using OpenCL. That's the best way to go.
There are a lot of smaller places that either set this stuff to run in the background on unused clock cycles or run things that will take a while at night. Motion graphics guys seem to do this, and it works quite well with stills. The same is also most likely true with FCPX as you mentioned. Also keep in mind that that while they use OpenCL, not everything is gpu bound. Regarding thunderbolt, it's not yet a complete solution. This early in the game I'm not even sure of their long term intentions. I know they released a lot of marketing early on to sell more computers. Beyond that I have to wonder where it's going. There are discussions over dongles and adapters and all kinds of ways to use a single port (two on the 27" imac) on a single connection. it's not so much of a catch all when you wish to run everything over the bandwidth of that one chip. Now let's assume Apple and Intel see it as a PCI replacement. They really need to help development there rather than just take the attitude of leaving no other options.
By the way, if the chips are available they can choose to address them. I've said many times that all I care about is an adequate level of functionality and reliability. I don't care very much about computer brand.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
The iMac GPU is very fast so real-time animation doesn't suffer at all. While the iMac CPUs are 1/3 of the 12-core Pro, the GPUs are almost identical in performance.
I like innovative solutions. Despite the interior design that is far superior to PC counterparts, I don't consider the Mac Pro to be one of those.
I can't find the exact comparison right now. It's still a fair margin over the imac. It should be closer to double, but Apple's gpu drivers and OpenGL frameworks are terrible. This is something I hope they address in Mountain Lion. As for PC cases, the past few years, they've been going toward really clean interiors. If you buy a PC workstation, it's not a mess of internal wires even if it's not a case of everything being hidden.
I am curious. What is an example of a good PC workstation that is not a mess internally? The new ones from Dell? Ones from HP? Another brand?
It was already somewhat of a trend, but I think Apple had some influence here over the last generation. This doesn't mean all of the copying rhetoric needs to start again. They didn't copy internal layouts. I just meant they may have accelerated a trend toward tidier workstation interiors.
I was going to list a couple more, but I can't find photos or renders at the moment. I know Boxx updated theirs too. Their old ones had a lot of visible wires, but they were always held together well. What matters really is accessibility. Most of these are probably serviced on site, so that is important. The cliches don't always hold up. On the topic of Apple, I wish they came with more ports. It seems like I end up populating every available port which means the cord management is pretty extensive. Apple likes to make things inflexible. I wouldn't care about form factor given a suitable range of hardware and an array of ports. Thunderbolt annoys me more than most of them due to the way it's couple on display output and data. If they do kill the ODD on the macbook pro like the rumors suggest, it would be nice to see extra ports on the opposite side. I doubt that will happen though.
I am curious. What is an example of a good PC workstation that is not a mess internally? The new ones from Dell? Ones from HP? Another brand?
If you mean that "I see cables" is messy, then I don't have anything, but I've had several workstations over the last 14 years, a Digital 500a, Compaq w8000 and a HP xw8200 that I though were pretty well set up. They're not finished as nicely as a Mac Pro's interior, but I generally didn't have them open for more than an hour a year, making the proposition largely moot in my opinion.
Maybe no one has explained it to you, but you can replace the graphics card in the Mac Pro. It's not even that hard. And, believe it or not, replacing a graphics card is far less expensive than replacing the entire computer.
If you own an Early 2008 Mac Pro (64 bit intel which supports Lion) you have ZERO video card upgrade options that are SUPPORTED. Once you are pumped up on Ram and SSD (3G NOT 6G), the last option is Video Card and then you are screwed.
If you own an Early 2008 Mac Pro (64 bit intel which supports Lion) you have ZERO video card upgrade options that are SUPPORTED. Once you are pumped up on Ram and SSD (3G NOT 6G), the last option is Video Card and then you are screwed.
Does it really have to be 3G? I always thought that the interface is backward compatible, where you can use a SATA III drive on a SATAII port, just that it will run at the speed of the slower port.
As far as video cards, it is a bit tough. Some of the upgrades were only available for a certain time, and no longer available. My current graphics card is an Apple card that isn't technically supported by Apple to work on my first generation Mac Pro, but it works fine. All it really means is they're not giving you any assurance that it will work. But I've used it this way for at least a couple years now with no issues so far.
I always thought that the interface is backward compatible, where you can use a SATA III drive on a SATAII port, just that it will run at the speed of the slower port.
Yep. SATA III works perfectly in a SATA II machine.
[SIZE=4]Speculation about Apples GPU direction. [/SIZE]
High guys, the guys over at Phoronix have an interesting comparison of the new NVidia Keplar card going up against AMDs latest 7950. The AMD card actually does very well up against NVidias latest. More importantly it does so with significantly less power. Notably AMD is doing well with what are considered crappy Linux drivers.
So the question is this, is the latest GTX really the shoe in everybody thinks it is? AMDs power advantage may keep them on Apples hardware, plus OpenCL performance is really good. I'm not convinced Apple is dropping AMD GPUs, that is if they are being objective.
Higher clocked memory (1600)? More memory as standard? SSD+HDD as standard?
Workstations such as the HP Z sell for the same price as the Dual Processor Mac Pro line (around £2800 in the UK) and come with only one CPU (with no second socket, I think) and no graphics card. To really push the MacPro away from the top end iMac and other workstations, I think Dual Processor should be standard. But I'm daydreaming now, aren't I?
The single socket 6 core 3.33 GHz Xeon Mac Pro is a pretty badass machine, although Apple could easily have upgraded it to 3.5 GHz. But I agree that quad core Mac Pros need to go, it's pathetic that you can configure a Mac Pro with considerably less computing power than Apple's all in one display/computer combo.
It is true that Apple will ax the Mac Pro, but it's also true that they won't, since the replacement will still be a Xeon workstation. The "Apple Pro" is a cube workstation reminiscent of the NeXT cube, and it's stackable so distributed computing arrays can easily be configured (known as Apple Galaxy). The main difference is that the Apple Pro will have no hard drive bays, offering instead PCIE SSDs. An external HDD RAID enclosure will be offered that stacks with the Apple Pro cube. Expect a tribute to Steve Jobs on its release, with reflections on the NeXT cube and the role of NeXT in Apple's rise from the dead. The coolest part of the new cube lineup is that it may finally fill the gaping hole in Apple's desktop lineup, as both Xeon and i7 prototype cubes have been reported. If Apple offers an i7 cube below $2000, I will be camping out overnight at the Apple store to buy one!
Apple is a rug-puller. They pull the rug out so that people are forced to adapt. I'm sure there are some scenarios where Thunderbolt would fall down but not many and manufacturers would be fairly quick to adapt. Thunderbolt just puts a type of PCI on the outside, same as ExpressCard, it's up to manufacturers to do the rest just as they have with standard PCI.
Thunderbolt is 2 lanes of PCI Express bandwidth - max.
How does that in any way get close to offering what I have from the TWO full 16 lane PCI express slots I have in addition to the TWO full 8 lane PCI express slots?
Thunderbolt is a cool technology and provide a great alternative to proprietary docking solutions for laptops, but it is NOT a replacement for full PCI express slots.
Which is why any angst over Apple dropping the Mac Pro is completely and utterly idiotic. If you want to bitch about something related to the Mac Pro, rightfully complain about Apple's absolutely sucktatistic and lackluster support for anything remotely resembling a modern video card. Thank god for the crazy hackers at http://netkas.org
But I agree that quad core Mac Pros need to go, it's pathetic that you can configure a Mac Pro with considerably less computing power than Apple's all in one display/computer combo.
eight cores on one socket vs. four cores across two sockets? One memory controller vs. two? With equivalent generation CPUs the Mac Pro will always smoke the iMac.
My complaint with the Mac Pro is by hitching themselves to Intel's multi-socket Xeon server CPUs, they dramatically limit their choices for CPUs. I don't need two sockets, I need to be able to change video cards out. Enough with the BS Apple, release a single socket tower with PCI Express video already!
eight cores on one socket vs. four cores across two sockets? One memory controller vs. two? With equivalent generation CPUs the Mac Pro will always smoke the iMac.
My complaint with the Mac Pro is by hitching themselves to Intel's multi-socket Xeon server CPUs, they dramatically limit their choices for CPUs. I don't need two sockets, I need to be able to change video cards out. Enough with the BS Apple, release a single socket tower with PCI Express video already!
The quad and hex core models are single socket versions. They use a W3530 and a W3680 with a different daughterboard configuration, so you already have this option available. The i7 SKUs of those single package compliant parts cost the same amount at launch time.
The quad and hex core models are single socket versions. They use a W3530 and a W3680 with a different daughterboard configuration, so you already have this option available. The i7 SKUs of those single package compliant parts cost the same amount at launch time.
They have different daughterboard configurations but still use the 40% more expensive Xeon chips and the same corresponding lacklusterly updated motherboard chipsets. They are a sucky economic proposition - your paying for an expensive 2 socket foundation and ending up with the benefits of only one socket! The amount of memory slots is halved mainly because the second memory controller to drive them is absent since it would be in the second physical processor.
If your trying to imply that a single socket i7 configuration would be comparable in raw component parts to the current single socket Mac Pro configurations your either laughably ignorant or deliberately disingenuous...
They have different daughterboard configurations but still use the 40% more expensive Xeon chips and the same corresponding lacklusterly updated motherboard chipsets. They are a sucky economic proposition - your paying for an expensive 2 socket foundation and ending up with the benefits of only one socket! The amount of memory slots is halved mainly because the second memory controller to drive them is absent since it would be in the second physical processor.
If your trying to imply that a single socket i7 configuration would be comparable in raw component parts to the current single socket Mac Pro configurations your either laughably ignorant or deliberately disingenuous...
You necroed the thread without doing your research. The "40% more expensive cpus" are not used in the single package configuration. Those cpus run $300-600 suggested retail. Note that it's a W3680 in the 6 core which still sold for $3800 at the time of my last post here. You accuse me of being ignorant when you're suggesting incorrect parts. They use the daughterboard configuration to save on board costs with the single socket model too. If you look at the 1,1 through 3,1, they sold dual package models in this price range at that time. The price is where they want it to be, so suggesting that they could drop the price by doing X is silly.
Keep in mind prices have changed since launch, but these were always the same price. Your boards would make up some additional cost, but Apple shielded themselves here with the backplane design.
Comments
Edit: Decided to add something to this. There are many valid uses that start to become strained easier than you'd think on lighter hardware, and thunderbolt as it is today can't really fill those voids no matter how much you kick and scream about it. You can hook up a couple displays, storage, backup storage (or keep primary storage internal if speed is less of an issue), faster gpus (not talking about gaming benchmarks either), and whatever else. One of my problems with thunderbolt right now is the desire to push everything onto a single port per computer then say to daisy chain when it hasn't ben proven effective in such setups. The clustering idea doesn't actually work. I've noted on macrumors a few people use imacs for after effects work. The common complaint is that they get blazingly hot. Being within a few degrees of throttling or shutdown isn't really a good idea if it's going to run for hours. The problem is that lately that's what you get with Apple. They don't really design it with these uses in mind. You could play games over a macbook pro, but those fans will max out the entire time. Essentially they're not designed to be run at their full potential for longer periods of time. This is mostly hypothetical, but Apple's solutions break whenever your usage patterns don't line up with their design goals.
By the way, you can't actually use anything beyond 96GB of ram in OSX. It's an OS limitation.
One more link...
http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/envyspot.html?i=15
Somewhere down the page they reference a 16 core workstation. They've also mentioned rendering smaller projects on a single workstation in a couple of their videos.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
In the short term, this matters. In the long term, it doesn't. I go back to this often but 10 years ago, I would have said the same thing to you. Today I have a phone that's more powerful than the machine I would have said couldn't be replaced. So now, I'm saying in less than 10 years time, none of this will matter.
That doesn't mean the Mac Pro can be discontinued tomorrow without casualties. What it means is that it's going away very soon and Apple could do it tomorrow with little to no meaningful consequence.
The group of Mac Pro users is not exclusively professional. There are professional digital painters, professional graphic designers, professional developers, professional barristers, professional architects, professional doctors and so on who rely on computers just as much as the high-resource users.
The high resource users tend to need more than a Mac Pro. 3D animation needs a render farm, same with certain scientific fields. The Mac Pro holds the middle ground where it's not enough to render movie quality visual effects on its own but offers better performance than consumer machines albeit at great expense.
These same professionals have gotten by with far worse over the years.
We've all seen or read about it. Mini computers will never replace mainframes. Laptops will never replace desktops. Blah blah. Okay you're missing something here about why people dislike seeing the old thing going away. They're often left with another moving target that's designed for a different market segment. You can make it work, but it's not always ideal. The imacs and macbook pros can run close to throttling temperatures when functioning normally when they're fully utilized. They aren't within spec for use exceeding 8 hours a day in such a manner. Basically they're not built for hours of heavy tasks from a design standpoint, although they might tolerate it (I haven't tried). Imacs are much more prone to downtime. You don't have any kind of LUT based system for display matching or hardware level calibration. It uses a glass panel yet there are no treated glass options. The point is if you designed something as a successor aimed at a similar market, it wouldn't be this. You can argue in favor of abandoning them, but not wanting to take on a leveraged solution isn't really the same thing as holding back progress. Beyond that, who cares if you can pick up the computer and take it with you if you're tied to a lot of other larger stationary hardware already. Further editing 4k on one beyond slip edits doesn't sound like fun, although that's not really my area. Creative Cow had a discussion on this a while back, but I can't find it right now.
Now I've noticed some animators that are independent of big shops do render on single workstations. It's probably also true with motion graphics guys. As to having used far worse in the past, that's pretty meaningless as computing has always been a moving target.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9653
Note the increase in render time hours. Computer hardware keeps getting faster, yet it doesn't always outpace requirements. Better hardware means less animation would need to be done via proxy models with lower poly counts, meaning you'd have better feedback. I don't really care what the computer looks like. I care about design priorities. I don't care if they make it 10 mm thinner if this means I lose half the ports. When you're looking at leveraged solutions, you need to remember that the point of focus of these other solutions is also changing. If they were running in place on their target market, it would probably make the transition easier, but overall no one should buy a computer that doesn't suit their needs.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
All I hear from Mac Pro users is 'don't take away my PCI slots, don't take away my desktop GPU, don't take away my giant metal box, I must be able to use my hypothetical 100GB/s PCI cards and my hypothetical SLI capability and my affordable PCI SSD drives and the 128GB of RAM that I totally bought and almost max out'. And yet at the same time saying it's ok to stick an i7 in there as long as it's cheaper.
I still don't think you get this. While those users exist, the point of a machine is to solve problems. Personally I don't care what it looks like. The form factor difference between mini and mac pro means very little to me. The imac has terrible ergonomics and too many flaws to list. If I ever considered one, it would be about price rather than function, which doesn't say much for the machine. It might also be influenced by some of the terrible scaling at times under OSX. I don't know if I ever mentioned that OpenGL has been terrible since Snow Leopard. Anyway getting off track here, but the reason people don't want to see it go most likely has more to do with the lack of a near functionally seamless replacement. Also please don't reference the base eyesore mac pro again. It's a cheap cop out configuration with an inflated price tag.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
- ah but can the Macbook Pro import a 4k film off a Kona capture card while outputting 128 channels of audio over a DSP card from a PCI SSD and running Metro 2033 in the background connected up to 3 monitors. Didn't think so.
The scenarios are going to get more adventurous as time goes on and all it does is create noise. All people are talking about is raw spec and there's a disconnect between that and practical applications.
Would Apple gain from discontinuing the Pro? No, the same volume of users migrate to lower margin hardware or alternatives.
Would Apple gain from a minor update to the Pro? No, desktop sales have no growth and that update isn't compelling.
Would Apple gain from redesigning the Pro? In a small way, yes as they could increase their market volume in higher margin hardware by offering good value.
Whatever they do, the Mac Pro contributes something like 2% of their profits at most. Sure, it's not about the money but what is it about? Their volume isn't high so they aren't making an impact on any community.
I have yet to see it run something like that well along with an appropriate display. You are pretty lacking on ports with a macbook pro if you ignore the stupid television commercials and actually set out to build a setup around a macbook pro. This was my point. They didn't design it for that, so you're going to run into more gotchas that should be addressed on Apple's end. I still think you just like new shiny gadgets. I don't spite you for that. It's just that the science fiction comment supports it.
Apple is a rug-puller. They pull the rug out so that people are forced to adapt. I'm sure there are some scenarios where Thunderbolt would fall down but not many and manufacturers would be fairly quick to adapt. Thunderbolt just puts a type of PCI on the outside, same as ExpressCard, it's up to manufacturers to do the rest just as they have with standard PCI.
If you are maxing out your machine for hours at a time, you aren't using it as a workstation. It's clear Apple's movement is towards real-time. Motion and FCPX using the GPU to render and FCPX doing background rendering, both using OpenCL. That's the best way to go.
I'm in no way suggesting large computing resources (servers/workstations) are at present unnecessary, just that Apple doesn't have to accommodate that market. Apple doesn't even use their own servers in their own data centres. If you are a high resource user, you can buy a headless PC for the intensive tasks like video transcoding, rendering and so on and use the Mac for the real-time tasks. The cases where a Mac Pro can perform real-time tasks that the lower models can't are almost non-existant.
"Although we got a powerful render farm here at Taylor James we aim to keep our render times as low as possible. With the flexibility of V-Ray you can easily tweak your render times. Normally we aim for 30 min per frame for an HD frame on a 16-core machine."
If you used a single 16-core machine to render a 30 second TV commercial, it would take:
30 min/frame x 30 frames/second x 30 seconds = 27,000 minutes = 18+ days.
It'll take 10 years before that is feasible using the iterative approach, probably longer if they target higher resolutions. Stills can be done on single machines and obviously more basic animation but these can be done on lower-end hardware too. The smartest way is to have an efficient workflow that allows full creative control and not having your deadline dependent on transistor count.
I wouldn't say I'm entirely in favour of them abandoning them, I agree with your point about providing the right solutions but I absolutely believe they hold back progress. Necessity is the mother of invention and the Mac Pro tries to satisfy needs by offering raw power. It leads people to desperation for incremental performance when the desperation should be for better solutions. Do people really want to keep clinging onto the hope of a 40% speed bump every 2 years? It's slow torture.
What's the alternative you may ask? Just what you said, use the right solutions for the task. Get a render farm for rendering, get custom hardware for tasks that require it.
The iMac GPU is very fast so real-time animation doesn't suffer at all. While the iMac CPUs are 1/3 of the 12-core Pro, the GPUs are almost identical in performance.
I like innovative solutions. Despite the interior design that is far superior to PC counterparts, I don't consider the Mac Pro to be one of those.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
Apple is a rug-puller. They pull the rug out so that people are forced to adapt. I'm sure there are some scenarios where Thunderbolt would fall down but not many and manufacturers would be fairly quick to adapt. Thunderbolt just puts a type of PCI on the outside, same as ExpressCard, it's up to manufacturers to do the rest just as they have with standard PCI.
If you are maxing out your machine for hours at a time, you aren't using it as a workstation. It's clear Apple's movement is towards real-time. Motion and FCPX using the GPU to render and FCPX doing background rendering, both using OpenCL. That's the best way to go.
There are a lot of smaller places that either set this stuff to run in the background on unused clock cycles or run things that will take a while at night. Motion graphics guys seem to do this, and it works quite well with stills. The same is also most likely true with FCPX as you mentioned. Also keep in mind that that while they use OpenCL, not everything is gpu bound. Regarding thunderbolt, it's not yet a complete solution. This early in the game I'm not even sure of their long term intentions. I know they released a lot of marketing early on to sell more computers. Beyond that I have to wonder where it's going. There are discussions over dongles and adapters and all kinds of ways to use a single port (two on the 27" imac) on a single connection. it's not so much of a catch all when you wish to run everything over the bandwidth of that one chip. Now let's assume Apple and Intel see it as a PCI replacement. They really need to help development there rather than just take the attitude of leaving no other options.
By the way, if the chips are available they can choose to address them. I've said many times that all I care about is an adequate level of functionality and reliability. I don't care very much about computer brand.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
The iMac GPU is very fast so real-time animation doesn't suffer at all. While the iMac CPUs are 1/3 of the 12-core Pro, the GPUs are almost identical in performance.
I like innovative solutions. Despite the interior design that is far superior to PC counterparts, I don't consider the Mac Pro to be one of those.
I can't find the exact comparison right now. It's still a fair margin over the imac. It should be closer to double, but Apple's gpu drivers and OpenGL frameworks are terrible. This is something I hope they address in Mountain Lion. As for PC cases, the past few years, they've been going toward really clean interiors. If you buy a PC workstation, it's not a mess of internal wires even if it's not a case of everything being hidden.
I am curious. What is an example of a good PC workstation that is not a mess internally? The new ones from Dell? Ones from HP? Another brand?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Winter
I am curious. What is an example of a good PC workstation that is not a mess internally? The new ones from Dell? Ones from HP? Another brand?
It was already somewhat of a trend, but I think Apple had some influence here over the last generation. This doesn't mean all of the copying rhetoric needs to start again. They didn't copy internal layouts. I just meant they may have accelerated a trend toward tidier workstation interiors.
Z820
Z1
T3600
I was going to list a couple more, but I can't find photos or renders at the moment. I know Boxx updated theirs too. Their old ones had a lot of visible wires, but they were always held together well. What matters really is accessibility. Most of these are probably serviced on site, so that is important. The cliches don't always hold up. On the topic of Apple, I wish they came with more ports. It seems like I end up populating every available port which means the cord management is pretty extensive. Apple likes to make things inflexible. I wouldn't care about form factor given a suitable range of hardware and an array of ports. Thunderbolt annoys me more than most of them due to the way it's couple on display output and data. If they do kill the ODD on the macbook pro like the rumors suggest, it would be nice to see extra ports on the opposite side. I doubt that will happen though.
If you mean that "I see cables" is messy, then I don't have anything, but I've had several workstations over the last 14 years, a Digital 500a, Compaq w8000 and a HP xw8200 that I though were pretty well set up. They're not finished as nicely as a Mac Pro's interior, but I generally didn't have them open for more than an hour a year, making the proposition largely moot in my opinion.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jragosta
Maybe no one has explained it to you, but you can replace the graphics card in the Mac Pro. It's not even that hard. And, believe it or not, replacing a graphics card is far less expensive than replacing the entire computer.
If you own an Early 2008 Mac Pro (64 bit intel which supports Lion) you have ZERO video card upgrade options that are SUPPORTED. Once you are pumped up on Ram and SSD (3G NOT 6G), the last option is Video Card and then you are screwed.
Does it really have to be 3G? I always thought that the interface is backward compatible, where you can use a SATA III drive on a SATAII port, just that it will run at the speed of the slower port.
As far as video cards, it is a bit tough. Some of the upgrades were only available for a certain time, and no longer available. My current graphics card is an Apple card that isn't technically supported by Apple to work on my first generation Mac Pro, but it works fine. All it really means is they're not giving you any assurance that it will work. But I've used it this way for at least a couple years now with no issues so far.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JeffDM
I always thought that the interface is backward compatible, where you can use a SATA III drive on a SATAII port, just that it will run at the speed of the slower port.
Yep. SATA III works perfectly in a SATA II machine.
High guys, the guys over at Phoronix have an interesting comparison of the new NVidia Keplar card going up against AMDs latest 7950. The AMD card actually does very well up against NVidias latest. More importantly it does so with significantly less power. Notably AMD is doing well with what are considered crappy Linux drivers.
So the question is this, is the latest GTX really the shoe in everybody thinks it is? AMDs power advantage may keep them on Apples hardware, plus OpenCL performance is really good. I'm not convinced Apple is dropping AMD GPUs, that is if they are being objective.
Quote:
Originally Posted by benanderson89
Higher clocked memory (1600)? More memory as standard? SSD+HDD as standard?
Workstations such as the HP Z sell for the same price as the Dual Processor Mac Pro line (around £2800 in the UK) and come with only one CPU (with no second socket, I think) and no graphics card. To really push the MacPro away from the top end iMac and other workstations, I think Dual Processor should be standard. But I'm daydreaming now, aren't I?
The single socket 6 core 3.33 GHz Xeon Mac Pro is a pretty badass machine, although Apple could easily have upgraded it to 3.5 GHz. But I agree that quad core Mac Pros need to go, it's pathetic that you can configure a Mac Pro with considerably less computing power than Apple's all in one display/computer combo.
It is true that Apple will ax the Mac Pro, but it's also true that they won't, since the replacement will still be a Xeon workstation. The "Apple Pro" is a cube workstation reminiscent of the NeXT cube, and it's stackable so distributed computing arrays can easily be configured (known as Apple Galaxy). The main difference is that the Apple Pro will have no hard drive bays, offering instead PCIE SSDs. An external HDD RAID enclosure will be offered that stacks with the Apple Pro cube. Expect a tribute to Steve Jobs on its release, with reflections on the NeXT cube and the role of NeXT in Apple's rise from the dead. The coolest part of the new cube lineup is that it may finally fill the gaping hole in Apple's desktop lineup, as both Xeon and i7 prototype cubes have been reported. If Apple offers an i7 cube below $2000, I will be camping out overnight at the Apple store to buy one!
Thunderbolt is 2 lanes of PCI Express bandwidth - max.
How does that in any way get close to offering what I have from the TWO full 16 lane PCI express slots I have in addition to the TWO full 8 lane PCI express slots?
Thunderbolt is a cool technology and provide a great alternative to proprietary docking solutions for laptops, but it is NOT a replacement for full PCI express slots.
Which is why any angst over Apple dropping the Mac Pro is completely and utterly idiotic. If you want to bitch about something related to the Mac Pro, rightfully complain about Apple's absolutely sucktatistic and lackluster support for anything remotely resembling a modern video card. Thank god for the crazy hackers at http://netkas.org
eight cores on one socket vs. four cores across two sockets? One memory controller vs. two? With equivalent generation CPUs the Mac Pro will always smoke the iMac.
My complaint with the Mac Pro is by hitching themselves to Intel's multi-socket Xeon server CPUs, they dramatically limit their choices for CPUs. I don't need two sockets, I need to be able to change video cards out. Enough with the BS Apple, release a single socket tower with PCI Express video already!
Quote:
Originally Posted by DocNo42
eight cores on one socket vs. four cores across two sockets? One memory controller vs. two? With equivalent generation CPUs the Mac Pro will always smoke the iMac.
My complaint with the Mac Pro is by hitching themselves to Intel's multi-socket Xeon server CPUs, they dramatically limit their choices for CPUs. I don't need two sockets, I need to be able to change video cards out. Enough with the BS Apple, release a single socket tower with PCI Express video already!
The quad and hex core models are single socket versions. They use a W3530 and a W3680 with a different daughterboard configuration, so you already have this option available. The i7 SKUs of those single package compliant parts cost the same amount at launch time.
Not sure if this has been posted in this thread yet; but even if it has, it needs to be front and centre.
3 new systems that match the MacPro pricing structure. I call that a win!
EDIT: Seriously? Not letting me link to 9 to 5?
In a nut shell, people: 3 new SKUs.
MD770LL/A – K5BPLUS,BETTER, BTR-USA
MD771LL/A – K5BPLUS,BEST,BTR-USA
MD772LL/A – K5BPLUS,ULTIMATE,BTR-USA
MD770LL/A – K5BPLUS,BETTER, BTR-USA
single fast 8 core?
MD771LL/A – K5BPLUS,BEST,BTR-USA
slower dual 8 core?
MD772LL/A – K5BPLUS,ULTIMATE,BTR-USA
fast dual 8 core?
They have different daughterboard configurations but still use the 40% more expensive Xeon chips and the same corresponding lacklusterly updated motherboard chipsets. They are a sucky economic proposition - your paying for an expensive 2 socket foundation and ending up with the benefits of only one socket! The amount of memory slots is halved mainly because the second memory controller to drive them is absent since it would be in the second physical processor.
If your trying to imply that a single socket i7 configuration would be comparable in raw component parts to the current single socket Mac Pro configurations your either laughably ignorant or deliberately disingenuous...
Quote:
Originally Posted by DocNo42
They have different daughterboard configurations but still use the 40% more expensive Xeon chips and the same corresponding lacklusterly updated motherboard chipsets. They are a sucky economic proposition - your paying for an expensive 2 socket foundation and ending up with the benefits of only one socket! The amount of memory slots is halved mainly because the second memory controller to drive them is absent since it would be in the second physical processor.
If your trying to imply that a single socket i7 configuration would be comparable in raw component parts to the current single socket Mac Pro configurations your either laughably ignorant or deliberately disingenuous...
You necroed the thread without doing your research. The "40% more expensive cpus" are not used in the single package configuration. Those cpus run $300-600 suggested retail. Note that it's a W3680 in the 6 core which still sold for $3800 at the time of my last post here. You accuse me of being ignorant when you're suggesting incorrect parts. They use the daughterboard configuration to save on board costs with the single socket model too. If you look at the 1,1 through 3,1, they sold dual package models in this price range at that time. The price is where they want it to be, so suggesting that they could drop the price by doing X is silly.
Look at http://www.apple.com/macpro/specs.html
Note the cpu number on that page. It's a W3565 in the quad model. They went to that with the recent "update". Apple states it for you right there. Now you know that I'm not lying. Your statement ceased being correct in 2009 when they changed board designs. Here is an i7 version. http://ark.intel.com/products/37151/Intel-Core-i7-960-Processor-(8M-Cache-3_20-GHz-4_80-GTs-Intel-QPI)
Keep in mind prices have changed since launch, but these were always the same price. Your boards would make up some additional cost, but Apple shielded themselves here with the backplane design.