Apple 2017 year in review: The 'Pro' desktop market is revisited with the iMac Pro, with m...

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  • Reply 41 of 68
    danvmdanvm Posts: 1,400member
    macxpress said:
    VRing said:
    macxpress said:
     If Apple just wanted to pull an HP and just slap a bunch of shit together with a shitty heatsink on it then they could have had a new Mac Pro out before the end of 2017, but obviously Apple isn't going to do that. If that's what makes you happy then by all means go buy the HP. Nearly everything you see on and inside a Mac (or any Apple product for that matter) is custom engineered and built by Apple. Its not as simple as slap a bunch of shit together and call it a day like PC manufacturers do. 
    You should really stop drinking the Kool-Aid.

    HP makes some excellent workstations from the Z2 Mini:



    Up to the Z8:



    All of which will fail prematurely....

    And I'll ask you again, what is your purpose for being here other than to piss all over every single thing Apple does? 
    Do you have a link with specific numbers of hardware failures for HP workstations? 
    VRingwilliamlondon
  • Reply 42 of 68
    danvmdanvm Posts: 1,400member
    VRing said:
    macxpress said:
     If Apple just wanted to pull an HP and just slap a bunch of shit together with a shitty heatsink on it then they could have had a new Mac Pro out before the end of 2017, but obviously Apple isn't going to do that. If that's what makes you happy then by all means go buy the HP. Nearly everything you see on and inside a Mac (or any Apple product for that matter) is custom engineered and built by Apple. Its not as simple as slap a bunch of shit together and call it a day like PC manufacturers do. 
    You should really stop drinking the Kool-Aid.

    HP makes some excellent workstations from the Z2 Mini:



    Up to the Z8:



    Is that supposed to be impressive? The old Mac Pro cheese grater cases were more impressive and they’re over 12 years old. 
    The "cheese grater" Mac Pro's were impressive for their time, and the same can be said of the HP workstations of the time, IIRC the XW8000 series.  But Apple is no more in the mid/high end workstation market, while HP have been doing an excellent job.  As today, there is nothing from Apple that comes close to the Z8.  This system can be configured with 2 Xeon CPU's (56 cores), 1.5TB of RAM (yes, Terabytes. And 3TB for first half of next year), three NVidia P6000 and 48TB of internal storage.  And this system is design to work under stress with all those components installed.  IMO, this is far more impressive than the "cheese grater" Mac Pro. 
    williamlondonavon b7
  • Reply 43 of 68
    danvmdanvm Posts: 1,400member
    tht said:
    Marvin said:

    That report spells out the main issue. The revenue and unit volume there shows the average workstation price to be $1888, which is a lot lower than where Apple's pro desktops start. That average means a significant amount of workstation class devices are being sold below $1888, some of which get used as dedicated servers. HP actually notes 1 million mini workstations (< 3 litres volume, Mac mini/Cube size) are sold per year when they make the claim that their Z2 Mini is the first mini workstation designed for CAD users. Solidworks is Windows-only and has over 2 million users so Apple misses some of this market by not having the software compatibility.

    If we assume half of workstations are premium workstations (>$2k) and Apple gets 1/3 of the market like HP/Dell, they are aiming for a best-case of ~200k units per quarter. Apple used to sell this many in 2004 when the PowerMac started at $1800 and the PowerMac line was 20% of Mac sales. Once the price is near doubled, the unit volume drops more than half. These prices are largely due to Intel. AMD's latest chips currently offer much better value, maybe they will help drive Intel prices down if they gain some traction in servers.
    An ASP of 1800? And a 10% per year are Z2 minis?

    This really begs the question of what workstation is and what components are in them. If half the units are less than $1800, that implies these machines have Core chips, Intel processor graphics and lower end GPU compute cards. Looking at the HP Z4 G4 middle SKU for $2079:

    Z4 G4 Workstation 
    Intel® Xeon® W-2102 Processor (2.9 GHz, 8 MB cache, 4 core) 
    USB Premium Wired Keyboard
    HP Z4 G4 90 465W Chassis 
    USB Wired Mouse 
    Base - 4 x USB 3.0 Type A 
    AMD FirePro™ W2100 (2 GB; 2 DisplayPort 1.2, PCIe) Graphics 
    9.5mm DVD Writer Optical Disc Drive 
    Windows 10 Pro 64 - HP recommends Windows 10 Pro. 
    8 GB (1x8 GB) DDR4-2666 ECC Memory 
    1 TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.5" HDD 
    3/3/3-year warranty

    I only chose this because HP calls it a workstation. Performance wise, it’s nothing to write home about for $2000, but it really factors in HP’s service for it I’m sure. So, what is a user of this machine doing? And there are about half the units at less cost than this, implying even lower specs? What are people doing on these machines, and why is it called a workstation?

    There’s going to be a rather arbitrary feature that would lump a generic PC into a workstation category, like Windows “Pro” OS or corporate service. Just a brief survey of the stock models from Dell and HP and an ASP of $1800 would indicate it’s not performance. And yeah, the upcoming Mac Pro should be a 2 socket, 2 GPU, 512 GB RAM, 10 to 20 TB SSD/Optane machine. 
    The HP z4 is called a workstation for the same reason the iMac Pro is a workstation, because of the components you can have on them are different from every day PC's.  I can configure an iMac 5K with 32GB of RAM, an i7 4.2GHz, and AMD card with 8GB of VRAM and 1TB SSD, but still not a workstation even though is very similar to the entry iMac Pro model.  Workstations are more expandable than standard models, and are design to work under stress for extended period of time.  Plus HP certify their hardware with ISV's like Adobe, Autodesk and Siemens, to mention a few.  Performance is not the only criteria for a device being a workstation. 

    williamlondonVRing
  • Reply 44 of 68
    So far, it seems this article has drawn comments from either professional users or those with cash to burn on systems way beyond what would meet their everyday needs. And I have no issues with either group. You pay for what you need or what you want. 

    However, what about us waiting — and waiting — for an upgrade to the Mac Mini? Despite tantalizing hints from Cook that it is in Apple’s future, ah . . . nothing in 2017! Nothing mentioned in this annual review in AppleInsider. Which future? Next year? 5 years? 10 years? Some may argue that I should just go out and replace my mid-2011 Mini with a more recent iteration: 2014 version? Or just buy an iMac or cheap MacBook Air? As a visual artist, I recently up-purchased into the product line that included an iPhone 8 Plus and an iPad Pro 12.9”. This was expensive for a struggling artist but it works well for me, but I still need a desktop replacement for my aging mid 2011 Mac Mini. When Apple?
    williamlondonwatto_cobra
  • Reply 45 of 68
    macxpressmacxpress Posts: 5,801member
    jmulchino said:
    So far, it seems this article has drawn comments from either professional users or those with cash to burn on systems way beyond what would meet their everyday needs. And I have no issues with either group. You pay for what you need or what you want. 

    However, what about us waiting — and waiting — for an upgrade to the Mac Mini? Despite tantalizing hints from Cook that it is in Apple’s future, ah . . . nothing in 2017! Nothing mentioned in this annual review in AppleInsider. Which future? Next year? 5 years? 10 years? Some may argue that I should just go out and replace my mid-2011 Mini with a more recent iteration: 2014 version? Or just buy an iMac or cheap MacBook Air? As a visual artist, I recently up-purchased into the product line that included an iPhone 8 Plus and an iPad Pro 12.9”. This was expensive for a struggling artist but it works well for me, but I still need a desktop replacement for my aging mid 2011 Mac Mini. When Apple?
    The Mac mini will be released when its ready...and don't expect it to be modular either. I bet even the RAM will be soldered in just like the current version. 

    You could always pick up a nice used Mac too. 
  • Reply 46 of 68

    blastdoor said:
    My take is that Apple basically came out last year in a very courageous and forthright way to say “we goofed, and we are going to fix it.” They basically cut the legs out from under that subset of Apple fans who tie themselves in knots to defend everything Apple does, and who attack every criticism of Apple, even when that criticism is delivered thoughtfully and constructively by people who have been using Apple products professionally for decades. Simultaneously, Apple validated the points being made by many Pro users. 

    I suspect that really sticks in the craw of the types of people who mindlessly defend Apple. They now have to admit Apple was wrong, because Apple has admitted it. And in so doing, they have to admit that they were wrong in their mindless defense of Apple’s past pro screwups. 

    And so this leads me to wonder — is it just me, or is there a really snotty, sour grapes tone to this article? 
    Who are these people, specifically?

    Beautiful straw man you’ve constructed there. Excellent craftsmanship. 
    There was a guy around here, I think perhaps his name was AltiVec, who clearly and thoughtfully expressed his concerns as a longtime professional Apple customer that Apple had stopped meeting his needs and that he was very regretfully having to consider leaving the platform. His sincerity, specificity, and thoughtfulness was met with decisiveness and belittling. Were you one of the haters? I don’t really remember — the hordes of Apple fandom villagers with their pitchforks and torches were all pretty much indistinguishable from one another. 

    But the bottom line is — it turns out Apple actually was listening to the Altivecs of the world, and decided they were right. 
  • Reply 47 of 68
    blastdoorblastdoor Posts: 3,258member
    wizard69 said:
    blastdoor said:
    Regarding “modularity” — Craig talked about modularity in the context of thermal/physical constraints. So I think what they meant is that it will be easier for them — Apple — to upgrade the new Mac Pro on a regular basis without the need to do a total redesign. It will be easier for them to swap out old Xeons for new Xeons, old GPUs for new GPUs. They will give themselves more thermal headroom and physical space inside the case so that they can adapt as technology changes, and perhaps to offer more BTO configurations. 

    If you listen to what they said, instead of projecting your own BS onto it, I think that’s the most reasonable interpretation. 

    In other words, I don’t think they meant “you can attach TB peripherals to it” — that’s what the 2013 Mac Pro was. (Although of course it will support peripherals — I just mean that’s not what they have in mind when they say “modular”) 

    Nor do I think they mean “user-upgradable” in the sense that DIY PCs are user upgradable. It’s not like it will now be easy for users to swap out old Xeons for new. 


    Honestly I think Craig is full of crap!   

    In regards to upgrades for the current  Mac Pro (trashcan) there are plenty of upgrade vectors with respect to GPU's and CPU's that would dramatically increase performance while either lowering the thermals or keeping them the same.   IMac Pro pretty much validates this thought.   Any talk from Apple about thermal capacity is total nonsense in my mind due to the fact that all potential replacement chips actually run cooler.

    As for the Trashcan I never thought of it as a bad design however the delivery to the public was terrible   For one thing you can't expect to be taken seriously if you don't have a storage solution for the platform.   In other words if you don't have a storage solution ,either internal or external you don't have a pro solution and frankly that covers a wide array of what could be called pro users.   The lack of a corresponding display is even more perplexing and makes you wonder what the hell Apple was thinking.   The thing here is that there are a huge number of professionals that just needs a quality display and want the Apple logo on it.   Apple doens't need to offer a studio monitor which frankly is a specialist product, they just need to offer a high quality monitor.   In a nut shell the way the trashcan debuted had more to do with its lack of acceptance than the machine itself.

    AS for upgradability I really think that many of the people demanding such are living way way in the past.   Certainly we need Apple to avoid some of the stupid things it has been doing for the last couple of years with strange SSD ports and other proprietary nonsense.   The reality is that parts for high performance machines will get smaller and more tightly packed, the reason is simple, it is the time of flight of electrical signals that require parts to be close together to increase performance.   This is why high performance GPU's have RAM being integrated into the GPU chip housing and why Intel has high speed RAM integrated into some of their APU style chips.    In a nut shell it will get harder and harder to do some of the simple upgrades that people are use too.   And no, for the idiots out there, this isn't Apple or anybody else being a dick.  

    Now this doens't mean that upgradability isn't important it is for some things.    Secondary storage is ALWAYS something it need of upgrading or replacement.   However the forward looking approach here is not to offer spinning rust drive bays but rather to offer industry standard slots for SSD expansion.   Note industry standard here.   Any desktop machine worth a damn will have at least four SSD slots.

    Frankly I see Apple as failing its Mac line up so badly that I went out and bought an HP laptop to replace a stolen MBP.   We are talking a machine that has AMD's latest Ryzen APU that offers plenty of performance in a machine that compares well to anything Apple has and only costs $750.   It has speakers I can actually hear which is a big deal for some of us.   It also has enough ports that it will be able to support some of my interests without a bunch of crap handing off the machine, this is unlike Apples machines which seem to be designed for idiots that don't even know how to use a USB or HDMI port.   Once I have Linux running on the machine not much will be different user wise from the current Apple hardware.    I have need for a desktop in the near future and frankly I'm hoping that Apple gets its crap together in that respect as a Mac does have some advantages for a home PC.   In a nut shell Apple has lost credibility with me as a supplier of computing hardware, at times they just can't seem to grasp that different users have different ways of working.   Can they pull out a few wins to regain some credibility, maybe but it will take considerable innovation and reasonable pricing to do so.
    You make a good point that the components of the 2013 design could have been upgraded while staying within the thermals. That’s just an unambiguously correct statement, so I tip my hat to you on that one. And it’s true that the iMac Pro shows you can put some high power gear in a tight enclosure.

    Yet I don’t think Craig was full of crap, either. The iMac Pro looks like a great machine — I have been very tempted to get one — but it isn’t a Mac Pro. For a true Mac Pro — something that could reasonably be viewed as an upgrade to the old aluminum towers — more power is needed. And I think Craig was right that they did design themselves into a corner with regards such a machine. 

    Instead of saying Craig is full of crap, I guess what I would say is that he’s not telling the whole story. I suspect there is another part of this story that has to do with Phil and the marketing guys. They probably made a mistake in believing that the needs of their longtime core professional Mac users could be met without selling a natural successor to the big aluminum tower. And they are probably right for many, many users. But there is a hard core group of users, perhaps numbering so low as to only support sales of fewer than 100k Mac Pros a year, who really do need the natural successor to the tower. Phil might have underestimated the needs of this group and also the importance of this group. 
  • Reply 48 of 68
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    VRing said:
    Marvin said:

    It would be nice if Apple offered NVidia options but NVidia workstation GPUs are really expensive. They've been neutering compute features in their consumer cards, including Titans so they can push Teslas and Quadros on the high-end. The worthwhile models of those GPUs cost thousands each. Gaming cards like the 1080/ti aren't ideal for workstations. Titans are the only realistic option from NVidia and still ~$1200 each.
    NVIDIA cards are definitely expensive, but not necessarily neutered. Take the new $3000 TITAN V for example. It's not cheap, but it's essentially a Tesla V100. It offers 110 TFLOPS of performance through its tensor cores for deep learning applications. In comparison, the Vega 64 in the iMac Pro can only output ~22 TFLOPS (FP16).
    The 110TFLOPs number isn't the same as FP16. The FP16 performance of the V100 is noted here as 28TFLOPs:

    https://www.anandtech.com/show/11559/nvidia-formally-announces-pcie-tesla-v100-available-later-this-year

    The deep learning performance (Tensor FLOPs) only helps when it's used, there's a test here where it compares the 18TFLOP FP16 Nvidia P100 vs 112TFLOP Tensor V100 and it's 20%-100% difference:

    https://www.xcelerit.com/computing-benchmarks/insights/benchmarks-deep-learning-nvidia-p100-vs-v100-gpu/

    Vega 64 is a very capable GPU for computing and doesn't cost anywhere near $3k.
    tht said:
    An ASP of 1800? And a 10% per year are Z2 minis?

    This really begs the question of what workstation is and what components are in them. If half the units are less than $1800, that implies these machines have Core chips, Intel processor graphics and lower end GPU compute cards. Looking at the HP Z4 G4 middle SKU for $2079:

    I only chose this because HP calls it a workstation. Performance wise, it’s nothing to write home about for $2000, but it really factors in HP’s service for it I’m sure. So, what is a user of this machine doing? And there are about half the units at less cost than this, implying even lower specs? What are people doing on these machines, and why is it called a workstation?

    There’s going to be a rather arbitrary feature that would lump a generic PC into a workstation category, like Windows “Pro” OS or corporate service. Just a brief survey of the stock models from Dell and HP and an ASP of $1800 would indicate it’s not performance.
    The service is one aspect as well as durability of components. Error correcting (ECC) memory is a common feature, including on some GPUs so they can be assured there will be no data corruption. The GPUs sometimes have features for pro apps like anti-aliasing 3D viewports. They certify the hardware against software and workflows so that companies can be assured the machines will work with the software they use, sometimes gaming GPUs will just fail on compute projects:

    https://www.nvidia.co.uk/design-visualization/quadro-desktop-gpus/

    "Optimised, stable drivers with a predictable cadence, ISV certifications with over 100 professional applications and helpful tools for IT management are just some of the benefits of having Quadro in your system."

    The better and more reliable that consumer machines have become and the more that pro software and operating systems are being targeted at a wider audience, the less difference there is but it's much like how online services have business packages and consumer packages.
    If we believe Apple (Federighi) at their word of being thermally limited, it implies the triangular heat sink could only accept about 135 W per side, someone made a very bad bet at GPU perf/Watt at Apple. Apple could have done 8, 10, 14, 18 core Xeon configs a couple of years ago if they wanted, but if the triangular heatsink could only take 135 W per side, they were sunk on the GPU side as GPUs basically skipped the 20/22 nm node and spent 4 years at 28 nm. And they couldn’t redesign the heatsink for a 250 W GPU? Just don’t get it.
    Some of their rhetoric on the design is to pay lip-service to the complainers. When you keep in mind their development schedules, they must have started designing the iMac Pro around 2015, which was just two years after the 2013 Mac Pro so they knew back then that they wouldn't be updating it. The iMac Pro targets the same thermal profile so there's no point in selling both. That's mostly why they got stuck because to justify the Mac Pro at all, it needed to be faster than the iMac Pro or it would be discontinued.

    The demand for a headless Mac is also smaller and when they get returns, it's harder for them to shift so they get stale inventory. An iMac Pro can be resold to iMac customers at a lower price.
    Apple has a significant number, 5% (?), of buyers who want the fastest possible components for whatever they are doing. The iMac Pro is sitting at 500 W, and that won’t be enough. There will be enough customers who will be willing to pay $10k for top line performance, be it YouTubers, video production houses, programmers, engineers, etc. The lesson learned from the 2013 Mac Pro is that you can’t foresee where the components are going to go and how much power they’ll need. That necessarily means having a modular box that is capable of being configured for some future component or daughterboard that might need 500 W by itself, letting them adjust quickly. Integrated machines take time and resources and Apple doesn’t seem to give these Macs much time and effort.
    I don't think it's as much as 5% of buyers for the highest-end. The falloff is pretty fast the higher the price goes. HP is the biggest workstation seller and they make ~$1.8-2b from workstations. If you divide that by $10k units, it's ~200k units per year (it's less than half this when you subtract the lower price units). Apple sells 18-20m Macs per year so it would be less than 1% even if they were the biggest workstation seller in the world and they are far from this.

    This shouldn't be a surprise, the people who use machines like this can afford these machines and are willing to invest so much in them because they are highly paid to do those jobs. The reason they are highly paid is because there's so few people who do those jobs. Employment follows the same rules of supply and demand.

    Catering to high performance users is more a show of respect for that work and wanting it to be done on a Mac system. It's not a highly profitable venture by any stretch of the imagination. I don't think the best way to go is to use off-the-shelf hardware though because that's just the brute-force method. At some point that's all you have left but Apple has shown what they can do with custom ARM hardware. If you look at any high performance activity like Bitcoin mining and Deep Learning, they ditch general purpose hardware because it's too slow. High performance tasks, especially creative tasks are using very few specific algorithms over and over and Apple could build hardware to run those 10-100x faster in custom hardware, which would be a far better value offer than just the same hardware as everyone else and it can be supplemented with cloud computing and storage.
    Rayz2016watto_cobra
  • Reply 49 of 68
    VRingVRing Posts: 108member
    Marvin said:
    VRing said:
    Marvin said:

    It would be nice if Apple offered NVidia options but NVidia workstation GPUs are really expensive. They've been neutering compute features in their consumer cards, including Titans so they can push Teslas and Quadros on the high-end. The worthwhile models of those GPUs cost thousands each. Gaming cards like the 1080/ti aren't ideal for workstations. Titans are the only realistic option from NVidia and still ~$1200 each.
    NVIDIA cards are definitely expensive, but not necessarily neutered. Take the new $3000 TITAN V for example. It's not cheap, but it's essentially a Tesla V100. It offers 110 TFLOPS of performance through its tensor cores for deep learning applications. In comparison, the Vega 64 in the iMac Pro can only output ~22 TFLOPS (FP16).
    The 110TFLOPs number isn't the same as FP16. The FP16 performance of the V100 is noted here as 28TFLOPs:

    https://www.anandtech.com/show/11559/nvidia-formally-announces-pcie-tesla-v100-available-later-this-year

    The deep learning performance (Tensor FLOPs) only helps when it's used, there's a test here where it compares the 18TFLOP FP16 Nvidia P100 vs 112TFLOP Tensor V100 and it's 20%-100% difference:

    https://www.xcelerit.com/computing-benchmarks/insights/benchmarks-deep-learning-nvidia-p100-vs-v100-gpu/

    Vega 64 is a very capable GPU for computing and doesn't cost anywhere near $3k.
    That's the FP16 performance of just the CUDA cores, not the Tensor cores. As I said, the Tensor cores see their advantage for deep learning applications. It's not necessarily a linear increase as the type of network will dictate just how much the Tensor cores will be utilized. The 20%-100% increase you refereed to was only based on the size and type of network being tested. As you keep increasing the size of the network and introducing additional complexity, the Tensor cores will begin to show their prowess. The tests you linked are only using TensorFlow, if TensorRT 3 was applied you would see considerable increases in performance for the V100.

    The reason I noted the FP16 performance of Vega 64 is due to the Tensor cores being used for FP16 multiplications as well as mixed precision.
  • Reply 50 of 68
    danvm said:
    VRing said:
    macxpress said:
     If Apple just wanted to pull an HP and just slap a bunch of shit together with a shitty heatsink on it then they could have had a new Mac Pro out before the end of 2017, but obviously Apple isn't going to do that. If that's what makes you happy then by all means go buy the HP. Nearly everything you see on and inside a Mac (or any Apple product for that matter) is custom engineered and built by Apple. Its not as simple as slap a bunch of shit together and call it a day like PC manufacturers do. 
    You should really stop drinking the Kool-Aid.

    HP makes some excellent workstations from the Z2 Mini:



    Up to the Z8:



    Is that supposed to be impressive? The old Mac Pro cheese grater cases were more impressive and they’re over 12 years old. 
    The "cheese grater" Mac Pro's were impressive for their time, and the same can be said of the HP workstations of the time, IIRC the XW8000 series.  But Apple is no more in the mid/high end workstation market, while HP have been doing an excellent job.  As today, there is nothing from Apple that comes close to the Z8.  This system can be configured with 2 Xeon CPU's (56 cores), 1.5TB of RAM (yes, Terabytes. And 3TB for first half of next year), three NVidia P6000 and 48TB of internal storage.  And this system is design to work under stress with all those components installed.  IMO, this is far more impressive than the "cheese grater" Mac Pro. 
    I’m obviously not referring to the specs of an obsolete Mac. I’m referring to the case design and its thermal map he posted. 
    williamlondonwatto_cobra
  • Reply 51 of 68

    blastdoor said:

    blastdoor said:
    My take is that Apple basically came out last year in a very courageous and forthright way to say “we goofed, and we are going to fix it.” They basically cut the legs out from under that subset of Apple fans who tie themselves in knots to defend everything Apple does, and who attack every criticism of Apple, even when that criticism is delivered thoughtfully and constructively by people who have been using Apple products professionally for decades. Simultaneously, Apple validated the points being made by many Pro users. 

    I suspect that really sticks in the craw of the types of people who mindlessly defend Apple. They now have to admit Apple was wrong, because Apple has admitted it. And in so doing, they have to admit that they were wrong in their mindless defense of Apple’s past pro screwups. 

    And so this leads me to wonder — is it just me, or is there a really snotty, sour grapes tone to this article? 
    Who are these people, specifically?

    Beautiful straw man you’ve constructed there. Excellent craftsmanship. 
    There was a guy around here, I think perhaps his name was AltiVec, who clearly and thoughtfully expressed his concerns as a longtime professional Apple customer that Apple had stopped meeting his needs and that he was very regretfully having to consider leaving the platform. His sincerity, specificity, and thoughtfulness was met with decisiveness and belittling. Were you one of the haters? I don’t really remember — the hordes of Apple fandom villagers with their pitchforks and torches were all pretty much indistinguishable from one another. 

    But the bottom line is — it turns out Apple actually was listening to the Altivecs of the world, and decided they were right. 
    Ah ok so you don’t have any specific people or posts, you just made up a story and then used an ad hominem to suggest it was me.

    Again, excellent straw man you’ve built. So life-like...I can almost see its hopes and dreams. Thwack thwack!! Die straw man, die!
    edited December 2017 williamlondonwatto_cobra
  • Reply 52 of 68

    blastdoor said:
    wizard69 said:
    blastdoor said:
    Regarding “modularity” — Craig talked about modularity in the context of thermal/physical constraints. So I think what they meant is that it will be easier for them — Apple — to upgrade the new Mac Pro on a regular basis without the need to do a total redesign. It will be easier for them to swap out old Xeons for new Xeons, old GPUs for new GPUs. They will give themselves more thermal headroom and physical space inside the case so that they can adapt as technology changes, and perhaps to offer more BTO configurations. 

    If you listen to what they said, instead of projecting your own BS onto it, I think that’s the most reasonable interpretation. 

    In other words, I don’t think they meant “you can attach TB peripherals to it” — that’s what the 2013 Mac Pro was. (Although of course it will support peripherals — I just mean that’s not what they have in mind when they say “modular”) 

    Nor do I think they mean “user-upgradable” in the sense that DIY PCs are user upgradable. It’s not like it will now be easy for users to swap out old Xeons for new. 


    Honestly I think Craig is full of crap!   

    In regards to upgrades for the current  Mac Pro (trashcan) there are plenty of upgrade vectors with respect to GPU's and CPU's that would dramatically increase performance while either lowering the thermals or keeping them the same.   IMac Pro pretty much validates this thought.   Any talk from Apple about thermal capacity is total nonsense in my mind due to the fact that all potential replacement chips actually run cooler.

    As for the Trashcan I never thought of it as a bad design however the delivery to the public was terrible   For one thing you can't expect to be taken seriously if you don't have a storage solution for the platform.   In other words if you don't have a storage solution ,either internal or external you don't have a pro solution and frankly that covers a wide array of what could be called pro users.   The lack of a corresponding display is even more perplexing and makes you wonder what the hell Apple was thinking.   The thing here is that there are a huge number of professionals that just needs a quality display and want the Apple logo on it.   Apple doens't need to offer a studio monitor which frankly is a specialist product, they just need to offer a high quality monitor.   In a nut shell the way the trashcan debuted had more to do with its lack of acceptance than the machine itself.

    AS for upgradability I really think that many of the people demanding such are living way way in the past.   Certainly we need Apple to avoid some of the stupid things it has been doing for the last couple of years with strange SSD ports and other proprietary nonsense.   The reality is that parts for high performance machines will get smaller and more tightly packed, the reason is simple, it is the time of flight of electrical signals that require parts to be close together to increase performance.   This is why high performance GPU's have RAM being integrated into the GPU chip housing and why Intel has high speed RAM integrated into some of their APU style chips.    In a nut shell it will get harder and harder to do some of the simple upgrades that people are use too.   And no, for the idiots out there, this isn't Apple or anybody else being a dick.  

    Now this doens't mean that upgradability isn't important it is for some things.    Secondary storage is ALWAYS something it need of upgrading or replacement.   However the forward looking approach here is not to offer spinning rust drive bays but rather to offer industry standard slots for SSD expansion.   Note industry standard here.   Any desktop machine worth a damn will have at least four SSD slots.

    Frankly I see Apple as failing its Mac line up so badly that I went out and bought an HP laptop to replace a stolen MBP.   We are talking a machine that has AMD's latest Ryzen APU that offers plenty of performance in a machine that compares well to anything Apple has and only costs $750.   It has speakers I can actually hear which is a big deal for some of us.   It also has enough ports that it will be able to support some of my interests without a bunch of crap handing off the machine, this is unlike Apples machines which seem to be designed for idiots that don't even know how to use a USB or HDMI port.   Once I have Linux running on the machine not much will be different user wise from the current Apple hardware.    I have need for a desktop in the near future and frankly I'm hoping that Apple gets its crap together in that respect as a Mac does have some advantages for a home PC.   In a nut shell Apple has lost credibility with me as a supplier of computing hardware, at times they just can't seem to grasp that different users have different ways of working.   Can they pull out a few wins to regain some credibility, maybe but it will take considerable innovation and reasonable pricing to do so.
    You make a good point that the components of the 2013 design could have been upgraded while staying within the thermals. That’s just an unambiguously correct statement, so I tip my hat to you on that one. And it’s true that the iMac Pro shows you can put some high power gear in a tight enclosure.

    Yet I don’t think Craig was full of crap, either. The iMac Pro looks like a great machine — I have been very tempted to get one — but it isn’t a Mac Pro. For a true Mac Pro — something that could reasonably be viewed as an upgrade to the old aluminum towers — more power is needed. And I think Craig was right that they did design themselves into a corner with regards such a machine. 

    Instead of saying Craig is full of crap, I guess what I would say is that he’s not telling the whole story. I suspect there is another part of this story that has to do with Phil and the marketing guys. They probably made a mistake in believing that the needs of their longtime core professional Mac users could be met without selling a natural successor to the big aluminum tower. And they are probably right for many, many users. But there is a hard core group of users, perhaps numbering so low as to only support sales of fewer than 100k Mac Pros a year, who really do need the natural successor to the tower. Phil might have underestimated the needs of this group and also the importance of this group. 
    Or maybe Bigfoot? Seriously you’ve just invented a story about “Phil and the marketing guys” and attributed whatever you needed to to it. 
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 53 of 68
    danvmdanvm Posts: 1,400member
    danvm said:
    VRing said:
    macxpress said:
     If Apple just wanted to pull an HP and just slap a bunch of shit together with a shitty heatsink on it then they could have had a new Mac Pro out before the end of 2017, but obviously Apple isn't going to do that. If that's what makes you happy then by all means go buy the HP. Nearly everything you see on and inside a Mac (or any Apple product for that matter) is custom engineered and built by Apple. Its not as simple as slap a bunch of shit together and call it a day like PC manufacturers do. 
    You should really stop drinking the Kool-Aid.

    HP makes some excellent workstations from the Z2 Mini:



    Up to the Z8:



    Is that supposed to be impressive? The old Mac Pro cheese grater cases were more impressive and they’re over 12 years old. 
    The "cheese grater" Mac Pro's were impressive for their time, and the same can be said of the HP workstations of the time, IIRC the XW8000 series.  But Apple is no more in the mid/high end workstation market, while HP have been doing an excellent job.  As today, there is nothing from Apple that comes close to the Z8.  This system can be configured with 2 Xeon CPU's (56 cores), 1.5TB of RAM (yes, Terabytes. And 3TB for first half of next year), three NVidia P6000 and 48TB of internal storage.  And this system is design to work under stress with all those components installed.  IMO, this is far more impressive than the "cheese grater" Mac Pro. 
    I’m obviously not referring to the specs of an obsolete Mac. I’m referring to the case design and its thermal map he posted. 
    I'm talking about thermals too.  That's the reason I mention the specs you can have the Z8, which generate a lot of heat.  Would be nice to know how do you get to the conclusion that the 2006-2012 Mac Pro thermals are "far more impressive" than a 2017 HP Z8 based only in the picture @VRing posted.
    edited December 2017 williamlondon
  • Reply 54 of 68
    thttht Posts: 5,421member
    Marvin said:
    The service is one aspect as well as durability of components. Error correcting (ECC) memory is a common feature, including on some GPUs so they can be assured there will be no data corruption. The GPUs sometimes have features for pro apps like anti-aliasing 3D viewports. They certify the hardware against software and workflows so that companies can be assured the machines will work with the software they use, sometimes gaming GPUs will just fail on compute projects:

    https://www.nvidia.co.uk/design-visualization/quadro-desktop-gpus/

    "Optimised, stable drivers with a predictable cadence, ISV certifications with over 100 professional applications and helpful tools for IT management are just some of the benefits of having Quadro in your system."

    The better and more reliable that consumer machines have become and the more that pro software and operating systems are being targeted at a wider audience, the less difference there is but it's much like how online services have business packages and consumer packages.
    For HP and Dell, there does not look to be any unique hardware to categorize a computer as a workstation. They both offer the gamut from mini, subcompact, towers, big towers, and laptops form factors, spanning Core i3 with processor graphics and HDD to 2 socket machines with 48 cores or 2 GPUs. So, that’s why I suggested a non hardware related feature that puts a computer into a workstation category.

    How this analyst in the link categorizes them won’t be revealed without paying money.

    Marvin said:
    Some of their rhetoric on the design is to pay lip-service to the complainers. When you keep in mind their development schedules, they must have started designing the iMac Pro around 2015, which was just two years after the 2013 Mac Pro so they knew back then that they wouldn't be updating it. The iMac Pro targets the same thermal profile so there's no point in selling both. That's mostly why they got stuck because to justify the Mac Pro at all, it needed to be faster than the iMac Pro or it would be discontinued.
    That’s painting the 2013 Mac Pro into a corner, no?

    I still find it hard to understand. They could have redesigned the internals for 2 Vega CPUs and 1 CPU socket, along with 2 SSDs. That’ll be about 600 to 700 W. Segmentation with a single socket CPU is very much doable as Intel offers Xeons with 28 cores now. If the 2013 Mac Pro couldn’t handle 600 to 700 W, ok, thermal corner. It could be a features corner as buyers may want redundant power supplies too, or, maybe there really needs to be 8 DIMM slots at this level of hardware. 

    Anyways, they are convinced that a modular Mac Pro is necessary. Kind of implies power struggle and some manager made the wrong prediction for the market.

    Marvin said:
    Catering to high performance users is more a show of respect for that work and wanting it to be done on a Mac system. It's not a highly profitable venture by any stretch of the imagination. I don't think the best way to go is to use off-the-shelf hardware though because that's just the brute-force method. At some point that's all you have left but Apple has shown what they can do with custom ARM hardware. If you look at any high performance activity like Bitcoin mining and Deep Learning, they ditch general purpose hardware because it's too slow. High performance tasks, especially creative tasks are using very few specific algorithms over and over and Apple could build hardware to run those 10-100x faster in custom hardware, which would be a far better value offer than just the same hardware as everyone else and it can be supplemented with cloud computing and storage.

    I’m happy Apple is redoubling their efforts here. Strategically, it is the right thing to do as it is an ecosystem play. Apple offers a computer platform spanning wearables to desktops. Each offering increases the virtuous cycle for the platform. Philosophically, I think desktops are necessary for Apple as they are consumer facing computers. It’s a computer people see and feel, and serves as the high end of the portfolio. Not offering one leaves a weakness in the platform.

    Whether they do custom designed components or merchant components, who knows, just happy, that they are serving the top end of the market.
  • Reply 55 of 68
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    VRing said:
    That's the FP16 performance of just the CUDA cores, not the Tensor cores. As I said, the Tensor cores see their advantage for deep learning applications. It's not necessarily a linear increase as the type of network will dictate just how much the Tensor cores will be utilized. The 20%-100% increase you refereed to was only based on the size and type of network being tested. As you keep increasing the size of the network and introducing additional complexity, the Tensor cores will begin to show their prowess. The tests you linked are only using TensorFlow, if TensorRT 3 was applied you would see considerable increases in performance for the V100.

    The reason I noted the FP16 performance of Vega 64 is due to the Tensor cores being used for FP16 multiplications as well as mixed precision.
    If people need to do Deep Learning tasks or anything designed for Nvidia GPUs, the V100 is a server GPU so it can be rented and used remotely on any Mac system. On Macs natively, Nvidia GPUs can be hooked up over Thunderbolt 3 to any TB3 Mac system, including laptops.

    https://create.pro/blog/bringing-the-titan-x-to-the-mac-pro-61/
    https://browser.geekbench.com/cuda-benchmarks

    A $3k Titan V for specific AI software that uses Nvidia's own SDKs is a very narrow target audience but there are options if needed.
    tht said:
    Marvin said:
    Some of their rhetoric on the design is to pay lip-service to the complainers. When you keep in mind their development schedules, they must have started designing the iMac Pro around 2015, which was just two years after the 2013 Mac Pro so they knew back then that they wouldn't be updating it. The iMac Pro targets the same thermal profile so there's no point in selling both. That's mostly why they got stuck because to justify the Mac Pro at all, it needed to be faster than the iMac Pro or it would be discontinued.
    That’s painting the 2013 Mac Pro into a corner, no?

    I still find it hard to understand. They could have redesigned the internals for 2 Vega CPUs and 1 CPU socket, along with 2 SSDs. That’ll be about 600 to 700 W. Segmentation with a single socket CPU is very much doable as Intel offers Xeons with 28 cores now. If the 2013 Mac Pro couldn’t handle 600 to 700 W, ok, thermal corner. It could be a features corner as buyers may want redundant power supplies too, or, maybe there really needs to be 8 DIMM slots at this level of hardware. 

    Anyways, they are convinced that a modular Mac Pro is necessary. Kind of implies power struggle and some manager made the wrong prediction for the market.
    I think they decided to scrap the Mac Pro in 2012 due to poor sales but then decided to try an experiment with a new design that fit with the rest of the Mac lineup. The old Mac Pros didn't support Thunderbolt. It also allowed them to experiment on a small scale with manufacturing in the US.  Apple's keynote here explains the drive to make their machines all-in-one and how messy Steve Jobs considered the headless form factor:



    With the advances in performance-per-watt, Apple was able to take the thermal profile of the cylinder Mac Pro and deliver the all-in-one experience without the performance compromise, it improves on the cylinder performance as the GPU is a single unit.

    As for a power struggle internally, there might have been some of that, there are always people who don't want to abandon legacy products but it seems more like an updated Mac Pro was a request from outside that came with some financial incentive:

    https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/red-president-played-a-role-in-making-the-new-modular-mac-pro.2059763/

    If it was an internal decision, it wouldn't have been announced so far in advance of it being made. Apple designs computers according to their roadmap of where computers are going, people on the outside are looking for solutions to get jobs done right now. People working with RED video have been struggling with 8K workflows, the iMac Pro handles this now, although the RED decoders still have to be connected externally. When the Mac Pro eventually drops, the extra performance it offers will be of use to some people but the price point of the highest end options can only target a very small audience and a portion of them will have already migrated to the iMac Pro.

    The Mac Pro will need to use multiple GPUs and CPUs to outperform the iMac Pro. To get a dual high-end CPU and dual high-end GPU, it will cost ~$6200 on top of the base price, which won't be below $3k so easily $9200 to be a worthwhile investment over an iMac Pro and then add their Retina display, which I'd estimate to be $1500 and you're at $10,700.

    They could have refreshed the Mac Pro with the same components in the iMac Pro as you said but there's no point in selling both. The iMac form factor outsells the Mac Pro and mini 10:1. Partly this is due to the price and spec but most buyers prefer that form factor just as most buyers prefer laptops. There's a myth that if Apple just makes the right headless desktop, everyone would flock to it but that doesn't match up to reality. All PC manufacturers want to get away from the box model because it's the least desirable, least profitable, hardest to support and leads to the worst inventory management.
    Philosophically, I think desktops are necessary for Apple as they are consumer facing computers. It’s a computer people see and feel, and serves as the high end of the portfolio. Not offering one leaves a weakness in the platform.

    Ultimately the form factor differences are about performance. If it was possible for an iPhone/iPad to have some ultra fast chip like quantum computing or based on optics or some superconducting material, there wouldn't be a need for any other form factor beyond a display output. That's why consumer hardware erodes the workstation market.

    https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/412 - 12" Macbook 2017, 6667
    https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/253 - Mac Pro 2008, 5195

    Why pay more if a much sleeker form factor gets the job done? There's not a compelling reason for the headless desktop form factor to exist if much sleeker form factors offer enough performance to satisfy the vast majority of buyers, especially if the price point for that form factor results in an audience so small that it produces less or the same revenue it costs to run the manufacturing operation.

    macxpress
  • Reply 56 of 68
    Marvin said:
    tht said:
    Marvin said:
    Some of their rhetoric on the design is to pay lip-service to the complainers. When you keep in mind their development schedules, they must have started designing the iMac Pro around 2015, which was just two years after the 2013 Mac Pro so they knew back then that they wouldn't be updating it. The iMac Pro targets the same thermal profile so there's no point in selling both. That's mostly why they got stuck because to justify the Mac Pro at all, it needed to be faster than the iMac Pro or it would be discontinued.
    That’s painting the 2013 Mac Pro into a corner, no?

    I still find it hard to understand. They could have redesigned the internals for 2 Vega CPUs and 1 CPU socket, along with 2 SSDs. That’ll be about 600 to 700 W. Segmentation with a single socket CPU is very much doable as Intel offers Xeons with 28 cores now. If the 2013 Mac Pro couldn’t handle 600 to 700 W, ok, thermal corner. It could be a features corner as buyers may want redundant power supplies too, or, maybe there really needs to be 8 DIMM slots at this level of hardware. 

    Anyways, they are convinced that a modular Mac Pro is necessary. Kind of implies power struggle and some manager made the wrong prediction for the market.
    I think they decided to scrap the Mac Pro in 2012 due to poor sales but then decided to try an experiment with a new design that fit with the rest of the Mac lineup. The old Mac Pros didn't support Thunderbolt. It also allowed them to experiment on a small scale with manufacturing in the US.  Apple's keynote here explains the drive to make their machines all-in-one and how messy Steve Jobs considered the headless form factor:



    With the advances in performance-per-watt, Apple was able to take the thermal profile of the cylinder Mac Pro and deliver the all-in-one experience without the performance compromise, it improves on the cylinder performance as the GPU is a single unit.

    As for a power struggle internally, there might have been some of that, there are always people who don't want to abandon legacy products but it seems more like an updated Mac Pro was a request from outside that came with some financial incentive:

    https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/red-president-played-a-role-in-making-the-new-modular-mac-pro.2059763/

    If it was an internal decision, it wouldn't have been announced so far in advance of it being made. Apple designs computers according to their roadmap of where computers are going, people on the outside are looking for solutions to get jobs done right now. People working with RED video have been struggling with 8K workflows, the iMac Pro handles this now, although the RED decoders still have to be connected externally. When the Mac Pro eventually drops, the extra performance it offers will be of use to some people but the price point of the highest end options can only target a very small audience and a portion of them will have already migrated to the iMac Pro.

    The Mac Pro will need to use multiple GPUs and CPUs to outperform the iMac Pro. To get a dual high-end CPU and dual high-end GPU, it will cost ~$6200 on top of the base price, which won't be below $3k so easily $9200 to be a worthwhile investment over an iMac Pro and then add their Retina display, which I'd estimate to be $1500 and you're at $10,700.

    They could have refreshed the Mac Pro with the same components in the iMac Pro as you said but there's no point in selling both. The iMac form factor outsells the Mac Pro and mini 10:1. Partly this is due to the price and spec but most buyers prefer that form factor just as most buyers prefer laptops. There's a myth that if Apple just makes the right headless desktop, everyone would flock to it but that doesn't match up to reality. All PC manufacturers want to get away from the box model because it's the least desirable, least profitable, hardest to support and leads to the worst inventory management.
    Philosophically, I think desktops are necessary for Apple as they are consumer facing computers. It’s a computer people see and feel, and serves as the high end of the portfolio. Not offering one leaves a weakness in the platform.

    Ultimately the form factor differences are about performance. If it was possible for an iPhone/iPad to have some ultra fast chip like quantum computing or based on optics or some superconducting material, there wouldn't be a need for any other form factor beyond a display output. That's why consumer hardware erodes the workstation market.

    https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/412 - 12" Macbook 2017, 6667
    https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/253 - Mac Pro 2008, 5195

    Why pay more if a much sleeker form factor gets the job done? There's not a compelling reason for the headless desktop form factor to exist if much sleeker form factors offer enough performance to satisfy the vast majority of buyers, especially if the price point for that form factor results in an audience so small that it produces less or the same revenue it costs to run the manufacturing operation.

    Nicely done, thank you. The HP Z4 with specs that parallel the base 8-core iMac Pro is $6000. Component prices may come down (Xeon-W is "brand new" right now), but $5000 seems like the floor for this. That's without a display. So it seems pretty unlikely Apple will use Xeon-W for the Mac Pro, like you say. Apple is not HP.

    You might be missing an opening by lumping the Mac Pro and the Mac mini together. I think it's likely that the recent news about AMD supplying discrete GPUs to Intel for use with their "Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge" [EMIB] technology is relevant to Apple. A Mac mini with Xeon-E (due in 2018, formerly Xeon E3), 32GB, and a Radeon GPU/HBM2 will be possible later this year, maxing out at under $3000. They could even call it a "Pro" mini and use the same color differentiation as the iMac to distinguish it from the regular mini.

    So then the question becomes, where will the 3rd-generation Mac Pro fit into this? I think it has to be specialized like you suggest -- leveraging the Xeon-SP platform in ways that we can try to imagine. But there will be no Silver "Mac" to go with the Space Grey "Mac Pro" ... Let's try to remember that the original 1984 Macintosh was an all-in-one. The iMac and iMac Pro are the current Mac (and Mac SE). Period. Full stop. Successful headless Macs from the 1987 Macintosh II on were always higher-end, "Pro" machines. The successful headless consumer Mac is a myth, aside from the Mac mini.
    edited January 2018
  • Reply 57 of 68
    StrangeDaysStrangeDays Posts: 12,834member
    danvm said:
    danvm said:
    VRing said:
    macxpress said:
     If Apple just wanted to pull an HP and just slap a bunch of shit together with a shitty heatsink on it then they could have had a new Mac Pro out before the end of 2017, but obviously Apple isn't going to do that. If that's what makes you happy then by all means go buy the HP. Nearly everything you see on and inside a Mac (or any Apple product for that matter) is custom engineered and built by Apple. Its not as simple as slap a bunch of shit together and call it a day like PC manufacturers do. 
    You should really stop drinking the Kool-Aid.

    HP makes some excellent workstations from the Z2 Mini:



    Up to the Z8:



    Is that supposed to be impressive? The old Mac Pro cheese grater cases were more impressive and they’re over 12 years old. 
    The "cheese grater" Mac Pro's were impressive for their time, and the same can be said of the HP workstations of the time, IIRC the XW8000 series.  But Apple is no more in the mid/high end workstation market, while HP have been doing an excellent job.  As today, there is nothing from Apple that comes close to the Z8.  This system can be configured with 2 Xeon CPU's (56 cores), 1.5TB of RAM (yes, Terabytes. And 3TB for first half of next year), three NVidia P6000 and 48TB of internal storage.  And this system is design to work under stress with all those components installed.  IMO, this is far more impressive than the "cheese grater" Mac Pro. 
    I’m obviously not referring to the specs of an obsolete Mac. I’m referring to the case design and its thermal map he posted. 
    I'm talking about thermals too.  That's the reason I mention the specs you can have the Z8, which generate a lot of heat.  Would be nice to know how do you get to the conclusion that the 2006-2012 Mac Pro thermals are "far more impressive" than a 2017 HP Z8 based only in the picture @VRing posted.
    Let me try to make it clear for you - the case design (internals as posted in the pic and with regard to thermal management) of the 12+ year old cheese grater best the snot out of that ugly piece of junk. 
    williamlondonfarmboy
  • Reply 58 of 68
    avon b7avon b7 Posts: 7,624member
    danvm said:
    danvm said:
    VRing said:
    macxpress said:
     If Apple just wanted to pull an HP and just slap a bunch of shit together with a shitty heatsink on it then they could have had a new Mac Pro out before the end of 2017, but obviously Apple isn't going to do that. If that's what makes you happy then by all means go buy the HP. Nearly everything you see on and inside a Mac (or any Apple product for that matter) is custom engineered and built by Apple. Its not as simple as slap a bunch of shit together and call it a day like PC manufacturers do. 
    You should really stop drinking the Kool-Aid.

    HP makes some excellent workstations from the Z2 Mini:



    Up to the Z8:



    Is that supposed to be impressive? The old Mac Pro cheese grater cases were more impressive and they’re over 12 years old. 
    The "cheese grater" Mac Pro's were impressive for their time, and the same can be said of the HP workstations of the time, IIRC the XW8000 series.  But Apple is no more in the mid/high end workstation market, while HP have been doing an excellent job.  As today, there is nothing from Apple that comes close to the Z8.  This system can be configured with 2 Xeon CPU's (56 cores), 1.5TB of RAM (yes, Terabytes. And 3TB for first half of next year), three NVidia P6000 and 48TB of internal storage.  And this system is design to work under stress with all those components installed.  IMO, this is far more impressive than the "cheese grater" Mac Pro. 
    I’m obviously not referring to the specs of an obsolete Mac. I’m referring to the case design and its thermal map he posted. 
    I'm talking about thermals too.  That's the reason I mention the specs you can have the Z8, which generate a lot of heat.  Would be nice to know how do you get to the conclusion that the 2006-2012 Mac Pro thermals are "far more impressive" than a 2017 HP Z8 based only in the picture @VRing posted.
    Let me try to make it clear for you - the case design (internals as posted in the pic and with regard to thermal management) of the 12+ year old cheese grater best the snot out of that ugly piece of junk. 
    Junk? Hardly

    Ugly? I wouldn't call it ugly but if that's your opinion... The Cheesegraters weren't overly attractive. And the trash can Mac Pro was called all number of things. I suppose from a design perspective you could argue that if you see an image of either, you recognise them instantly. That's in their favour perhaps but I don't think the HP is ugly. Boring? Bland? I doubt case design was at the top of the list when they designed it, and probably isn't very high in the minds of those who are interested in one.

    I had peek at the quick specs (.pdf). It looks like a great machine. Seeing 'tool less' was nice for certain areas.

    http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetPDF.aspx

    As for cooling. The document provides some information on the subject but is it possible to compare to the Cheesegraters?

    I always thought the Cheesegraters had an elegant cooling approach but never actually owned one.
  • Reply 59 of 68
    MacProMacPro Posts: 19,718member
    I am sad there is such a lack of love for the late 2013 Mac Pro, I often wonder how much of it is from people that actually have one.  I've upgraded my 'Coke Can' (I like that lol) and it took less than five minutes to upgrade the RAM and SSD.  I am not going to bother with the GPUs and CPU this close to a new ...  new Mac Pro but it's doable.  I for one, cannot speak highly enough of the current Mac Pro and IMHO the best Apple has released and I've owned every tower / desktop Mac ever made.
    edited January 2018 williamlondon
  • Reply 60 of 68
    danvmdanvm Posts: 1,400member
    danvm said:
    danvm said:
    VRing said:
    macxpress said:
     If Apple just wanted to pull an HP and just slap a bunch of shit together with a shitty heatsink on it then they could have had a new Mac Pro out before the end of 2017, but obviously Apple isn't going to do that. If that's what makes you happy then by all means go buy the HP. Nearly everything you see on and inside a Mac (or any Apple product for that matter) is custom engineered and built by Apple. Its not as simple as slap a bunch of shit together and call it a day like PC manufacturers do. 
    You should really stop drinking the Kool-Aid.

    HP makes some excellent workstations from the Z2 Mini:



    Up to the Z8:



    Is that supposed to be impressive? The old Mac Pro cheese grater cases were more impressive and they’re over 12 years old. 
    The "cheese grater" Mac Pro's were impressive for their time, and the same can be said of the HP workstations of the time, IIRC the XW8000 series.  But Apple is no more in the mid/high end workstation market, while HP have been doing an excellent job.  As today, there is nothing from Apple that comes close to the Z8.  This system can be configured with 2 Xeon CPU's (56 cores), 1.5TB of RAM (yes, Terabytes. And 3TB for first half of next year), three NVidia P6000 and 48TB of internal storage.  And this system is design to work under stress with all those components installed.  IMO, this is far more impressive than the "cheese grater" Mac Pro. 
    I’m obviously not referring to the specs of an obsolete Mac. I’m referring to the case design and its thermal map he posted. 
    I'm talking about thermals too.  That's the reason I mention the specs you can have the Z8, which generate a lot of heat.  Would be nice to know how do you get to the conclusion that the 2006-2012 Mac Pro thermals are "far more impressive" than a 2017 HP Z8 based only in the picture @VRing posted.
    Let me try to make it clear for you - the case design (internals as posted in the pic and with regard to thermal management) of the 12+ year old cheese grater best the snot out of that ugly piece of junk. 
    I'm still not clear by your response.  Again, how the MacPro 2006-2012 if "far more impressive" than a HP Z8 2017?  How do you got to that conclusion by only looking at the picture?  Do you have technical details of both devices on how they manage thermals?

    BTW, do you really think a device that can hold 1.5/3TB of RAM, 56 cores and three NVidia P6000 w/24GB of RAM each is an "ugly piece of junk"?  I don't think companies like Adobe, Autodesk, Solidworks, Siemens and Bentley agree with you, since every HP Z Workstation is certified by them, among other companies.

    http://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/isv-certifications/mcad-isv-certification.html?jumpid=ba_yt8mgi675q

    Plus companies like DreamWorks do their movies with HP Z workstations.  Impressive what you can do with these "ugly pieces of junk", don't you think?

    http://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/workstations/media-entertainment-animation.html
     




    VRingavon b7williamlondon
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