I don't recall that. That's good to know. I wonder if the delay means that tech like Face ID will make its way into this future external display.
I'm a little skeptical, my understanding is that the secure enclave needs to be tightly coupled to the motherboard. An externally connected device could be vulnerable to an attack "in the middle." This is why iMacs don't have TouchID. ((I could definitely be mistaken.))
Don't see why the secure enclave couldn't be tightly coupled to the motherboard of an iMac or Mac Pro. The TrueDepth camera being in an external display (or the builtiin for the iMac) wouldn't seem to prevent that. They could secure the communication between the camera and enclave when being used for the purposes of Face ID easily enough.
TouchID requires a validated pairing between the iPhone and the home button. There was a whole flap about this a couple years ago when non-Apple-authorized iPhone repairs were bricking iPhones because they couldn't do that revalidation. In Apple's own words, "Without this unique pairing, a malicious touch ID sensor could be substituted, thereby gaining access to the secure enclave. When iOS detects that the pairing fails, touch ID, including Apple Pay, is disabled so the device remains secure."
I'm don't think we'll ever see a version of TouchID or FaceID that simply works over a USB cable. /shrug
I don't recall that. That's good to know. I wonder if the delay means that tech like Face ID will make its way into this future external display.
I'm a little skeptical, my understanding is that the secure enclave needs to be tightly coupled to the motherboard. An externally connected device could be vulnerable to an attack "in the middle." This is why iMacs don't have TouchID. ((I could definitely be mistaken.))
Understood, but there’s a lot of encryption that can be used over TB, which I assume is still the connection of choice; and we can already unlock our Macs and even use Apple Pay via our Watch on the Mac.
If they are comfortable with that over wireless and/or some iCloud relay then I can’t rule out that it’s not doable over TB.
How much would it be to put a T-series and/or some variant of the S-series on the external display (or in a keyboard for Touch ID and the TouchBar) to get this feature?
Rayz2016 said: Jobs’s real talent was surrounding himself with exceptional people who shared his vision for simplicity, and could temper his vision with pragmatism. If not for the pragmatiststs then OSX would’ve been released without the Carbon APIs, and iOS would’ve been released without an API at all.
...
App,e want to kickstart its line of professional desktop machines then they hire professionals … with the same vision for simplicity. And that’s kind of important, because the machine that will show up at the end of this extended incubation is not the machine that the “professionals” around here are asking for, namely a Dell box that just happens to run OSX. They certainly wouldn’t need until the end of 2019 to pull that off.
And, saying no often enough, though it wasn't a perfect track record. And, catching rather obvious things the current Apple can't seem to. Maybe the professionals around here are asking for something they actually need, until Apple can come up with the next wiz-bang thing? I'd love some wild new computer that I can't even imagine right now, but until then, yes a Dell that runs macOS would be far better than what we've got to pick from!
chasm said: 3. The forthcoming Mac Pro could ferment, brew and dispense free beer inside it, and it would still be way less than five percent of Mac sales. Schiller said it was never higher than that -- ever. A niche product that 0.1 percent of Apple customers are going to buy is not going to turn anything around, particularly when there is literally no area of the company that is not currently in possession of a license to print money and high-90s customer sat. The next Mac Pro is a thank you (and likely a sign-off) to the Mac veterans, not a viable product line.
And, that's the kind of of thinking that I'm scared is going on at Apple. No vision, no bigger-picture. Pie-charts.
ascii said: Even granting all that, when has Apple purely been about making profit? They want to make profit and make the world a better place at the same time I think.
And giving the smartest and most creative people amazing tools could make the world a better place and Apple will benefit from that along with the rest of us. I hope that doesn't sound hopelessly naive, but Tim Cook has publicly said on several occasions that X product or X initiative was not purely about profit.
They weren't always in the past. Apple sunk tons of cash into things that paid dividends far into the future (some simply in terms of brand perception). I guess maybe being able to see detail while also a big-picture is a special gift, but I'm always a bit shocked when people can't get it even after it is explained to them.
My fear is that Tim just likes to talk a good game after having been around the master for long enough... he really cares about Mac Minis too, apparently.
Why is Apple still selling the cylinder Mac Pro? Who would buy it? This blog says Apple should have resurrected the cheese grater while they work on this new device. I think that’s ridiculous but if Apple is going keep selling the trash can it should contain the most up to date specs as possible.
I'm considering buying one now that the prices have come down... if it hadn't been for the recent drop of TB2 drivers for eGPU. I can't wait until sometime in 2019, and Apple has no other viable even prosumer product besides a $6000+ iMac Pro.
macplusplus said: Thunderbolt is the standard that turns your PC inside-out.
The main components of your PC are tied together with a bus called PCIe. Your graphics card, your SSD communicate with the CPU over PCIe. Now consider extending that PCIe bus over a cable outside the case of your PC: this is Thunderbolt. With Thunderbolt you can attach a desk-load of peripherals (RAIDs, monitors, external GPUs, network interfaces…) and make all of these communicate at speeds previously only available internally on your PC. Without Thunderbolt, you’d have to build a PC the size of that desk to include all of those peripherals. Thanks to Thunderbolt you can isolate the core of your PC from the peripherals and get a more refined and modern configuration with better thermal management and virtually unlimited expandability.
Um, no. A TB2 port can't even support a single modern GPU at full speed. It's a fraction of the internal bus capacity.
If you're disgusted with Apple's prosumer approach, well then, vote with your dollars. Today. Don't wait, don't threaten to switch to Windows. Do it today.
The goal should be a $1200 selling price for a respectably configured machine. Why $1200 for a decent machine, because Apple repeatably fails to understand the word "pro". Not every professional needs nor wants a $500 machine. The low end wants decent processor performance in a box (tube) that supports modest expansion. Modest being a storage device and possibly a GPU card. What they dont need is a buikt in monitor, an extra GPU nir a Xeon processor. They want a decent desktop Mac something Apple has failed reppeatable to deliver. Even looking back decades ago at the cube and other desktop failure you have to wonder if Apple will ever learn. You can only try to squeeze so much profit out of middling designs before people question the value if the product. This has doomed just about ever Apple desktop in memory as the hardware has become overpriced junk. Frankly junk is the right wird for todays Mini, Mac Pro and especially the iMacs. Junk is what you call very dated hardware.
$1200?
If you think they are going to sell a "headless" pro machine for $1200 when an iPhone goes for $1000 you are high. That headless dream has been floating for decades and will never happen. They are not going to undercut their MacBook Pros and iMacs with their Pro iMac with a headless machine.
$3000 will be the starting point pre-configured on the very low end (gimped to consumer processors, RAM and a single GPU), probably $5000 for decent machine and up to $10k or $15k on the top side. You can also bet it will be high-end CPUs with ECC ram and a mid-to-high level GPU, etc, at a minimum. When Apple means pro, they will mean pro, as in aiming for the high margin market of professionals making commercial films and TV, industrial designers (cars, airplanes, rockets), etc,. We're talking about people who will sink $5000 into a machine like they would drop $500 on dinner without a thought.
Rayz2016 said: Jobs’s real talent was surrounding himself with exceptional people who shared his vision for simplicity, and could temper his vision with pragmatism. If not for the pragmatiststs then OSX would’ve been released without the Carbon APIs, and iOS would’ve been released without an API at all.
...
App,e want to kickstart its line of professional desktop machines then they hire professionals … with the same vision for simplicity. And that’s kind of important, because the machine that will show up at the end of this extended incubation is not the machine that the “professionals” around here are asking for, namely a Dell box that just happens to run OSX. They certainly wouldn’t need until the end of 2019 to pull that off.
And, saying no often enough, though it wasn't a perfect track record. And, catching rather obvious things the current Apple can't seem to. Maybe the professionals around here are asking for something they actually need, until Apple can come up with the next wiz-bang thing? I'd love some wild new computer that I can't even imagine right now, but until then, yes a Dell that runs macOS would be far better than what we've got to pick from!
chasm said: 3. The forthcoming Mac Pro could ferment, brew and dispense free beer inside it, and it would still be way less than five percent of Mac sales. Schiller said it was never higher than that -- ever. A niche product that 0.1 percent of Apple customers are going to buy is not going to turn anything around, particularly when there is literally no area of the company that is not currently in possession of a license to print money and high-90s customer sat. The next Mac Pro is a thank you (and likely a sign-off) to the Mac veterans, not a viable product line.
And, that's the kind of of thinking that I'm scared is going on at Apple. No vision, no bigger-picture. Pie-charts.
ascii said: Even granting all that, when has Apple purely been about making profit? They want to make profit and make the world a better place at the same time I think.
And giving the smartest and most creative people amazing tools could make the world a better place and Apple will benefit from that along with the rest of us. I hope that doesn't sound hopelessly naive, but Tim Cook has publicly said on several occasions that X product or X initiative was not purely about profit.
They weren't always in the past. Apple sunk tons of cash into things that paid dividends far into the future (some simply in terms of brand perception). I guess maybe being able to see detail while also a big-picture is a special gift, but I'm always a bit shocked when people can't get it even after it is explained to them.
My fear is that Tim just likes to talk a good game after having been around the master for long enough... he really cares about Mac Minis too, apparently.
Why is Apple still selling the cylinder Mac Pro? Who would buy it? This blog says Apple should have resurrected the cheese grater while they work on this new device. I think that’s ridiculous but if Apple is going keep selling the trash can it should contain the most up to date specs as possible.
I'm considering buying one now that the prices have come down... if it hadn't been for the recent drop of TB2 drivers for eGPU. I can't wait until sometime in 2019, and Apple has no other viable even prosumer product besides a $6000+ iMac Pro.
macplusplus said: Thunderbolt is the standard that turns your PC inside-out.
The main components of your PC are tied together with a bus called PCIe. Your graphics card, your SSD communicate with the CPU over PCIe. Now consider extending that PCIe bus over a cable outside the case of your PC: this is Thunderbolt. With Thunderbolt you can attach a desk-load of peripherals (RAIDs, monitors, external GPUs, network interfaces…) and make all of these communicate at speeds previously only available internally on your PC. Without Thunderbolt, you’d have to build a PC the size of that desk to include all of those peripherals. Thanks to Thunderbolt you can isolate the core of your PC from the peripherals and get a more refined and modern configuration with better thermal management and virtually unlimited expandability.
Um, no. A TB2 port can't even support a single modern GPU at full speed. It's a fraction of the internal bus capacity.
So what? Critical components are already on the internal bus, no one says to you to put the main storage on Thunderbolt. That was a cartoonish representation of a new paradigm using as few words as possible. Have fun...
A redesigned modular Mac Pro -- teased in April 2017 for professionals that want to upgrade faster -- won't ship until 2019, Apple declared on Thursday.
The Mac Pro hasn't seen a major update since 2013.
"We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product. It's not something for this year," Apple's senior director of Mac hardware product marketing, Tom Boger, toldTechCrunch. The executive added that Apple is informing people now since professional customers may be weighing whether to buy an iMac Pro or hold off a few more months.
Apple's global marketing chief, Phil Schiller, confirmed that work is continuing on a standalone monitor. In fact the company has created a newly-disclosed group called the Pro Workflow Team, led by John Ternus and working in close cooperation with engineers. The company is hiring full-time and contracted artists to produce media projects that can be used to test Apple's hardware and software.
"We've been focusing on visual effects and video editing and 3D animation and music production as well," said Ternus. "And we've brought in some pretty incredible talent, really masters of their craft. And so they're now sitting and building out workflows internally with real content and really looking for what are the bottlenecks. What are the pain points. How can we improve things. And then we take this information where we find it and we go into our architecture team and our performance architects and really drill down and figure out where is the bottleneck. Is it the OS, is it in the drivers, is it in the application, is it in the silicon, and then run it to ground to get it fixed."
"We said in the meeting last year that the pro community isn't one thing," added Ternus. "It's very diverse. There's many different types of pros and obviously they go really deep into the hardware and software and are pushing everything to its limit. So one thing you have to do is we need to be engaging with the customers to really understand their needs. Because we want to provide complete pro solutions not just deliver big hardware which we're doing and we did it with iMac Pro. But look at everything holistically."
The entire effort goes beyond the iMac Pro and the 2019 Mac Pro -- with external GPU technology springing from it. The Pro group as a whole is examining not only workflows of customers in detail, but also examining the culture of Apple's hardware development, and how the company makes decisions about what it builds and how it does it. And, the group is hiring.
"We've gone from, just, you know, engineering Macs and software to actually engineering a workflow and really understanding from soup to nuts, every single stage of the process, where those bottlenecks are, where we can optimize that," said Boger. "Because we build the hardware the firmware the operating system the software and have these close relationships with third parties we can attack the entire stack and we can really ferret out where we are we can optimize for performance."
When asked if the Mac Pro was intended for 2018, Apple denied that there has been any alteration in the roadmap. Additionally, Ternus and Boger made it clear that through the design process a "modular" approach is still the focus of the machine -- but didn't go into any large amount of detail about it.
"I don't think that the timeline has fundamentally changed," said Ternus. "I think this is very much a situation where we want to measure twice and cut once and we want to make sure we're building a really well thought out platform for what our pro customers are doing today. But also with an eye towards what they're going to be doing in future as well. And so to do that right that's what we're focusing on."
"There is absolutely a need in certain places for modularity." said Ternus. "But it's also really clear that the iMac form factor or the MacBook Pros can be exceptionally good tools."
Apple's unexpected announcement in April of 2017 came after years of concern from professional users, many of whom believed that Apple had abandoned the pro market. In a meeting with journalists, Apple revealed that most professional users rely on the MacBook Pro or iMac, while the Mac Pro accounts for just a "low single digit" percentage market share.
"One of the good things, hopefully, with Apple through the years," Schiller said in April 2017, "has been a willingness to say when something isn't quite what we wanted it do be, didn't live up to expectations, to not be afraid to admit it and look for the next answer."
I cant wait for the launching of this newly Apple creation. Been an Apple Fan since 2010
Why is Apple still selling the cylinder Mac Pro? Who would buy it? This blog says Apple should have resurrected the cheese grater while they work on this new device. I think that’s ridiculous but if Apple is going keep selling the trash can it should contain the most up to date specs as possible.
Why is Apple still selling the cylinder Mac Pro? Who would buy it? This blog says Apple should have resurrected the cheese grater while they work on this new device. I think that’s ridiculous but if Apple is going keep selling the trash can it should contain the most up to date specs as possible.
Correct. It shouldn't be hard to just switch to the lates Intel chips, unless they're all custom built for the trash can.
To me the whole thing means that I'll have to stick with my 2013 trash can and but that the 2019 model is what I need and that I can afford it.
Still, a six years renew cycle is just ridiculous. The MacMini cycle goes in the same direction. Sad!
(Emphasis added.)
The most cost-efficient move today is to buy a used quad-core trash can (eBay "sold" average is about $1450) and the 12 core E5-2697 V2 on eBay ("sold" average is about $500), substitute the 12 core for the 4 core, and voila - you have a 12 core trash can for a fraction of the price that Apple wants for it.
The CPUs are not peculiar to Apple - they are standard socketed Xeons.
commentzilla said: If you think they are going to sell a "headless" pro machine for $1200 when an iPhone goes for $1000 you are high. That headless dream has been floating for decades and will never happen. They are not going to undercut their MacBook Pros and iMacs with their Pro iMac with a headless machine.
$3000 will be the starting point pre-configured on the very low end (gimped to consumer processors, RAM and a single GPU), probably $5000 for decent machine and up to $10k or $15k on the top side. You can also bet it will be high-end CPUs with ECC ram and a mid-to-high level GPU, etc, at a minimum. When Apple means pro, they will mean pro, as in aiming for the high margin market of professionals making commercial films and TV, industrial designers (cars, airplanes, rockets), etc,. We're talking about people who will sink $5000 into a machine like they would drop $500 on dinner without a thought.
The problem is more that they need a prosumer machine, AND a pro machine. There is a massive gap in the product line where they have lower end machines for the masses and then the iMac Pro and Mac Pro. There's nothing in the middle except iMacs and MacBook Pros... but not everyone wants an all-in-one, and both iMacs and MacBook Pros suffer from heat issues under heavier use.
But, you're probably right that Apple doesn't give a hoot. The reason people are complaining, is that this used to not be the case. A decade ago and back, I never had an issue finding a Mac to fit my needs (I'm prosumer to pro at times). Today, I'm struggling to figure out what to buy. Apple makes nothing for me.
cgWerks said: Um, no. A TB2 port can't even support a single modern GPU at full speed. It's a fraction of the internal bus capacity.
So what? Critical components are already on the internal bus, no one says to you to put the main storage on Thunderbolt. That was a cartoonish representation of a new paradigm using as few words as possible. Have fun...
You were the one talking like the cylinder Mac Pro was perfect for the future because everything could just be put externally. And, yes, that is the way it was presented and sold. I (we're) just pointing out the problems between that marketing and reality. TB3 is *finally* able to pull this off to some extent if there are enough separate controllers/ports. It was just a pipe-dream in 2013, which is why the real pros were upset.
svencito said: Correct. It shouldn't be hard to just switch to the lates Intel chips, unless they're all custom built for the trash can.
To me the whole thing means that I'll have to stick with my 2013 trash can and but that the 2019 model is what I need and that I can afford it. Still, a six years renew cycle is just ridiculous. The MacMini cycle goes in the same direction. Sad!
Yea, I suppose refreshing the cylinder could take a bit of work, but either project shouldn't be that difficult. Apple just doesn't give a rip. And, updating the Mini is crazy simple.
But, as I said above, I think the big problem here is that they aren't considering the middle at all (or think the iMac suffices for everyone). They are finally addressing the pros, but in typical Apple style, it has to be a massive multi-year long project to build the 'right thing' that might not be by the time it finally gets released anyway (like the cylinder). They need to move at a bit quicker than snail-pace... like they do with the iPhone.
automaticftp1 said: The most cost-efficient move today is to buy a used quad-core trash can (eBay "sold" average is about $1450) and the 12 core E5-2697 V2 on eBay ("sold" average is about $500), substitute the 12 core for the 4 core, and voila - you have a 12 core trash can for a fraction of the price that Apple wants for it.
The CPUs are not peculiar to Apple - they are standard socketed Xeons.
Thanks for the tip! I'm really close to buying a 2013, and that would make it so much nicer. My main concern, though, is how long it will be supported for OS updates (hopefully a few years yet?), and then that it's TB2 in terms of eGPU support (with Apple pulling it recently). Though the hacker community looks to have solved that for now. But I hate playing cat and mouse with that kind of thing.
cgWerks said: Um, no. A TB2 port can't even support a single modern GPU at full speed. It's a fraction of the internal bus capacity.
So what? Critical components are already on the internal bus, no one says to you to put the main storage on Thunderbolt. That was a cartoonish representation of a new paradigm using as few words as possible. Have fun...
You were the one talking like the cylinder Mac Pro was perfect for the future because everything could just be put externally. And, yes, that is the way it was presented and sold. I (we're) just pointing out the problems between that marketing and reality. TB3 is *finally* able to pull this off to some extent if there are enough separate controllers/ports. It was just a pipe-dream in 2013, which is why the real pros were upset.
It is still a decent 4K video editing workstation, with its upgraded Xeons and upgraded dual AMDs coupled with Final Cut Pro along with Thunderbolt 2 driving 4K and 5K monitors. Not every "real pro" does 8K video editing. And after iMac Pro starting at $5000 it is a bargain at $3000. Video uploaders should not miss it.
And yes it is still a concept ahead of its time. The industry just couldn't keep up with the highly parallel processing brought up by dual GPUs and gone different way sticking with single GPU. Is that a problem for Apple? Absolutely not. As long as they have kernel support for dual GPU and pro software based on that highly parallel processing, they are on the right course. And here are Final Cut Pro X, Motion, Compressor, Logic Pro X all able to exploit the dual GPUs. They control the manufacture and sourcing, can adjust offer according to demand, thus they will never have a stock exploding in their backyard.
And the next iteration most probably will bring also the dual Xeons in addition to dual GPUs and we've yet to see what the industry will do with that.
automaticftp1 said: The most cost-efficient move today is to buy a used quad-core trash can (eBay "sold" average is about $1450) and the 12 core E5-2697 V2 on eBay ("sold" average is about $500), substitute the 12 core for the 4 core, and voila - you have a 12 core trash can for a fraction of the price that Apple wants for it.
The CPUs are not peculiar to Apple - they are standard socketed Xeons.
Thanks for the tip! I'm really close to buying a 2013, and that would make it so much nicer. My main concern, though, is how long it will be supported for OS updates (hopefully a few years yet?), and then that it's TB2 in terms of eGPU support (with Apple pulling it recently). Though the hacker community looks to have solved that for now. But I hate playing cat and mouse with that kind of thing.
I wouldn't rely on TB2 and neither on hacker community for eGPU support and consider it non-existant. The actual eGPU solutions seem targeting rather MBP users. We have to resolve how meaningful Mac Pro + eGPU vs. iMac Pro.
"What shape that modularity takes is another matter entirely, of course. I know some people have been pining for the days of internal expansion card configurations with standardized hardware — and maybe that is the way that this will go. But on Tuesday I also got a tour of the editing suites where Mac hardware and software is pushed to the limits, including extensive use of eGPU support, and a different vision emerges."
What may be that "different vision"? The author emphasizes the extensive use of eGPU support. An expansion box comes to mind...
Whatever it is, according to that clue, the future Mac Pro may not be a traditional PC box with expansion slots.
[...] The main components of your PC are tied together with a bus called PCIe. Your graphics card, your SSD communicate with the CPU over PCIe. Now consider extending that PCIe bus over a cable outside the case of your PC: this is Thunderbolt.
Great in theory, except that Thunderbolt only manages a fraction of the speed an internal PCIe bus provides. It's not actually equivalent.
According to your non-equivalence theory, all of those 4K and 5K Thunderbolt monitors are hoaxes then? Since they wouldn't be able to display 4K video as it is pumped out by the CPU/GPU.
He's literally saying, the PCIe 3.0 x16 offers 32 GB/s, while Thunderbolt 3 offers 5 GB/s. So an external GPU, for example, is now limited to 5 GB/s (2.5 GB/s each way).
How did you get those numbers?
Thunderbolt 3 has a total bandwidth of 40 Gb/s, convert to GB/s and we get 5 GB/s.
B = byte b = bit 8 bits = 1 byte
Yes that's it, then what is the significance of those numbers in terms of GPU performance, what is the difference between using a graphics card internally on a x16 PCIe slot and using it in an eGPU TB 3 enclosure? Is that difference so big to justify using an internal slot? eGPU testing articles will certainly reveal that, I'm just asking without digging further.
That's a bit of a loaded question as a lot depends on the setup.
Here's a 3D benchmark with an older dGPU.
PCIe x16 3.0 (external monitor):
[removed]
Thunderbolt 3 (external monitor):
[snip]
Of course, there are more scenarios than the above. For example, when using an eGPU with a laptop, you either connect an external monitor to the eGPU directly, or, you use the laptop's internal display. When using the internal display, the bandwidth for the GPU over TB3 is cut even further to 2.5 GB/s and the performance will be even lower.
The situation becomes even more complex for multi GPU setups, as even PCIe 3.0 x16 can be a bottleneck. As I pointed out above, NVIDIA, for their V100 GPUs, uses NVLink 2.0. In a four GPU configuration, each GPU has 200 GB/s of bandwidth over the NVLink.
TL;DR - Thunderbolt 3 is not going to cut it.
Of course there is a reason Apple has soldered two GPUs onto the main board in Mac Pro. It might put a decent single GPU and suggest eGPU for the rest, but this is not the case. My point is, pushing the performance loss of a eGPU as a weakness of Thunderbolt doesn't do justice. Despite all those performance losses, eGPUs are still proposed as long as they offer better performance than the internal GPU: https://9to5mac.com/2017/11/27/egpu-amd-rx-vega-64-macos-high-sierra-beta-gpu-video/
The FPS in your screen shots goes from 90.5 to 76.1, is that such a big deal? Can the gamer move at 90.5 fps? No, then this is irrelevant unless you're a FPS freak. That doesn't mean that eGPU should replace your PC's graphics card, as it doesn't mean that eGPU should replace Mac Pro's soldered dual GPUs (it can't). But as an expansion option Thunderbolt delivers, no one can deny this, it is not redundant or added cost. It deserves its place in your budget and in your machine.
So you go with a Xeon based machine - which benefits on double the PCIe lanes (per CPU) of around 44 (vs 20/24) double the bandwidth -- then instead of putting the GPU card in 16 PCIe lane slot close the CPU -- you hobble it by putting on Thunderbolt which BEST case scenario - will only have access to 4 PCIe lanes. It is fine to put an eGPU through thunderbolt if you have no other option (like a laptop), but it is idiocy to turn a $3000 card into a $700 card, a $1000+ card into a $500 card performance-wise. I don't even think Apple is that stupid. You also take away the possibility of slotting it up with TPUs for AI (locally not in the cloud), things like Red Rocket cards etc. Thunderbolt is a good performance external link, but you should not be OCD about it and assume that it is the right solution to every problem.
[...] The main components of your PC are tied together with a bus called PCIe. Your graphics card, your SSD communicate with the CPU over PCIe. Now consider extending that PCIe bus over a cable outside the case of your PC: this is Thunderbolt.
Great in theory, except that Thunderbolt only manages a fraction of the speed an internal PCIe bus provides. It's not actually equivalent.
According to your non-equivalence theory, all of those 4K and 5K Thunderbolt monitors are hoaxes then? Since they wouldn't be able to display 4K video as it is pumped out by the CPU/GPU.
He's literally saying, the PCIe 3.0 x16 offers 32 GB/s, while Thunderbolt 3 offers 5 GB/s. So an external GPU, for example, is now limited to 5 GB/s (2.5 GB/s each way).
How did you get those numbers?
Thunderbolt 3 has a total bandwidth of 40 Gb/s, convert to GB/s and we get 5 GB/s.
B = byte b = bit 8 bits = 1 byte
Yes that's it, then what is the significance of those numbers in terms of GPU performance, what is the difference between using a graphics card internally on a x16 PCIe slot and using it in an eGPU TB 3 enclosure? Is that difference so big to justify using an internal slot? eGPU testing articles will certainly reveal that, I'm just asking without digging further.
That's a bit of a loaded question as a lot depends on the setup.
Here's a 3D benchmark with an older dGPU.
PCIe x16 3.0 (external monitor):
[removed]
Thunderbolt 3 (external monitor):
[snip]
Of course, there are more scenarios than the above. For example, when using an eGPU with a laptop, you either connect an external monitor to the eGPU directly, or, you use the laptop's internal display. When using the internal display, the bandwidth for the GPU over TB3 is cut even further to 2.5 GB/s and the performance will be even lower.
The situation becomes even more complex for multi GPU setups, as even PCIe 3.0 x16 can be a bottleneck. As I pointed out above, NVIDIA, for their V100 GPUs, uses NVLink 2.0. In a four GPU configuration, each GPU has 200 GB/s of bandwidth over the NVLink.
TL;DR - Thunderbolt 3 is not going to cut it.
Of course there is a reason Apple has soldered two GPUs onto the main board in Mac Pro. It might put a decent single GPU and suggest eGPU for the rest, but this is not the case. My point is, pushing the performance loss of a eGPU as a weakness of Thunderbolt doesn't do justice. Despite all those performance losses, eGPUs are still proposed as long as they offer better performance than the internal GPU: https://9to5mac.com/2017/11/27/egpu-amd-rx-vega-64-macos-high-sierra-beta-gpu-video/
The FPS in your screen shots goes from 90.5 to 76.1, is that such a big deal? Can the gamer move at 90.5 fps? No, then this is irrelevant unless you're a FPS freak. That doesn't mean that eGPU should replace your PC's graphics card, as it doesn't mean that eGPU should replace Mac Pro's soldered dual GPUs (it can't). But as an expansion option Thunderbolt delivers, no one can deny this, it is not redundant or added cost. It deserves its place in your budget and in your machine.
So you go with a Xeon based machine - which benefits on double the PCIe lanes (per CPU) of around 44 (vs 20/24) double the bandwidth -- then instead of putting the GPU card in 16 PCIe lane slot close the CPU -- you hobble it by putting on Thunderbolt which BEST case scenario - will only have access to 4 PCIe lanes. It is fine to put an eGPU through thunderbolt if you have no other option (like a laptop), but it is idiocy to turn a $3000 card into a $700 card, a $1000+ card into a $500 card performance-wise. I don't even think Apple is that stupid. You also take away the possibility of slotting it up with TPUs for AI (locally not in the cloud), things like Red Rocket cards etc. Thunderbolt is a good performance external link, but you should not be OCD about it and assume that it is the right solution to every problem.
What are you talking about? I said exactly the opposite of what you understand, as the quotation you made disproves you. If Apple has soldered two GPUs on the motherboard there was a reason for this. And that reason is, no eGPU can compete with the performance of dual GPUs soldered on motherboard. This is what I am saying there.
People force themselves to discredit Thunderbolt as if it is claiming to be a substitute to "motherboard". Thunderbolt has no such a claim, it is an expansion option, not the motherboard itself. I'd made a cartoonish representation to cut the wording short. Feel free to have fun with that but do not try to tweak it to discredit Thunderbolt.
[...] The main components of your PC are tied together with a bus called PCIe. Your graphics card, your SSD communicate with the CPU over PCIe. Now consider extending that PCIe bus over a cable outside the case of your PC: this is Thunderbolt.
Great in theory, except that Thunderbolt only manages a fraction of the speed an internal PCIe bus provides. It's not actually equivalent.
According to your non-equivalence theory, all of those 4K and 5K Thunderbolt monitors are hoaxes then? Since they wouldn't be able to display 4K video as it is pumped out by the CPU/GPU.
He's literally saying, the PCIe 3.0 x16 offers 32 GB/s, while Thunderbolt 3 offers 5 GB/s. So an external GPU, for example, is now limited to 5 GB/s (2.5 GB/s each way).
How did you get those numbers?
Thunderbolt 3 has a total bandwidth of 40 Gb/s, convert to GB/s and we get 5 GB/s.
B = byte b = bit 8 bits = 1 byte
Yes that's it, then what is the significance of those numbers in terms of GPU performance, what is the difference between using a graphics card internally on a x16 PCIe slot and using it in an eGPU TB 3 enclosure? Is that difference so big to justify using an internal slot? eGPU testing articles will certainly reveal that, I'm just asking without digging further.
That's a bit of a loaded question as a lot depends on the setup.
Here's a 3D benchmark with an older dGPU.
PCIe x16 3.0 (external monitor):
[removed]
Thunderbolt 3 (external monitor):
[snip]
Of course, there are more scenarios than the above. For example, when using an eGPU with a laptop, you either connect an external monitor to the eGPU directly, or, you use the laptop's internal display. When using the internal display, the bandwidth for the GPU over TB3 is cut even further to 2.5 GB/s and the performance will be even lower.
The situation becomes even more complex for multi GPU setups, as even PCIe 3.0 x16 can be a bottleneck. As I pointed out above, NVIDIA, for their V100 GPUs, uses NVLink 2.0. In a four GPU configuration, each GPU has 200 GB/s of bandwidth over the NVLink.
TL;DR - Thunderbolt 3 is not going to cut it.
Of course there is a reason Apple has soldered two GPUs onto the main board in Mac Pro. It might put a decent single GPU and suggest eGPU for the rest, but this is not the case. My point is, pushing the performance loss of a eGPU as a weakness of Thunderbolt doesn't do justice. Despite all those performance losses, eGPUs are still proposed as long as they offer better performance than the internal GPU: https://9to5mac.com/2017/11/27/egpu-amd-rx-vega-64-macos-high-sierra-beta-gpu-video/
The FPS in your screen shots goes from 90.5 to 76.1, is that such a big deal? Can the gamer move at 90.5 fps? No, then this is irrelevant unless you're a FPS freak. That doesn't mean that eGPU should replace your PC's graphics card, as it doesn't mean that eGPU should replace Mac Pro's soldered dual GPUs (it can't). But as an expansion option Thunderbolt delivers, no one can deny this, it is not redundant or added cost. It deserves its place in your budget and in your machine.
So you go with a Xeon based machine - which benefits on double the PCIe lanes (per CPU) of around 44 (vs 20/24) double the bandwidth -- then instead of putting the GPU card in 16 PCIe lane slot close the CPU -- you hobble it by putting on Thunderbolt which BEST case scenario - will only have access to 4 PCIe lanes. It is fine to put an eGPU through thunderbolt if you have no other option (like a laptop), but it is idiocy to turn a $3000 card into a $700 card, a $1000+ card into a $500 card performance-wise. I don't even think Apple is that stupid. You also take away the possibility of slotting it up with TPUs for AI (locally not in the cloud), things like Red Rocket cards etc. Thunderbolt is a good performance external link, but you should not be OCD about it and assume that it is the right solution to every problem.
What are you talking about? I said exactly the opposite of what you understand, as the quotation you made disproves you. If Apple has soldered two GPUs on the motherboard there was a reason for this. And that reason is, no eGPU can compete with the performance of dual GPUs soldered on motherboard. This is what I am saying there.
People force themselves to discredit Thunderbolt as if it is claiming to be a substitute to "motherboard". Thunderbolt has no such a claim, it is an expansion option, not the motherboard itself. I'd made a cartoonish representation to cut the wording short. Feel free to have fun with that but do not try to tweak it to discredit Thunderbolt.
Thunderbolt is an EXTENSION of 4 PCIe lanes (maximum) only.
Intel offers three versions of the controller:
one "DP" (Double Port) version that uses a PCIe 3.0 ×4 link to provide two Thunderbolt 3 ports (DSL6540)
one "SP" (Single Port) version that uses a PCIe 3.0 ×4 link to provide one Thunderbolt 3 port (DSL6340)
an "LP" (Low Power) version that uses a PCIe 3.0 ×2 link to provide one Thunderbolt 3 port (JHL6240).
I believe Apple typically uses the "DP" version.
High-end graphics cards recommend seating them in the 16 PCIe slot for maximum performance. The equivalent of wiring up a graphics card to Thunderbolt is to take that nice high-end graphics cards and slotting it into an x4 PCIe slot.
Testing on eGPU has reflected that it is between 20% to 30% of an impact.
So basically, but running a graphics card over Thunderbolt vs the motherboard - is equivalent to buying a GTX 1080Ti graphics card and getting GTX 1070 performance. The higher the performance graphics card beyond that point the higher the impact - due to bottlenecking bandwidth over 4 PCIe x4.
Thunderbolt is very low overhead -- but there is still overhead.
I am not trying to discredit Thunderbolt - I far prefer it over things like USB. It works well for high throughput, low latency communications which much better for higher-end peripherals... but it is no substitute for having direct PCIe slots available for things like graphics cards, TPU cards, etc.
The cMP had 4 PCIe slots. Two of them could accommodate two upgradeable Video Cards, a third would become unusable if a second video card was installed -- leaving one lower spec final slot. Many have argued that it was far superior in expandability than the trashcan Mac Pro, but I would argue it is not. It did give you upgradeable video cards (video card performance and TPU performance is improving faster than CPUs - and are more likely to need upgrading at the end of 2 or 3 years - if you rely on top performance video cards). The mistake Apple made with the trashcan though is at the top end of the "professional market" -- it was introduced as a substitute for PCIe slots (after the graphics card) and not as a further expansion. I am hoping that the new modular will support both (at least 4 slots) and at least 6 Thunderbolt/USB-C connectors.
[...] The main components of your PC are tied together with a bus called PCIe. Your graphics card, your SSD communicate with the CPU over PCIe. Now consider extending that PCIe bus over a cable outside the case of your PC: this is Thunderbolt.
Great in theory, except that Thunderbolt only manages a fraction of the speed an internal PCIe bus provides. It's not actually equivalent.
According to your non-equivalence theory, all of those 4K and 5K Thunderbolt monitors are hoaxes then? Since they wouldn't be able to display 4K video as it is pumped out by the CPU/GPU.
He's literally saying, the PCIe 3.0 x16 offers 32 GB/s, while Thunderbolt 3 offers 5 GB/s. So an external GPU, for example, is now limited to 5 GB/s (2.5 GB/s each way).
How did you get those numbers?
Thunderbolt 3 has a total bandwidth of 40 Gb/s, convert to GB/s and we get 5 GB/s.
B = byte b = bit 8 bits = 1 byte
Yes that's it, then what is the significance of those numbers in terms of GPU performance, what is the difference between using a graphics card internally on a x16 PCIe slot and using it in an eGPU TB 3 enclosure? Is that difference so big to justify using an internal slot? eGPU testing articles will certainly reveal that, I'm just asking without digging further.
That's a bit of a loaded question as a lot depends on the setup.
Here's a 3D benchmark with an older dGPU.
PCIe x16 3.0 (external monitor):
[removed]
Thunderbolt 3 (external monitor):
[snip]
Of course, there are more scenarios than the above. For example, when using an eGPU with a laptop, you either connect an external monitor to the eGPU directly, or, you use the laptop's internal display. When using the internal display, the bandwidth for the GPU over TB3 is cut even further to 2.5 GB/s and the performance will be even lower.
The situation becomes even more complex for multi GPU setups, as even PCIe 3.0 x16 can be a bottleneck. As I pointed out above, NVIDIA, for their V100 GPUs, uses NVLink 2.0. In a four GPU configuration, each GPU has 200 GB/s of bandwidth over the NVLink.
TL;DR - Thunderbolt 3 is not going to cut it.
Of course there is a reason Apple has soldered two GPUs onto the main board in Mac Pro. It might put a decent single GPU and suggest eGPU for the rest, but this is not the case. My point is, pushing the performance loss of a eGPU as a weakness of Thunderbolt doesn't do justice. Despite all those performance losses, eGPUs are still proposed as long as they offer better performance than the internal GPU: https://9to5mac.com/2017/11/27/egpu-amd-rx-vega-64-macos-high-sierra-beta-gpu-video/
The FPS in your screen shots goes from 90.5 to 76.1, is that such a big deal? Can the gamer move at 90.5 fps? No, then this is irrelevant unless you're a FPS freak. That doesn't mean that eGPU should replace your PC's graphics card, as it doesn't mean that eGPU should replace Mac Pro's soldered dual GPUs (it can't). But as an expansion option Thunderbolt delivers, no one can deny this, it is not redundant or added cost. It deserves its place in your budget and in your machine.
So you go with a Xeon based machine - which benefits on double the PCIe lanes (per CPU) of around 44 (vs 20/24) double the bandwidth -- then instead of putting the GPU card in 16 PCIe lane slot close the CPU -- you hobble it by putting on Thunderbolt which BEST case scenario - will only have access to 4 PCIe lanes. It is fine to put an eGPU through thunderbolt if you have no other option (like a laptop), but it is idiocy to turn a $3000 card into a $700 card, a $1000+ card into a $500 card performance-wise. I don't even think Apple is that stupid. You also take away the possibility of slotting it up with TPUs for AI (locally not in the cloud), things like Red Rocket cards etc. Thunderbolt is a good performance external link, but you should not be OCD about it and assume that it is the right solution to every problem.
What are you talking about? I said exactly the opposite of what you understand, as the quotation you made disproves you. If Apple has soldered two GPUs on the motherboard there was a reason for this. And that reason is, no eGPU can compete with the performance of dual GPUs soldered on motherboard. This is what I am saying there.
People force themselves to discredit Thunderbolt as if it is claiming to be a substitute to "motherboard". Thunderbolt has no such a claim, it is an expansion option, not the motherboard itself. I'd made a cartoonish representation to cut the wording short. Feel free to have fun with that but do not try to tweak it to discredit Thunderbolt.
Thunderbolt is an EXTENSION of 4 PCIe lanes (maximum) only.
Intel offers three versions of the controller:
one "DP" (Double Port) version that uses a PCIe 3.0 ×4 link to provide two Thunderbolt 3 ports (DSL6540)
one "SP" (Single Port) version that uses a PCIe 3.0 ×4 link to provide one Thunderbolt 3 port (DSL6340)
an "LP" (Low Power) version that uses a PCIe 3.0 ×2 link to provide one Thunderbolt 3 port (JHL6240).
I believe Apple typically uses the "DP" version.
High-end graphics cards recommend seating them in the 16 PCIe slot for maximum performance. The equivalent of wiring up a graphics card to Thunderbolt is to take that nice high-end graphics cards and slotting it into an x4 PCIe slot.
Testing on eGPU has reflected that it is between 20% to 30% of an impact.
So basically, but running a graphics card over Thunderbolt vs the motherboard - is equivalent to buying a GTX 1080Ti graphics card and getting GTX 1070 performance. The higher the performance graphics card beyond that point the higher the impact - due to bottlenecking bandwidth over 4 PCIe x4.
Thunderbolt is very low overhead -- but there is still overhead.
I am not trying to discredit Thunderbolt - I far prefer it over things like USB. It works well for high throughput, low latency communications which much better for higher-end peripherals... but it is no substitute for having direct PCIe slots available for things like graphics cards, TPU cards, etc.
The cMP had 4 PCIe slots. Two of them could accommodate two upgradeable Video Cards, a third would become unusable if a second video card was installed -- leaving one lower spec final slot. Many have argued that it was far superior in expandability than the trashcan Mac Pro, but I would argue it is not. It did give you upgradeable video cards (video card performance and TPU performance is improving faster than CPUs - and are more likely to need upgrading at the end of 2 or 3 years - if you rely on top performance video cards). The mistake Apple made with the trashcan though is at the top end of the "professional market" -- it was introduced as a substitute for PCIe slots (after the graphics card) and not as a further expansion. I am hoping that the new modular will support both (at least 4 slots) and at least 6 Thunderbolt/USB-C connectors.
You exposed well the dilemma PCIe slot vs Thunderbolt. Now further digging is needed to understand why Apple may have chosen Thunderbolt 2 over PCIe slot as the expansion option in trash can MP.
[...] The main components of your PC are tied together with a bus called PCIe. Your graphics card, your SSD communicate with the CPU over PCIe. Now consider extending that PCIe bus over a cable outside the case of your PC: this is Thunderbolt.
Great in theory, except that Thunderbolt only manages a fraction of the speed an internal PCIe bus provides. It's not actually equivalent.
According to your non-equivalence theory, all of those 4K and 5K Thunderbolt monitors are hoaxes then? Since they wouldn't be able to display 4K video as it is pumped out by the CPU/GPU.
He's literally saying, the PCIe 3.0 x16 offers 32 GB/s, while Thunderbolt 3 offers 5 GB/s. So an external GPU, for example, is now limited to 5 GB/s (2.5 GB/s each way).
How did you get those numbers?
Thunderbolt 3 has a total bandwidth of 40 Gb/s, convert to GB/s and we get 5 GB/s.
B = byte b = bit 8 bits = 1 byte
Yes that's it, then what is the significance of those numbers in terms of GPU performance, what is the difference between using a graphics card internally on a x16 PCIe slot and using it in an eGPU TB 3 enclosure? Is that difference so big to justify using an internal slot? eGPU testing articles will certainly reveal that, I'm just asking without digging further.
That's a bit of a loaded question as a lot depends on the setup.
Here's a 3D benchmark with an older dGPU.
PCIe x16 3.0 (external monitor):
[removed]
Thunderbolt 3 (external monitor):
[snip]
Of course, there are more scenarios than the above. For example, when using an eGPU with a laptop, you either connect an external monitor to the eGPU directly, or, you use the laptop's internal display. When using the internal display, the bandwidth for the GPU over TB3 is cut even further to 2.5 GB/s and the performance will be even lower.
The situation becomes even more complex for multi GPU setups, as even PCIe 3.0 x16 can be a bottleneck. As I pointed out above, NVIDIA, for their V100 GPUs, uses NVLink 2.0. In a four GPU configuration, each GPU has 200 GB/s of bandwidth over the NVLink.
TL;DR - Thunderbolt 3 is not going to cut it.
Of course there is a reason Apple has soldered two GPUs onto the main board in Mac Pro. It might put a decent single GPU and suggest eGPU for the rest, but this is not the case. My point is, pushing the performance loss of a eGPU as a weakness of Thunderbolt doesn't do justice. Despite all those performance losses, eGPUs are still proposed as long as they offer better performance than the internal GPU: https://9to5mac.com/2017/11/27/egpu-amd-rx-vega-64-macos-high-sierra-beta-gpu-video/
The FPS in your screen shots goes from 90.5 to 76.1, is that such a big deal? Can the gamer move at 90.5 fps? No, then this is irrelevant unless you're a FPS freak. That doesn't mean that eGPU should replace your PC's graphics card, as it doesn't mean that eGPU should replace Mac Pro's soldered dual GPUs (it can't). But as an expansion option Thunderbolt delivers, no one can deny this, it is not redundant or added cost. It deserves its place in your budget and in your machine.
So you go with a Xeon based machine - which benefits on double the PCIe lanes (per CPU) of around 44 (vs 20/24) double the bandwidth -- then instead of putting the GPU card in 16 PCIe lane slot close the CPU -- you hobble it by putting on Thunderbolt which BEST case scenario - will only have access to 4 PCIe lanes. It is fine to put an eGPU through thunderbolt if you have no other option (like a laptop), but it is idiocy to turn a $3000 card into a $700 card, a $1000+ card into a $500 card performance-wise. I don't even think Apple is that stupid. You also take away the possibility of slotting it up with TPUs for AI (locally not in the cloud), things like Red Rocket cards etc. Thunderbolt is a good performance external link, but you should not be OCD about it and assume that it is the right solution to every problem.
Yes but the GPU to put image to screen doesn't need to be near the CPU or have super high bandwidth to be as effective. So that could be the eGPU and built inside the case of the monitor. Then one product is a booster for iMacs, a dock for Laptops and allows the Grunt Mac Pro to be up what 100m away with optic fibre Thunderbolt. Which then looks neat and tidy to the user, and quiet. Like the left side of the image not like the right side of the image. Find away to sideline the users personal tasks off the main grunt box (iPad, iPhone and cohearance maybe) and users with the same large data set could be running with multiple app instances of for each user on small set of machines or just one multiple processor in one box.
That frees up high bandwidth connection for grunt and keeps the grunt close to the data. Instead of spreading the data out to be near the grunt which needs to near the user is the current situation.
macplusplus said: It is still a decent 4K video editing workstation, with its upgraded Xeons and upgraded dual AMDs coupled with Final Cut Pro along with Thunderbolt 2 driving 4K and 5K monitors. Not every "real pro" does 8K video editing. ... And yes it is still a concept ahead of its time. The industry just couldn't keep up with the highly parallel processing brought up by dual GPUs ...
And the next iteration most probably will bring also the dual Xeons in addition to dual GPUs and we've yet to see what the industry will do with that. ... I wouldn't rely on TB2 and neither on hacker community for eGPU support and consider it non-existant. The actual eGPU solutions seem targeting rather MBP users. We have to resolve how meaningful Mac Pro + eGPU vs. iMac Pro.
Except not everyone judges these based on video editing. There are scientific applications, 3D rendering/animation, etc. A lot of Apple's computers do pretty well at video editing. I agree that it's probably fine for video editing except at the extreme.
What I was hearing from the pro community when it came out, was concern with built-in, non-changable video cards (as most of these people upgrade video cards whenever the tech updates), and especially that there was no option for nVidia (i.e.: CUDA support).
With eGPUs, that option opens back up.... IF the speed is fast enough. TB3 is finally getting there. Or course, that's if Apple supports it in terms of drivers... and they seem to be going the opposite way... clamping back down instead of expanding support.
I agree that a 2013 Mac Pro w/ TB2 and looking at eGPUs is quite risky right now. It had been looking like a possible option if one was willing to lose 20% performance on the GPU. That has changed now, and looks like Apple is purposely closing off that avenue for some reason.
macplusplus said: What may be that "different vision"? The author emphasizes the extensive use of eGPU support. An expansion box comes to mind...
Whatever it is, according to that clue, the future Mac Pro may not be a traditional PC box with expansion slots.
Yes, I kinda doubt Apple is going back to the 'cheese grater' style machine, even if that's what many want. I remember talking to a friend who was consulting with several Mac Pro using shops in the SF area back in 2013. He said everyone was impressed with the Mac Pro for what it was... but it wasn't what they wanted. They didn't care about beautiful cylinders to sit on a desk, or that it's small, or any of that kind of stuff. Big machines with lots of slots and expansion was what they wanted.
Now, several years later, I think everyone would re-think it all again, as it's more viable to do something different to meet the pro's needs (that wasn't possible in 2013). But, I think TB3 still isn't at a point of being an external bus for some purposes... barely enough for others... and overkill for some.
macplusplus said: You exposed well the dilemma PCIe slot vs Thunderbolt. Now further digging is needed to understand why Apple may have chosen Thunderbolt 2 over PCIe slot as the expansion option in trash can MP.
Because Phil wanted to get up on stage and utter his now infamous little quip? Apple thought they were innovating, and that won out over practicality. In a way, they were innovating, I suppose, just a half-decade+ before the technology was ready to pull it off. Flying cars are innovative, but mostly useless, too. Innovation and practicality need to meet.
It's not a bad machine. It's nearly idea (original cost aside) for someone like me. It just wasn't appropriate for a good segment of the target market. If Apple were committed to eGPU on TB2, I'd probably buy one despite the performance loss. But, as others pointed out above, that doesn't cut it, necessarily, for the real heavy use pros.
mattinoz said: Then one product is a booster for iMacs, a dock for Laptops and allows the Grunt Mac Pro to be up what 100m away with optic fibre Thunderbolt.
Which then looks neat and tidy to the user, and quiet.
Sounds good in theory, but I don't think the software/hardware is really there on the whole. Maybe once TB reaches it's full potential.
Comments
I'm don't think we'll ever see a version of TouchID or FaceID that simply works over a USB cable. /shrug
If they are comfortable with that over wireless and/or some iCloud relay then I can’t rule out that it’s not doable over TB.
How much would it be to put a T-series and/or some variant of the S-series on the external display (or in a keyboard for Touch ID and the TouchBar) to get this feature?
Maybe the professionals around here are asking for something they actually need, until Apple can come up with the next wiz-bang thing?
I'd love some wild new computer that I can't even imagine right now, but until then, yes a Dell that runs macOS would be far better than what we've got to pick from!
And, that's the kind of of thinking that I'm scared is going on at Apple. No vision, no bigger-picture. Pie-charts.
They weren't always in the past. Apple sunk tons of cash into things that paid dividends far into the future (some simply in terms of brand perception). I guess maybe being able to see detail while also a big-picture is a special gift, but I'm always a bit shocked when people can't get it even after it is explained to them.
My fear is that Tim just likes to talk a good game after having been around the master for long enough... he really cares about Mac Minis too, apparently.
I'm considering buying one now that the prices have come down... if it hadn't been for the recent drop of TB2 drivers for eGPU. I can't wait until sometime in 2019, and Apple has no other viable even prosumer product besides a $6000+ iMac Pro.
Um, no. A TB2 port can't even support a single modern GPU at full speed. It's a fraction of the internal bus capacity.
If it were only that easy...
If you think they are going to sell a "headless" pro machine for $1200 when an iPhone goes for $1000 you are high. That headless dream has been floating for decades and will never happen. They are not going to undercut their MacBook Pros and iMacs with their Pro iMac with a headless machine.
$3000 will be the starting point pre-configured on the very low end (gimped to consumer processors, RAM and a single GPU), probably $5000 for decent machine and up to $10k or $15k on the top side. You can also bet it will be high-end CPUs with ECC ram and a mid-to-high level GPU, etc, at a minimum. When Apple means pro, they will mean pro, as in aiming for the high margin market of professionals making commercial films and TV, industrial designers (cars, airplanes, rockets), etc,. We're talking about people who will sink $5000 into a machine like they would drop $500 on dinner without a thought.
To me the whole thing means that I'll have to stick with my 2013 trash can and but that the 2019 model is what I need and that I can afford it.
Still, a six years renew cycle is just ridiculous. The MacMini cycle goes in the same direction. Sad!
The most cost-efficient move today is to buy a used quad-core trash can (eBay "sold" average is about $1450) and the 12 core E5-2697 V2 on eBay ("sold" average is about $500), substitute the 12 core for the 4 core, and voila - you have a 12 core trash can for a fraction of the price that Apple wants for it.
The CPUs are not peculiar to Apple - they are standard socketed Xeons.
But, you're probably right that Apple doesn't give a hoot. The reason people are complaining, is that this used to not be the case. A decade ago and back, I never had an issue finding a Mac to fit my needs (I'm prosumer to pro at times). Today, I'm struggling to figure out what to buy. Apple makes nothing for me.
You were the one talking like the cylinder Mac Pro was perfect for the future because everything could just be put externally. And, yes, that is the way it was presented and sold. I (we're) just pointing out the problems between that marketing and reality. TB3 is *finally* able to pull this off to some extent if there are enough separate controllers/ports. It was just a pipe-dream in 2013, which is why the real pros were upset.
Yea, I suppose refreshing the cylinder could take a bit of work, but either project shouldn't be that difficult. Apple just doesn't give a rip. And, updating the Mini is crazy simple.
But, as I said above, I think the big problem here is that they aren't considering the middle at all (or think the iMac suffices for everyone). They are finally addressing the pros, but in typical Apple style, it has to be a massive multi-year long project to build the 'right thing' that might not be by the time it finally gets released anyway (like the cylinder). They need to move at a bit quicker than snail-pace... like they do with the iPhone.
Thanks for the tip! I'm really close to buying a 2013, and that would make it so much nicer. My main concern, though, is how long it will be supported for OS updates (hopefully a few years yet?), and then that it's TB2 in terms of eGPU support (with Apple pulling it recently). Though the hacker community looks to have solved that for now. But I hate playing cat and mouse with that kind of thing.
It is still a decent 4K video editing workstation, with its upgraded Xeons and upgraded dual AMDs coupled with Final Cut Pro along with Thunderbolt 2 driving 4K and 5K monitors. Not every "real pro" does 8K video editing. And after iMac Pro starting at $5000 it is a bargain at $3000. Video uploaders should not miss it.
And yes it is still a concept ahead of its time. The industry just couldn't keep up with the highly parallel processing brought up by dual GPUs and gone different way sticking with single GPU. Is that a problem for Apple? Absolutely not. As long as they have kernel support for dual GPU and pro software based on that highly parallel processing, they are on the right course. And here are Final Cut Pro X, Motion, Compressor, Logic Pro X all able to exploit the dual GPUs. They control the manufacture and sourcing, can adjust offer according to demand, thus they will never have a stock exploding in their backyard.
And the next iteration most probably will bring also the dual Xeons in addition to dual GPUs and we've yet to see what the industry will do with that.
I wouldn't rely on TB2 and neither on hacker community for eGPU support and consider it non-existant. The actual eGPU solutions seem targeting rather MBP users. We have to resolve how meaningful Mac Pro + eGPU vs. iMac Pro.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/05/apples-2019-imac-pro-will-be-shaped-by-workflows/
"What shape that modularity takes is another matter entirely, of course. I know some people have been pining for the days of internal expansion card configurations with standardized hardware — and maybe that is the way that this will go. But on Tuesday I also got a tour of the editing suites where Mac hardware and software is pushed to the limits, including extensive use of eGPU support, and a different vision emerges."
What may be that "different vision"? The author emphasizes the extensive use of eGPU support. An expansion box comes to mind...
Whatever it is, according to that clue, the future Mac Pro may not be a traditional PC box with expansion slots.
Of course it doesn’t work.
http://exotech.biz/public/Images/imac-vs-dell.jpg
People force themselves to discredit Thunderbolt as if it is claiming to be a substitute to "motherboard". Thunderbolt has no such a claim, it is an expansion option, not the motherboard itself. I'd made a cartoonish representation to cut the wording short. Feel free to have fun with that but do not try to tweak it to discredit Thunderbolt.
Intel offers three versions of the controller:
- one "DP" (Double Port) version that uses a PCIe 3.0 ×4 link to provide two Thunderbolt 3 ports (DSL6540)
- one "SP" (Single Port) version that uses a PCIe 3.0 ×4 link to provide one Thunderbolt 3 port (DSL6340)
- an "LP" (Low Power) version that uses a PCIe 3.0 ×2 link to provide one Thunderbolt 3 port (JHL6240).
I believe Apple typically uses the "DP" version.High-end graphics cards recommend seating them in the 16 PCIe slot for maximum performance. The equivalent of wiring up a graphics card to Thunderbolt is to take that nice high-end graphics cards and slotting it into an x4 PCIe slot.
Testing on eGPU has reflected that it is between 20% to 30% of an impact.
So basically, but running a graphics card over Thunderbolt vs the motherboard - is equivalent to buying a GTX 1080Ti graphics card and getting GTX 1070 performance. The higher the performance graphics card beyond that point the higher the impact - due to bottlenecking bandwidth over 4 PCIe x4.
Thunderbolt is very low overhead -- but there is still overhead.
I am not trying to discredit Thunderbolt - I far prefer it over things like USB. It works well for high throughput, low latency communications which much better for higher-end peripherals... but it is no substitute for having direct PCIe slots available for things like graphics cards, TPU cards, etc.
The cMP had 4 PCIe slots. Two of them could accommodate two upgradeable Video Cards, a third would become unusable if a second video card was installed -- leaving one lower spec final slot. Many have argued that it was far superior in expandability than the trashcan Mac Pro, but I would argue it is not. It did give you upgradeable video cards (video card performance and TPU performance is improving faster than CPUs - and are more likely to need upgrading at the end of 2 or 3 years - if you rely on top performance video cards). The mistake Apple made with the trashcan though is at the top end of the "professional market" -- it was introduced as a substitute for PCIe slots (after the graphics card) and not as a further expansion. I am hoping that the new modular will support both (at least 4 slots) and at least 6 Thunderbolt/USB-C connectors.
Which then looks neat and tidy to the user, and quiet. Like the left side of the image not like the right side of the image. Find away to sideline the users personal tasks off the main grunt box (iPad, iPhone and cohearance maybe) and users with the same large data set could be running with multiple app instances of for each user on small set of machines or just one multiple processor in one box.
That frees up high bandwidth connection for grunt and keeps the grunt close to the data. Instead of spreading the data out to be near the grunt which needs to near the user is the current situation.
What I was hearing from the pro community when it came out, was concern with built-in, non-changable video cards (as most of these people upgrade video cards whenever the tech updates), and especially that there was no option for nVidia (i.e.: CUDA support).
With eGPUs, that option opens back up.... IF the speed is fast enough. TB3 is finally getting there. Or course, that's if Apple supports it in terms of drivers... and they seem to be going the opposite way... clamping back down instead of expanding support.
I agree that a 2013 Mac Pro w/ TB2 and looking at eGPUs is quite risky right now. It had been looking like a possible option if one was willing to lose 20% performance on the GPU. That has changed now, and looks like Apple is purposely closing off that avenue for some reason.
Yes, I kinda doubt Apple is going back to the 'cheese grater' style machine, even if that's what many want. I remember talking to a friend who was consulting with several Mac Pro using shops in the SF area back in 2013. He said everyone was impressed with the Mac Pro for what it was... but it wasn't what they wanted. They didn't care about beautiful cylinders to sit on a desk, or that it's small, or any of that kind of stuff. Big machines with lots of slots and expansion was what they wanted.
Now, several years later, I think everyone would re-think it all again, as it's more viable to do something different to meet the pro's needs (that wasn't possible in 2013). But, I think TB3 still isn't at a point of being an external bus for some purposes... barely enough for others... and overkill for some.
It's not a bad machine. It's nearly idea (original cost aside) for someone like me. It just wasn't appropriate for a good segment of the target market. If Apple were committed to eGPU on TB2, I'd probably buy one despite the performance loss. But, as others pointed out above, that doesn't cut it, necessarily, for the real heavy use pros.
Sounds good in theory, but I don't think the software/hardware is really there on the whole. Maybe once TB reaches it's full potential.