sagery

lowededwookie said:

This is the thing the so-called "Pros" don't get.

Thunderbolt 3 has greater throughput than PCI-e which means that you don't need internal upgrades other than RAM as it can all be done over Thunderbolt 3.

In otherwords Thunderbolt 3 makes upgrading your setup infinitely simpler and can in theory even allow for more videos cards to be used than you ever could with a big box Mac. Think about it, from all the big system boards I've seen in the past 5 years in the PC world the most PCI-e ports I've ever seen on a system board were two. That's not a lot of expansion capabilities but with Thunderbolt 3 I believe each port is capable of daisy chaining four Thunderbolt 3 devices. That means this new iMac Pro literally has 16 PCI-e capable ports that can be used at least in theory.

To not call this machine a pro machine is a delusion.

You must not be much of a pro, because you're words just simply aren't true. 

First of all - Thunderbolt 3 doesn't have a greater throughput than PCI-e. not by a longshot. The throughput of T3 is 40Gbps. the throughput of PCI-e 3.0 x16 slot is 16GBps which is 128 Gbps. Thats over 3 times the amount of throughput. The big B (GB) and little b (Gb) make a huge difference.  the little b is bits. the big B is Bytes. there are 8 bits in a Byte.

But! you may argue that most modern GPUs dont saturate a full x16 PCIe Gen-3 slot, a lot of them run just fine at x8. thats still 64Gbps. which is still more than Thunderbolt 3. 

The next thing is that depending on what you're doing - Thunderbolt's throughput can be cut in half. For example: if you were using this external box to drive an *internal* display on your macbook pro, you're only getting 20Gbps throughput, because the information has to be sent to the external box AND return over the same cable. which only has a *maximum* throughput of 40Gbps. So you get 20 to send, and 20 to receive. PCIe slots don't have that problem.

Just look at this video: 
Where Linus tests 2 popular external graphics boxes and compares a thunderbolt 3 box vs a proprietary PCIe version. 

The last thing - you can easily get boards that support more than 2 graphics cards. most consumer X99 platform boards will support 3 or 4, if you have a CPU with enough PCIe lanes to drive them. Those boards are a dime a dozen. you can google it yourself and see. Then there are server grade boards that will support up to 7 and 8 cards. Just look up GPU mining or GPU rendering.  

I'm not crapping on the hardware apple announced today. I definitely think its a step in the right direction for professional users...... but no mistake - its just a step. You don't need to spread disinformation in order to support apple. 

I am a pro. All pros are not all the same. What as announced will be good enough for a lot of pros, as were all the previous generations of apple hardware..... but what was announced today is still not 'pro' enough for my use case. That doesnt mean it's "Not Pro". That also doesn't mean that I "don't get it".