ecarlseen

cpsro said:

N.B. The advertised 26 GB/s speed is when the card is installed in a PCIe Gen. 4 computer. The 2019 Mac Pro is PCI Gen. 3, with an advertised speed up to 12 GB/s for the card.

If only they had used ThreadRipper / Epyc instead of Xeon.

This is just sloppy and another example of how Apple has been slacking on supporting and enabling professional users. No, I don't use my scanner every day or even every week... but when I need it, I need it. With a decent, mid-priced scanner, I can scan 200 pages in less than four minutes. Try doing that with an iPhone or iPad.

Gurman believes rumors about a final Intel Mac Pro are true, with one more apparently planned for launch. Rumors from July point to a Xeon W-3300 family CPU being used in an update, in parallel to Apple Silicon. 

It makes sense to release a "final" Intel-based Mac Pro at the same time or slightly earlier than the Apple Silicon Mac Pro. There will be some highly CPU-optimized software out there (think vertical markets) that will not make the transition to Apple Silicon in a timely manner, because re-doing those optimizations is extremely expensive and time-consuming. Supporting these Intel-captive customers long enough for them to transition is a good idea.

Keep in mind that there are people out there with decades of experience in optimizing code for x86 platforms and AMD/nVidia GPUs, but far fewer with that sort of experience on ARM in general and by defiition nobody with that much experience with Apple Silicon.

mac_dog said:

How much of this am I entitled to?

None. How would it benefit government bureaucrats to give you money? Remember when Wells Fargo defrauded millions of customers by signing them up for services they didn't want or request? The government took $187M for themselves, and order $5M in restitution to the defrauded customers (about two dollars each). They don't care about you. They don't really even care about the corporate malfeasance (if they did, the fines would be meaningful). They just care about excuses to take money from whomever they can, with as little effort as possible. So they keep the numbers low enough that the corporations can shrug it off as a cost of doing business, consumers get screwed, and the cushy government jobs and pensions are protected. All of the important people win. Sorry that doesn't include you (or me).

blastdoor said:

ecarlseen said:

I'm happy that Apple is still addressing the pro market, but it's unfortunate they missed so badly using Intel Xeon CPUs instead of AMD Epyc CPUs for this generation. The additional cores and PCIe bandwidth would be massively useful, especially if they could shave some serious money off the price at the same time.

Yeah, Rome is looking pretty good, and maybe that would have been better. 

But, I can think of three reasons why the path they chose might be ok:

1. AVX 512 --- the AltiVec of our day. Xeon has it, Epyc doesn't. 
2. AMD is historically an unreliable supplier on the CPU side of things
3. Intel has already announced that Cascade Lake Xeon Ws will be much cheaper than their Skylake predecessors. That could mitigate the Epyc price advantage. 

"Pretty good" is a bit of an understatement. Epyc Rome thrashes Xeon Cascade Lake more badly than Apple's A-series CPUs beat Qualcomm's Snapdragon. It's all just flat-out annihilation with the exception of single-threaded loads on low core-count CPUs, where Intel maintains a very slight edge. On the top end, Epyc's multi-core performance is about 260% of Skylake at less than half the price. I don't expect this to change until 2022 unless Intel gets incredibly lucky. Their 10nm performance is still utter crap - stuff coming off the line right now is slower than 14nm unless they bump the TDP, and who wants to use more power for the same speed? Intel is still excellent at core and uncore design, but they can't manufacture at a competitive level so it doesn't matter. Ultimately, this is a leadership issue. AMD has a fairly brilliant engineer (Lisa Su) running things, and Intel has been trying to cost-cut itself to death (turns out that dumping engineering resources while bringing up 10nm cost them several orders of magnitude more that it "saved"). Anyway, if early-silicon Ice Lake vs. early-silicon Milan is anything to go by, it only gets worse in the near term. Much, much worse.

AVX512 is a distinct advantage in single-threaded loads (and how many of those are there for AVX512?), but I don't think it overcomes the massive overall performance differential (assuming one doesn't dump those loads to a GPU anyway). 

With regards to reliability - AMD had their shot back in that Athlon64 / Opteron days and promptly fumbled the opportunity because they couldn't match Intel in IPC or performance-per-watt. Both of these issues have been overcome with Rome. AMD's Naples was a solid performer for the money (I bought a few of their servers to play with), Rome is awesome, and Milan is looking great. In the meantime, Intel has basically screwed things up fairly consistently for the past seven years (14nm was a mess and 10nm is  still deeply problematic unless magic happens). Furthermore, AMD gambled heavily on their "chiplet" solution for scaling core count in a single package and it payed off perfectly. Intel doesn't have anything to compete with that in the near term, and even if they started their own project in the last year or two then they're still likely looking at a 2022 shipment timeframe (in line with when they expect 7nm to start volume production, assuming all goes well).

Intel will have to cut Cascade Lake prices to stay in the game, but it doesn't matter because except in a very few edge cases the performance will not be close. The 56-core Cascade Lake part is a joke - it requires water cooling, offers only one DIMM per channel, and nobody other than Intel is even bothering to make motherboards for it. AMD's 64-core Rome beats it soundly with air cooling, a full load of memory, massively more PCIe bandwidth, and for far less money. Even if Intel matches the price, they can't do anything about the performance (or lack thereof). 

The only reason I can see for Apple to stay with Xeon for their Mac Pros is if macOS so heavily optimized for Intel's architecture that adjusting for AMD's Zen2 / Zen3 cores is too problematic to be worth the effort. AMD still isn't terribly competitive in the mobile / laptop space, which is where Apple sells most of their Intel-based machines (although there are some interesting APU possibilities there).

Ultimately, I don't care whether Intel or AMD supplies the CPUs - I just need some serious performance bumps. We've been treading water in the industry for over half a decade now, and it's getting very stale.