VRing

macxpress said:

Hey @VRing, does that supposed magical and revolutionary custom build of yours that is SO much better than an iMac Pro do this? Didn't think so and never will! 

I know you're just flaming, but TPM chips have been in the vast majority of Windows computers and motherboards for enterprise use for years. As well, a number of these types of computers have a self-healing BIOS to restore a corrupt or potentially attacked BIOS.

To give everyone an idea of performance based on Samsung's claims:

Apple A10 (iPhone 7 Plus)

-Geekbench Single Core: 3,438
-Geekbench Multi Core: 5,723
-3DMark Sling Shot Extreme (Metal): 1,986

Exynos 8895 (Galaxy S8)

-Geekbench Single Core: 1,956
-Geekbench Multi Core: 6,432
-3DMark Sling Shot Extreme (OpenGL): 3,142

Apple A11 (iPhone X)

-Geekbench Single Core: 4,203
-Geekbench Multi Core: 10,103
-3DMark Sling Shot Extreme (Metal): 2,691

Exynos 9810 (expected performance)

-Geekbench Single Core: 3,912 (2x performance increase)
-Geekbench Multi Core: 9,005 (1.4x performance increase)
-3DMark Sling Shot Extreme (OpenGL): 3,770 (1.2x performance increase)

Geekbench values: https://browser.geekbench.com/
3DMark values: https://www.futuremark.com/hardware/mobile

It looks like Samsung will extend their graphics lead and start approaching Apple in single core and multi core performance. It's clear that Apple has a decent lead in CPU performance.

maestro64 said:

Correct me if I am wrong, It sounds like the video processing performance of the Pro appears to be less than the regular Imac mainly due to the fact the software is not optimize for the new Pro Imac processors. If this is the case and the software uses the processors to their full extent, will the Pro be much faster?

Optimization is part of it, but so is the single core performance for certain tasks. 

Depending on your needs in Final Cut Pro, you might be better off with the 5K iMac.

If you're using Premiere Pro, well, you probably shouldn't be using a Mac anyways. A simple Skylake-X configuration with a GTX 1070 (or above) might be a sweet spot for cost/performance.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/pic_disp.php?id=43480&width=705

https://www.pugetsystems.com/pic_disp.php?id=42347&width=701

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).

You touched on quite a few interesting ideas in your post, particularly a service for offloading work.

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: