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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

As we get closer Mac Pro - peoples thoughts

Imagine that you have a plug-in hybrid car that you really love. You love it enough that you are eagerly awaiting the new model. Then, the bastards announce the new model but they tell you it is going to have just a 2 gallon fuel tank. "Wowzers," you say. "Will that ever screw up my travels. I won't ever be able to go more than maybe 40 miles after my batteries are drained. And my batteries only last about 60 miles. This is a disaster! I'll never buy that car."

But, it turns out the technology has actually improved. (Novel thought.) And the batteries now deliver 1000 miles between plug-ins and the car gets 50 miles per gallon on the fuel side.

Not really an analogy; perhaps more of a metaphorical reference. :smiley:

Things change. Technology evolves. This machine won't make all people happy. But. hey, it will evolve the technology. (Apple has a funny habit of doing that - I'll bet this machine will also not have 3.5" floppy drives or a CD-ROM drive, either. LOL)
 
Christopher*Seguine said:
In terms of technology, it is a legacy design, just in a different physical shape.

I tried out 10.9. It still only supports 8bit per channel color.

Ridiculous that they add firepro graphics to the new macpro and still do not support this basic feature of workstation level graphics cards.
Click to expand...

I give up. All I've been trying to do in this entire thread is get people to have an open mind about a new product that hasn't been put in their hands yet. Clearly some have no intention of doing that, they prefer to declare both the product and the company making it inadequate before it's even been delivered. So be it.
 
There is already a 3rd party DVD/CD base plate for the upcoming Mac Pro, Bluetooth/WiFi I believe, lots of new products around the corner.

I think what most people are concerned about is that the new Mac Pro seems to be more of an alternative rather than a vast improvement to what already exists, we'll just have to wait and see.
 
Christopher*Seguine said:
In terms of technology, it is a legacy design, just in a different physical shape.

I tried out 10.9. It still only supports 8bit per channel color.

Ridiculous that they add firepro graphics to the new macpro and still do not support this basic feature of workstation level graphics cards.
Click to expand...

Now this is just dumb. Apple has gone beyond legacy design in many ways, they're using newly proposed PCIe designs for both GPUs and storage and have a proprietary airflow and cooling design. You can have > 8bpc color in OSX via OpenGL surfaces and a couple other techniques -- just as you can in Windows and pretty much the same way it works in Windows. You know, the Windows GUI is all based on 8bpc display as well. So I'm not sure what you're getting at here. And why are FirePro graphics ridiculous? What isn't supported? Sure, there are people who want to see nvidia/ CUDA support with the new Mac Pro and that might make some sense for the near term. The industry is shifting to OpenCL.
 
Not dumb at all. Physical design innovation, yes. Technological innovation, no. The GPUs are still sitting on the same pcie bus, just a physical size change - no increased bandwidth or decreased latency.
The SSD is also sitting off a pcie bus just as most storage on laptops do these days. Its not any faster or more efficient, just looks kinda cooler.


And you are incorrect about greater than 8bit support on macos. Sure you can create a 16bit surface but there is no API do display it. MacOs can only display 8bits per channel of color information


Windows since 2009 could support 10bit per channel displays. No the OS is not in 10bits, who needs that, however the OS needs to provide the API to support greater than 24bit displays.
MacOs does not.

On windows, we have photoshop running with dell and eizo monitors with 30bit color using quadro and firepro cards over displayport and have been using it for awhile now. Apple use to lead the way in creative computing applications, now they dont even care to keep up.

Besides viewports for 3d apps one of the other primary advantage of a workstation card - quadro/firepro vs is gtx/radeon equivalent is 10bit color.
To promote having firepro gpus in the new macpro and still not update the OS to support 10bit color is definitely ridiculous.

No complaints they went with firepro vs quadro, both have their benefits, the complaint is the OS does not properly support either.
 
Christopher*Seguine said:
The SSD is also sitting off a pcie bus just as most storage on laptops do these days. Its not any faster or more efficient, just looks kinda cooler.
Click to expand...

From apple.com/mac-pro

"There’s flash storage, and then there’s next-generation PCI Express flash storage. We’re talking storage that’s up to 2.5 times faster than the fastest SATA-based solid-state drive and up to 10 times faster than a 7200-rpm SATA hard drive. Most flash storage systems connect via SATA buses designed for slower spinning hard drives. But we designed the new Mac Pro around new PCI Express-based flash controller technology to deliver the fastest solid-state drives available standard in a desktop computer. So booting up, launching apps, even opening massive files happens in, well, a flash."
 
Christopher*Seguine said:
Not dumb at all. Physical design innovation, yes. Technological innovation, no. The GPUs are still sitting on the same pcie bus, just a physical size change - no increased bandwidth or decreased latency.
The SSD is also sitting off a pcie bus just as most storage on laptops do these days. Its not any faster or more efficient, just looks kinda cooler.


And you are incorrect about greater than 8bit support on macos. Sure you can create a 16bit surface but there is no API do display it. MacOs can only display 8bits per channel of color information


Windows since 2009 could support 10bit per channel displays. No the OS is not in 10bits, who needs that, however the OS needs to provide the API to support greater than 24bit displays.
MacOs does not.

On windows, we have photoshop running with dell and eizo monitors with 30bit color using quadro and firepro cards over displayport and have been using it for awhile now. Apple use to lead the way in creative computing applications, now they dont even care to keep up.

Besides viewports for 3d apps one of the other primary advantage of a workstation card - quadro/firepro vs is gtx/radeon equivalent is 10bit color.
To promote having firepro gpus in the new macpro and still not update the OS to support 10bit color is definitely ridiculous.

No complaints they went with firepro vs quadro, both have their benefits, the complaint is the OS does not properly support either.
Click to expand...

Just curious, have you factored in that Apple is releasing a new OS?
 
I think 10 bit color depth is mandatory for serious compositing & color correction, so I think this new mac approach requires getting thunderbolt hdmi 10 bit interfaces (i.e. like black magic intensity thunderbolt attached hdmi interface for 10 bit), then get software that can take advantage of that attachment. It's kind of a different mindset where in some circumstances i like the chaining of thunderbolt technologies, but others I really hate it. A good example of the trade I'm going through on the sound side is getting a avid protools HD native thunderbolt interface vs going protools HDX PCI. I really like the ease of the native thunderbolt, but I have found only about 10% of the AAX processing can be moved to the thunderbolt interface (which btw is a $5k upgrade) but on the other extreme if i go protools hdx the system is about 4x times more complicated to hook up and about $20k of hardware(but allows A level feature mixing). On the windows side i could just get a 32 processor windows system and just stay with normal protools and be able to beat most of the lower end HDX systems just using standard AAX 64 bit. My gut feel is moving processing into the thunderbolt 2 buss will take about 2-3 years for the software packages to catch up in distributed network processing (i.e. when will AAX 64 native be able to be moved to thunderbol external ? i guess DSP can be moved to thunderbolt but a lot of the plugins are dropping support of DSP and that is another $10k for a decent system that will use the thunderbolt attachment).
 
Christopher*Seguine said:
Not dumb at all. Physical design innovation, yes. Technological innovation, no. The GPUs are still sitting on the same pcie bus, just a physical size change - no increased bandwidth or decreased latency.
The SSD is also sitting off a pcie bus just as most storage on laptops do these days. Its not any faster or more efficient, just looks kinda cooler.
Click to expand...

Um.... Just what innovations were you expecting to see here? There are still industry standards to adhere to and they can only innovate within the walled garden that Intel has made available via their CPU and platform abilities. I suppose Apple could do what they have done with their ARM designs and implement their own customized Xeon platform chipsets and ditch Intel's C6xx. Hey, why not go for the gold and just create their own x86 architecture CPU. You know, because that's worked out so well for everyone else who's tried it. AMD had a brief rise to the top when Intel fumbled, but when was that, like more than a decade ago?

The GPUs are not proprietary, they are a newly proposed industry standard that makes a lot of sense. Why do they need more bandwidth? There isn't a GPU out there that can saturate that PCIe v3 X8 (per GPU) interface. Latency on PCIe v3 is nearly 10% less than on gen 2. SSD is using a proprietary host controller and PCIe interface. There's no SAS or SATA getting in the way. How is this not faster or more efficient. It's not the same thing as "just as most storage on laptops do these days." There are only 3 models of laptop on the market that I'm aware of doing direct PCIe integration of SSD storage and two of those are model lines are made by Apple.

And you are incorrect about greater than 8bit support on macos. Sure you can create a 16bit surface but there is no API do display it. MacOs can only display 8bits per channel of color information
Click to expand...

I guess you're unaware that >8bpc actually is do-able and even usable in Photoshop or other supporting apps since OSX 10.6, with the proper GPU hardware. As a blanket statement on 10bit support, yes the Mac essentially doesn't support it. In fact, Apple has only sold two GPUs in the history of the Mac Pro that supported 10bpc output -- the Quadro FX4500 and Quadro FX4800. The Quadro 4000 supports it, but was a third-party release via PNY, as is the same case with the Quadro K5000. What is said about no API support is also not true. The predominant means of support is via OpenGL, which does indeed have display APIs that run on supportive hardware. Up to 16bpc / 64bit RGBA, although I don't know of any GPU hardware that offers more than 10bpc. Some video I/O boards offer up to 16bit, but that's a whole different animal. Anyway, OSX support, is very similar to 10bpc support in Windows for most purposes -- > 8bpc support in Windows is available through OpenGL and DirectX. Photoshop on both Windows and Mac uses OpenGL for acceleration as well as the display of > than 8bpc content. The GTX680 supports 10bpc output via hardware, but all drivers, Windows, OSX and Linux for the 600 series are crippled to 8bit. The Quadro K series all support 10bpc output, but no proper driver support in OSX for anything but the K5000, which does indeed support 10bit output. Same goes for the Titan which supports it, but drivers are incomplete on OSX. OSX 10.9 Mavericks has better support for the Titan, GTX780 and K5000/ K6000, although still incomplete for the Titan and EFI mods are needed for all non-Mac edition cards to enable full functionality of temp and power monitoring, clock rate throttling, etc... The nVidia driver package for these cards on OSX is still incomplete and Apple has done away with most of the accessible configuration details and kexts.

So for the new Mac Pro, we can only wait and see what they provide in terms of hardware and software support. Not trying to argue here, but perhaps I'm being too pedantic in a nit-picky sense of things. It's not that there are no APIs and it's not that there have been no options to support 10bit color. Apple has done little to provide such options and the majority of which have been supplied by third parties at this point. So while there may be support, it's hardly official or encouraged. Can't say that it's highly encouraged or promoted on the Windows side of things either. We have seen more recently in the Windows world with some GPUs and applications, mostly for video playback purposes. Primarily Blu-Ray playback support of 10 and 12 bit x.v. and deep color.
 
Jeff your a machine ;)

Maybe we should start calling you "Machete" ;)

Great post btw :)
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Um.... Just what innovations were you expecting to see here? There are still industry standards to adhere to and they can only innovate within the walled garden that Intel
Click to expand...

No they do not, thats the whole point, Apple is their own ecosystem, they can do whatever they want, and they are sitting on plenty of cash to do it. Speaking as a stock holder, I dont want buy backs, spend the cash on R&D - move the industry forward, put even 1/1000th of the manpower they spend on ios into furthering macos, not turning it into ios.


Jeff Kilgroe said:
I guess you're unaware that >8bpc actually is do-able and even usable in Photoshop or other supporting apps since OSX 10.6, with the proper GPU hardware.
Click to expand...

I guess you never tried it. MacOs has never supported greater than 8bpc display, and it does not support it in 10.9 Mavericks.

We have K5000s, on the mac it is 8bit only. Bootcamp to Windows Server 2012 on the same machine - 10bit support.

No graphics card on Macos can display more than 8bpc, its is not a hardware limitation, it is a MacOs limitation.


Ask Adobe, the answer will be we are waiting on Apple.


Ask Apple, the answer will be silence.
There has never been an Apple monitor greater than 8bpc, until there is, they will probably never add support for greater than 8bpc. Apple likes to be perceived as the best, high end, when they are not they just pretend it does not exist.

Look at the developer docs for 10.9, there is no mechanism to display greater than 8bits.

I would like it work, we have artists that would prefer to be mac based - however macos does not supply the API for 10bit support in photoshop. Even Lightroom supports 10bit displays on windows.
We have clients that need to view dicom files and satellite imagery and they would prefer to use more stylish computers that match their iphones, but they can't because 10bit display is mandatory, and it is not supported on macos.

So, yes, its ridiculous for them to have put firepro gpus in the new macpro when the new 10.9 OS still does not support 10bit color.


Jeff Kilgroe said:
The GTX680 supports 10bpc output via hardware, but all drivers, Windows, OSX and Linux for the 600 series are crippled to 8bit.
Click to expand...

Also incorrect, you can modify the straps of GTX680 to so it appears as a quadro K5000 or Tesla, and the driver sees its as Quadro or Tesla, however the features of the workstation class card are still non-functional - No 10 bit support, still missing the extra GL features, and obviously no ecc. Its crippled in hardware. Nvidia needs to make money too. However you can modify it to a Grid K2 and then gpu virtualization magically works, and thats very cool.


I am not anti-apple, I am anti-stagnation. I would prefer us to use to macs, but we can't. If Apple's limitation are not glossed over and not passed off as functional when they are not, I hope eventually they will be addressed.
 
Nvidia added 10-bit output to all GeForce cards 8000 series and later in their Linux drivers in early 2012. I haven't tried it but I believe you have to manually configure it via configuration file editing and it may only work via DisplayPort.
 
Excited to finally see the price point once its released next month! If it comes in cheap enough I am still interested...I figure even if they solder it all in, its still going to beat a rMBP when it comes to r3d needs
 
I understand that Nvidia's CUDA language still has features that allow their GPUs to more efficiently use their own GPU resources (dynamic parallelism), and reduce the CPU side bottlenecks in feeding the GPUs (GPUDirect). As Apple's might behind OpenCL pushes forward - I believe Nvidia are also helping to push their CUDA technology into OpenCL with the help of Neil Trevett (who both chairs the OpenCL working Group and and is VP of mobile content in Nvidia).

The New mac pro is OpenCL 1.2 (which I believe is dictated by Mavericks). When OpenCL 2.0 is ratified - many of these CUDA only features will become available for the next Mac OS, introducing Shared VM, Dynamic Parallelism, and Pipes (a kind of local FIFO iterative processing buffer).

At that point the Mac Pro's CPU will be less stressed trying to ship data to the GPU (the GPU will just grab it), less busy creating threads (kernels) of GPU tasks (as the kernel itself will be allowed to do it), and it will have more time to do GPU unfriendly compute.

Just another reason that the high memory bandwidth, screamingly fast PCI storage, and external storage are a good long term bet for this machine..... Roll on Nov 15h.

AJ.
 
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Geforce cards have 10bit support via Direct X and not Open GL. This is due to the HDMi 1.3 and 1.4 standards which implemented Deep Color. The reason Applications such as Adobe or Avid do not give 10Bit support via Geforce is because they use a Open GL API and not Direct X. If they used a Direct X API then the Geforce cards would give you 10 bit color support.

GPU processing especially in the media content creative realm is a pipeline. The data has to decode and process in the CPU first. Then ram buffers are created in the system ram for the data to transit down to the GPU ram. Once shadowed down, the GPU then processes the data that is accelerated which is returned to the GPU ram. Then that data is returned to the system ram for final CPU encoding. Regardless of the changes to Open CL or Cuda standards this process will not and cannot change because the frame data has to decode first before any GPU processing can occur. Since the CPU must handle the initial part of the pipeline and the memory management for the data buffer in system ram, the CPU threading and clock speed is the primary deciding factor on how fast the data gets down to the GPU for processing and how much load the GPU processing is put on the GPU's. Right now there is not a single CPU that can push the largest GPU's available such as the Titan card. A Dual 12 Core 48 Thread system so far is the only system that seems to be able to push 1 but especially 2 Titan cards. I don't see how 1 12 Core Xeon can possibly push 2 ATI workstation class cards. Also Open CL has far less development behind it than CUDA does. The largest factor with performance and programming GPU acceleration is the memory management that has to be refined over time due to all of the different data sets the software is working with. The amount of data per frame for a Red frame at 4K is vastly different from a data frame of DSLR ie H264 at 1080. This is just 1 example. They have to refine hundreds of caching models. This takes time and unfortunately right now CUDA has far better performance then Open CL because it has cooked far longer in that regard.

Thunderbolt is all fine and good until you start looking at the tunnel of bandwidth available and how many devices may have to chain. Keep in mind every device you chain on a bus whether thunderbolt or not add's latency to the communication. The Controller has to start managing the device communication as data is going to different devices. The more management you add to the controller the higher the latency in data reaching source or destination. The 1 bane to GPU acceleration is latency since several components including hardware, drivers, OS, and software layers are involved. If the latency exceed what the player can handle for a data wait state then the player will error and crash. At the very least there will be dropped frames as you reach closer to latency point before the application/player crashes or the video driver crashes. Thunderbolt only expansion is not ready for prime time. 2.5GB/s per channel is only a PCi-E Gen 2 5X bandwidth lane equivalent shared amongst all devices. 4K DPX Files on storage alone exceed 1.2GB/s just for reading from a storage raid. If you add any media playback devices to that same chain, you are going to start looking at latency issues very quickly because the storage has already used 50% of the bandwidth but almost all of the latency available. This type of problem is going to make configuring Thunderbolt expansion complex and problematic, not easier as many anticipate. Lightpeak was and is the real implementation of this technology and expansion because optical resolves many of these problems. That will be out in a year or so based on Intel's current roadmap on a PC near you. I am surprised Apple did not wait for that to release this versus now with copper. In translation, all of this means Mac Pro's will become more complex rather than less especially for troubleshooting application issues which is far from what most expect.
 
Mr eric +1 on thunderbol in its current state. Just not ready to go main stream. But have anybody heard of the ATTO SC 3808D external thunderbolt controller seem thunderbolt pci cards are already surfacing
 
If I were DITing today, based on the above speculation, with a new Mac Pro I think the following works best: Hook your rocket through thunderbolt 2, monitoring through HDMI, and storage through USB3. Separate the buses as needed to avoid issues I think is the best bet. And if you don't have a rocket or capture card, use the TB2 for the storage and the HDMI for monitoring..
 
I'm remembering the Firewire days with G5 towers. All those connectors were on one bus and I needed a third party firewire card to do things like isolate a ProTools interface and get max throughput. Wonder if TB will be handled the same way on the next gen?

Myself, I'm about to do some upgrades to the old Mac Pro to get me through the holidays and maybe into spring... SSDs, more RAM, more RAID, beefier graphics. I'll let you guys work the bugs out for a while!

I have to say though... my first Mac was a little beige box with a 9" grayscale screen. To this day I'm pretty amazed at the resale value... I can get 3-4 years from a high end model (all the way back to my IIfx - a $10k box) and get about half what I paid for it. Sure takes the bite out of upgrades, and something the anti-Mac crowd rarely takes into account. To each their own though.
 
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