New Mac Pro

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Hmm, it doesn't have my country under the name forum panel. Well Jimmy, it is nearly $3999us in my country, a big hike in what was already very pricey. I was wanting 4x4k for 8k table surface touch computing, I long have sourced 8k display tech. Unfortunately my potential engineer decided he might become ceo of a really large company instead.

You guys down-under get screwed, that's for sure. Everything in that region of the globe costs at least double… We ship a lot of stuff to and from Australia and the running joke around here is that it costs quite a bit more since the planes have to fly upside down to land there.

OTOH, prices here in the USA are not too bad for the new Mac Pro. They're right about what I expected, but I was hoping for $500 cheaper on the base model. I guess what really matters are the prices on configurations many of us will want. I want to see what they're going to charge for the 10 and 12 core chips and 1TB SSD storage. The base model could have done well with a lower-end Xeon CPU, but they designed this thing around the E5-2600 V2 series and there's really no wiggle room for moving up or down.

 

[Scott Brown]

Anyone had much luck in getting discounts from Apple?

They offer students 15%, but for business, the best we've had so far here in the UK is a 5% offer in store.

We have a LOT of new gear to purchase and we're thinking of approaching the manager of our local Apple store and pushing for discount - we're going to aim for 10% but it would be good to know if anyone has had any such luck?

Interestingly here in the UK, retailer John Lewis (approved Apple reseller), is offering a free 3 year warranty on the new MacBook Pro's, something that Apple would charge £299 for!

Best wishes

Scott

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

That's not really true, or better said, it is true in the general case, but not particularly true in lots of niche markets for GPUs, including video post. There are certainly very compute intensive processing steps that challenge current GPUs (noise reducting, wavelet decoding, etc.), but lots of algorithms that are interesting to us, like for instance color transformations, scaling and blending are so simple and so well-matched to the GPU architectures that they don't even come close to being bottlenecked by the actual computing power of the GPU, but rather by the available local memory, and closely related to that, of course, to the bandwidth available in transfering frame buffers between storage, CPU / Memory, GPU and back. This becomes even more evident when you try to scale across more than one GPU, since you now have to coordinate the upload and download of frame buffers between the GPUs as well.

I agree with pretty much everything you have said, however I still maintain that there isn't a GPU on the market today that can truly saturate an X8 PCIe v3 slot. The Quadro K6000 is a beautiful example. By all the marketing specs, it should be able to bury an X8 slot in data, even bury an X16 slot and then some. It has an onboard memory bandwidth of 288Gbps or over 33.5GB/s! But it's really not that rosy when you dig deeper. With the 2-bit positioning overhead and ECC the memory, in reality, chokes up far short of that. Onboard memory bandwidth is really more in the range of 24GB/s. Still nothing to sneeze at and yet a DMA-access memory dump of its 12GB onboard memory onto the PCIe bus, as fast as it can unload data, tops out right below 6GB/s as you say. And yet, we have SSD storage arrays connected through X8 on the same systems, tested on the same slots, that can do better, get right up there near the 8GB/s (more like 7.8GB/s max potential bandwidth). Installing the K6000 in an X16 slot yields slightly faster performance, but still below the X8 threshold. For all that onboard bandwidth, the ability to load data on and off the card is still the bottleneck and a tighter one than the PCIe slot. Before the Kepler architecture, Fermi had a huge issue with pushing data back onto the PCIe bus. It just plain sucked at it.

All the bandwidth considerations taken into account here, the data I/O is never my bottleneck. I only shoot video in 4K+ (with the exception of a few GoPro shots) and 90% of what I work with is 5K Epic footage, I shoot at 96fps as often as I can. Most of my corporate work demands that I do this anyway, it's perfect for pulling stills and altering playback speeds. I do tons of post-processing, 3D rendering, etc.. My bottlenecks are always computational. Working in Resolve in 4K is a computational bottleneck, never an issue of data throughput -- we can't process anything fast enough to load up these interfaces. Same with compositing in Nuke. Or pretty much any other apps I work with. Yes, I'm looking at it from my perspective, but as powerful as these GPUs are, they can barely spit back 5K 30fps in real-time just decoding an R3D stream and applying a conventional LUT.

A 6K Dragon frame decoded as 48bit RGB (16bits/channel) is 114MB. At 60fps, that's 6.7GB/s, still well within the range of an X8 PCIe v3 slot. The dual PCIe X8 slots in the new Mac Pro have enough combined bandwidth to handle full 6K uncompressed at 16bpc/48bit RGB at over 120fps or 32bit float at over 80fps. Will those GPUs be able to handle that??? Nope. GPUs coming next year? Perhaps. The year after that? Probably.

By this time next year, I'm sure the situation will have turned and many of the new GPUs will overrun those X8 slots. So I totally agree that it's not a very forward-thinking design in some ways. But that can be said about the Xeon platform in general and there's more going on here than just Apple "innovation". Why Intel only has 40 lanes per CPU on the Ivy and Sandy Bridge CPUs is somewhat of a puzzler. The original draft of the Xeon E5 from a couple years back called for 60 lanes -- then the platform showed up more than a year late and lacking a lot of the initially planned specs. But I think I would rather have two GPUs on two X8 interfaces than a single GPU on an X16. And two years from now, we will have new Xeon CPUs and PCIe v4 and hopefully a new Mac Pro to capitalize on those, assuming this Mac Pro turns into a success. Of course, there will always be more powerful systems out there, many of those configurations better suited to certain tasks than this new Mac Pro.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Anyone had much luck in getting discounts from Apple?

They offer students 15%, but for business, the best we've had so far here in the UK is a 5% offer in store.

Here in the USA it seems that 5% is the standard discount for business customers in-store. And for students, 10% off. These discounts both seem to work with the computer and anything purchased along with it, peripherals, monitors, software, accessories, etc..
I knew the business sales guy at my local Apple store, until he transferred away, and he would give me 10% off a system on occasion, but not on other stuff bought with it. Around here, Apple is very lax on the student policy. They pretty much give the 10% discount to any family buying a computer if they have kids in school, doesn't have to be for college students.

 

[Scott Brown]

Thanks Jeff, I'll push for 10% and keep you all posted on how we get on )

The business team now have details in store on the various Mac Pro options (beyond the 2 systems currently showing in the Apple Store) including RAM etc and I'm hoping to find out more next week!

Best wishes

Scott

 

[Eric Bowen]

When a product line is established such as Apple having a product built, they have a MOQ or minimum order quantity that they have to place with their hardware partners. This is based on many factors such as what type of pricing the original manufacturing partner must pay for component parts based on volume. So if Circuit board A requires this much cost per 1 manufactured from a Partner then that manufacturer may have to buy 10K units to get the pricing in the range they used to quote Apple. Now The Mac Pro as a whole has not altered in form drastically so it was far easier for the Manufacturer to retool lines and produce updated parts for the updated version Apple would release. That ease translates into a lower MOQ that Apple is required to get up front. Apple can then turn around and increase the ordering instead thereby lowering the cost per unit which they can then pass onto their customers. This new Mac Pro however is a complete re-design. Nothing about this unit is similar to past units which means all of the hardware partners had to re-engineer and re do lines to produce the components required for the final manufactured product. What this translates to is the Manufacturer has to require Apple a significantly increased MOQ to get the pricing anywhere near a reasonable range expected by Apple. A construction difference of this magnitude likely means a multiplication increase of MOQ and not just percentages. This means Apple cannot justify a much larger order projection to lower the overall cost from the manufacturer thereby giving them room to pass savings to their customers. This is allot of the reason for the new pricing. Add to this Intel has increased the pricing model for the V2 Xeons from previous versions and you have a very big pricing change from previous versions. Apple is good but they cant make miracles out of thin air.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

If you want to set your own prices on things you buy, there's always Priceline. If you want to buy things from manufacturers, they set the price, not you. Apple is a pretty darned successful company and they aren't going to drop their prices by 1/3 simply because Wayne Morellini wants them to. Nor should they. If you don't like what they're charging, don't buy one. Simple as that. But "demanding" a certain price point that you deem appropriate is a bit ridiculous, especially when you have absolutely no idea what it is actually costing them to design, fabricate, manufacture, package, ship, market, and support the product, along with generating at least some profit. Not that it really matters anyway. It's Apple's product. They can charge whatever they want. People will either buy it at that price or they won't. If you think you can design, fabricate, manufacture, package, market, ship, and support a better product for less and still be profitable, then I suggest you try to do so. But if you can't, you really should stop telling them what they should or should not be doing.

If my name was Steve, they might M . But you don't realise that you stumbled on the answer I'm talking about. Seriously, if everybody said they are not buying it, they would have little option, so it might pay for M Most to stop telling people to stop telling them to drop the price. That is how it works, it is our money and not up to a company to demand on us how to spend it.

M you might have no idea of how much it costs them, but don't presume everybody else doesn't, wouldn't that be ridiculous? I can go down the local computer shop and often get a better deal. Apple had better widen the gap or charge less before another company narrows it. The little dream world is drawing closed.

It is ironic, how many of the truly great designs I see in recent years are things that I considered years ago. Even Les nearly got it right, I did reinvent the wheel, very proud of that little job actually. How many people here could say that? That silly case, I considered something even more radical last month, even 7 years ago. No active cooling, could even stuck a coke can in it. If only I had the money to fund the processing array design (not off the shelf part yet) for it. Actually, somebody is doing sealed motherboards I wanted to do as a case. The thought of the macpro like case is something I considered years ago, what is unique.

People need to learn to Listen, Read and Understand before Commenting, which is polite enough, people don't have to even agree. I enjoy enlightened conversation.

Thanks again M say g'day to James b for me.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

You guys down-under get screwed, that's for sure. Everything in that region of the globe costs at least double… We ship a lot of stuff to and from Australia and the running joke around here is that it costs quite a bit more since the planes have to fly upside down to land there.

OTOH, prices here in the USA are not too bad for the new Mac Pro. They're right about what I expected, but I was hoping for $500 cheaper on the base model. I guess what really matters are the prices on configurations many of us will want. I want to see what they're going to charge for the 10 and 12 core chips and 1TB SSD storage. The base model could have done well with a lower-end Xeon CPU, but they designed this thing around the E5-2600 V2 series and there's really no wiggle room for moving up or down.

Lol! That is the best one yet Jeff. If it costs double, it would mean that the Mac Pro's real price would be around $1999 . The actual IMac 27 inch price gas been close.

I think the 10 and 12 cores prices will be way more as previously. I always remember a naive little Mac sales person quoting me a nearly $30k configuration, when I asked about basic pricing.

 

[Antony Newman]

"I want to see what they're going to charge for the 10 and 12 core chips"

It would cause too much confusion if they shipped both ... as the 10 core would be able to outperform the 12 core under certain loads.
As 12 has more ultimate 'reach' - this is the what they will ship.

AJ

 

[Wayne Morellini]

When a product line is established such as Apple having a product built, they have a MOQ or minimum order quantity that they have to place with their hardware partners. This is based on many factors such as what type of pricing the original manufacturing partner must pay for component parts based on volume. So if Circuit board A requires this much cost per 1 manufactured from a Partner then that manufacturer may have to buy 10K units to get the pricing in the range they used to quote Apple. Now The Mac Pro as a whole has not altered in form drastically so it was far easier for the Manufacturer to retool lines and produce updated parts for the updated version Apple would release. That ease translates into a lower MOQ that Apple is required to get up front. Apple can then turn around and increase the ordering instead thereby lowering the cost per unit which they can then pass onto their customers. This new Mac Pro however is a complete re-design. Nothing about this unit is similar to past units which means all of the hardware partners had to re-engineer and re do lines to produce the components required for the final manufactured product. What this translates to is the Manufacturer has to require Apple a significantly increased MOQ to get the pricing anywhere near a reasonable range expected by Apple. A construction difference of this magnitude likely means a multiplication increase of MOQ and not just percentages. This means Apple cannot justify a much larger order projection to lower the overall cost from the manufacturer thereby giving them room to pass savings to their customers. This is allot of the reason for the new pricing. Add to this Intel has increased the pricing model for the V2 Xeons from previous versions and you have a very big pricing change from previous versions. Apple is good but they cant make miracles out of thin air.

Eric, where do I start, most of the complexity in the new macpro, apart from Apple software, is prepackaged in mass produced parts, the rest assured of it approaches the complexity of a toaster, at the most a desktop fridge, which have similar or less production runs. The quantities that Apple will produce easily fall in contract manufacturing runs, where a contract manufacturer may change (retool) lines monthly for completely different products, no miracle needed. Shapes etc are cheap, look at cheap vacuum cleaners. I suspect Apple expects millions of MacPro sales, and a significant number of shared commodity components across Mac lines. As for this price, my gripe is that it is just a continuation of what they already used to do, rather than a reduction. They have a trendy product, and the lambs are likely to come in for the slaughter.

As it is, I had already gotten an old DVD player case to modify into a blade like vertical media center computer, and know where to get 90 degree pcie extenders, before Intel introduced similar slim lined cases. I might as well get two of those (I would buy a 12 core MP to use for years, or I could just buy a cheap computer and just keep upgrading as prices drop and I need more power). I could buy an actual server blade, as long as I could get one that supports enough ports.

 

[Eric Bowen]

The Re-design and MOQ for parts is not necessarily based on the overall complexity. It's based on the amount of sub components the actual hardware component partners have to purchase. I reference mass produced as the amount of hardware that has to be purchased for a certain price range. Tooling the line is common but not cheap especially when they are systemboard type components that have a completely different structural design. Yes this does translate into overall cost the Manufacturer has to charge Apple to make per unit. They also have to adjust for sub component availability and price fluctuation. A perfect example of this is laptop design and MOQ for a single model. Go to a ODM such as Clevo and request what a MOQ is of a standard laptop production model. I think you would be surprised at the number. Then change the model specifics and engineering completely outside of the normal production structure and that number goes way up. The Mac line for Apple is a very small portion of their overall sales and production. The expected sales on this 1 model is not nearly the numbers of a single model from HP. Therefore the overall cost per unit is much higher. I deal with direct manufacturer engineers and these numbers. They are allot higher than people expect even for a 2 dollar sub component change.

 

[richard peterson]

Apple made a mistake releasing this video on how they assemble their pro desktop. Now I have their playbook I will save a little money and build a hackintosh myself

http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/video/#assembly

On a not so related topic, anybody have a laser robot drill thing I can borrow? and a light blue lab coat.

 

[L. Langer]

Looks like the new OS refresh has a serious bug! External storage seems to be randomly corrupted/erased by the OS. No fix as of yet but Apple is aware of the problem.

 

[Zeb B]

Apple made a mistake releasing this video on how they assemble their pro desktop. Now I have their playbook I will save a little money and build a hackintosh myself

http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/video/#assembly

On a not so related topic, anybody have a laser robot drill thing I can borrow? and a light blue lab coat.

that's funy

 

[Robert Bluemke]

Looks like the new OS refresh has a serious bug! External storage seems to be randomly corrupted/erased by the OS. No fix as of yet but Apple is aware of the problem.

From the reading I've done, it seems like a problem that's limited to drives that have a proprietary set up assistant i.e. Lacie, Western Digital etc.

That said, I'm not leaving any drives plugged in that aren't in use. Scary stuff.

 

[Jake Wilganowski]

Looks like the new OS refresh has a serious bug! External storage seems to be randomly corrupted/erased by the OS. No fix as of yet but Apple is aware of the problem.

Umm WHAT?! So basically no external footage is safe when using Mavericks?

 

[Bob Gundu]

Umm WHAT?! So basically no external footage is safe when using Mavericks?

http://thenextweb.com/gadgets/2013/...avericks-users-external-hard-drive-data-loss/

 

[jake blackstone]

Umm WHAT?! So basically no external footage is safe when using Mavericks?

No, that's not the case. It's only an issue, if anyone uses third party proprietary security software included with the drive. If you use standard OS drive formatting tools without using those proprietary features, no problem whatsoever. No need to freak out about some third party software not working with new OS. It happens all the time. It would be more appropriate, if all these companies- WD, LaCie etc, bothered to test their software compatibility BEFORE release of Maverick. It's not like Apple was hiding the OS info from them.

 

[L. Langer]

Umm WHAT?! So basically no external footage is safe when using Mavericks?

I'm now reading that people have also reported the same problem with internal storage as well - not sure if they have the same management software installed as external drive users - but it seems mostly confined to external storage users due to the prevalence of the iMac, which relies on external storage.

 

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

It would be more appropriate, if all these companies- WD, LaCie etc, bothered to test their software compatibility BEFORE release of Maverick. It's not like Apple was hiding the OS info from them.

True. These betas have been available since June. It always amazes me that small developers have their software ready on time, and the big ones often when the new OS is out, put all kinds of warnings out suddenly. Instead of
1. Making sure the software is compatible on day one, as you say, they have time to test it.

If that isn't possible

2. Put your warnings up BEFORE the software is released, so people don't have to learn it the hard way.