New Mac Pro

[Bob Gundu]

Justin, I would give Apple some slack in this. They are building a new facility just for this mac pro. Also, they have been slave to Intels processors schedules. That goes for TB2 as well. They are first out of the gate on many of these. I would say they have been better than most for guessing a suitable release date.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Hey Guys,

I have never personally owned a Promise Raid. What do you guys think of the Promise TB2 raids listed on there. I was thinking about pulling the trigger on a 12TB (6x2TB) drive. Right now I am using a G-Tech 6TB thunderbolt drive to work from. Are the Promise drives solid? Reliable? …and how would you configure a 12TB raid? Thanks for the advise.

If you're in the USA, order elsewhere. I think I'm going for the 6x3TB Pegasus2 and Apple did not show that as one of their options. Many of the internet resellers catering to creative pros have better pricing on these RAIDs.

The Promise Pegasus RAIDs have been great. I'm hoping the Pegasus2 continues that.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Justin, I would give Apple some slack in this. They are building a new facility just for this mac pro. Also, they have been slave to Intels processors schedules. That goes for TB2 as well. They are first out of the gate on many of these. I would say they have been better than most for guessing a suitable release date.

Mac Pro systems always trickle out at launch. And technically Apple isn't wrong about their launch and delivery. There are systems out there. My local Apple store received 3 of the stock configurations, 1 x 4-core and 2 x 6-core. They're putting one 6-core out for display, the other two went quick to business customers that got to pick them up first thing this morning. Long gone before I had a chance at them, I would have passed anyway.


As for PCIe lanes. I guess we'll see how it all lays out as reports come in. There's conflicting info on GPU lanes, even from Apple. I'm betting the two GPUs share 16 lanes. It seems that everything else in the system works out perfect lane-wise if we give the GPUs each an X8 allotment.

And that's more than plenty for these GPUs or any that are coming along in the foreseeable future. Don't get hung up by onboard transaction speeds and all that. Offboard I/O transactions of even the fastest GPUs like the Superclocked Titans and K6000's can't saturate 8 lanes of PCIe 3.0, let alone 16. When used for computational purposes, this is even more so. Computationally, the GPU processors are the bottleneck, not the PCIe interface.

 

[Justin Quinn]

Justin, I would give Apple some slack in this. They are building a new facility just for this mac pro. Also, they have been slave to Intels processors schedules. That goes for TB2 as well. They are first out of the gate on many of these. I would say they have been better than most for guessing a suitable release date.

No can do... all it would have taken from them is a simple announcement!

I'm not criticizing late/delayed technology, that's life. I work in the same industry as you do, bro!

What I find unexceptable is how they are handling this situation. They've known all along they wouldn't make a 2013 release date. That really is the definition of vaporware, leading customers to believe you can deliver something so as to prevent them from buying from your competitors. It's a shady business practice and I always took Apple to be above it. Guess not.

I'm being totally fair here, guys. Nobody wanted this thing more than me... I planned on getting two!

 

[Justin Quinn]

Mac Pro systems always trickle out at launch. And technically Apple isn't wrong about their launch and delivery. There are systems out there. My local Apple store received 3 of the stock configurations, 1 x 4-core and 2 x 6-core. They're putting one 6-core out for display, the other two went quick to business customers that got to pick them up first thing this morning. Long gone before I had a chance at them, I would have passed anyway.

Yep, you're right: technically they're not wrong about their launch and delivery.

I'm really surprised that your local store is getting 3 of them... may local store doesn't have any at all, not even a display model... but then again, I live in NYC. Go figure!

I'm a business client too, but they wouldn't allow me to pre-order. I've been trying all week.

 

[Michael Jarvis]

Thanks for the info Jeff. You are right, the (6x3tb) is where I want to be. Should be a nice working drive for the new Mac Pro. Should give me 9TB to work from a 9 as an redundant backup. I have a tech question that has had me concerned in the past, in general, about raid systems. When I really got into raids back in 06 I bought into a Sonnet Raid. Since then, I have lost all respect for their gear as it proved to suck…a lot. Less than a year old, the drive crashed. I should say…the drives were fine….but the software that configures and organizes them as a raid got corrupted and essentially rendered the raid useless. My question is, how common it is for a raid to go down like this? I sent it back to Sonnet, they wiped the raids clean, and I had it back up and running. Just curious if the info Sonnet gave me on that was exactly as it sounds and if that is common. The Sonnet rep made it sound as though the raid organizing software can commonly become corrupt and essentially make the drives lose their functionality…but the physical drives can remain perfectly fine. Is that normal? Since then, I have always had a fear my raid will randomly just stop working for no reason due to a software glitch.

Whats your experience. (I know this is not a MacPro topic….sorry. I'll limit this discussion to this question. Just thinking of ordering a new raid with my Mac Pro).

 

[Andrei Mihailescu]

And that's more than plenty for these GPUs or any that are coming along in the foreseeable future. Don't get hung up by onboard transaction speeds and all that. Offboard I/O transactions of even the fastest GPUs like the Superclocked Titans and K6000's can't saturate 8 lanes of PCIe 3.0, let alone 16. When used for computational purposes, this is even more so. Computationally, the GPU processors are the bottleneck, not the PCIe interface.

Eh, we've already been through this before, in this thread. It's simply not true, even a relatively lame GPU can currently move frame buffers in and out of its local memory faster than a x8 PCIe 3.0 bus can keep up with. But it would be nice if Apple would publish the technical Manual for the new Mac Pro, so that we can see exactly where the compromises are.

 

[Michael McCaffrey]

Hey guys is it worth the extra money for a 12-core processor on the new Mac Pros? I'm primarily using Premiere Pro and AE. Wondering if the the extra cores will be utilized at all with R3D playback etc or if I'd be better off with a 4 or 6-core with faster clock speeds?

 

[Isaac Marchionna]

I don't think you'll feel like you got 3/4ths the machine by going to the 8-core. Which is the machine I have a feeling a lot of people will go for when factoring in price/life-span of the machine.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Yep, you're right: technically they're not wrong about their launch and delivery.

Yeah. Technically right, but I totally feel your frustration. Biggest issue for most at this time of year is the year-end purchase for tax reasons.

I'm really surprised that your local store is getting 3 of them... may local store doesn't have any at all, not even a display model... but then again, I live in NYC. Go figure!

We're in a huge tech area. World HQ's around here for companies like HP, Micron, and more plus major facilities for many… Sun, IBM, StorageTek, Quantum, Seagate… We get a lot of the cool toys first. A couple of the Apple stores here are some of the top in the nation for business sales.

I'm a business client too, but they wouldn't allow me to pre-order. I've been trying all week.

Same here. Wouldn't let me place my order until yesterday but the guy told me straight out that he couldn't submit it until they went live in Apple's system. And he didn't have all the CTO pricing and options info as of last night at 8:00PM. Better to get the order in and adjust pricing after the fact. Earlier this week, I could have put in my requested specs and he would've called with a definitive price, once known and option to place the order. The first couple people to order the stock configs got a chance at the couple they did get in. They're expecting a couple more systems around the 1st. While the Mac Pro isn't vaporware at this point, it sure is trickle-ware.

I'm planning on end of January to first week of februray for delivery. Mine says January, but if I chose to pick it up at a local store, it told me February 5 and that usually only adds a couple days to the process. Hopefully their shipping estimates are a bit conservative, as they often are. I think there are some unknowns to conquer as they ramp up production. The G5 launch with the new aluminum tower and the initial Mac Pro launch were both like this. '08 Mac Pro launch was very limited as well. Pretty common for most new products of this magnitude, regardless of who is making them or selling them. All kinda sucks for people who needed to budget it into the is year's expenses for tax purposes.

 

[Isaac Marchionna]

The upside is that you got it in for tax purposes. The bad news is that they don't fulfill instant gratification by shipping this month.

That said I find that trying to press into service a new piece of gear on jobs already booked is always a recipe for disaster. I have 5 large motion graphics jobs in January, and while I'd certainly like to get this computer on those jobs, I also realize that I'll have to work under the assumption it'll be my Macbook Pro (late 2013, aka the current model) doing the work. Which is no slouch I might add.

As Jeff said, I have a feeling the Late Jan/Early Feb estimate is conservative, and I wouldn't be surprised if mine makes it in the first batch. I need to call my rep and see what the deal is, but it would be foolish for me to start making assumptions about how it will effect existing projects, when prior to this morning I had ZERO estimate on a delivery date at all.

 

[Eric Bowen]

Yes raid volumes can corrupt without the drives being defective. This is because the Drive manufacturers ship drives with acceptable amount of bad blocks and don't seem to be marking them out at the factory anymore. If those blocks occur in the Raid Volume table area then corruption will happen. One very important way to prevent this though is to periodically run integrity/parity checks to verify the parity data. Another way is to run Raid 6 instead of Raid 5. That gives 2 levels of Parity instead of 1 to verify with. A 3rd way is to write zeros to each drive before you build the raid. A problem in the past on the OSX side is HFS+ performed better than NTFS but was not nearly as robust with regards to corruption. I have only ever seen a Raid 6 volume completely corrupt with HFS+. I have never seen a NTFS Raid 6 corrupt beyond a few files. 10.9 supposedly uses a new Partition type but as of yet I have not seen if that stands up better to corruption than HFS+ does.

 

[Justin Quinn]

One thing I completely confused about it the graphic card pricing... it seems too good to be true! I thought that the D700 were supposed to be equivalent to AMD high end W9000 which is $3,000 cards? To upgrade from the D300 to the D700 is only $1,000. huh? Doesn't really make sense to me, I would have thought it'd be much more, even with some sort of special agreement between Apple and AMD...

Any ideas on why that is?

 

[Eric Santiago]

One thing I completely confused about it the graphic card pricing... it seems too good to be true! I thought that the D700 were supposed to be equivalent to AMD high end W9000 which is $3,000 cards? To upgrade from the D300 to the D700 is only $1,000. huh? Doesn't really make sense to me, I would have thought it'd be much more, even with some sort of special agreement between Apple and AMD...

Any ideas on why that is?

Same reason why a 900 iPhone can be had for 129 in some places using a two year contract.

Its all about quantity.

 

[AndreasOberg]

One thing I completely confused about it the graphic card pricing... it seems too good to be true! I thought that the D700 were supposed to be equivalent to AMD high end W9000 which is $3,000 cards? To upgrade from the D300 to the D700 is only $1,000. huh? Doesn't really make sense to me, I would have thought it'd be much more, even with some sort of special agreement between Apple and AMD...

Any ideas on why that is?

Me too. I cant quite believe it. I quess the W9000 cards dont sell that much so they have a very hefty price tag.

 

[Isaac Marchionna]

I wouldn't bank on your january release days. "Made in Austin"...very slowly:

http://www.macrumors.com/2013/12/19...-mac-pro-online-orders-slip-to-february-2014/

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

The W9000 cards are very capable beasts, but have been plagued with weak software. Supposedly that has changed for the better in the past few months, but I haven't seen any real benchmarks to prove it, as most of the PC industry has turned their attention elsewhere. First impressions are everything. They score favorably compared to a Titan, but not quite there, more in line with a GTX780 when the software is up to snuff -- Direct3D scores lately are pretty darn good and OpenGL can be good. OpenCL via AMD on OSX has been rather good over the past several months, so I have very high hopes for these in the Mac Pro. The D700's are effectively the W9000 cards in the different oddball form factor. 6GB VRAM on each. If they can drive OpenGL/ CL with a combined total of 12GB and at the same level as a GTX780 or somewhere between the Quadro K5000 and K6000 for each GPU, which is what the hardware is capable of, then we're in for a treat. Especially given the pricing. I'm not expecting to see updated GPUs or any nVidia options anytime soon. I'm guessing Apple worked out a pretty significant arrangement for this.

 

[Chris Kenny]

Like others, I was on the fence about the 8-core vs. 12-core decision. Ultimately decided to go with the 12-core mostly on the basis that we'll probably end up doing a fair bit of 4K DCP encoding over the timespan of this machine, which is a brutally intensive CPU-bound task — that, fortunately, parallelizes very well. I suspect most customers will be served quite well by 6-core + D700. (Honestly D500 is probably just fine for most workloads, but at $600 that upgrade is irresistible.)

What I find ridiculous is the prevaricating semantics of this release... they said something really special for 2013... then Fall 2013... then December... then wait until the last day of Fall to "release" which really isn't a release at all. The stock model is shipping December 30th, so will definitely not arrive anywhere in 2013. Apple has known this all along, and they could easily have updated their professional user base, but the chose not to do so. Sure, it's they're business and they have the right... and technically they are releasing the mac pro in 2013... but it's all just a word game and I've come to expect more from Apple.

To be fair, Tim's first e-mail said something like "later in 2013." They never lead anyone to believe it was going to be, say, June.

 

[Bruce Allen]

One thing I completely confused about it the graphic card pricing... it seems too good to be true! I thought that the D700 were supposed to be equivalent to AMD high end W9000 which is $3,000 cards? To upgrade from the D300 to the D700 is only $1,000. huh? Doesn't really make sense to me, I would have thought it'd be much more, even with some sort of special agreement between Apple and AMD...

Any ideas on why that is?

Because AMD wasn't selling any because they sucked?

I don't know anyone who has willingly bought an AMD FirePro card. nVidia, sure.

They're basically the same chips that are in AMD's $300 gaming cards. Add in some more RAM and you're good.

AMD could give them to Apple for $100 and it would still be a smart business decision and good PR.

But I'm going to stop harping on this as of NOW

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Andrei Mihailescu]

The D700's are effectively the W9000 cards in the different oddball form factor. 6GB VRAM on each.

Not quite - they are quite likely underclocked, since the theoretical single point performance of the D700 is 3,5 Tflops, whereas the W9000 has 4 TFlops. So basically a 15% underclock, probably because of power management constraints. And obviously no ECC memory.