Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • 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 :)

New Mac Pro

For my DIT cart:

4-core
512gb
32GB
dual d700

It comes out to around $5000 for me which is fine considering how much power is contained in such a compact form. I'm excited about thunderbolt and all the i/o stuff that can be done. Allowing the internal pcie externally via TB allows great freedom to customize. The MacPro will grow with maturity and as second gen apple products are almost always better purchases in the long run, I'm not so interested in having the best possible workstation but more like a laptop on super steroids. Thunderbolt will hit 100GB/s bandwidth in a few years and the innovation that apple has obviously figured into this beautiful new mac will for sure have a profound effect on the integration between the camera and computer that was itself pioneered by the red one. All aspects of creative production have a powerful new tool to play with in their hands. It's about time.


-noel
 
Delays suck, but honestly they aren't really 'delays' since nothing is ever on time. I wanted to punch something during the red one to epic x upgrade process, because that took FOREVER. But all I accomplished was pissing myself off, and the day it finally came I didn't care anymore. I learned my lesson, and now with the dragon and the new Mac Pro, I'll just be happy when they come. I completely understand the frustration. Just let go of it now because this will definitely not be the last time. It's gonna happen every time. Save yourself the grief.

I'm getting the 8core, d700s, and I'll put 64gigs of 3rd party ram in. Any time I need the extra cores I'll just use cloud rendering.

The flash storage is really really interesting. I wonder in a few years how much RAM I'll want vs flash.

Can't wait to see where thunderbolt expansion takes us. 6 ports might not be enough.

Now if I can just get a red projector to pair with this. Despite my best efforts, that delay is really starting to bum me out.
 
Alec Morris said:
Now if I can just get a red projector to pair with this. Despite my best efforts, that delay is really starting to bum me out.
Click to expand...

Still waiting for our REDRAY here.
 
I find it interesting that over the last few years a typical MacPro tower config for pro apps would have had dual CPUs and a single GPU (yes, I know adding more GPUs has gotten more common of late).

With the nMP, that's inverted to a single CPU with dual GPUs. Obviously different apps utilize resources differently, but GPUs are typically more important for pixel pushers like us. IMO, Apple has charted a course with the design of the nMP based on ever greater reliance on GPUs for the heavy lifting. I will be very curious to see how Apple utilizes the dual GPU architecture - note even the base model has two GPUs.

My hunch is that in some respects the 2 separate physical cards will act as one for many tasks, perhaps similar to some of what SLI enables. Conceptually, the idea makes sense to me - should be more scalable, maybe more efficient sharing of lanes, perhaps even some sort of interleaving strategy to reduce practical latency...

Apple, love 'em or hate 'em, has one key advantage over most of the competition; they can integrate hardware/OS/software with far greater depth and efficiency. IF, and its a big IF, Apple can significantly increase system resource utilization metrics; the real world performance of the nMP might well exceed what the specs suggest. Our computers spend more time waiting around than most people realize, if the topology of the nMP can reduce the number and duration of these waits the cumulative benefit could be significant.

Bring on the benchmarks!

Cheers - #19
 
Another thing that doesn't inspire much confidence is that looking at Apple.com, you won't see any announcement about the new Mac Pro... it's not on the Home page, it's not on the Store page, it's not on the Mac page... Instead on the Mac page you'll see a Macbook Pro... Why does every other product get a red carpet intro but not this guy?

I've really been anticipating this thing, perhaps against my better judgement.
 
Justin Quinn said:
Another thing that doesn't inspire much confidence is that looking at Apple.com, you won't see any announcement about the new Mac Pro... it's not on the Home page, it's not on the Store page, it's not on the Mac page... Instead on the Mac page you'll see a Macbook Pro... Why does every other product get a red carpet intro but not this guy?

I've really been anticipating this thing, perhaps against my better judgement.
Click to expand...

Well it's fairly prominent on the store & Mac pages - Red Carpet? Why? It's a niche product that will sell less in a year than iPhone / iPad / iPod will in a week.

***Or you could take a conspiracy theory outlook and think that Apple knows this is crap and won't work, and the sky is falling and that this is a sign that you should build a Hackintosh in your basement that only works half the time.***
 
Unfortunately there is nothing in OSX or even Windows that can make the hardware perform better than the specs. The software is just to far behind the hardware in general right now. The scaling of GPU's has been in the CUDA realm for years now and the performance when memory management is good is very significant. So the nPro having this is nothing special beyond catching up to the current market. I understand many are really excited about the new hardware but understand these technologies such as GPU acceleration and TB have their limits or have specific process's that are dependent on other hardware ie CPU and Ram to get the real performance. Until the OS or virtualization host itself is GPU accelerated this is not going to change for the Media market. GPU acceleration doesn't work without the CPU first for us. I can take a 12 Core Xeon on my bench and see very clearly what the performance is right now for that hardware and the difference between Windows and OSX performance is not different enough to change that.
 
Agree that software optimization is the key.

Not suggesting that 3rd party apps will necessarily run faster on the nMP, just that lower level tasks and the passing around of data could get closer to the theoretical maximums through better optimized software/hardware integration made possible by a single company controlling both.

Perhaps I'm overly optimistic and will be proven wrong. To repeat - bring on the benchmarks with real world examples...

Cheers - #19
 
Glen Powell said:
Well it's fairly prominent on the store & Mac pages - Red Carpet? Why? It's a niche product that will sell less in a year than iPhone / iPad / iPod will in a week.

***Or you could take a conspiracy theory outlook and think that Apple knows this is crap and won't work, and the sky is falling and that this is a sign that you should build a Hackintosh in your basement that only works half the time.***
Click to expand...

Yes, if you scroll down on the store page you can see it... and if you stay on the Mac page for a few seconds then a sliding interface reveals it second to the Macbook Pro... not exactly the gun show I'm used to seeing from Apple... just saying that to me, it definitely does not inspire confidence... Here we are entering 2014 and Apple is finally getting these essentials such as usb 3.0 and TB...

But yeah, regardless, I think the Mac Pro deserves the red carpet treatment... I mean, I live in NYC and they don't even have any on display in the stores here. Business team director told me not to expect any either as they would take away space from the iPads, etc... "But the thing is tiny!" I says to him.
 
The general impression so far has been expectations somewhere along the line of the greatest thing since sliced bread. You have to keep in mind this hardware other than the GPU models have been available for 4 months now. That is more than long enough to accurately gauge the performance. However the innovation here from Apple is not the actual hardware other than TB2 although PC has that now to with Z87. The innovation is the form factor. The hardware itself is just catching up to what is already available on PC.
 
Justin Quinn said:
Another thing that doesn't inspire much confidence is that looking at Apple.com, you won't see any announcement about the new Mac Pro... it's not on the Home page, it's not on the Store page, it's not on the Mac page... Instead on the Mac page you'll see a Macbook Pro... Why does every other product get a red carpet intro but not this guy?
Click to expand...

According to the only remotely recent number I've ever seen reported, Apple sells about 50K Mac Pros a quarter. That's ~550 units a day, compared with, say, ~370,000 iPhones a day. In fact, in less than three days iPhone moves more units than the entire global workstation market moves in a year.

I think some of us, who use high-powered hardware professionally and who are often tech enthusiasts as well, have trouble internalizing just how disconnected the stuff we do has become from the rest of the computing world. The median price of a Wintel machine is something like $450 now -- it's a crappy plastic notebook. Even the MacBook Air is 'high end' in comparison to that. The Mac Pro is so different that it's only even considered to be in the same general product category as a consequence of its historical lineage, not its present features (i.e. it runs OS X, descended fem Mac OS, a 'personal computer' platform). The existence of a product like this is so irrelevant to mainstream users that its presence on Apple's home page might be literally be confusing to some of them -- and certainly would be occupying valuable web real estate in the lead up to the holiday quarter, the most important time of the year for iDevice sales. Meanwhile, everyone in this machine's actual target market already knows about it, so there wouldn't be much promotional value there at all.

The existence of this extremely elaborate product demonstrates that Apple still cares deeply about the creative pro market (even if their vision for it doesn't entirely match up with what some of their customers want). Its lack of prominent placement on their home page, though, is just a straightforward consequence of Apple's correct understanding that most people don't care about this market.

All of that said, I think it probably would rate a spot on the home page anyway if it weren't launching a couple of days after the start of an extremely high-profile promotional campaign for iOS devices. Apple almost always has a product rotation set up on their home page, where refreshing the page shows different products more or less prominently. They're not even doing that right now — the home page is just their new ad and their four iOS products, in what I'm sure is a meticulously selected fixed layout.
 
L. Langer said:
HDMI 2.0 gear will be shipping en masse next Spring/Summer in the new TVs - and maybe 4K Blu-Ray players too - and Intel's Broadwell will be using HDMI 2.0 in the new mobo designs.
Click to expand...

I think you're being overly optimistic, which is why I give the industry about a year or so to catch up...

Look at TB and USB 3.0, I don't see what makes HDMI 2.0 the exception.
 
Anyone have insight into 6 core vs 8? I'm on the fence given the $1500 bump can buy a lot of other goodies multiplied over a half dozen Mac Pro tower swaps around here.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top