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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 :)

New MacPro predictions? Hopes? Fears?

Kinda kicking myself for not getting the iMacPro when it came out. Would have served me well this past year and a half and would make a great B station to the MacPro when it comes out. But at this point I might as well keep circling the runway.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
(snip) the new Mac Pro will be based on a forthcoming Xeon platform that Intel has not officially announced yet. Not only that, we don't even know if it will be 10nm or other details. I'm expecting to see more of the Intel CPU + AMD GPU package configurations like Intel used for their Hades Canyon.
As Apple transitions to their ARM based Core series CPUs, Intel would have a lot to offer in terms of manufacturing. Also they're the ones to go to if Apple decides to build x86/A-Core hybrid CPUs. Intel has already been working on x86/ARM hybrids of their own.
Anyway, I think we'll get a first look at what's really coming here in a few months at WWDC.
Click to expand...

These CPU/GPU on package hybrids sure sound like a great option for Apple to transition to the presumed A-core future. Sadly, I may finally have to depend on a Windows box to take advantage of the new nVidia RedCode processing capabilities. If Apple releases a MacPro that can't eat R3Ds for breakfast - AMD's latest and some serious coding/optimization could potentially manage that - then nVidia becomes a virtual must have for RedUsers. Moreover, a ton of the ancillary software of our trade is leveraging nVidia's CUDA cores

Cheers - #19
 
Blair S. Paulsen said:
These CPU/GPU on package hybrids sure sound like a great option for Apple to transition to the presumed A-core future. Sadly, I may finally have to depend on a Windows box to take advantage of the new nVidia RedCode processing capabilities. If Apple releases a MacPro that can't eat R3Ds for breakfast - AMD's latest and some serious coding/optimization could potentially manage that - then nVidia becomes a virtual must have for RedUsers. Moreover, a ton of the ancillary software of our trade is leveraging nVidia's CUDA cores

Cheers - #19
Click to expand...

The i9-7980xe is already capable of decoding all sorts of R3D in realtime, same is true for the W-3175X (same for the 2970/90WX under Linux). Within half year AMD will have a $500 CPU's that can do the same and intels upcoming 10nm should also be capable to handle it at a lower than current price point. It's not that your out of options to process R3D without a NVidia GPU. At the moment only $1200+ NVidia GPU's can handle all sorts of 8k.R3D decoding in realtime.
Apple is capable to do the same with Intel, AMD, ARM or any other CPU/GPU combination, the question is: do they care?
 
Misha Engel said:
The i9-7980xe is already capable of decoding all sorts of R3D in realtime, same is true for the W-3175X (same for the 2970/90WX under Linux). Within half year AMD will have a $500 CPU's that can do the same and intels upcoming 10nm should also be capable to handle it at a lower than current price point. It's not that your out of options to process R3D without a NVidia GPU. At the moment only $1200+ NVidia GPU's can handle all sorts of 8k.R3D decoding in realtime.
Apple is capable to do the same with Intel, AMD, ARM or any other CPU/GPU combination, the question is: do they care?
Click to expand...

It's already perfectly possible to decode all sorts of R3D on Apple hardware. A Xeon-W iMac Pro will handle a large variety of R3D without issue at all. If RED wanted to they could work on non-CUDA GPU decoding as well and make it even better. Right now Nvidia is likely subsidizing some of that development so they partnered with them. Hopefully they will expand that to more open platforms at some point. Would love to be able to playback R3D on an iPad Pro someday.

All this GPU decoding stuff is great, but it isn't really doing things yet that is a must have for most people working with R3D at the moment.
 
andrewhake said:
It's already perfectly possible to decode all sorts of R3D on Apple hardware. A Xeon-W iMac Pro will handle a large variety of R3D without issue at all. If RED wanted to they could work on non-CUDA GPU decoding as well and make it even better. Right now Nvidia is likely subsidizing some of that development so they partnered with them. Hopefully they will expand that to more open platforms at some point. Would love to be able to playback R3D on an iPad Pro someday.

All this GPU decoding stuff is great, but it isn't really doing things yet that is a must have for most people working with R3D at the moment.
Click to expand...

I think Misha is talking 8k r3d realtime or more. Not chewing on r3ds that my 5 year old laptop also can do.

My i9 hack with single 1080ti has no trouble with 8k full debayer realtime in OSX without the new sauce from red/intel. Sure would be nice to have the new drivers also for high sierra but it sounds like red / nvidia will not go there. And I guess moving forward I will need to jump to AMD but as Misha says its actually less costly cards and they will have the needed performance even without the special code that Nvidia red wrote together, atleast for 8k but I guess soon we got even bigger r3d´s 2020 is not far away and I think thats DSMC3 year no?
 
Björn Benckert said:
I think Misha is talking 8k r3d realtime or more. Not chewing on r3ds that my 5 year old laptop also can do.

My i9 hack with single 1080ti has no trouble with 8k full debayer realtime in OSX without the new sauce from red/intel. Sure would be nice to have the new drivers also for high sierra but it sounds like red / nvidia will not go there. And I guess moving forward I will need to jump to AMD but as Misha says its actually less costly cards and they will have the needed performance even without the special code that Nvidia red wrote together, atleast for 8k but I guess soon we got even bigger r3d´s 2020 is not far away and I think thats DSMC3 year no?
Click to expand...

I don't expect next resolution DSMC3 (11k ???) to be a problem for next gen Threadripper in realtime. The current 2950x can handle 8k R3D 7:1 in realtime, it's successor will be at least twice as fast (32c/64tr, 4.5 GHz all-core) and won't suffer from the NUMA bug in Windows 10. You still need a GPU fast enough to do the de-bayering.
 
I think the resolution race is kinda over for a while. 8k is where it’ll top out for now. Sure, Red might make a 12k Monstro or whatever, but those won’t go mainstream. It’ll be a specialty camera like imax. It theory, Red post should only be getting faster and easier from here on in.

In DSMC3 I’m looking for more framerates at full res, better lowlight and dynamic range, and io improvements like 4k monitoting etc. I don’t need any more k’s.
 
So some nice updates in specs on the iMac today, 8 Core i9 top end.
iMacPro Ram bumped to 256, Vega 64X.
SSD Price drops across all lines.

Definitely liking the direction Apple has been headed lately with what they did with the new Mini and bumping the MBPs to 32GB.

Hope they can bring it home with the new MacPro!
 
I’ve been using a maxed late-2015 and have been clamoring for the iMac Pro but this new iMac is pretty great. $4K on that machine with max RAM is awful intriguing.
 
it appears that the Vega 64 is now officially discontinued (and it may be as simple as it is renamed the WX8200) - but the Vega 64 in the iMac Pro appears to be "obsolete".
So since this is the "New Mac Pro" thread - if you can't change out the GPU card (even if it's just another newer AMD card) by yourself, then there is no reason for a new Mac Pro on June 3rd.
If we can't change the RAM, the GPU, the drives, then exactly what are we waiting for ?

Bob Zelin
 
ARM it is, it's in the Apple phone, watch, TV, pod, tablet and in the near future in the Mac.
 
Bob Zelin said:
it appears that the Vega 64 is now officially discontinued (and it may be as simple as it is renamed the WX8200) - but the Vega 64 in the iMac Pro appears to be "obsolete".
Click to expand...

Not discontinued... yet. Apple quietly price adjusted the iMac Pro and upgraded the minimum specs, added the Vega 64X GPU option several months back. I’m expecting an update to the iMac Pro at some point this year. Probably not at WWDC and they may wait and do it at the same time or close to when the Mac Pro launches. At that time, Vega GPU options should be replaced with Navi GPUs.

As for the Mac Pro, I’m fully expecting the unveil at WWDC in June. As they did in 2013, we’ll get to see it at WWDC and order it this fall with delivery by the end of the year. That’s my prediction. Next round of Xeon CPUs should be shipping late Q3 or early Q4. These will be the Cooper Lake series chips, still based on 14nm process and heavy focus on some new functionality to assist machine learning tasks and Optane integration. I’m expecting the new Mac Pro to utilize these chips. They can’t afford to wait until late 2020 for the Ice Lake series chips, which should be pretty much the same, but incorporating the die shrink to 10nm. And Ice Lake would provide for a nice spec bump after the first year if reception to the new Mac Pro is favorable.

I see Apple shifting to their own A-Series CPUs and their own GPUs at some point. IPad Pro is already kicking ass, but needs serious OS renovation to catch up to the hardware potential. I fully expect to see a revamped and more capable iOS take shape staring this year at WWDC and improving rapidly over the next few years.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
I see Apple shifting to their own A-Series CPUs and their own GPUs at some point. IPad Pro is already kicking ass, but needs serious OS renovation to catch up to the hardware potential. I fully expect to see a revamped and more capable iOS take shape staring this year at WWDC and improving rapidly over the next few years.
Click to expand...

I'm going to go further! Yes, you are right here, but thing about this: Macs will move to ARM, just like they did from 68K to PPC, and from PPC to Intel. Right? But something else happened, too, after the move to PPC: a brand new OS. I predict that in 2021, Apple will replace OS X with a brand new platform with no legacy (except an emulation layer). It's probably going to be based on Haiku, which is an open version of BeOS. We shall see.

I really cannot wait to see the new Mac Pro.
 
Yes, OS X and iOS will converge at some point and we’ll see an all new OS. This was Steve Jobs’ intention. He knew it would take time and said so on many occasions. I’d like to think that the iOS and Mac OS convergence would be further along if he were still here. OTOH, I don’t think anyone, nor Jobs, could have foreseen the staggering rate of development achieved by Apple’s CPU team. Seriously doubt the new OS will be derived from BeOS/ Haiku. Honestly, I don’t think they will deviate from the BSD base UNIX core. We’ll see a ground-up re-write of a new OS to serve the new paradigm built around the BSD kernel and core functionality.

I think we’ll see a shift to ARM on both the Mac and PC side of things. Intel is working on some pretty compelling ARM products of their own. The tried and true x86 architecture is still relevant, but I think it’s reached a point where it’s carrying around so much legacy bloat that it’s become far too difficult or costly to evolve. There are probably legacy structures in the core x86 CPU that most, if not all, Intel engineers no longer know what they do. Intel is nearly 2 years late shifting to 10nm process with only a couple CPU products finally shipping late last year. It’s not that they can’t do 10nm... They’ve already shown they can do 7nm on some of their memory products. It’s getting that bloated legacy mess that we know as x86 to scale reliably to 10nm. A daunting challenge to say the least.

We won’t see the shift to ARM, or Apple’s own chips in their systems, until they can truly outperform their x86 counterparts. And that day is rapidly approaching... The current iPad Pro is right on par with the mid-CPU MacBook Air and has both a superior GPU and superior power and heat properties. I think by the time Apple drops the A15x in 2 years, it’s going to be rocking 8 to 10 cores and will be neck and neck even with whatever Intel CPU would end up in the top end MacBook Pro with 40% lower TDP and kickass GPU on package.

And that’s probably the point where Apple kicks Intel and AMD to the curb.

I have a hunch that the MacBook Pro, Air, etc.. go ARM/Apple CPUs exclusively at the change point, probably the iMac too. Thinking that iMac Pro and Mac Pro *might* still include a lesser x86 CPU option along with ARM/Apple to continue support for some legacy stuff for a while. The option could even come as an optional PCIe v4 or Thunderbolt 4 peripheral. I don’t think we’ll see an x86 emulator as we saw with the Rosetta PPC emulation. The development tools have become so crazy good and developers are more accustomed to frequent builds for OS changes and such anyway. If Apple handles the OS evolution the right way, support for the new platform could just be a recompile away. You can bet they’ll have Adobe and some other big guys on deck and ready to go when the transition happens. The consumer isn’t going to care at all... We just get sleek new computers.

I also can’t wait to see the new Mac Pro. I think it’s going to be pretty awesome... Unfortunately it will probably also be completely different than what many are hoping to see. Kinda like the trash can 2013 Mac Pro. The concept was, and still is, pretty amazing. Execution was kinda meh... Pricing and options were a failure... And yet, the trash can Mac was about the most cost-effective way to build high density Xeon blade or appliance farm when the systems could be stacked and racked like soda cans and came with multi-port 10G+ connectivity right out of the box.

I will be shocked if the new Mac Pro offers dual CPUs. I think it will be like the upcoming Intel NUC X concept but a bit more refined and without being an I/O port slut that hooks up with everything natively.
 
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