New MacPro predictions? Hopes? Fears?

[Daniel Kelly Brown]

Anyone know if we will we be able to plug in externally housed graphics cards to this new MBP via T3 connection? If so will it have worthwhile speed increases for video editing?

 

[Mike Halper]

If thunderbolt 3 on the new Mac supports external GPU then I am interested and will stay with Mac for a while.
Thunderbolt 3 is the only real new thing. 9 months after being on a PC.

Up until the last couple months there's been nothing to take advantage of Thunderbolt 3, except for some docks and peripherals that give you nothing more than Thunderbolt 2 can do.

 

[Antony Newman]

For the 99% of customers that don't need a truck of computer grunt - a 16GB 2016 15" MBP probably meets their needs squarely.

Apple have probably negotiated an excellent deal on AMD Polaris GPUs, that both keeps AMD relevant (and above water), and gives them sufficient funds to develop Laptop & iMac GPUs that Apple needs.

Also : I am curious to see if the ARM compatibility build into MacOS is required to interact with & update the Firmware of the Apple Security chip (with its Secure Enclave).
If not needed for the Secure Enclave - could this a threat by Apple for Intel? Just like the less-than-idle threat that Jobs gave IBM in the PowerPC days?

GPU : Is what makes Volta such a leap forward over Pascal an Maxwell that Shader Cores (the 'heart' of the GPU) have been completely redeveloped?
Is this that same part of the Apples Imagination Technologies PowerVR that the A10 Fusion that Apple redesigned internally and works so much more efficiently with Apples Metal driver?
At some point in time ... will Apples mobile : Fixed Point shader + Apple Shader Core + Apple Metal driver outperform Nvidia Stack (Volta Shader + CUDA)?

Perhaps in the distant future Apple will replace AMD, and create their own GPUs further optimised for metal for when 8K iMac's are the new 'standard'?

Without a suitable AMD GPU today ... is Apple actually waiting for AMD or Intel (Kaby) or both?

AJ

 

[Jason Bognacki]

Still hope?

http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/mac/...mac-pro-2016-tech-specs-new-features-3536364/

 

[Antony Newman]

... Wonder how long it will be before Apple offer a standalone Apple keyboard with Touchbar that is compatible with the existing Trashcan.

Just trying to make sense of Blackmagic spending so much effort on bringing new Resolve GUI functionality ... to a LAPTOP.

Jeff ... you didn't get delivery of a new keyboard too did you? ;-)

AJ

 

[Daniel Reed]

Still hope?

http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/mac/...mac-pro-2016-tech-specs-new-features-3536364/

eh, reads more like click-bait to me.

From what little I've heard from chatty birds around the bay, is to expect an iMac Pro next year, most likely around this time

The problem with the new MBP is the max memory is still capped at 16GB - the same Cap as the MBP released in March 2011

Even with Maxwell titan, or potential buggy pascal support down the road, one still can't get the CPU core counts or system memory needed as a work solution.
Sure, if you run Maxwell over TB3, you get roughly a 5% gain on CUDA compute over TB2.
And if you downscale to 2K, one may be able to edit a feature on a new MBP as-is.

Of course, External raid will certainly benefit from TB3; however,
I have my suspicions on how many true TB3 lanes there are. I suspect each TB3 port pair share bandwidth.

 

[Antony Newman]

In terms of 8K Editing on a Laptop : I guess the 3GB/sec SSD is more than enough to Read, Write & Cache.

If an RRX was looped in over TB3 .... and the resultant feed was 4K UHD back to the editor, this would be the same sort of CPU burden than 6K is now?

AJ

 

[Hrvoje Simic]

Just saw that there is a 4GB Radeon Pro 460 GPU option. Some sparks of hope still left despite all the rest. What is its computing power compared to Pascal GTX series ?
Jeff ?

In terms of 8K Editing on a Laptop : I guess the 3GB/sec SSD is more than enough to Read, Write & Cache.

SSD is not the bottleneck. Helium is 280MB/s.

I'm scrubbing through 8K raw based Resolve 4K project like DV with RT playback in HD monitoring with 12C, GTX1070 & 500MB/s disk read.

 

[jonathan murphy]

What do you guys think of this for an editing machine? Has a 1080 but is still thin. Also 17 inches. How do you think this compares against the new MacBook pro? Heavily leaning toward the razor at this point. Thoughts? http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade-pro

 

[Daniel Reed]

Okay, just saw that there is a 4GB Radeon Pro 460 GPU option. Still hoping.

The problem with the 4GB option is it is 4GB.
Granted, this may employ HMB1 memory (which is very fast), but there's no confirmation yet on what memory format the custom Radeon Pro cards for Apple uses.

ALSO, the top end MBP Radeon Pro 460 option has only 1.9 TFlops of peak performance, less then 25% computational power of the 7.9 TFlops peak performance from the mobile nVidia Pascal 1080 options.

Resolve needs more then 6GB of video ram on a Mac for a single neatvideo node on 6K dragon; otherwise, an out of GPU memory occurs and the project won't render/export/deliver.
The only work-around is to do a downscale to 4K pass render, then on a new 4K project do any noise reduction - but this is with 6GB of video ram.
With only 4GB of video ram, one may have to scale down to 3K or 2K masters to use neadvideo in Resolve on a Mac. (i'm under the impression win10AE uses less video ram by a large margin).

I don't know if its possible, but if one can somehow use the integrated intel graphics on the MBP that uses system memory for GUI, and the Radeon Pro just for OpenCL, then maybe one can get away with doing more (as the Radeon Pro won't have to use any resources for GUI).

 

[Hrvoje Simic]

The problem with the 4GB option is it is 4GB.
Granted, this may employ HMB1 memory (which is very fast), but there's no confirmation yet on what memory format the custom Radeon Pro cards for Apple uses.

Resolve needs more then 6GB of video ram on a Mac for a single neatvideo node on 6K dragon; otherwise, an out of GPU memory occurs and the project won't render/export/deliver.
The only work-around is to do a downscale to 4K pass render, then on a new 4K project do any noise reduction - but this is with 6GB of video ram.
With only 4GB of video ram, one may have to scale down to 3K or 2K masters to use neadvideo in Resolve on a Mac. (i'm under the impression win10AE uses less video ram by a large margin).

I don't know if its possible, but if you can use the integrated intel graphics on the MBP that uses system memory for GUI, and the Radeon Pro just for OpenCL, maybe you can get away doing more (as the Radeon Pro won't have to use any memory for GUI).

I don't need a 4K project noise reduction on a laptop, I'm interested if this can be used for UHD raw project editing in at least HD resolution preview (from half res debayer 4K to quarter 8K) and for practical first light and dailies, without st-st-stutter and me seeking additional cooler for the frying pan. Also with various other codecs in 4K timeline such as tasking Prores XQ and XAVC. Zero interest in FCPx performance.

GTX970 is 4GB and chews through 8K nicely as well in quarter res.

 

[Steve Sherrick]

Jeff, will you please, please get yourself employed at Apple and start convincing them that if they give us the power we want (64GB RAM on a MBP would be exactly what the doctor ordered) that we will continue to buy all of the other crap like iPhones and watches.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Well, as critical as I've been here today about the 16GB RAM, I bit the bullet and ordered a maxed-out 15" in space gray. We'll see how it goes. I need a new MBP for iOS development work and couldn't get myself to go with one of the lesser variants. I waffled a bit on the 2TB SSD, but ultimately went for it. It's only money, I guess. If Apple drops a 32GB+ model this one will be for sale instantly. Looks like I snuck my order in while it was still 2~3 weeks delivery, site now says 3~4 weeks.

Jeff, will you please, please get yourself employed at Apple and start convincing them that if they give us the power we want (64GB RAM on a MBP would be exactly what the doctor ordered) that we will continue to buy all of the other crap like iPhones and watches.

I'd go for it, but I think there's a long list of people already there trying to work their way into that position. Besides, I don't think Jonny and I would see eye to eye on a lot of things. ...that and I'm so frustrated with the computer industry as a whole these days. Not just Apple, but Microsoft and most others. Intel and pretty much everyone else are trying to kill the professional workstation PC. Of course the market has been in a nose dive for the past few years and fewer people are needing the monster workstations. But if that wasn't bad enough, we now have Microsoft competing head to head with apple on their own vertical platform and most of the same issues. I think the real reason we didn't see a new iMac today is because of the Surface Studio. And while I appreciate and applaud the enthusiasm for the pro design community in Microsoft's presentation yesterday, I get the impression they were just pandering to all of the Apple supporters who feel like they're being left behind. The new reality is corporate greed and gross consumerism now are the primary driving factors behind computer design. It's not worth it to the big guys to offer up a cookie-cutter pro workstation. Intel isn't even positioning their Xeon CPU line for workstations anymore and they are designing them and marketing them to fit the server and virtualization markets.

 

[jonathan murphy]

Jeff, What do you think of the new razor blade pro with 1080 for video editing? Worth it?

 

[Steve Sherrick]

Well, as critical as I've been here today about the 16GB RAM, I bit the bullet and ordered a maxed-out 15" in space gray. We'll see how it goes. I need a new MBP for iOS development work and couldn't get myself to go with one of the lesser variants. I waffled a bit on the 2TB SSD, but ultimately went for it. It's only money, I guess. If Apple drops a 32GB+ model this one will be for sale instantly. Looks like I snuck my order in while it was still 2~3 weeks delivery, site now says 3~4 weeks.



I'd go for it, but I think there's a long list of people already there trying to work their way into that position. Besides, I don't think Jonny and I would see eye to eye on a lot of things. ...that and I'm so frustrated with the computer industry as a whole these days. Not just Apple, but Microsoft and most others. Intel and pretty much everyone else are trying to kill the professional workstation PC. Of course the market has been in a nose dive for the past few years and fewer people are needing the monster workstations. But if that wasn't bad enough, we now have Microsoft competing head to head with apple on their own vertical platform and most of the same issues. I think the real reason we didn't see a new iMac today is because of the Surface Studio. And while I appreciate and applaud the enthusiasm for the pro design community in Microsoft's presentation yesterday, I get the impression they were just pandering to all of the Apple supporters who feel like they're being left behind. The new reality is corporate greed and gross consumerism now are the primary driving factors behind computer design. It's not worth it to the big guys to offer up a cookie-cutter pro workstation. Intel isn't even positioning their Xeon CPU line for workstations anymore and they are designing them and marketing them to fit the server and virtualization markets.

I have an idea for a video that will challenge both Microsoft and Apple. If I ever get around to writing it, I could see it being done as a Reduser group project to spread the time/cost.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Jeff, What do you think of the new razor blade pro with 1080 for video editing? Worth it?

Looks somewhat promising. Hope the build quality is better than their past efforts and the I/O is weak. It has a nice combination of form factor, CPU and GPU, but we have to recognize that its primary purpose is to play games. Which can be a good thing... I would like to get my hands on one and really test it.

I should also add that we can get a superior CPU in the MBP and I don't have high hopes for the quality of the screen on the Razer. By the numbers, the battery life should be horrible on the Razer. It's claim to fame is the 8GB 1080 GPU and the 17" UHD screen. Storage is M.2 SSD and won't provide the same level of performance as what's in the new MBP's... Or the last couple versions of MBP, for that matter. But this does provide a significant cost advantage while still being a lot faster than HDDs or SATA-interface SSD.

 

[Daniel Reed]

What do you guys think of this for an editing machine? Has a 1080 but is still thin. Also 17 inches. How do you think this compares against the new MacBook pro? Heavily leaning toward the razor at this point. Thoughts? http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade-pro

That will spank a MBP, especially if you add another 1080 or Titan, or even an eventual 1080Ti, via Razor's "Core" TB3 expansion bay.

As I noted above, a mobile Pascal 1080 has more then 4 times the peak TFlop computational power then Apple's best AMD option - 1.9TFlops for AMD's custom 460s vs 7.9TFlops for Mobile 1080s

 

[L. Langer]

Just out of curiosity, can anyone tell me why Apple doesn't offer 64GB of RAM as an high margin BTO option?

I'd need a fucking chalk board to explain DRAM to ya, but to make it short and simple, it's not possible at this time, without committing more physical real estate to RAM. You can do 64GB with 4 SODIMMs or a larger chunk of board space for embedded LPDDR, like the new products are using. Stacked DRAM will make it possible to have large amounts of RAM, but that tech is being held back for the moment, for various reasons.

 

[Jarek Zabczynski]

And speaking of FCPX...Tracks are back, and better then ever.

Do tell. Did they also make the magnetic timeline optional? That and no tracks were my two requirements before I gave it another look.

I guess what I'm asking is, can I make and have empty tracks in my timeline and not have stuff shifting around as I add to or take away from it?

 

[Daniel Reed]

I'd need a fucking chalk board to explain DRAM to ya, but to make it short and simple, it's not possible at this time, without committing more physical real estate to RAM. You can do 64GB with 4 SODIMMs or a larger chunk of board space for embedded LPDDR, like the new products are using. Stacked DRAM will make it possible to have large amounts of RAM, but that tech is being held back for the moment, for various reasons.

Apple could've technically offered a 32GB BTO option :sad: