New Mac Pro • Hacker News Board

Re: New Mac Pro

#131

Post by eBombzor » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 8:26 PM UTC

mcphage wrote: post #70

Shivetya wrote: post #23

I know being expandable is important here but I am stunned by the fact that an iMac Pro actually comes with better SSD and Video Card for less money and you get a screen to boot! 256g SSD is shameful, I don't care what they were thinking. No Nvidia support mentioned so I know a few that just wrote it off for that oversight alone. They will probably hold out just to be sure but that was the hope for them and others. W…

> 580X is old, 2017 old Is it? This site claims it came out in March 2019 but I definitely can't keep the various graphics card lines separate in my head: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-pro-580x.c3398

Sure maybe that mobile-workstation card came out this year but the tech behind it is very old (GCN 4.0). In fact all of AMD's current offerings are fairly old now. Navi is the first GPU architecture since 2012 that's not based on GCN.

Re: New Mac Pro

#132

Post by JeremyBanks » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 8:26 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #78

slantyyz wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if the baseline for the Pro market was made up of people who could afford the last version, then one can make the argument that Apple is the one that has redefined "Pro".

It seems evident that Apple views the "pro" market as movie studios, large corporations, and media entities that need serious computing power. On HN "pro" is three guys at a co-working space using coupons to buy coffee. It's these people who will complain the loudest about the new Mac Pro.

Watch every keynote that Steve Jobs ever presented, and you'll find his idea of "pro" is a lot closer to Hacker News' than Tim Cook's.

Re: New Mac Pro

#133

Post by mcphage » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 8:27 PM UTC

opencl wrote: post #115

mcphage wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 580X is old, 2017 old Is it? This site claims it came out in March 2019 but I definitely can't keep the various graphics card lines separate in my head: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-pro-580x.c3398

The 580X is technically "new" but it's the same Polaris 20 GPU chip that has been around since the RX480 in 2016 and has seen several rebadges accompanied by slight clockspeed bumps. This particular rebadge is Apple-specific and debuted with the recent iMac refresh.

Ah, okay, that makes sense. Thanks.

Re: New Mac Pro

#134

Post by psychometry » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 8:27 PM UTC

Shivetya wrote: post #23

I know being expandable is important here but I am stunned by the fact that an iMac Pro actually comes with better SSD and Video Card for less money and you get a screen to boot! 256g SSD is shameful, I don't care what they were thinking. No Nvidia support mentioned so I know a few that just wrote it off for that oversight alone. They will probably hold out just to be sure but that was the hope for them and others. W…

It's almost like they assume everyone's going to upgrade the drive. Might as well just ship without any at all.

Re: New Mac Pro

#135

Post by zerocrates » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 8:27 PM UTC

mcphage wrote: post #70

Shivetya wrote: post #23

I know being expandable is important here but I am stunned by the fact that an iMac Pro actually comes with better SSD and Video Card for less money and you get a screen to boot! 256g SSD is shameful, I don't care what they were thinking. No Nvidia support mentioned so I know a few that just wrote it off for that oversight alone. They will probably hold out just to be sure but that was the hope for them and others. W…

> 580X is old, 2017 old Is it? This site claims it came out in March 2019 but I definitely can't keep the various graphics card lines separate in my head: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-pro-580x.c3398

My understanding is that a Pro 580X is just a rebadging of the Pro 580, which is from mid-to-early 2017, and all the 5xx series is just minor spec bumps on top of the 4xx series.

Re: New Mac Pro

#136

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 8:27 PM UTC

wjakob wrote: post #46

Lack of NVIDIA support is a deal-breaker. The AMD ecosystem is just so far behind when it comes to frameworks like CUDA, OptiX, cuDNN, etc.. Why can't Apple open up kernel-level support by cooperating more with NVIDIA? This state of things seems completely bizarre to me.

The AMD ecosystem will always remain behind if application developers continue to choose single-vendor proprietary frameworks rather than standard APIs.

Re: New Mac Pro

#137

Post by rock_artist » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 8:28 PM UTC

As most of us here are with the developer hat. I think it's worth reminding that the target audience of those machines are Pro creatives. (those who didn't ditch Apple yet ;) )

It's also the second time I remember Apple revert a critical interface removal. (first one was FireWire from the first Unibody MacBook).

Apple lost a lot users when they've ditched PCIe. you can buy those Thunderbolt-PCIe cages and have a lot of external media drives outside your machine, but for pro people that meant new Mac Pro isn't well for putting in a machine room or stacking under the table.

Back when Apple announced the switch to Intel a lot of studios had to do an expensive upgrade not only replacing their old G5s but also additional DSP/Accelerator cards from PCI-X to PCIe. when Apple showed the trashcan (Mac Pro 2013) it was a hard sale that kept many folks with their Mac Pro 2010-2012.

While it's not stylish looking (imho) or ground-breaking modular deisgn as I've assumed, it's the first time in a while Apple is responding to their hard-core users.

price? I had macOS running on my AMD Athlon X2 back in the days (Leopard!) and even then Mac Pros were much more expansive if you've compared pure hardware. professional got Mac Pros because they've preferred their peace of mind. and I must admit, with exception of memory & gpus failures, I know many of those machines that are still rockin'.

Last thing Apple should do to get pros the freedom is sign Nvidia's drivers...

Re: New Mac Pro

#138

Post by myrandomcomment » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 8:28 PM UTC

Shivetya wrote: post #23

I know being expandable is important here but I am stunned by the fact that an iMac Pro actually comes with better SSD and Video Card for less money and you get a screen to boot! 256g SSD is shameful, I don't care what they were thinking. No Nvidia support mentioned so I know a few that just wrote it off for that oversight alone. They will probably hold out just to be sure but that was the hope for them and others. W…

Most of the people that are buying this will attached very large external storage as it is most likely going to be used as a video editing workstation.

Re: New Mac Pro

#139

Post by threeseed » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 8:28 PM UTC

old-gregg wrote: post #104

mcphage wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 580X is old, 2017 old Is it? This site claims it came out in March 2019 but I definitely can't keep the various graphics card lines separate in my head: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-pro-580x.c3398

Yes, 580X is old (it's the same hardware as RX 480 from 2016) In fact, everything in that machine is old: the Xeons they use are rocking the Skylake core form 2015, with all of the recently discovered side-channel vulnerabilities. The upcoming AMD Threadripper 3 CPUs with PCIe4 would be a much better Pro offering. Clock-for-clock they are beating Skylake now, rumored to have up to 64 cores. Also, PCIe4-based RAID 0 a…

Don't forget that Apple can see AMD and Intel's future roadmaps.

AMD definitely has a superior offering with Threadripper 3 but we haven't seen what Intel is going to offer in comparison. And switching CPU manufacturers is never trial.

Re: New Mac Pro

#140

Post by jwr » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 8:28 PM UTC

Those of us who are slightly older may still remember how much real workstations (as in a Sun SparcStation or an SGI Indigo) cost back in the day, and are less shocked by the pricing :-)

Computing has really been democratized over the last 25 years.