New Mac Pro • Hacker News Board

Re: New Mac Pro

#431

Post by liquidify » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 11:12 PM UTC

Miredly wrote: post #367

lambdasquirrel wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything about the base specs are just good enough. I’m not defending it per se, but if you spec’ed the machine for any given purpose, whether software dev, or rendering, it’d probably raise the cost by at least $1-2k, and then you’d have the “real” machine. So, the reason the price looks egregious is because most of it is just base cost. This is a computer made for the engineers who’ve already “made it,” who are m…

It's designed to be useful for more than one kind of "Pro". The old Mac Pro, for instance, seemed to completely forget about music studios and their professional requirements for Macs. This new machine may seem like overkill to software developers, but as an audio engineer, it's perfect. I don't even want a 1TB SSD in it, the 256 is perfect to hold the OS, a few DAWs, and all the plugins I could ever want. Everything…

256 is not enough for a serious main drive in a DAW. Sample libraries should all be on the fastest drive. There are single instruments that take up 50GB. And consider that most studios are recording in 24 or 32 bits at higher frequencies than 44.1Khz. 1TB is probably enough for a music production system although I'd personally prefer larger so that I don't have to be swapping things around all the time.

Re: New Mac Pro

#432

Post by jwr » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 11:15 PM UTC

noir_lord wrote: post #234

jwr wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For development, I'm actually perfectly fine with 256GB SSD. And I don't care about the video card much at all. Still, I don't see this as a developer machine — I think an iMac Pro is a much better value proposition for developers, and in my case, where I really mostly care about single-threaded performance for interactive development in Clojure and ClojureScript, I'm looking at the iMac.

On the flip side over in Linux land I built an 8 core 16T desktop with 64GB of RAM and two 27” 4K HDR monitors for less than half the price of the base Mac Pro. Oh and it has an RTX2080 which beats an RX580 so badly it’s practically attempted murder. I bet the apple tax I really do (typing this on a 5th gen mini) but the base model is hilariously expensive and in a world where I can buy a 12 core/16T for 499 that bea…

Well, that's cool, but that's comparing Apples to Linux-Oranges, I guess.

I do have a Linux box with a fast Intel CPU and it's nice and fast, but a Mac it ain't. I'm happy to pay more for a Mac machine, if only for the fact that I get an OS with working copy/paste in all applications. I won't be buying the Mac Pro anytime soon, though, I'm not willing to pay that much. But there are people who are and I'm glad there is something being offered there.

Re: New Mac Pro

#433

Post by liquidify » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 11:16 PM UTC

JBorrow wrote: post #317

noir_lord wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side over in Linux land I built an 8 core 16T desktop with 64GB of RAM and two 27” 4K HDR monitors for less than half the price of the base Mac Pro. Oh and it has an RTX2080 which beats an RX580 so badly it’s practically attempted murder. I bet the apple tax I really do (typing this on a 5th gen mini) but the base model is hilariously expensive and in a world where I can buy a 12 core/16T for 499 that bea…

Not to come out over-defensive, but your base configuration (I guess?) doesn't include a GPU, I bet your caches are significantly smaller, and also no ECC ram. I also bet your storage is considerably slower.

ECC ram can actually be a negative in certain use cases. Recording studios don't like the extra latency the ECC adds for MIDI for example.

Re: New Mac Pro

#434

Post by whywhywhywhy » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 11:16 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.

There was some sleight of hand in the benchmarking for me too, they compared GPU compute rendering engine speeds to "Nvidia Quadros" when no one doing CUDA rendering on Windows uses Quadro cards, they all use GTX because the price to performance is ridiculous on Octane render/Redshift/etc.

Re: New Mac Pro

#435

Post by nvahalik » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 11:17 PM UTC

atonse wrote: post #283

rock_artist wrote: post #137

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…

This likely is a great machine for creative pros. But as a developer, I wanted a desktop class CPU and just a separate monitor (tired of hearing my laptop fans all the time, and it not being expandable), so I can upgrade them independently. So while developers are pros, we won't appreciate things like XDR because we don't need them, unlike movie studios and photographers. So a $5k monitor is overpriced for editing co…

I’m right here with you. Just built a Win10 machine because of thermal issues. I don’t even mind having a laptop but is it too much to ask to pay iMac prices for mid grade hardware??

Re: New Mac Pro

#436

Post by chaostheory » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 11:18 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #189

aczerepinski wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that it’s always been this way. I bought a G4 tower when I was in college and it sure as heck wasn’t $6,000 back then. This is the only traditional desktop computer that Apple sells, so it’s disappointing that everybody outside of movie studio employees has to fall back to an iMac or a Windows/Linux machine.

I don't think there is much demand anymore for a Mac tower in the consumer space; actually, I don't think towers have been a popular option in the consumer space for a long time for any platform.

Yes because:

1. Apple first failed to update the cheese grater line for years consecutively

2. Then Apple's redesign of the Mac Pro transformed it into a larger Mac Mini trashcan which wasn't really expandable compared to the original cheese grater line. No one asked for that.

There is evidence for demand for a reasonably priced Mac Pro Tower if you look at the Hackintosh community and eBay sales of older cheese grater Mac Pros, but Apple keeps refusing to meet demand.

Re: New Mac Pro

#437

Post by santadakota » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 11:18 PM UTC

Nexxxeh wrote: post #342

eropple wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not mad that it's 10GBASE-T, but I'd personally rather 10G over SFP+. The sorts of shops that can afford these probably already have some pretty burly networking infrastructure, and 10GBASE-T is both expensive and (IME) less reliable. The encoding/decoding capacity of Ethernet-over-twisted-pair seems to be reaching a point of sharply diminishing returns and the hardware for 10GBASE-T is really expensive for what'…

>but I'd personally rather 10G over SFP+. Is that the wrong way around? I'm struggling to parse otherwise.

Another way to say 10G via an SFP+ transceiver, as opposed to 10G via twisted pair.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_form-factor_pluggable_tr...

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair

Re: New Mac Pro

#438

Post by mratzloff » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 11:19 PM UTC

I've been waiting on Apple's Mac Pro announcement to decide if I would be buying their new pro monitor. I have previously owned an Apple Cinema HD Display 30", which was great, but started to show its age over time. I believe it cost me about $2500 at the time. I'm not afraid of spending a lot for a great monitor.

This is $5000, or $6000 with the stand. Oof. I wish there were a cheaper 4K version.

I guess I'll just spend like 10-20% of that price some other 4K monitor.

Re: New Mac Pro

#439

Post by teddyc » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 11:19 PM UTC

You almost need a dedicated 15-amp circuit to run this or have 20-amp circuits so you have some overhead for the rest of your electronics (or a cubicle neighbor).

The power supply draws 1280W. A 15-amp circuit provides 1800W, but you are really supposed to keep steady loads at no more than 80%, which is 1440W. I bet some circuit breakers are going to start tripping when these go live.

Re: New Mac Pro

#440

Post by cbsmith » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 11:20 PM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #222

jandrese wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2x 10GBE actually. Plus four 40Gbps Thunderbolt ports.

I find that link aggregation is pretty much useless and/or unstable. Not sure what good two 10gbe ports do. But seeing 10gbe becoming part of the standard spec is a really welcomed improvement. Not the least because it will drive prices down.

Even without link aggregation (which does generally work quite well), this would allow you to have a dedicated SAN + network solution, which is often very useful.