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New Mac Pro

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Re: New Mac Pro

#591

Post by pryce »

justinsaccount wrote: post #80
h3throw wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only Apple could get shat on for using appropriate but obscure terminology.

But is it appropriate here? from that wikipedia page: > The simplest form of space frame is a horizontal slab of interlocking square pyramids and tetrahedra built from aluminium or tubular steel struts Do you see anything that looks like that?

Sure. Looking at each of the external sphere holes, each seems to be associated with a triangle of connected internal sphere holes. The central point of each sphere is therefore associated with the central points of three others in an adjacent plane.

It is easily possible to conceptualise the 'grate' of this mac-pro as a set of interlocking tetrahedra of origins of the spherical spaces, instead of interlocking tetrahedra of the joints; a little like a photo-negative.

I dislike the appearance myself, it provokes a mild feeling of trypophobia, but I don't see anything dishonest about their term.

Re: New Mac Pro

#592

Post by asveikau »

hinkley wrote: post #363
imagetic wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every machine I've worked on, bought or built has had 256 or 500gb. We only run the OS/apps on the main drive. Then a second drive for scratch disk and then SAN/NAS storage for the media. It's VERY normal.

I've found that 256G is 'not quite enough', so my old Macbook has 256G and I moved my media folder to one of those flush-mount microSD card adapters. It's read-mostly so who cares about write cycles?

My experience in personal use is that data loss with microSD is extremely common, much worse than, say, magnetic disks (and certainly much worse than SSD).

Re: New Mac Pro

#593

Post by wtallis »

icedchai wrote: post #550
endorphone wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neat. My new MacBook Pro has 256GB. I'm using ~133GB. That's XCode and the Xcode Beta, the full Office suite, Logic Pro, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IntelliJ, GoLand, Photoshop, Illustrator, a bunch of other Adobe apps, and on and on. When I'm at the desktop I use an external drive for dumping junk to, and for Time Machine backups. There is a point of diminishing returns, and given that most people don't have a giant St…

You are right. It is sufficient for a large number of users. However, the Mac Pro is a high end workstation used by professionals, targeted for applications like high resolution video editing that require insane amounts of storage. Relatively speaking, storage is cheap. A high performance, 1 TB NVME drive can be had for under $350. This should be the base configuration on a high end workstation...

What benefit does a 1TB SSD have over 256GB for a video workstation that needs to connect to a 100+ TB array for the real work? If your video editing task can get by with even the 4TB maximum build-to-order option, then you're not in the target market.

Re: New Mac Pro

#594

Post by rewgs »

holy_city wrote: post #82
gigatexal wrote: post #10

Complaining only signals that you are not the market they’re targeting. This is for Hollywood media makers, high end studios, etc. This was never to be a mass market item.

I work in Hollywood. The complaints are here too. But people are more concerned with upgrades and repairs. Loss of a machine for a few days/weeks for a repair is far more costly than anything else. That said a lot of the industry is moving to the cloud anyway and doesn't require workstations. Some shops are entirely on Linux. Audio post/recording and editing are the last bastions of mac pro dominance, imo.

I do music and audio in Hollywood, and yup, the Mac Pro will never die here. Which is funny, because this machine isn't exactly for us, either -- a Xeon is often less favorable than an i7 or i9 in our world.

Re: New Mac Pro

#595

Post by rewgs »

Redoubts wrote: post #420
_bxg1 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The branding distinction between "iMac Pro" and "Mac Pro" is just incredibly confusing.

I think the Macbook and Macbook Air is much worse, but I suppose it's unclear if both are currently active lines.

Agreed, and the solution is stupidly simple -- just swap the names! The whole thing is so un-Apple.

Re: New Mac Pro

#596

Post by TomVDB »

justinclift wrote: post #565
TomVDB wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know nothing about SAN, but I'm still surprised that it would be faster than a PCIe connected local SSD?

Decent network cards (40GbE, etc) with reasonable network NAS/SAN storage can return data in similar time frames to a local PCIe SSD. That's for storage physically located nearby though. eg same building, no more than 1 or two network hops (roughly). Higher end networking from the last decade or so has become really fast . :)

40GbE is indeed crazy fast. Didn’t realize that you can have PCIe cards that do this for less than $500.

Re: New Mac Pro

#597

Post by unixhero »

timc3 wrote: post #350
rhinoceraptor wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you spec something with similar workstation grade hardware, you'll be in the same ballpark. Gaming PC hardware isn't comparable.

Have a look here https://zworkstations.com/products/z840/ I tried coming up with something similar to the base spec MacPro but got larger storage, more cores and an Nvidia card with a decent saving.

Plus, those machines are frigging awesome.

Re: New Mac Pro

#598

Post by banachtarski »

pcwalton wrote: post #344
snazz wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d argue this is good for users, because vendor-supplied drivers always seem to have crappy updater software running at all times and send pop-ups at all hours on Windows. Vendors really need to better support open-source drivers for user experience purposes, but they don’t because they want more control over their market.

It's not good for users when vendor drivers work and Apple's drivers don't. I know OpenGL is deprecated, but a lot of apps still use it because it's cross platform, and Apple has the worst GL drivers in the industry. Even Metal is missing many features from Vulkan [1]. [1]: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/blob/master/Docs/Mo...

Right, I'm not an expert on the Metal API but I noticed there didn't seem to be a way to submit split barriers to the command queues.

I don't know much more about Metal beyond that though.

Re: New Mac Pro

#599

Post by bscphil »

your-nanny wrote: post #557
bscphil wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if only for the fact that I get an OS with working copy/paste in all applications That's such an oddly specific reason to require MacOS. Can you say more? I can't say I've ever had a problem with copy/paste in Linux, in any application. If this issue were serious enough to me to consider doubling my computer's price tag, I'd at least first look at Hackintoshing, which tends to be pretty solid these days when you can…

I suspect the issue is that in Linux the copy paste comnands are specific to each application, which can be annoying when copy pasting between multiple alplications., without a lot of configuring.

Hmm, that sounds like a possibility, though as a practical matter every UI application I can remember using on Linux uses Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V, and terminal applications use Ctrl-Shift-C / Ctrl-Shift-V - because Ctrl is for sending signals to applications (like Ctrl-C). That's universal enough that I don't see any issue. (Actually I prefer it to the way Apple separates Cmd and Ctrl, which I find infuriating because of the awkward finger positioning it requires.)

Re: New Mac Pro

#600

Post by copperx »

spamizbad wrote: post #464
liquidify wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ECC does not add latency and MIDI isn’t even sensitive to additional clock cycles in buffered memory (we are talking Nanoseconds here)

Audioland is a magic place where even different brands of hard drives can "affect the sound quality."

I'm not even a bit surprised by these outlandish claims of ECC RAM latency affecting MIDI timing.

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