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New Mac Pro

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Re: New Mac Pro

#601

Post by gigatexal »

holy_city wrote: post #241
gigatexal wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t there something to be said about a local powerful workstation though or has offloading things to the cloud gotten that good?

There is, but it's changing. Disclaimer, I'm on the audio side of things and my knowledge of video post is much more limited. Dedicated processors are bigger for us than cloud solutions. Audio post/recording shops use Protools HDX systems [1] which are rackmount units holding a handful of DSPs connected to the PC with proprietary PCIe cards. The industry is moving towards ASPs as a whole, through products like Waves…

Fascinating. Thanks for your reply.

Re: New Mac Pro

#602

Post by terandle »

askafriend wrote: post #579
ghobs91 wrote: post #299

$1000 for a monitor stand is the pinnacle of arrogance from a brand.

How is it arrogance? Have you ever bought a nice pice of furniture? This stand is a super low volume, custom design. It's solid milled aluminum and likely very hefty since it needs to handle a 32" monitor (which itself is probably pretty hefty). Not to mention the intricate hinge design that they say is rock solid (not an easy feat to achieve). This whole system is built to compete against $25k-50k reference monitors…

That link does not help your case $300 for a fashionable lamp you can use for life and is a major fixture of a living space vs a $1,000 monitor stand? Congrats Apple you made restoration hardware look like ikea in terms of pricing.

Re: New Mac Pro

#603

Post by shaklee3 »

chx wrote: post #500
ianhowson wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of cheap NVMe SSDs that can push 3.5Gbytes/sec (Samsung 970, Adata XPG). Even with dual 10Gbe NICs, you can't match that, nor the low access times of local storage. But I do agree that SAN storage is the norm here.

We are past that now, new PCIe 4.0 SSDs just have been showcased along with the new AMD chips and they can do 5GBytes/s read and a bit above 4GB/s write (AMD is rumored to have invested in the R&D of the controller). You'd need 40 GbE to match one -- and EPYC Rome, also scheduled for this fall, will have 160 lanes allowing for dozens of them. You could very easily reach 100 GByte/s read which no network will match.

Pcie 3 was not the bottleneck for SSD. They typically are only 4 pcie lanes, when they could go up to 16 for 4x the bandwidth.

Re: New Mac Pro

#606

Post by imagetic »

cfarm wrote: post #516
imagetic wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In media studio environments, it' makes some sense...but it's mostly an iMac on a cart these days.

Do you also wheel around your monitor?

I honestly don't see a use for a computer on wheels though, a cart is more than ideal and holds everything with it.

Re: New Mac Pro

#607

Post by cm2187 »

jlgaddis wrote: post #462
cm2187 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Not sure what good two 10gbe ports do. 1 x 10 GbE for your regular Ethernet/IP traffic and 1 x 10 GbE for your storage traffic. You do run your network storage over a physically separate network, right?

I don't know. Intuitively I would have thought that a NAS that updates itself automatically, with SMB1 disabled, is less dangerous that a NAS that is in theory insulated from the internet but not patched for security vulnerabilities (since not connected) and connected to machines that are on the internet and could be infected.

Re: New Mac Pro

#608

Post by hbosch »

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…

> 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 ;) )

I seriously wonder about those that haven't left Apple yet, that are willing to shell out $6k for a new Mac Pro. There was a small cohort of studios and creative professionals who invested into the old Mac Pro Trashcan and got severely burned by hardware that was overpriced, obsolete, and non-upgradable. Almost everyone I know who bought one of those ended up re-investing into a W10 PC with 1080s to TITANs or now 2080s.

You can't do anything meaningful in 3D with the specs on this PC, so this machine is instantly DOA for the entire top-end of the (read: willing to spend $$$) creative field... that's motion graphics, animation, modeling, game design, VR, vis fx and simulation, etc. because since Apple took so long to ship this they've all experienced the wonders of a ~$3k-$4k computer that was bought 2 years ago and runs circles around even the highest spec Mac Pro.

The next tier down, your UX designers, visual designers, sound designers, print designers, type designers, etc. have no need for this that a Macbook Pro doesn't serve.

Mac still has Final Cut Pro, Logic, and Sketch. Those apps are what tether creatives to the OS, not much else. But I think many, many people are seeing that PCs are becoming the better route for the creative industry, generally.

Re: New Mac Pro

#609

Post by datalus »

chaostheory wrote: post #396
at-fates-hands wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny this just came out when it did. I was just looking at getting an older Mac Pro 5,1 and upgrading all the components in it like a few friends have done. For under $2K you can have a machine that competes with newer machines that cost twice that much. If you're a professional creative type, these machines are the real deal: The Most Powerful Mac Is 6 Years Old and Not Sold By Apple - https://www.vice.com/en_…

The big issue with older mac pros is for how long is it able to install the latest versions of MacOS?

There are ways around the official support drop as well, I run macOS mojave fine with a Mac Pro 3,1. These original cheese grater macs are truly still the best desktop tower they'll ever make at this point. It'd be fun to trick one out with a 3rd gen threadripper, which is probably faster than the 28-core rumored $35,000 mac pro.

Here's the patcher: http://dosdude1.com/mojave/

There are caveats, but I've found it to work well. Of course it's totally unsupported so here be dragons, etc.

Re: New Mac Pro

#610

Post by justinclift »

TomVDB wrote: post #596
justinclift wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For a home lab or dev/test gear, where getting stuff off Ebay is an ok thing to do, older Mellanox cards can commonly be found for under $100. Sometimes much cheaper. depending on what the seller is doing. :)

Looking quickly at the US Ebay just now, here are some older single port ConnectX-2 cards:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Mellanox-MHQH19B-XTR-PCI-E-Single-P...

US $23.00 each, free shipping. Note - I don't know the seller at all, this is just from a quick look on Ebay.

There's a tonne of stuff on there. ConnectX-2 is no longer supported by Mellanox, though the cards themselves are generally pretty bullet proof.

Drivers for Linux and FreeBSD come with the OS. :)

Drivers for Windows are a bit more complicated. Mellanox has an archive section with the ConnectX-2 drivers, which work for most people.

Cabling directly between two cards - instead of going via a switch - is pretty common for people just trying out the tech. It lets them plug one card into (say) a FreeNAS server, with the other card in their desktop or workstation. Removes the ~120MB/s limit of 1GbE, assuming any kind of reasonable disks in the connected NAS. :)

If this kind of thing is of interest, probably the best place on the whole internet (not joking) for this stuff is Serve The Homes' Networking forum:

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?forums/networking....

Plenty of advice and stuff to read there, and a good place to ask questions from people that have a clue. :)

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