Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New Mac Pro

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 731 posts

Re: New Mac Pro

#621

Post by chaostheory »

liquidify wrote: post #447
shoo_pl wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's silly to be honest. I am a developer myself and I can tell you Mac Pro or iMac Pro is a waste of money in every way imaginable. Look up barefeats benchmarks. Unless you have very specialised needs (like video editing) there is visible penalty when you increase the number of your cores. For every day usage 6-8 cores is what you should be aiming at, and preferably with highest clock speed possible. The more core…

I disagree. Having more cores is becoming more and more relevant to software engineers these days. The power wall is forcing application scaling to happen through core count, so a lot of the software development in the world is focused on that. Having a beefy multicore machine is becoming more and more relevant to devs.

I agree. Just wanted to point out that Ryzen provides it at a much better price point.

Re: New Mac Pro

#623

Post by ksec »

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.

It is $3000, but

>Quad-Core 2.6GHz Intel Xeon Broadwell E5-2623 v4 [4-cores / 8-threads]

We are well into Skylake era, a Broadwell is ancient comparatively speaking. The Mac Pro will be Cascade Lake, not state of the Art like EPYC with 7nm. But still a very large improvement.

>HP Z Turbo Drive Even if we choose a 256GB version of Z Turbo instead of SATA as you confined, the Turbo Drive will still be a lot slower.

>HP Thunderbolt 2 (20GB/s; one port) +$200 Yes, Thunderbolt Port are expensive. And these are only TB2, not even TB3, and still missing 3 Port.

>Intel X540-T2 | Dual-Port | RJ45 | PCIe 2.0 | 10GbE Network Adapter

Even this 2013 Dual Port 10Gbps Ethernet is a $250 upgrade.

>Wireless Mouse and Keyboard, and WiFi Added those .

So a not similar config with a very old Intel CPU cost $3475. I would imagine if you spec it exactly the same as Mac Pro, with TB3 and every hardware and ports, the HP would cost $4K+, with an ugly design. Quite a bit of saving but not as dramatic as some would imagine.

Re: New Mac Pro

#624

Post by Hikikomori »

buildbot wrote: post #488
cm2187 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't SFP+ not compatible with 1G (i.e. can only be used with a 10G network equipment)? If you are selling a machine that people will plug into either a 1gbe or 10gbe network, you'd rather have some interface that can downgrade.

You can use SFP in an SFP+ socket, but not the other way around. The downgrade to 1GB would work fine. Since this is still a desk focused machine vs. datacenter, I'd expect most offices to be wired to cat6 ethernet which can do 10GB if needed vs. SFP+ cables or SFP+ to Fiber.

Not always true, it needs explicit support for SFP as it's not backwards compatible.

Re: New Mac Pro

#625

Post by fock »

nice to see that Apple still can build a real (UNIX) workstation. just about the right combination of power, standard but exotic IO, price and design (though not my favourite)

Re: New Mac Pro

#627

Post by ksec »

I am wondering what the top config would cost,

Intel Cascade Lake 28 Core

1.5 TB DDR4 2933 ECC Memory

2 x 2TB SSD

Radeon VEGA II Duo x 2 128GB HMB2 Memory

Thunderbolt 3 x 4 Port

Two 10Gb Ethernet ports:

Apple Afterburner FPGA Card

My guess would be $40K+?

There also another small question ( or big for some ) , what happen to people with Trypophobia looking at the Mac Pro?

Re: New Mac Pro

#629

Post by machz »

duskwuff wrote: post #51
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…

The first step up from 256GB is 2x512GB, and there's configurations up to 2x2TB. My guess is that the 256GB configuration is meant for users that work primarily with data that's kept on network storage.

The 256GB model is an old Apple hack to show a lower starting price (which rarely anyone would buy at this time) and which quickly goes up as you upgrade the components.

Re: New Mac Pro

#630

Post by JBorrow »

noir_lord wrote: post #512
JBorrow wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No that price included a RTX2080 which is a pretty decent card and better than the base config in the new Mac Pro. Platform supports ECC all Ryzens do, though it’s on the board vendors to support it officially. Cache size no idea, will not that the new 3900X would obliterate the sky lake Xeon (12 cores vs 8 and comparable or better IPC) on in the Mac Pro base confit, it’s an 8 core older architecture against AMD’s ne…

My point was that ECC ram is twice as expensive. Cache is super expensive (your consumer chip will have significantly less), so are PCI lanes (again, consumer chips have significantly fewer of these), and also your Ryzen chip doesn't have AVX-512 support which is important for e.g. video work.
Post reply on HN