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

631–640 of 731 posts

Re: New Mac Pro

#631

Post by 9935c101ab17a66 »

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…

Just wanted to say this is a super insightful reply! Thanks for taking the time to share.

Re: New Mac Pro

#632

Post by tigershark »

justinclift wrote: post #613
chx wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You could very easily reach 100 GByte/s read which no network will match. High end networking gear already has higher throughput: http://www.mellanox.com/page/ethernet_cards_overview https://www.servethehome.com/mellanox-connectx-6-brings-200g... A SAN/NAS using the same PCIe 4.0 SSD's you mention could probably fill the pipes too. ... and it would probably need a bunch of network stack tuning. ;)

The 200 gb/s network adapter that you linked are 4 times slower than 100GB/s. The parent comment wrote explicitly 100 Gbyte/s.

Re: New Mac Pro

#633

Post by tigershark »

__d wrote: post #554
chx wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Twin ConnectX6 adaptors, gives you 800Gbps, or ~1GB/s, at an absolute theoretical max. It's good to see that local storage has finally returned to the reasonable state of being faster than network storage. SATA / SAS was a long, slow period ...

If it’s 800 gbps then it’s 100GB/s, not 1...

Re: New Mac Pro

#634

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

asveikau wrote: post #592
hinkley wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Use industrial cards.

Re: New Mac Pro

#635

Post by copperx »

hinkley wrote: post #372
asaph wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a computer made for the engineers who’ve already “made it,” who are making that $500k a year and are looking for a Porsche over a Corvette. What about an EV such as a Tesla?

I was tempted to make a joke about the Porsche or Corvette being luxury vehicles but I've noticed we spend way too much time nitpicking after fine details. It deflects from the thesis to do so and I'm not a fan. I can understand GP's point just fine without getting into quibbles over that. Instead I took umbrage with the idea that a $3000 laptop which is our primary tool is a luxury item. I think it's one of many sig…

Am I really a cheapskate if I can do my job just as well on a $1k machine as on a $6k one? The new Mac Pro is overkill for many development workflows.

Re: New Mac Pro

#636

Post by _Codemonkeyism »

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.

And how many people here who claim to use a SAN for sure use a NAS is funny.

From maintaining large image storage FC SANs with Apple xServe and IBM DS for some years this is no fun to administrate for peak performance and I would assume most smaller shops have NAS instead of SANs (no arguing larger shops have SANs as we did driving ten photo studios).

Re: New Mac Pro

#637

Post by carlob »

reaperducer wrote: post #295
slantyyz wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It seems evident that Apple views the "pro" market as movie studios, large corporations, and media entities that need serious computing power. If Apple is going to price out people who had purchased Mac Pros in the past (the lowest point of entry for the new model is -double- the price of the lowest late 2013 model), I don't really have a problem with that group complaining about the price. For that particular gro…

the lowest point of entry for the new model is -double- the price of the lowest late 2013 model 2x the price for what multiple of performance? 5x? 10x? 100x?

According to their own marketing the new 18-core model is between 2.2 and 3.7 times faster than the the 2013 12-core model. They don't compare the entry level ones, but I highly doubt it is even two times faster.

Re: New Mac Pro

#638

Post by philjohn »

p1necone wrote: post #227
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 don't see how "the target market will still pay for it" is justification for insane markups on commodity hardware. I understand paying a premium for the R&D that would have gone into the case and cooling design, but to then go and put such dated hardware in it and still start at $6000.

what's dated about an unreleased Xeon? Or the just released Vega II Pro on 7nm?

Re: New Mac Pro

#639

Post by justinclift »

tigershark wrote: post #632
justinclift wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could very easily reach 100 GByte/s read which no network will match. High end networking gear already has higher throughput: http://www.mellanox.com/page/ethernet_cards_overview https://www.servethehome.com/mellanox-connectx-6-brings-200g... A SAN/NAS using the same PCIe 4.0 SSD's you mention could probably fill the pipes too. ... and it would probably need a bunch of network stack tuning. ;)

The 200 gb/s network adapter that you linked are 4 times slower than 100GB/s. The parent comment wrote explicitly 100 Gbyte/s.

Oops. Didn't spot that, sorry. :)

That being said, after re-reading the comment they're talking about adding multiple PCIe cards to a box to achieve 100GB/s of local total throughput.

That would be achievable over a network by adding multiple PCIe 200Gb/s network cards too. :)

Re: New Mac Pro

#640

Post by michelb »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #309
vbezhenar wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it's win-win situation for Apple. They help Nvidia with drivers, more people buy Mac Pro to use Nvidia GPU. I have no idea why Apple don't want to work with Nvidia. They are not selling desktop GPU after all. May be they have some hidden agreements with AMD.

The unsubstantiated scuttlebutt is that Apple is pissed at NVidia because when MBP's used Nvidia GPUs there were quality issues

So I guess Apple must be feeling what many Apple customers have been feeling for some time? :)
Post reply on HN