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New Mac Pro

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Re: New Mac Pro

#651
I don't see it mentioned anywhere, but to me it's obvious they intentionally went for an actual "cheese grater" look, as a play on the old "cheese grater" Mac legacy.

(They made it functional of course, with the holes used for cooling etc, but the 100% cheese grater look was intended this time).

Re: New Mac Pro

#652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multimedia professionals do not store their data in internal/primary drives. They generally have RAID boxes with either Ethernet or thunderbolt connection. Most video editing/rendering is done on big storage arrays anyway. So 256GB storage is more than enough for most serious multimedia professionals.

I'm not entirely sure my Lightroom cache would fit on this drive...

Lightroom allows to move the cache on another drive...

Besides, perhaps you're the user that needs the multi-TB version. Others, e.g. video professionals wont have huge tens-of-TB source files in their main system drive.

Re: New Mac Pro

#653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multimedia professionals do not store their data in internal/primary drives. They generally have RAID boxes with either Ethernet or thunderbolt connection. Most video editing/rendering is done on big storage arrays anyway. So 256GB storage is more than enough for most serious multimedia professionals.

I'm not entirely sure my Lightroom cache would fit on this drive...

So I'm a web dev but in a previous role we bought a 2 man company that made medical renders. I ended up making them a mini-SAS Raid 5 made out of SSDs. This is before M.2 started taking off. That thing did 1.1 Gigabyte/sec write on a little table top with terabytes of storage. It was over 20x more than they were used to.

Re: New Mac Pro

#654
post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> enterprise dlink switches "enterprise" DLink switches aren't really a thing yet, regardless of what their marketing team wants to brand them as. :( Cisco, HPE, etc have "enterprise" switches. DLink might be in a decade. > it is hard to saturate a 10gbe connection with a single NAS, unless it is packed with SSDs No, it's just a matter of having enough spindles behind it. As a rough guide, with a (say) average spinni…

I would defer to people with more enterprise hardware experience than me for serious NAS set ups, but my experience with various generations of 12 disks synology nas is that you loose a lot of performance to disk vibrations / inefficiencies of the raid implementation / sync between drives / tcp, etc. So I don't think it scales linearly. With a synology DS3615 and 12 HGST Helium drives in RAID5, I barely get over 1GB/…

Yeah, no idea with Synology. When I was originally looking at NAS solutions, they (and QNAP) just seemed expensive for not much product.

Went with FreeNAS instead, as I was already very familiar with building systems, it's based on FreeBSD (OSS), and it gives better tuning on the higher end.

Doesn't have as pretty a GUI though. ;)

Re: New Mac Pro

#655

The thing the Mac Pro does is magically make the price of every other computer look that much better. $6000 for a computer? Johnson, that's insane. What about $4999 for an iMac Pro? It comes with a display. Great, order it! What about $2499 for a Mac Mini with 32GB and 1TB SSD? Great, order it! What about $2499 for a Macbook Pro? Great, order it!

The 1987 Mac II released at $5,498, $12,125 adjusted for inflation. Granted, that included a monitor. IMO these things are designed for companies like Pixar, Disney, and aerospace, the "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" world.

If aerospace get computers like this, I'd love to hear where I need to be applying to. We're running on Windows 7 machines with i5-2400 CPUs, about 4GB of RAM, and integrated graphics. All our CAD software is run on a grid system, where we access e3, Altium and Catia via a remote server. The engineers are all on hardware about 7 years old.

Re: New Mac Pro

#656
I wonder if the people who complain about the price here have ever worked with computers. For example, I am a software developer. It costs about 5000€/month or so to hire me after I graduate. Every workplace I have been in has given me a 3500€ MBP to write code with, no questions asked. Why? I need it and it's cheap compared to my wage anyway. Even a 10000€ computer wouldn't be very expensive considering it's estimated lifespan is 5-12 years.

For companies the cost of computers next to the cost of people is insignificant, and that is the target customer group for this machine.

Re: New Mac Pro

#657
post #463
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is great that they have a real high-end product. But in the past, at least the starting price of the Mac Pro was in enthusiast-range. There should be a product between the Mini and the Pro which supports a desktop graphics card.

On that, we agree. I write code, and I used to own a 2008 "cheese-grater" Mac Pro. That one was affordable enough for developers, came with a low-end video card (which was fine!), supported lots of RAM, and provided a rock-stable machine for development. The new one, not so much, it seems to be mostly good for specialized applications (like video editing). But on the other hand, I don't think I'd want to buy this Mac…

I am stuck in the same situation. I am using my Mac for development and photo processing. Currently I am using a late 2015 5k iMac. The screen is beautiful, I wouldn't mind a somewhat larger screen though. From that sense, the new 6k screen has the perfect size. The big problems I have with my current iMac are:

- disk space, I need more disk space and have no good solution for that

- I would like to have a real graphics card, StarCraft even struggles in 1920x1080 resolution.

Even the iMac Pro doesn't really solve either of that, at already a too high price. I would have been willing to spend like 6k on a basic Mac Pro with a display, which wouldn't sound impossible considering that in older times the Mac Pro started well below 3k, but the new one is in an entirely different league. I am not sure why Apple thinks that "Pro" users are a synonym for video makers. There are photographers, there are software developers and many more.

Re: New Mac Pro

#658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

Nah, a motherboard with enough M.2 connectors could easily exist. Or, U.2 or OCuLink. We have already seen 1P EPYC servers with six OCULink connectors...

Re: New Mac Pro

#659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new Mac Pro, like Mac Pros always have been, is for music/TV studios and design agencies that bill their time starting at $500/hour. It's really not for individuals, and that's ok. Apple made a computer "just for the pros", like HN begs for in every butterfly keyboard thread. I'm thrilled about it even though I know I'll never touch one. It's for people who don't know what a CPU core is but know how to produce a…

That was basically my takeaway as well. Writing/compiling code just isn't "pro" anymore — doesn't require pro hardware. The new Mac Pro is meant for professional studios . And to think music studios need so much horsepower when "Sgt. Pepper's" was recorded on 4 tracks…

> And to think music studios need so much horsepower when "Sgt. Pepper's" was recorded on 4 tracks…

Estimates are > 700 hours for the album; 700/13 = more than 50 hours per track. A lot of that time was bouncing down 4 tracks to smaller numbers for future takes.

Re: New Mac Pro

#660
post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AMD ecosystem will always remain behind if application developers continue to choose single-vendor proprietary frameworks rather than standard APIs.

This is an odd complaint considering the Metal requirement on MacOS.

I'm not happy about Metal either. There is at least MoltenVK…
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