New Mac Pro • Hacker News Board

Re: New Mac Pro

#681

Post by justinclift » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 2:38 PM UTC

dethac wrote: post #578

floatboth wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like Xeon tax. The new Mac Pro has a ton more PCIe lanes and DDR4 channels. It's a completely different league, it can't be directly compared to mainstream platforms that only have dual-channel and 16-24 lanes. EPYC would've been a better value, but it's still not cheap. Big computers with lots of memory and I/O capacity will always look ridiculously expensive next to mainstream desktop.

Threadripper exists for PCIe + DDR4 (less than the reported 2TiB because of no RDIMM support, but theoretically could hit 2 TiB if people start producing 256GB UDIMMs. But... 64 lanes of PCIe 3.0. 32 cores. 64 threads with SMT. 80MB of cache (think of all the locality!). 256GB of RAM support (if you're using more, you're probably doing scientific compute and you're probably better off on Linux anyway, I'd assume). EC…

It will be ironically funny when people start posting benchmarks of macOS on their (Hackintosh) Threadripper based workstations. ;)

Re: New Mac Pro

#682

Post by justinclift » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 2:55 PM UTC

socialist_coder wrote: post #543

1over137 wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

macOS 10.15 drops support for the MacPro5,1 (and for no other Macs).

dang. that is a bummer. i picked up a MacPro5,1 from a govdeals auction and it is a pretty nice computer. it even runs dark mode in OSX Mojave. guess it's days are numbered =( i do have to say though, the single core performance of my MacPro5,1 is pretty abysmal. even with similar clock speeds, my 2015 mac mini is 50% faster in single core performance.

Which cpu model do you have in the MacPro5,1?

Re: New Mac Pro

#683

Post by qixxy » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 3:10 PM UTC

nihonde wrote: post #483

chaostheory wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get iCloud on Windows now https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204301 It's not a great solution, but I'm not paying over $6000 for a Mac Pro.

Pro machines for A/V production are routinely $7-10k and have been for as long as I can recall, right back to the 90s. You’re probably just not in the market. These are for commercial buyers who make lots more money from these machines than they spend. Also, six months ago everyone was bellyaching about how Apple has no serious pro devices and was abandoning the desktop. Now it’s too expensive, and my eyes can’t roll…

Arguably, the whole idea of a modular machine is that the base price can be lower, and then you can spend the money on the things that are valuable to you.

I've owned the last two Mac Pros. I won't be able to afford this one. But fair enough: in this case it may be that they can't raise the ceiling without raising the floor.

Re: New Mac Pro

#684

Post by macNchz » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 3:26 PM UTC

vondur wrote: post #555

macNchz wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found the invoice a while ago for the professional desktop publishing setup that my parents bought in 1993...a Quadra 800 mac, upgraded video memory, a flatbed scanner, b&w laser printer, a 20" monitor, a 14400 modem and some kind of fancy magneto optical drive or something for FedExing large files. Total price was $13k at the time.

A 20” monitor in 1993? That had to be super expensive!

Yeah it was definitely something geared towards graphics professionals...just found an old magazine ad for it, looks like it had a Trinitron tube and ran for $2700 at the time. It weighed an absolute ton. I certainly enjoyed the screen real estate for playing Sim City when my parents weren't working!

Also in googling for it I found it had been featured in Jurassic Park: https://productplacementblog.com/movies/supermatch-20-t-moni...

Re: New Mac Pro

#685

Post by _bxg1 » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 3:46 PM UTC

rewgs wrote: post #595

Redoubts wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I partly understood it with the "first"-gen New MacBook; it was experimental, and they wanted to give it this kind of minimalist-mystique of flipping the naming convention where this forward-looking device was now simply "The MacBook". But why does it even still exist now that the other ones have adopted most of its features?

Re: New Mac Pro

#686

Post by mseidl » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 4:07 PM UTC

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.

The new x570 motherboards will have them soon the pci 4.0 soon

Re: New Mac Pro

#687

Post by swordsmith » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 4:07 PM UTC

The lattice gives me the creeps. Much better to just get a Lenovo C730 cube. Similar mechanical design, better specs, and 1/5 of the price.

Re: New Mac Pro

#688

Post by sixothree » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 4:11 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #652

sixothree wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess the point is for $6000 it should have another drive.

Re: New Mac Pro

#689

Post by rhinoceraptor » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 4:54 PM UTC

vbezhenar wrote: post #386

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.

Prices from newegg SuperMicro 5039A-i 730 Xeon W-2145 1175 4x8GB ECC RAM $74 x 4 = 296 AMD Radeon RX 480 415 SAMSUNG 970 PRO 512GB 160 Total: 2776 So Apple charges more than x2. And if one would use Ryzen and consumer GPU, price would be massively reduced.

The CPUs they're using are Cascade Lake, not Skylake. So I'd add at least about $500 there. You'll also need to add ~$300 for the giant 1400 watt PSU, and at least $500 for the custom cooling solution and case. Most PC cases are really not built that well.

Re: New Mac Pro

#690

Post by _bxg1 » Tue, Jun 04, 2019, 4:59 PM UTC

hu3 wrote: post #647

_bxg1 wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pixar.

Not according to electricslpnsld: > I worked at two movie studios (Pixar, Weta Digital) and they were both almost 100% Linux with a smattering of Windows machines here and there. Apple stuff was mainly iPads for story boarding and that kind of stuff. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20088170

The point isn't that they use Apple, it's that they would be willing to pay 5 figures for a workstation:

https://schuttejoe.github.io/post/disneypostmortem/

> This image was rendered at 2048x858 with 256spp and took 3.5 hours to render. I allowed it access to 28Gb of RAM but had to estimate how much embree would use for BVH data so it occasionally would exceed that number enough that the OS would start paging.