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New Mac Pro

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Re: New Mac Pro

#711
post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You're right. Brainfade.

So, even with protocol overhead from all the stack layers chewing up maybe an order of magnitude, that'd still leave 10GBps.

So .. I guess it's still possible, if impractical, to outperform a good PCIe SSD with the latest network interface.

Re: New Mac Pro

#712
post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

cough 1GB/s can by done by 10GbE. Maybe a slight typo there? Need to add a few zeros? :)

You're right, doh. See above.

Re: New Mac Pro

#713

Lots of talk about 8k video/etc, but you have to buy a dell/etc to get a 8k monitor. Really?

Do you edit 12 megapixel photos on a 12 megapixel monitor?

Yes I do edit 12M images on a ~15M monitor. Its also the weak point in the system, as your average midrange+ DSLR is 25-50M, and its pretty easy to create a printout where the effective resolution of the page/poster is vastly higher.

But that is not really the point, the apple presentation goes on about how the machine can play 3 8k video streams simultaneously, but you have to buy a 3rd party monitor/projector to even be able to view a single stream.

Re: New Mac Pro

#714

Lots of talk about 8k video/etc, but you have to buy a dell/etc to get a 8k monitor. Really?

Nobody edits AT 8k. Or watches anything at 8k for that matter.

"Nobody" is obviously the market that RED is targeting with their 8K cameras (shooting raw/lossless for that matter) or various projector manufactures. Sure not everyone in the production pipeline is going to be watching manipulating the edit list in 8k, but you better be sure there are a few people looking at the dailies at full 8k res before the OCD/dictatorial director shows up.

Apple obviously thinks there is a market here too, or they wouldn't be talking about how the machine can show three simultaneous 8k streams.

Re: New Mac Pro

#715
post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the sticking points on Windows that prevent me from considering it for more than gaming are 1) advertising to me within the OS, 2) frequent, aggressive restarts for updates, even when actively using the computer and 3) the higher quality productivity app ecosystem on the Mac. The first two signal a big lack of respect for their users, imo. I know you can tweak it, but they make it unnecessarily hard, and I thi…

I’ve been using windows 10 as a gaming machine all this time and I haven’t noticed advertising. The restarts were annoying for my windows box acting as my video security server, but for personal machines you can easily schedule updates and restarts to when you’re asleep so I’m not seeing that as a real issue either. You are right about the higher quality software on the Mac. I will miss that but I’m not sure how long…

What you save by not upgrading Apple’s egregiously priced flash memory, you can put towards a much larger NAS :-) With 10GbE becoming available, you can get pretty great performance from 6-8 spinning disks, with gobs of space.

Re: New Mac Pro

#716
post #679
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the answer is to expand externally. The solution I settled on was a Mac Mini to serve as my interface and run desktop applications, and a big hefty expandable Threadripper box running Linux that I SSH into to do all heavy lifting (and that I can put away in a closet). A NAS holds most files. I've been really happy with the Mac Mini for this role, and the Threadripper box provides more power than I could reaso…

I could never really use a remote system as well as a local one - the various kinds of file syncing or mounting (samba, SSHfs, expandrive) have their problems or only work 99% of the time. Maybe when remote VSCode improves I'll try that.

Yeah, I mostly use emacs, which is pretty terminal friendly, or ssh-piped Jupyter, which I love and hate. I used to try to make those remote mounting solutions work.

One thing you can do is run a Linux VM locally with VMWare’s shared folder stuff (annoying to get working but solid once working). Develop using your local IDE, test locally on your VM, and then check in/check out on the heavy weight machine once you have something ready to run something big. Depends on what you’re doing, though. For machine learning, Jupyter is niceish.

Re: New Mac Pro

#717
post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But as a developer, I wanted a desktop class CPU and just a separate monitor (tired of hearing my laptop fans all the time, and it not being expandable), so I can upgrade them independently. What's wrong with the Mac Mini? Sure, there's no way to upgrade the CPU, but considering the resale value of Apple hardware replacing the whole machine every few years is actually a worthwhile upgrade strategy. Of course the sa…

I wish macOS wasn't as important, but honestly it's the most important. I don't want to switch back to Windows or Linux at this point since I'm too invested in the Apple ecosystem (and it's certainly the most privacy conscious option right now).

Same here. And that's exactly why the choice between upgradeability and macOS is still an easy one, at least for me. Sure, I'd love to build an affordable, modular computer, particularly since AMD's renaissance, but not if it means sacrificing macOS.

Re: New Mac Pro

#719
post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You're right. Brainfade. So, even with protocol overhead from all the stack layers chewing up maybe an order of magnitude, that'd still leave 10GBps. So .. I guess it's still possible, if impractical, to outperform a good PCIe SSD with the latest network interface.

... ~10GB/s can be done by a single 100Gb/s adapter.

More 0's needed? :)

Re: New Mac Pro

#720
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dad is a graphic designer who got his start doing desktop publishing on a Macintosh II using QuarkXPress. He's faithfully stuck with the Mac since the '80s and currently has a trash can Mac Pro, with which he is mostly happy. He's never billed anywhere near $500/hour as most of his work is for small print periodicals ( Currently, his only outstanding need is for better render times on Final Cut Pro (rendering vide…

It obviously doesn't fit everyone's needs, but the plain old iMac is quite reasonably priced for what it is.

If only it had better GPU options
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