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Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

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Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#241

Post by reitzensteinm »

jacques_chester wrote: post #211
reitzensteinm wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD makes 16 core Opterons (codename Interlagos), however they're slower than the latest 8 core Xeons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opteron#Models

Slower per-core, certainly. But for some workloads more cores is worth it.

I should have been more specific. They're so much slower per thread that they're still slower overall even in heavily multithreaded tasks.

In this Anandtech review, the 16 core Opteron trades blows with a six core Xeon (clocked at 2.3ghz vs 2.66ghz):

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5058/amds-opteron-interlagos-6...

The 8 core DP Xeons weren't out yet when that review took place, but the Sandy Bridge chip was a big improvement over Westmere, in addition to the extra cores.

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#242

Post by daimyoyo »

It occurs to me that the single biggest complaint about the current update is the lack of processing power in the current MacPro. Why not rig together a box the size of an external drive that contains a dozen core Xeon processor and 64GB of DDR3 RAM? Then you could attatch it to whatever Mac product you were using via Thunderbolt and have all the horsepower you needed. Has any company done this?

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#243

Post by brunorsini »

There might be some hope, after all, at least according to David Pogue: "Many Apple observers also wonder if Apple thinks that desktop computers are dead, since not a word was said about the iMac and Mac Pro. An executive did assure me, however, that new models and new designs are under way, probably for release in 2013."

2013, really?

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/11/an-explanation-of-...

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#245

Post by cheatercheater »

mortenjorck wrote: post #25

Let's say I'm running a post shop and I want to render from After Effects as fast as possible. In normal use, just how much faster will one of these dated Xeons render my comps than the quad-core i7 in a top-of-the-line iMac?

Why can't you offload to render nodes?

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#246

Post by cheatercheater »

nikatwork wrote: post #170
joshAg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he meant, why wouldn't a windows/unix/linux machine with similar hardware work just as well?

Most creative pro apps are only available on Windows or OSX. I don't hate Windows7 but I find OSX superior (integration, stability, decent shell etc). If you want OSX, you generally need a Mac. I'd switch to Linux if the apps were there, but it's not even close. And I'm an edge case, I suspect most creative types would rather not mess with xorg.conf.

That's why I wish, over and over, for a Wine equivalent that runs OSX apps.

I have ran some windows audio applications on Ubuntu 10.04 and the timing accuracy (tested by specialist software) was several orders of magnitude higher. In addition, I can achieve higher workloads. This is all with software that wasn't even compiled for my OS.

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#247

Post by jarek »

therandomguy wrote: post #231
robomartin wrote: post #98

This illustrates the issue I highlighted in another thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4097141 The fact that Apple keeps hardware and, increasingly, software, so tightly controlled leads to a situation like that of this "new" Mac Pro. If the Apple hardware ecosystem were open like that of Windows you'd have major companies all over the world evolving the platform in wonderful ways. Performance would go up an…

You are forgetting the primary question here: What is in it for Apple to cater to users who couldn't give a crap about a nice and polished enclosure? They are happy to play in the premium segment.

They don't play in the premium segment for high-end desktops anymore. That's their right but it does bum out users who would like a high-end OS X desktop.

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#248

Post by AncientPC »

cheatercheater wrote: post #239
AncientPC wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. There are monetary and performance gains for using Linux on servers and embedded products. As a result, OEMs have a financial incentive for making sure those products run Linux well. No such incentive exists for desktops. Apple incorporates the cost of OS X into selling hardware. Windows' licenses are effectively free for OEM manufacturers. Dell is the only major OEM I know of that offers a Linux laptop and I'd g…

I believe some countries require vendors to supply the computer with an OS installed; in this case not needing to include a half-assed version of Windows Home Underwhelm Experience can help them cut away those 10% of $300 low-end models. There's a reason many netbooks come with linux and it's not user-friendliness. Additionally, more and more governments pass laws that require their institutions to use linux or open…

OEMs get paid for pre-installing bloatware onto machines which can add up to $40+ per machine. Offering Linux costs them money (in addition to R&D, support, training, marketing, etc).

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#249

Post by chipotle_coyote »

ktizo wrote: post #189
alaskamiller wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony of this post is so hilarious to me, this is Apple coming full circle from its clone wars days. Man, those were some shitty experiences. Apple is an hardware company. They make money off the nuts and bolts pieced together with premium markup, software is but icing on top. They practically give away the results of their development costs on OSX. You're encountering the cognitive dissonance as experienced in t…

They practically give away the results of their development costs on OSX. Most of the development was already done for them in the development of Open-BSD.

I really wish people would get over this meme.

(1) You're thinking of FreeBSD. Not OpenBSD. A lot of the command line utilities Unix nerds would use in the terminal are ported from FreeBSD.

(2) The kernel, Darwin, is NOT based on FreeBSD. Darwin is a direct descendant of NextStep, based on the Mach microkernel.

(3) And pretty much all of the GUI and indeed the whole Cocoa API are also from Apple/Next. Not FreeBSD. Essentially, everything that isn't what Unix nerds interact with? That's pretty much all Apple. (Except for Apache if they turn on personal web serving, but that's not FreeBSD. And Webkit started as a fork of KHTML, but, y'know, not FreeBSD again.)

(4) For that matter, even a fair amount of the Unix nerd stuff is specific to OS X, like launchd, or has tweaks to support OS X-specific nerdosity.

So, vain hope, could we _please_ knock this sort of nonsense off? For both better and worse, OS X is very much its own animal, and whether or not you like it, it's ridiculous to claim that Apple doesn't put a hell of a lot of development work into it.

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#250

Post by fredsted »

tedunangst wrote: post #135
Osiris wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I learned something today. Oh, and the Dell is less than half the price of the Mac Pro.

A quad core Dell is half the price of a 12-core Mac. Once you put the same CPU, RAM, and hard drive in the Dell, the difference is about $200. It's cheaper, but not that much cheaper. The bulk of a Mac Pro's cost is really just passing along Intel's price for Xeon processors.

Of course, the Mac Pro uses 2 year old hardware while the Dell is using the latest Xeons.
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