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Apple's New Mac Pro Begins Showing Up in Benchmarks

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Re: Apple's New Mac Pro Begins Showing Up in Benchmarks

#21

Post by ricardobeat »

sliverstorm wrote: post #18
tracker1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be too sure of that.. plenty of pros want upgradable systems... Most of the mac pro users I know tend to keep them 4-5 years or more, with an upgrade cycle every 12-24 months (faster cpu, more ram, ssd, etc) in the same box. The new form factor really limits that, and would probably be better served with a consumer grade CPU etc.. this is much closer to a mid-range desktop a lot of people have been asking for,…

this is much closer to a mid-range desktop a lot of people have been asking for, except it's going to cost an arm and a leg. Kind of like Apple is pulling something like this: Mid-range desktop you say? Hmm... Yes, I've got just the thing- How about a mid-range desktop with the price of a top-end desktop?

I don't see how a machine that has almost 1GB/s disk transfer speeds, 60GB/s memory bandwidth and 7 teraflops GPU power (almost double the top of the line geforce) is "mid-range" unless you're from the future.

Re: Apple's New Mac Pro Begins Showing Up in Benchmarks

#22

Post by lostlogin »

dmishe wrote: post #7
tbrock wrote: post #3

I'm just excited the older models will be getting less expensive soon so I can afford one.

Pretty sure that macbook pros are cheaper and faster that that already.

Smoking graphics performance on the MacBook Pro too.

Re: Apple's New Mac Pro Begins Showing Up in Benchmarks

#23

Post by alanthonyc »

sjtgraham wrote: post #17

Registered Apple developers should watch WWDC 2013 session 109 to get a taste of what the new Mac Pro is capable of.

What's the title? (The index[1] is currently hard to search by session number.)

[1]:https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/videos/

Re: Apple's New Mac Pro Begins Showing Up in Benchmarks

#24

Post by lostlogin »

jviddy wrote: post #16

As someone who's never owned a mac pro can someone give an indication of how often "power" users are upgrading their CPU. When I was a windows desktop user (up until about 8 years ago) I found that everytime i wanted upgrade the internals the CPU socket had changed along with the Mobo chipset necessitating a upgrade of not just CPU, but Mobo and memory. I can understand swapping out gfx cards fairly regularly but are…

I could be wrong as I've been out of the powerful-beige-box world for quite a few years. However when I was in it, the upgrade and replace thing was always with consumer grade CPUs and was like this for everyone I knew. The xenon isn't really targeting the same market. Rock solid stability and sustained performance wasn't something the gaming crowd I was in was after. Massive over-clocks, super hot chips (that died hot deaths) and a GPU clocked to the threshold of showing artefacts. The frame rate must stay high at all costs. This is nothing like what the Xeon targets. Just a thought, and again, I may be wrong.

Re: Apple's New Mac Pro Begins Showing Up in Benchmarks

#25

Post by mahyarm »

ricardobeat wrote: post #21
sliverstorm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is much closer to a mid-range desktop a lot of people have been asking for, except it's going to cost an arm and a leg. Kind of like Apple is pulling something like this: Mid-range desktop you say? Hmm... Yes, I've got just the thing- How about a mid-range desktop with the price of a top-end desktop?

I don't see how a machine that has almost 1GB/s disk transfer speeds, 60GB/s memory bandwidth and 7 teraflops GPU power (almost double the top of the line geforce) is "mid-range" unless you're from the future.

If you do something that is fairly CPU bound, such as large project C++ compiles for iOS software, it matters, a lot.

GPUs are not going to make those compiles any faster, and apple has abandoned distcc. The more CPU cores the better.

I'm seriously disappointed that they are not offering a 2 or even 3 socket version of the new mac pro. They're all, fuck you iOS developers, the only people who are practically stuck on our platform.

Re: Apple's New Mac Pro Begins Showing Up in Benchmarks

#26

Post by dasmoth »

ricardobeat wrote: post #21
sliverstorm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is much closer to a mid-range desktop a lot of people have been asking for, except it's going to cost an arm and a leg. Kind of like Apple is pulling something like this: Mid-range desktop you say? Hmm... Yes, I've got just the thing- How about a mid-range desktop with the price of a top-end desktop?

I don't see how a machine that has almost 1GB/s disk transfer speeds, 60GB/s memory bandwidth and 7 teraflops GPU power (almost double the top of the line geforce) is "mid-range" unless you're from the future.

I don't think performance numbers have been a good way to distinguish between mid-range and high-end for a while now. Especially for users who are looking for a single machine that covers a range of uses including games.

ECC memory is a high-end feature. As is the specific choice of GPUs. Arguably, the fast PCIe SSD counts, too, although I suspect that won't last -- everyone benefits from I/O bandwidth, and there's no particular reason, other than market segmentation, for PCIe SSDs to be more expensive.

Re: Apple's New Mac Pro Begins Showing Up in Benchmarks

#27

Post by mehrdada »

pslam wrote: post #5
wtallis wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely nobody uses that scheme for referring to memory speeds. Everybody uses the effective clock speed, and there's really nothing technically wrong about labeling that with MHz, since Hz isn't restricted to referring to only sinusoidal clock signals. If you're going to be pedantic, then you ought to make clear when you're referring to the memory clock speed or the I/O clock speed or the transfer rate. For anyon…

Hz refers to the number of cycles per second. Everybody uses this as the effective transfer clock, but hey, everybody is wrong. It's correct to use MT/sec instead, but you're right that it's being pedantic and it's unlikely to confuse anyone who really did care. On the other hand, it does stink of specmanship to quote the doubled frequency. I would have hoped a Pro spec machine would rise above that kind of thing.

Hz is just 1/sec. If you want to be technically correct, don't add any implicit meaning to it. Frequency is the rate of something happening per unit of time. That "something" can be "number of data transfers" or "number of clock cycles" or "number of times a ball hits the floor". The frequency of all of those can be measured in Hz. You should be clear about what quantity you're measuring, but the unit is Hertz nevertheless.

(And MT/sec is really "some unit-less quantity/sec", so it can be accurately called MHz.)

Re: Apple's New Mac Pro Begins Showing Up in Benchmarks

#28

Post by xuki »

alanthonyc wrote: post #23
sjtgraham wrote: post #17

Registered Apple developers should watch WWDC 2013 session 109 to get a taste of what the new Mac Pro is capable of.

What's the title? (The index[1] is currently hard to search by session number.) [1]: https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/videos/

It's a lunch talk: Painting the future

Re: Apple's New Mac Pro Begins Showing Up in Benchmarks

#29

Post by alanthonyc »

xuki wrote: post #28
alanthonyc wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the title? (The index[1] is currently hard to search by session number.) [1]: https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/videos/

It's a lunch talk: Painting the future

Ah, cool. Thank you. I actually saw that at the event. Excellent demo.

Re: Apple's New Mac Pro Begins Showing Up in Benchmarks

#30

Post by ricardobeat »

dasmoth wrote: post #26
ricardobeat wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how a machine that has almost 1GB/s disk transfer speeds, 60GB/s memory bandwidth and 7 teraflops GPU power (almost double the top of the line geforce) is "mid-range" unless you're from the future.

I don't think performance numbers have been a good way to distinguish between mid-range and high-end for a while now. Especially for users who are looking for a single machine that covers a range of uses including games . ECC memory is a high-end feature. As is the specific choice of GPUs. Arguably, the fast PCIe SSD counts, too, although I suspect that won't last -- everyone benefits from I/O bandwidth, and there's…

So what makes the Mac Pro a mid-range computer? Bear in mind that it's not a consumer product, it's squarely aimed at audio/video/graphics professionals, even though it'll blow any current gaming rig out of the water with those specs.
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