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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

#41

Post by coldtea »

frozenport wrote: post #32
elithrar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Geekbench does not measure GPU performance at all AFAIK. Nor does it measure I/O. I'm interested to see how that PCIe SSD performs.

PCIe SSDs are a terrible disappointment.I was able to achive the same performance as ' http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227... with 3 Samsung RAID0 drives.

For one, I doubt you got the numbers Apple states for the Pro with 3 HDs in Raid0.

Maybe you beat some other PCIe SSD product, but that's not saying much. Capabilities differ between SSDs, even if they are all using PCIe.

But even if you did, how does what you write make them "disappointing"?

Seeing that you need 3 (THREE) drives in RAID0 to beat ONE SSD.

And that of course that won't help you in random access times.

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

#42

Post by nileshk »

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…

Apple does not support CPU upgrades in the Mac Pros. You need non-standard tools to do it, it's not as easy as in a typical PC, and occasionally have to hack a firmware update depending on what Mac Pro model and what new CPU you want to use. The firmware hack is because Apple does not update firmware in older models to support newer CPUs, even though the hardware is otherwise capable of it.

I think people who upgrade their CPU in Mac Pros are a minority of Mac Pro users. I'm probably not a typical Mac Pro user (a "mid-range" tower would've been fine for me), but I bought a 2007 Mac Pro with the least expensive CPU option, then in 2012 upgraded the CPUs in it to extend it's life. The Xeon CPUs I used were ones Apple never offered, but they happen to work in the machine I had.

Also: I upgraded the graphics card several years ago, to an official Apple supported graphics (ATI 5770), but my Mac Pro model isn't officially supported by Apple (but it works fine). I also did a hack to get the current OS X version, Mountain Lion, running on my machine (it isn't supported by Apple). My Mac Pro borders on being a Hackintosh at this point.

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

#43

Post by stephencanon »

diroussel wrote: post #38
stephencanon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geekbench doesn’t use the GPU; Geekbench also doesn’t use AVX, so half of the floating-point performance of recent cores is left on the table. Actually, looking at disassembly of Geekbench, they barely even use SSE vectors, so it’s really nearly 3/4 of the floating-point performance that goes unmeasured by the benchmark. One could perhaps argue in the defense of the benchmark that many consumer applications don’t tak…

I guess a LINPAK Benchmark would be more suitable? http://www.top500.org/project/linpack/

LINPACK has its own issues as a benchmark; it only exercises extremely predictable floating-point multiply add loops. If a well-tuned implementation of the operation is used (as you see in the scientific computing community), this is representative of the peak arithmetic throughput that the hardware is capable of (so it is a good proxy for raw compute power), but it is still not representative of the way most real workloads (even professional or scientific computing) drive hardware. Even the scientific computing community is slowly starting to move away from LINPACK (see, for instance, http://www.sandia.gov/~maherou/docs/HPCG-Benchmark.pdf).

LINPACK as you typically see reported for consumer and mobile devices is far worse; the implementations used there are often naive scalar implementations that do not do any form of cache tiling. This means that for small problem sizes they are actually measuring how clever the compiler is, and for large problem sizes they are actually measuring memory throughput (both of which are interesting, but they are not what a “CPU benchmark” should be reporting).

The set of operations covered by Geekbench is actually fairly interesting (with some exceptions). If they simply used the best available libraries instead of their own naive implementations it would almost be a respectable benchmark.

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

#44

Post by Shivetya »

colmvp wrote: post #9
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,…

Yeah, as much as I love the aesthetics, I'm predicting poor sales unless the price is comparable to other desktops. It's precisely the reason I avoided the Cube back in 2000/2001 and opted for the Tower.

Comparable to whose desktops? The server edition of the Mac Mini is a thousand dollars and its absolutely nothing special in hardware. I haven't seen this much disappointment amongst people who actually use the hardware when it comes to an Apple product ever. Well, we have the cheer leaders for the new hardware but its pretty obvious they don't use the current hardware. You get these types in any conversation.

No internal expansion, no built in CD/DVD drives, limited memory, no apparent means of upgrading the video, and if one of the components breaks its off to the store. Yet if predictions are right this will be even more expensive than current solutions. Worse, Thunderbolt enclosures are not cheap, if can even find them.

Unless those price predictions are way off base I and a few others I know have even started serious talk of going hackintosh.

Apple had every opportunity to produce a slimmer tower that still gave options for expansion. Instead its a replay of the "Cube" days.

Its not even good looking, the Cube at least could pass as a conversation piece

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

#45

Post by diroussel »

buro9 wrote: post #37
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 am a workstation user. I've used both Mac Pro and HP Z800 workstations, and currently use a HP Z800 that is probably 3 or 4 years old, but also have used a Mac Pro as recently as 2 years ago. I've never upgraded a CPU in a workstation. The CPUs I buy are chosen for performance at a sane (relative) price. I'm currently running a couple of Xeon X5560 CPUs, I think they cost £1,600 each at the time. I also buy as much…

It's a shame Maverics only supports 128GB RAM.

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

#46

Post by buro9 »

diroussel wrote: post #45
buro9 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a workstation user. I've used both Mac Pro and HP Z800 workstations, and currently use a HP Z800 that is probably 3 or 4 years old, but also have used a Mac Pro as recently as 2 years ago. I've never upgraded a CPU in a workstation. The CPUs I buy are chosen for performance at a sane (relative) price. I'm currently running a couple of Xeon X5560 CPUs, I think they cost £1,600 each at the time. I also buy as much…

It's a shame Maverics only supports 128GB RAM.

4 slots, 128GB max = 4 x 32GB modules @ ~£1k per module (price based on average observed price for 32GB ECC RAM).

£4k for 128GB RAM, compared to 12 * 16GB modules @ £200 = £2.4k for 192GB RAM.

Hmm. Yeah, I'll probably be sticking with the PC route and running Linux still.

Even with these purely speculative prices, the Mac Pro design forces fewer denser modules and is really going to hit the pocket hard.

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

#47

Post by newman314 »

nileshk wrote: post #42
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…

Apple does not support CPU upgrades in the Mac Pros. You need non-standard tools to do it, it's not as easy as in a typical PC, and occasionally have to hack a firmware update depending on what Mac Pro model and what new CPU you want to use. The firmware hack is because Apple does not update firmware in older models to support newer CPUs, even though the hardware is otherwise capable of it. I think people who upgrade…

What did you change to get Mountain Lion running?

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

#48

Post by frozenport »

stephencanon wrote: post #43
diroussel wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess a LINPAK Benchmark would be more suitable? http://www.top500.org/project/linpack/

LINPACK has its own issues as a benchmark; it only exercises extremely predictable floating-point multiply add loops. If a well-tuned implementation of the operation is used (as you see in the scientific computing community), this is representative of the peak arithmetic throughput that the hardware is capable of (so it is a good proxy for raw compute power), but it is still not representative of the way most real wo…

Also LINPACK doesn't do IO, which a frequently sets the max speed.

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

#49

Post by tracker1 »

Shivetya wrote: post #44
colmvp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, as much as I love the aesthetics, I'm predicting poor sales unless the price is comparable to other desktops. It's precisely the reason I avoided the Cube back in 2000/2001 and opted for the Tower.

Comparable to whose desktops? The server edition of the Mac Mini is a thousand dollars and its absolutely nothing special in hardware. I haven't seen this much disappointment amongst people who actually use the hardware when it comes to an Apple product ever. Well, we have the cheer leaders for the new hardware but its pretty obvious they don't use the current hardware. You get these types in any conversation. No int…

I think it's pretty good looking myself... just that it would be better with desktop class parts, and sold as a mid-range option (between the mini and pro). As it stands, as a new pro, I think it's a failure. I'm with you on the hackintosh route.

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

#50

Post by tracker1 »

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'm saying that the form factor would be better suited as a mid-range product with more consumer class hardware inside. As it stands, I don't think it will do very well.
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