A great machine to be sure for high end content creation but Apple is not chasing the deep learning dev market because of the lack of CUDA. That market is better served by Linux boxes with appropriate GPUs for TensorFlow, PyTorch, etc. support.
New Mac Pro Tech Specs
151–160 of 497 posts
Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always argued that for the prices that Apple charges Apple Care should be included in all its products. The first Apple computers I bought lasted for years and I never thought Apple Care was necessary, but since the fiasco with the 2011 MBP and the butterfly keyboards I'm not buying another of its products without Apple Care. Yes, Apple ended up doing the right thing in both cases but it took years after the pro…
It presumably is in some areas. In New Zealand we have The Consumer Guarantees Act. Things are expected to have a reasonable life span. What this means is not specified but is generally accepted to be relative to the price paid (eg if it’s expensive, it should last). It’s a fantastic piece of legislation. I’ve had a 2.5 year old iPhone covered for example.
I believe that the parent meant that Apple charges enough (in the US), so it should have the extended guarantee included there. In NZ, things cost extra due to that law, correct? The difference: is everybody is paying for that extra protection, there's no choice.
Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs
#153Slightly off-topic, but who here uses a HEDT (high-end desktop) or workstation computer for software development? Does it make a significant difference in comparison with a standard business laptop?
Yes. I work on a Linux distro, and the amount of time my 1st gen 32 core Threadripper has saved me is truly mind blowing. It made it possible to do changes I wouldn't have dreamed of.
As an example, I worked a bunch on our PostgreSQL infrastructure, but we support 5 years of versions. So you have to CI/integrate your changes and test them across all 5 versions, every time you test. My machine could do this on the order of 2-3 minutes -- recompiling everything from scratch every time, and running all integration tests on all versions. There's no CI system or cost-effective cloud hardware that would have given me turnaround like that. In the end I was doing hundreds of builds over the course of just a few days.
In contrast, at $WORK we have a C codebase that takes < 1 minute to compile on my 4 core work laptop. YMMV.
Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe spin up an instance on GCE or EC2 and remote into it? If you live anywhere near a data center it should be under 50ms delay. Your time is certainly worth more than whatever the cost of the instance.
> If you live anywhere near a data center it should be under 50ms delay. Hm, I guess I don't live anywhere near a data center. 1M+ North American city, but lowest ping to any AWS/GCE region is ~130ms.
Most likely that latency comes from the link between your place and your ISP.
Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't have an HEDT but an outdated Haswell i5 laptop (not an Ultra Low Voltage model at least, so it's quite fast). Last year I spotted a bug in Firefox and I though it was time to put a line in the contribution section in my resume. The contribution experience was a nightmare because a full build of Firefox took 3 hrs and running the entire testing framework took 4 hrs, though it turned out that I needed to run on…
Woof. I wasn't aware compilation times got that long for people who aren't building a whole OS.
Try building Chromium from source. Anandtech uses it as a multithreaded benchmark. The top CPUS can average just under an hour compile time.
Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs
#156This thing is pulling almost 12 amps by itself. Add a couple monitors and hopefully you have recent vintage wiring in your office...
That'll be a peak amperage; it won't draw 12 amps by itself. Even if it did, most displays pull less than 1A, so theoretically you have room for 3 more displays on your standard 15A North American residential circuit. Any office should be on 20A circuits, anyways.
That would work great if you had nothing else in your office...
A coffee pot pulls 5-8 amps. Laser printer 3-5 amps while printing. Stereo, lamps, etc., it all adds up pretty fast.
Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs
#157And all of that will be pretty laughable compared to the stuff AMD is releasing later this year.
The AMD Vega II appears to be a higher-end Radeon VII except with 32GB of HBM2 (instead of 16GB like the Radeon VII). So not really. AMD VegaII Duo (the dual-Vega II) is going to be far more powerful than anything AMD releases in the near future. 64GB of HBM2, 28+ TFlops single precision, etc. etc. CPU-wise, probably. Xeon W 28-core is still quite good from Intel however, with AVX 512 support and such.
I would think he's referring to Zen2-based Threadripper.
Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe spin up an instance on GCE or EC2 and remote into it? If you live anywhere near a data center it should be under 50ms delay. Your time is certainly worth more than whatever the cost of the instance.
> If you live anywhere near a data center it should be under 50ms delay. Hm, I guess I don't live anywhere near a data center. 1M+ North American city, but lowest ping to any AWS/GCE region is ~130ms.
My RTT from the midwestern US to AWS/Azure/GCP in Germany is less than that. I think your ISP has more blame than your distance to the nearest zone in NA.
Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs
#159Slightly off-topic, but who here uses a HEDT (high-end desktop) or workstation computer for software development? Does it make a significant difference in comparison with a standard business laptop?
The standard business laptop msxes out with 16GB, which is good enough if you don’t run all the secondary stuff like databases locally. But 32GB would be great.
Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Same with removing the headphone jack conversation–no one wants to talk about the trade-offs in making a phone waterproof whether they trade a headphone jack for a waterproof phone. This is not true at all. There are multiple Android phones that have waterproof and they have headphone jacks.
What did they sacrifice for that? Nothing is free and those plugs are large.
They replaced the headphone jack with a barometric vent which other phone manufacturers just put in a different location. Apple didn't have to get rid of the port. They decided to get rid of the port because they knew that their users would buy the phone anyway and then have more of a reason to buy AirPods. There is plenty of space in that corner though. Some guy wanted to see if he could add the headphone jack back and was pretty successful for a hand crafted solution.