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The Mac Pro Review

anandtech.com

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Re: The Mac Pro Review

#151

Post by gress »

corresation wrote: post #70
gfodor wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a "forward looking" architecture (to steal the line from the iPhone 5S pitch.) They're betting big on GPU compute. I wouldn't say it is for "niche markets", though perhaps today it is only useful to smaller markets, it's that this computer is going to over time get faster and faster relative to the 2013 iMac and MBPs as more apps take advantage of the GPUs. It's kind of a unique phenomenon and makes the benchmar…

This has kind of been the claim for years now, though, with a burgeoning market of compute apps just around the corner. Only it isn't so easy, and compute applications only apply for a specific set of problems, not only because of the GPU geared restrictions and architecture of these designs, but because of the islands of memory forcing endless memory copies back and forth. Unified memory should go a long way to maki…

The person paying $6000 for this unit is a delighted Final Cut Pro user who has read the reviews and understands how the machine is tailored for them.

For more conventional, but still pro workloads, most of us will be much better off with a $3000-4500 model.

It's going to be interesting to see how pro apps end up tailored for this architecture.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#152

Post by corresation »

pohl wrote: post #146
corresation wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but Samsung has been convicted for paying shills Apple gives special treatment to outlets and bloggers who treat them "well" (and punish those who don't). It's all the same inducement, and it's all just as grubby.

So knocking Gizmodo — who chose to profit from the receipt of an ill-gotten prototype — off the list of invitees is somehow just as bad as buying journalists outright?

If you want to present a boorish caricature and then snarkily knock it down, I guess congratulations? Gizmodo and the stolen phone debacle has absolutely nothing to do with this.

Having early access to products and personnel for Apple reviews is a huge coup for media outlets: They need Apple far more than Apple needs them (if Anandtech didn't get sent a day 0 $7000 review unit, AnandTech would have gone without a lot of views and a front-page of HN and many other sites. Apple would have lost nothing -- the target market for the Pro would have just read the reviews elsewhere, and are at no risk of buying a competing workstation).

Apple hand-selects who gets these early access units, and thus who gets the attention of an early review. There is a strong incentive for those reviews to gently understate negatives and to overstate positives, remaining on the list for the next go around. In this case a workstation that prioritizes the irrelevant (box size is never even a discussion point when talking about high power workstation, but suddenly it's the primary design point?), and has some astounding faults that most other companies would be eviscerated for: The dongle approach of expansion; Power draw that at times exceeds the power supply rating; Chipsets going to 100C+ because the "thermal prioritized" design was actually "being novel small" designed; Performance that even in CPU+GPU scenarios only marginally improves on the performance of a box from four years ago?

I would posit that had this box carried a Lenova or HP tag on it, the reviews would be extremely negative, if not mocking.

This is not unique to Apple: Exactly the same thing has happened over the years with various industry or namespace leaders, reviews veering towards the positive to assure that you get to the front of the list for the next wave, in a perpetual cycle. There was a time when getting early access to Microsoft inspired a whole industry of fawning and soft-gloving.

Bizarre that gress is so desperately trying to present the notion that I'm somehow defending Samsung and their pathetic attempts at astroturfing support (though such is the entire business model of the PR industry, which every business engages in, so pretending it's so unique is delightfully naive). Their tactics seem very trollish so I'll simply ignore their nonsense.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#153

Post by [deleted] »

gress wrote: post #150
corresation wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but Samsung has been convicted for paying shills Apple gives special treatment to outlets and bloggers who treat them "well" (and punish those who don't). It's all the same inducement, and it's all just as grubby.

It's hard to believe that you are equating the fact that Apple chooses who to invite to press conferences (what else do you expect them to do?), with Samsung paying for shills to fake reviews and forum postings.

[deleted]

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#154

Post by gress »

roc wrote: post #106
rmrfrmrf wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple develops a library to help facilitate GPU usage, similar to how they developed Grand Central Dispatch to help developers utilize multicore CPUs more effectively.

Doesn't GCD do OpenCL? Or do you mean something more seamless and auto-magical?

No - GCD is only about distributing workloads across CPU cores, and doesn't involve the GPU.

OpenCL uses a special programming model so you can't use it for general application code. It's good for doing repetitive operations on large arrays - e.g. Image or signal processing, or machine learning. OpenCL code will run in the CPU if there is no GPU or if the overhead of shipping the data to the GPU is too high.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#155

Post by gress »

corresation wrote: post #152
pohl wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So knocking Gizmodo — who chose to profit from the receipt of an ill-gotten prototype — off the list of invitees is somehow just as bad as buying journalists outright?

If you want to present a boorish caricature and then snarkily knock it down, I guess congratulations? Gizmodo and the stolen phone debacle has absolutely nothing to do with this. Having early access to products and personnel for Apple reviews is a huge coup for media outlets: They need Apple far more than Apple needs them (if Anandtech didn't get sent a day 0 $7000 review unit, AnandTech would have gone without a lot…

If you want to attack his "caricature" you should be able to point out some way in which it is inaccurate.

Samsung has been convicted of paying shills to make false forum postings and reviews.

You are accusing apple of choosing who to give review units and press invites to based on who they prefer.

Every company does this. What else do you expect them to do? Provide a review unit to every blogger who asks for one? If you claim their behavior is underhand, you should be able to explain an alternative.

Comparing giving out review units to paying for shills is plainly absurd.

As to your comments about the review itself, they certainly reveal things that you would like to complain about, but none of these things were whitewashed or concealed by AnandTech, in fact they were fully exposed in statements, charts, and numbers.

Your chief complaint seems to be that you would have liked the review to have a vitriolic tone.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#156

Post by leoc »

Watabou wrote: post #56
bane wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the customer is spending north of $3k on a computer, why not toss in the warranty for free?

When you see the price of the dual GPUs, the ECC RAM, PCIe SSD, and the small design, you will see why they didn't toss in the warranty for free. You do get 1 year free warranty though and that's something. It's only $249 for the extra two years which is worth it in my opinion.

ECC isn't that much more expensive, while AFAIK the price premium for pro-model GPUs is almost pure price-gouging, and Apple's surely not paying those inflated prices for the GPUs.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#157

Post by yapcguy »

gress wrote: post #116
corresation wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those kinds of complaints can be seen anywhere there is a positive review of Apple products. Those kinds of complaints can be seen anywhere there is a positive review of any product. If someone likes Google Glass, four hundred comments by people calling you a glasshole and telling you that you must like Google stealing all your data. Positive reviews of the Samsung Galaxy Note got huge criticism among the Apple spher…

Quite so for most of these cases, but Samsung has been convicted for paying shills, so let's not use this as an excuse to whitewash them.

And Apple has been convicted of e-book price fixing as well as misleading customers into buying extended warranties which were not necessary...

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#158

Post by likeclockwork »

mturmon wrote: post #128
altero wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thing my desktop is nicer than this surounded by dozen external HDDs.

Perish the thought! The solution they have in mind for expansion is more like: http://www.promise.com/news_room/news.aspx?m=23&region=en-gl... E.g., http://store.apple.com/us/product/HE153VC/A/promise-pegasus2... I have had the predecessor device, a 6bay Thunderbolt RAID 6, for two years and it has been quiet and reliable.

Oh those are pretty neat. Imagine if your motherboard was in there with your drives? That would be so convenient.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#159

Post by leephillips »

tanzam75 wrote: post #149
leephillips wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AnandTech is often the only place that measures and reports anything about the screens of computers, tablets, and phones aside from how many pixels they have (color space, color accuracy, etc.). For this alone they are gold.

> AnandTech is often the only place that measures and reports anything about the screens of computers, tablets, and phones aside from how many pixels they have (color space, color accuracy, etc.). For this alone they are gold. Not the only place. I have found the German site NotebookCheck.net to be more thorough than Anandtech when it comes to laptop reviews. Not only do they measure color space and color accuracy, b…

This sounds like an excellent site, thanks for the tip.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#160

Post by gress »

yapcguy wrote: post #157
gress wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite so for most of these cases, but Samsung has been convicted for paying shills, so let's not use this as an excuse to whitewash them.

And Apple has been convicted of e-book price fixing as well as misleading customers into buying extended warranties which were not necessary...

So this is really about bashing apple.
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