New Mac Pro Tech Specs • Hacker News Board

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#321

Post by unicornfinder » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 10:14 AM UTC

yalok wrote: post #208

mark_l_watson wrote: post #151

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.

Exactly, and to me it’s a deal breaker. Anyone privy on what hold Apple back on supporting Nvidia? The only info I read was due to some earlier bad blood, but I wonder why hurt your users just because of some old scuffles...

I've heard it's down to patent disputes. Wouldn't surprise me.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#322

Post by tolien » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 10:15 AM UTC

hyperactive wrote: post #286

Not impressive. New MacPro hosts only PCIe gen3 when all PC motherboards are on gen4 already. New MacPro is old and it did not come out yet.

> all PC motherboards

Gonna need a citation on the Xeon-W board with PCIe 4.0 support. Apple aren’t using Ryzen and definitely not Ryzen 3. If they were they’d be waiting for Threadripper - even current TR doesn’t support PCIe 4.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#323

Post by remus » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 10:19 AM UTC

cgb223 wrote: post #235

Is this saying that I can have 1.5 TERABYTES of RAM? That’s wild What’s the professional use case for that?

Running in-memory databases is a common use case for chewing through loads of RAM.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#324

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 10:20 AM UTC

lostlogin wrote: post #129

pier25 wrote: post #111

Earlier 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.

[deleted]

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#325

Post by iagooar » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 10:21 AM UTC

Corrado wrote: post #103

I think they should include Apple Care for their professional equipment. This won't put any any more money in Apple's pocket but I could see it being another differentiator and a good bit of PR, especially to all of those price arguments. Plus, it's only $300 and I'm sure Apple could suffer that "loss" on a $6,000 - $30,000 purchase.

It goes both ways. If you can afford to spend this (crazy) amount of money, you can pay for Apple Care as well.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#326

Post by rangibaby » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 10:25 AM UTC

_ph_ wrote: post #260

initself wrote: post #40

Looks like a company finally listened.

Very little. Yes, they finally made a Mac Pro that is extensible and up to date. Basically everything the 2008 Mac Pro already was. On the downside, they doubled its price so for the non-Hollywood customer, there still isn't a desktop machine. Even 3k is much for a deskop machine, but I had set some money aside to get a Mac Pro, if it had started around its predecessor price. There was even a time in the past, when a…

> on the downside, they doubled its price so for the non-Hollywood customer, there still isn't a desktop machine. Even 3k is much for a deskop machine

I think there were more benefits to an ordinary user to getting a tower in the past then there are now.

In the past even a hobby or prosumer photographer would see a big benefit from getting a Mac Pro. Nowadays an iMac or Macbook Pro with very normal specs can edit large RAW files without breaking a sweat.

The extra HDD bays on a Mac Pro were great because you didn't have to mess around with USB2 (cheap but slow) or FW (fast but expensive). Now you have USB3 (cheap and fast) or TB (very fast but expensive).

I guess that leaves upgradeable graphics cards, at this point it is easier to just get a PC or try a hackintosh build if you want a beast GPU for the latest games.

> There was even a time in the past, when a Mac Pro would start below 2k and consequently was very popular.

2006:

Mac Pro base model: $2,199 ($2,800 in 2019 dollars)

30" Cinema Display: $3,299 ($4,198)

Soundsticks (Of course!) $169.99

2019:

iMac 27" 5K base model: $1,799

iMac Pro base model: $4,999

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#327

Post by snvzz » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 10:29 AM UTC

m0zg wrote: post #168

snvzz wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think he's referring to Zen2-based Threadripper.

Not just Threadrippers, but better EPYCs as well. More PCIe lanes, more cores, cheaper (hence higher profit margin), and the only thing you really lose is AVX512 which hardly any software besides Intel MKL makes use of anyway.

Keep in mind EPYC are not workstation CPUs. They can be used like that, but they are not made for that. Different tradeoffs.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#328

Post by techstrategist » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 10:29 AM UTC

What’s the best explanation as to why Apple is not supporting Nvidia GPUs?

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#329

Post by robin_reala » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 10:39 AM UTC

tlobes wrote: post #180

Pmop wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hackintosh allows you to have OS X on better hardware but these days it's really unsafe, due to the possibility of Apple going full ARM in the near future, dropping all the support for x86.

Given that the latest Mac still uses an Intel CPU, I’d say the range is [5,7] years at minimum, based on Apple’s current vintage/obsolete policy, before x86 support is dropped from OSX.

It was only 4 years between the Intel announcement and Snow Leopard (Intel-only), and you couldn’t even buy an Intel Mac for nearly the first year.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#330

Post by Narishma » Fri, Sep 27, 2019, 10:45 AM UTC

_bxg1 wrote: post #115

kbumsik wrote: post #110

Earlier 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.

A browser nowadays is pretty much a whole OS.