341–350 of 734 posts
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In...datacenters? That's a strange usecase!
https://www.macstadium.com/datacenters If you scroll to the bottom of this page, there is an image carousel with an example.
I can understand it if it's just for fun, but otherwise it seems like a really strange idea.
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OK but to what end? Looking at the Mac Studio... what would an M1-based, drop-in Mac Pro replacement offer on top? That sounds like a tail-end product. It's not like 2022 Apple is the kind of business that announces deep partnerships with graphics card makers. It feels more to me like we're going to see either something that is half-rack-half-Mac, or something with major developments in neural engine hardware, or som…
CGI, CAD, rendering, driving huge screens, running live sporting events, scientific workloads, massive simultaneous automated app testing, etc. Just because you can’t imagine why someone would need that much compute doesn’t mean the use cases don’t exist.
Not at all.
What I said if you read the rest of my comments is that I find it difficult to believe there is a specifically single-desktop-machine use case for that kind of power over and above the Mac Studio.
The reason I mention this is that high end (TV and cinema) CGI just is not the domain of single machines anymore; it's the domain of render farms. The people who do that kind of work for TV and cinema now expect to run farms of commodity hardware that can be swapped out and replaced. And that technology is available to everyone in a way that can be constructed more pragmatically.
Scientific workloads, similarly: most of that market is not going to spend a bucketload on a single Mac when they can spread their risk with cluster computing.
App testing: again, an application for clustering, and low cost hardware spreads risk.
So my point, again: given the existence of the iMac Pro line, and the M1 Ultra Mac Studio (with its evident astonishing GPU performance), given that I imagine most Mac Pro users never put an expansion card in their machines (which is the grand theme of Apple -- people don't upgrade or expand, usually), and given that cluster hardware is commonly in use and well-supported, is the niche for single mega-expensive desktops really big enough?
I don't think it is -- you think it is. But I think you can disagree with me without imagining me stupid, as I disagree with you without doing the same.
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> And they've been saying that for, what, nearly a decade now? The latest generation is from 2019?
I guess. I mean, it's a forgettable stopgap machine (I forgot it ;-) It's not really what people wanted, is it? It's just something they had to put on sale to shut people up. A conventional, Intel-era thing. They've been saying "something really great is coming", all that. That Mac Pro was not that. Does Apple still care about the market that wants to plug in internal GPU cards? Does that make much sense even in the…
Tons of people in pro industries bought it and love it. Pre-COVID it was sold out for almost a year. Every professional music producer I know bought one, and I’m sure they’ll get the M1 Mac Pro.
Funny story. Max Martin partnered with Creative to make a new audio rack to enable the audio for the first Back Street Boys album. That got miniaturized to audio cards for gaming which further shrunk down to a DAC and that lead to the iPod which lead to the iPhone which lead to Apple Silicon which brought us here today. Music producers are huge fucking tech nerds and literally move technology forward. Apple frequently works with producers when developing their highest end products that eventually trickle down to consumer grade.
More and more I see the M1 chips and I wish Mac worked seriously well for gaming. Would love too see something like Proton but for Mac (given up hopes for native support). I hate that I have my gaming PC and then my Mac for everything else. I have to wonder though what their plan is for the M2. Are they laying the groundwork for when the M2 comes out all of these variants will be ready at the same time? Or a gradual…
Game companies and their parent companies tend to install some shady spyware on your machine in the name of "anti-cheat software" (ie, installed in the ring0/kernel space). I am kind of relieved that I have 2 separate machines.
Although if they develop virtualized environments to sandbox games from the host machine (similar to QEMU) then I suppose that might work.
Guess I'll watch to mkhb video to see what the product is
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> Apple wants a large cut from doesn't sound like a good idea It sounds like a good idea if it leads to higher profits. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all charge game developers similar fees.
Maybe short term. Helping a company grow that is know to lock down their products and force developers to pay them for access might not be the best long term plan overall.
I would like to highlight just how much Apple is focusing on their customers and use cases right now. It seems that they're targeting products to what their professional customers actually want. And in this case, it's a 3.7" little thing that can process 18 streams of 8k video (fully specced out). That's kinda crazy, and they're doing it at a price point that's competitive compared to all of the companies out there.…
This is very interesting because PC workstations have been stagnating for quite long! It'd be cool to be able to bring medium-sized tasks back from clouds to personal computers. The CPU performance is impressive but I wonder how well it'd fare against say an AMD ThreadRipper or a dual socket system with an equivalent price? It'd be also interesting to see a deep learning benchmark against Nvidia. Branding and RAM lim…
How have they stagnated?
I guess I’d better not hold my breath about support there, given Apples historical stance on support third party APIs/frameworks?
I would like to highlight just how much Apple is focusing on their customers and use cases right now. It seems that they're targeting products to what their professional customers actually want. And in this case, it's a 3.7" little thing that can process 18 streams of 8k video (fully specced out). That's kinda crazy, and they're doing it at a price point that's competitive compared to all of the companies out there.…