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New Mac Pro Tech Specs

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Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#451

Post by tracker1 »

jchw wrote: post #96
lliamander wrote: post #49

Slightly 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?

I just upgraded from a 2700X to a 3900X. Maybe it’s not quite HEDT but its closer, and my god, it’s literally mind blowing. I measured a 47% wall clock improvement on a test compilation. If you compile lots of C++ you are in for some serious surprises. Especially so if you are doing things that cross-cut hundreds of C++ packages at once, it basically enables things that aren’t possible on, say, a mid range laptop. Th…

Regarding webpack builds... absolutely NVME, when I went from SSD to NVME it's the Node/webpack build times that I really noticed the performance differences.

I would think the extra cpu would be more of an impact with Rust than even C++... I wouldn't know, running a 3600 as a place holder until the 3950X comes out. I couldn't handle the 4790K anymore, going from 32gb to 64gb and the couple extra cores made a huge difference for my docker/vm workflows. Can't wait for the 3950x. I'm sure the TR 3rd gen will be similarly impressive with the changes to IO.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#452

Post by tracker1 »

stephenr wrote: post #231
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I don't have an HEDT but an outdated Haswell i5 laptop (not an Ultra Low Voltage model at least, so it's quite fast).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…

3 HOURS? Does that say more about your workstation or the project? I've recently built php + most of the bundled extensions, in a VM (on a 2018 Mac mini) and it's only a couple of minutes at most to build.

A modern browser is a MUCH larger codebase.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#453

Post by tracker1 »

lliamander wrote: post #75
valbaca wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company provides a pretty standard laptop, but they rarely have more than 2 cores. In native app development, Android Studio and Xcode are severely bottlenecked by 2 cores. The difference between my laptop and my Mac Mini (6 cores) is astounding. The difference between a build taking 6x minutes and 1x minutes is more than just 1/6 because it goes from "Well, guess I'll check email/messenger/HN real quick." to taki…

Slow builds can definitely break concentration. I'm on a dual core as well, although most new business laptops come with 4 cores. My build times aren't as long, because I'm working with Java-based microservices, so each service takes a minute or so to build (with tests) but even that delay can break concentration. Turning off tests helps, but then you don't always have the immediate feedback of the test results (and…

I worked on a codebase a few years ago that took over 44 minutes to compile... a change you would think should take 10 minutes took 3 days. RSS was still a big thing at the time, and did a LOT of reading while waiting.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#454

Post by sudhirj »

_ph_ wrote: post #254
sudhirj wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends entirely on workflow. A lot of shops will have all of their stuff on a 10G NAS share, so you’re actually forbidden from copying to and from your computer because it’s just stupid and sometimes slower to do so.

Still, it isn't as if 1T of SSD is expensive. So if they set the entry price to 6k, 1T of SSD would be an appropriate minimum.

Yeah, that’s what they give on the iMac Pro as base, so it’s not like they’d never do it. But it’s clear they’re deliberately under configuring the base to force complete customisation, which is what I assume the kinds of people buying this will want.

I’d go so far as to say they should sell it without a default hard disk if they could - let the buyers make the choice. I’m guessing it’s defaulting to the smallest disk just for optics.

This is clearly a start with the skeleton and build it yourself kind of machine, which is as it should be. It just looks odd when the selector defaults to the lowest available option on every selection.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#455

Post by stephenr »

tracker1 wrote: post #452
stephenr wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 HOURS? Does that say more about your workstation or the project? I've recently built php + most of the bundled extensions, in a VM (on a 2018 Mac mini) and it's only a couple of minutes at most to build.

A modern browser is a MUCH larger codebase.

Well perhaps if browsers didn't try to cram every feature of a desktop operating system into their own runtime, it wouldn't be?

Seriously. Chrome and Firefox are both guilty of this.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#456

Post by nsxwolf »

xenospn wrote: post #439
nsxwolf wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? My friend was forced to drag his 27 inch iMac into the Woodfield shopping mall location, which if you've ever been there, is a quarter mile minimum walk from the parking lot to the store.

He probably chose to do that. You can't force someone to physically appear in your store. What if they're disabled?

Pedantry. They didn't give him an option besides physically bringing it into the store.

Good question about accessibility. I have no idea. But it's not as though our society is a perfect utopia for the disabled. I can only imagine it would have gone far worse.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#457

Post by lliamander »

Uehreka wrote: post #205
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.

Nvidia really has the GPU market under their thumb. It would be one thing if their pitch was "We're not as good as AMD for games, but we've got CUDA for professionals and researchers!". At least that way there could be some sort of segmentation and I could tell people shopping for GPUs to "get the right one for what you want to do!" But that's not the world we live in. Nvidia's pitch is "We make the only hardware tha…

This will probably only get more difficult as a bunch of AMD GPU engineers defected to Intel.

I'd still likely only go AMD GPUs in the near future, just because I don't have particularly demanding GPU requirements and they have better Linux drivers.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#458

Post by esmi »

I was very skeptical of this machine and the whole Mac Pro as concept car idea [1] but the Afterburner Accelerator Card has me wondering if I was wrong. Especially if Apple finds a way to support more works flows and applications with it. That could be a real advantage moving forward and it’s not hard to understand how it could trickledown to other products.

[1] http://hypercritical.co/2013/03/08/the-case-for-a-true-mac-p...

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#459

Post by lliamander »

bgentry wrote: post #440
maaaats wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at my laptop until monday so not sure about all details, but almost that, yes. It's a top specced P1. Xeon but 6 cores I think. 64gb ddr4. 1500mb/s read I think it was on the SSD. Not silent, exactly though, hehe.

Wow, that’s a beast of a laptop. I just configured one and the cost isn’t all that different from my 18mo old iMac Pro :) I have to imagine that the battery life isn’t great given the non-mobile parts, and that it must weigh a ton? I’m enjoying the combo of a powerful workstation where I work most of the time, and then a thin & light portable device for when I need portability. For me that combo works well and hits t…

I don't think the P1 is all that heavy. Maybe 4lbs?

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#460

Post by nickjj »

tracker1 wrote: post #445
nickjj wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Do Apple hardware failures happen often? In ~20 years of assembling PCs with consumer grade parts I've only had 2 legit non-keyboard/mouse hardware failures (3 if you count lightn…

Funny, in about the same period ~27 years or so, I've seen enough PSU failures alone, that I always use a UPS. I've seen ram that failed a couple times, quite a few motherboards die in the early 00's. A MB that was DOA and a video card that died after a year. Oh, and a first gen Intel SSD that suddenly thought it was an 8mb drive. I still prefer to DIY for value... my 4790k build lasted 5 years, just put together a n…

What's really funny is in the late 1990s and early 2000s I always overclocked my systems because it gave a noticeable FPS boost in the games I played. Dual Celerons (physical chips) running 366@550 (a classic) and then a Pentium III 733@900 which was a huge upgrade, especially for a consistent 125 FPS in Quake 2 / 3.

My 2 legit failures were an old IDE HDD that audibly clicked like crazy for months before failing completely. Since it gave such a long warning I was able to back everything up thankfully. The 2nd failure was a different power supply that just stopped working without any notice or grand events. I never had any RAM or video cards go bad, but after assembling a new machine I always run them through rigorous automated tests to help detect faults. I've had 1 stick of RAM be DOA but I don't count that as a failure.

My current system is an i5 4460 (3.2ghz) with a bunch of other components. It's been going 5ish years now without issues and I work this thing pretty hard. Full time development, video recording and editing, gaming, etc..

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