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Apple Mac Studio

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Re: Apple Mac Studio

#461

Post by nicoburns »

paulmd wrote: post #451
runjake wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did better with the limited space they have — they included a bunch of multi-functional USB-C ports that can be used with dongles for additional HDMI ports!

USB-C (or Thunderbolt) can also carry a DisplayPort link natively, and you don't even need a dongle for that. Workstations don't really care about HDMI, that's for TVs. Not only that but with the Ultra variant, all of the USB-C ports are thunderbolt 4 ports at 80gb/s, that's a massive amount of IO. (note that despite the number of ports - only 4 of them can be running displays, plus the HDMI port gets its own channel…

> Workstations don't really care about HDMI, that's for TVs.

And people who only have HDMI cables! I was using display port on my old MacBook, but I'm using HDMI on the new one as I already had an HDMI cable, but not a USB-C to DisplayPort one.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#462

Post by deagle50 »

drorco wrote: post #358
cassianoleal wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have one of these [0]. Goes up to 144Hz, single cable to hook up laptop to display and charge. [0] https://www.lg.com/uk/monitors/lg-38WN95C-W

Cool. Does G-SYNC/FreeSync work with the USB-C port?

It does on my Samsung G70A with a DP-USB-C cable.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#463

Post by zten »

mshockwave wrote: post #41
nerdjon wrote: post #15

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…

Same, I want to run AAA games using these crazy Mac hardwares. A more interesting question will be: how hard it will be to implement such Proton for Mac? Is there any previous project?

It exists as a proprietary product. Final Fantasy 14's Mac "port" is using Crossover, which slaps some magic on Wine. Definitely not a AAA graphics title but you could run it today. On a 16" MBP with the top spec M1 Max, it will get about 30-50fps with medium detail and I think I tested it at 1680x1050 - which feels like a miracle, almost, but gets trounced by an Intel i9 + AMD Vega 56(?) MBP running Windows from a few years ago. If the right APIs were available and an aarch64 binary were published instead, it would probably be a different story.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#464

Post by torginus »

As a dev, I think this is neat - but unfortunately, to this very day, the most important workloads usually are single-threaded, even the ones that are multi-threaded, rarely scale to more than 8 cores.

This usually means that the advanced M1 variants don't really offer an advantage over the base offering, although, more RAM is always nice.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#465

Post by nebula8804 »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #403
bni wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USB-C to Displayport cable. I use a 144Hz gaming screen with my Mac mini in this way

Which display are you using and does it wake up properly when you wake your mac mini? I've had a problem with displays that wake up normally with an intel based mac but not with an M1 mac.

Is it an ASUS display? I have had multiple ASUS displays exhibit this problem. I think I have replicated it with other non-Apple machines as well.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#466

Post by eyelidlessness »

xwowsersx wrote: post #106

Could/would this machine makes sense as a development machine? I use a Macbook Pro (M1) and it's always docked...I basically don't need it to be transportable. I could also use more power (I'm regularly running a bunch of docker containers + PyCharm + DataGrip + Android Studio).

I’ll pretty likely swap this in for my almost always docked intel 16”, and keep that around for the rare times I go mobile.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#467

Post by dylan604 »

assttoasstmgr wrote: post #433
ilamont wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My jaw hit the floor when I saw USB A ports. If only it had multiple HDMI ...

And yet none on the front. So your shoebox full of thumb drives are useless and you have to plug them in from behind. Just to be clear yes I know USB-C thumb drives exist but they are next to useless because their whole purpose is to shuttle files between devices. Devices that likely don't have USB-C yet.

just connect that USB-A hub you know you already have and plug in all the USB-A thumb drives you can fit.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#468

Post by rsynnott »

wmeredith wrote: post #311
andjd wrote: post #212

I'm really happy they're not going with a iMac pro form factor for these. Having a separate display and computer is great for avoiding e-waste. There are a ton of iMacs out there that have obsolete hardware but a screen that still works great.

I died inside when they got rid of target display mode for iMacs.

This was initially kinda justifiable; when the first 5K iMac came out there was no commonly available connection that could do 5K (the iMac used a somewhat overclocked DP link internally, I think), so their only option would have been two DP cables (a configuration that then also had very limited support).

That excuse really went away with TB3 and newer iterations of DP, tho, and it's pretty disappointing that they didn't bring it back at that point.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#469

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

forgotmyoldacc wrote: post #440
hughrr wrote: post #4

This is actually really cheap. Maxed out at £7999 is less than half the price of an HP Z with similar numbers configured in which it probably can’t even get near the mac. And it doesn’t need $1000 wheels.

My workstation build with Epyc is ~$5,000 and has more cores (24 core), more memory (256 GB), faster GPU (3090), a 2TB pcie 4 SSD and I suspect will perform better on standard benchmarks. Definitely not as compact as the Studio though but lot more extendable.

> I suspect will perform better on standard benchmarks.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. These M1 chips have some crazy benchmark performance.

What they don't have, is a standard x86 ISA, which means that a lot of applications run emulated (and still tend to beat many Intel specs, anyway). I keep reading people complaining that "It's faster, but not that much faster. What's the big deal?", when they are talking about an i86 application, running on Rosetta2.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#470

Post by dylan604 »

nextos wrote: post #136
areoform wrote: post #22

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…

Even if they stagnate, you can at least pull out a GPU and replace it with another (when they're available for purchase) even if you don't change RAM/CPU which you could replace when faster is better as well. You can even change storage options.

None of that swapability is available on any of the Apple systems, so when they stagnate there's nothing that can be done.

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