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New Mac Pro Tech Specs

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Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#471

Post by wlesieutre »

wlesieutre wrote: post #415
overcast wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The base price has more than doubled from the original cheese grater we all fell in love with. I'd be willing to bet the home user MacPro community is much larger than Hollywood. People have been clamoring for an updated cheese grater for the better part of a decade. They are STILL actively developing hacks to keep their 2008/2009 models running. Shit, I just retired mine this year in favor of Hackintosh, because I'm…

Many of the home users who were buying $3000 base model cheese grater Mac Pros could get by now with a 6-core i7 Mac Mini. Price would be around $1300 for the computer, $300 for an eGPU enclosure, and $700ish for a Radeon R7, plus aftermarket RAM. AMD's not in a great spot for high end GPUs right now, but when the Navi 23 cards land next year it will be looking better. This doesn't scale as well for multi GPU machine…

Missed the edit window but for GPU I meant the Radeon VII not R7. Double checking benchmarks, the RX 5700 XT compares pretty well to that, but 2nd gen Navi will have a new higher end card.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#472

Post by thelittleone »

throwaway1777 wrote: post #303
thelittleone wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s far but 24hrs is a bit stretching reality e.g. ~12hrs to Santiago Chile. ~9hrs to Bali, Indonesia. ~13hrs to Los Angeles, USA. ~4hrs to Sydney, Australia.

Add a layover and you could easily be at 20+ hours (which is common since NZ is small so there aren’t that many flights). Europe is well over 24 hours even to the major hubs.

Granted, however the flights I listed are all non-stop.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#473

Post by arvinsim »

wlesieutre wrote: post #415
overcast wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The base price has more than doubled from the original cheese grater we all fell in love with. I'd be willing to bet the home user MacPro community is much larger than Hollywood. People have been clamoring for an updated cheese grater for the better part of a decade. They are STILL actively developing hacks to keep their 2008/2009 models running. Shit, I just retired mine this year in favor of Hackintosh, because I'm…

Many of the home users who were buying $3000 base model cheese grater Mac Pros could get by now with a 6-core i7 Mac Mini. Price would be around $1300 for the computer, $300 for an eGPU enclosure, and $700ish for a Radeon R7, plus aftermarket RAM. AMD's not in a great spot for high end GPUs right now, but when the Navi 23 cards land next year it will be looking better. This doesn't scale as well for multi GPU machine…

> Price would be around $1300 for the computer, $300 for an eGPU enclosure, and $700ish for a Radeon R7, plus aftermarket RAM. AMD's not in a great spot for high end GPUs right now, but when the Navi 23 cards land next year it will be looking better.

I used to want an eGPU. Then I learned that you need to disable SIP in order to do so...

> This doesn't scale as well for multi GPU machine learning workloads and Apple needs to get over their shit with Nvidia, but as a lower end "modular" Mac than the $6000 cheese grater 2019, it's an option.

No one is going to wait for that hypothetical future where MacOS supports Nvidia GPUs.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#474

Post by arvinsim »

snapetom wrote: post #463
jcadam wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I remember when PowerMacs could be had at a wide variety of price points. That was nice. If Apple doesn't want to serve the "I need a decently powerful machine but don't want to waste money on what is basically a status symbol" market, maybe they should license MacOS to someone who does. Something like that might actually bring me back to the platform. As it is, I stick to PCs running Linux.

Yeah, I've waited years for this machine, was excited when it came out, and in an epiphany last night, will probably pass on it and opt for a beefed up Mac Book Pro instead. It will be cheaper and fill my needs. I'm a programmer. If I want to prototype a multi-component stack, I've got a Raspberry Pi Cluster running K8 for that. If I want to play around with deep learning, I'll just spin up EC2 instances. Games? Let'…

> Let's be honest. That war was lost decades ago. I've got a good PC rig for that now. The days of a general machine to do everything are gone.

Businesses listen when their bottom line is hit.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#475

Post by arvinsim »

innocentoldguy wrote: post #466
philliphaydon wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find macOS cumbersome and unpleasant to use and would rather pay more for windows or linux.

It's it wonderful that you can have an opinion that works for you too?

It's sad that Windows users have a plethora of hardware options available for them while Mac users are stuck with few choice options.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#476

Post by arvinsim »

wffurr wrote: post #450
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can hook up GPUs to it with the thunderbolt ports Thunderbolt GPU cases are hundreds of dollars. For a dual GPU Mac Mini setup (which would be a mass of cables and require 3 outlet plugs) you could afford a 3 GPU Windows tower. As someone who used to be a pretty extreme Mac evangelist I really did look into all this before I made the switch to a Windows machine.

Sure, Windows machines have always been cheaper for similar specs and performance. The Mac Mini and GPU setup is way cheaper than the new Mac Pro and hits a bunch of the use cases (development, machine learning, gaming) that people wanted a Mac Pro for.

The current and last generation of Nvidia GPUs are not officially supported by MacOS. How is that good for use cases which uses CUDA cores?

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#477

Post by movedx »

Crinus wrote: post #319
movedx wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't get why you'd want to buy this, then it's not aimed at you. "Why would I pay AWS to host a Virtual Machine for me when I can get a physical host on Hetzner for the same price, if not less, that's 5x better?" -- the point has truly been missed.

And what is the point then? I'm serious since i read this "if you do not understand why then it isn't for you" but without any explanations about what isn't understood.

Think about other products that exist in the wild. Have you ever looked at something on a shelf, or in someone's hand, come to an understanding of what it is and what it does and then thought, "That's stupid. I don't need that. There are better options!" The thing is the person using it loves it , and it's solving a very specific problem for them, a problem you don't have.

It's the same thing here: you don't respect the product so you don't understand who would use it, so you don't buy it. That's fair enough.

But the MacPro is designed for a niche audience who are happy with the hardware, implementation, support, and so on. The things they're doing with this product are not things you're doing, so you don't understand their pain points.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#478

Post by droithomme »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #336

Still don't understand the justification for this machine, I waited years for a MacPro but when it became clear that Apple actually considered it a dead product and behind the scenes were building the iMac Pro to fill the niche I switched to windows and now run a dual 1080Ti workstation (Uses CUDA for 3D rendering path-tracing) for around half the price of a iMac Pro. Apple bloggers said time and time again the reaso…

I need a Mac where I can replace the harddrive when it fails after 18 months like Mac drives always do, and also I'd like a bay to put a decent optical drive and not the low quality Apple SuperDrive which they finally gave up on, and add a card so I can have more than 1 USB port which is ridiculous.

And it should cost around $500, not $12,000.

$500 with what I request is certainly available on the PC side of things and I have that and run Linux on it and have transitioned everything I can off Apple because they can't produce the desktop that I need. I've put Mac versions of my products on bug fix only status and when customers ask me when the new version comes out I tell them never and advise them to try Linux.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#479

Post by jchw »

tracker1 wrote: post #451
jchw wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

Oh yeah, NVMe is an absolute given. It only took one NVMe drive experience and I have never had a desktop or laptop since without a large NVMe SSD as the boot and primary disk. It is in many cases a substantial boost and you can benefit across more things than a bigger CPU since many things these days are IO bound to begin with!

I’m rocking a Samsung 970 Pro 512 GB on my desktop. I never thought I’d need more space than that, since I can always use my NAS or the spare spinning disk I have installed. But, the more CPU power you have, the more you can feed it... I find myself building entire fragments of Nixpkgs now and it takes substantial disk space to do it.

Re: New Mac Pro Tech Specs

#480

Post by jchw »

Macha wrote: post #434
jchw wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Rust actually benefits a lot from more threads once you have a couple of dependencies. A personal project using amethyst/nalgebra dropped its compile time for a fresh release build from 20 minutes to 2 when I upgraded from a i5-4670k to a r9 3900x.

This is true; I’ve never worked on a huge Rust project, only fairly large C++ projects (at home, anyways.) Rust compilations always felt fast enough to not matter, similar to Go, although maybe not quite that fast. (With Go, it never felt to slow to say, build Kubernetes from scratch; it’s just fast.)
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