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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#591

Post by nottorp »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #585
nottorp wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humm purple and 4 gigs of ram in 2001 sounds like SGI. But those purple SGIs ran Irix so no 3d studio.

You're right! Crazy, that brings me back. I wonder why he showed it off. I wish I could find it. He probably wasn't using it for the tutorial at all, just nerding out and talking about how beefy computers handle rendering and complex geometry better. I was constantly constrained by my computers back then. Trying to navigate complex scenes or model very detailed meshes could get soooo slow. But man I loved it so much.

> I wonder why he showed it off.

Probably because it ran Maya. Which was a SGI product back then, not an Autodesk product yet.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#592

Post by ua709 »

brailsafe wrote: post #554
pchristensen wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$3.5k is a lot of money, but not a ton by American hobby standards. It's easy to spend multiples, even orders of magnitude more than that on hobbies like fishing, wine, sports tickets, concerts, scuba, travel, being a foodie, golf, marathons, collectibles, etc. It's out of reach for lots of people, even in developed countries. But it's easily within reach for loads of people that care more about computing than other…

I'd argue that some of those are more consumption and activity than hobby depending on how they're engaged with, and that people use the word "hobby" too loosely, but would agree that Americans in-particular consume at obscene rates. Golf equipment, mountaineering equipment, skiing and snowboarding lift tickets and gear, a single excessive graphics card that's only used for increasing frame rates marginally, or basic…

Those are the prices for just buying equipment, which at least retain some kind of value. 3 million+ American kids are enrolled in competitive soccer with annual clubs dues between $1K and $5K, and that money is just gone at the end of the year. Basically none of those kids are going to have a career in soccer, so it's clearly a hobby, and everyone knows it. And soccer isn't even the most popular sport!

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#593

Post by raydev »

andrewl-hn wrote: post #332

This would probably push some high-end audio professionals away from Logic. One of the niches Mac Pro has been popular is audio production. And with cheesegrader the ability to slot in many-many different audio interfaces into a box instead of dangling out to various PCIe enclosures has been a big win. Here's a good video how it looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIQINCWMd6I&list=PLi2i2YhL6o... (at 1:40 Neil…

The video you linked is from 2019. A lot has changed with Thunderbolt capability and the Studios now have enough ports/bandwidth to handle audio processing needs to multiple boxes.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#594

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Orygin wrote: post #354
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ethernet and audio have been standard integrated onto the motherboard itself for decades Unless the one it comes with isn't as fast as the one you want, or they didn't integrate one at all, or you need more than one. > Across all desktop PCs, the most common number of slots filled is one (a single GPU), and the average is surely less than one (systems using zero slots and relying on integrated graphics must greatly…

My motherboard has 3 16x PCIe slots, but realistically only one is used for the GPU as the other two are under the mastodon of a cooler needed by the GPU. Can't use a 100G network card if I can't fit it under the GPU. Can't not use the GPU as I don't have an iGPU in my CPU. He's not advocating from removing PCIe slots, but in practice, it's needed by way less consumers than before. There's probably more computers bei…

> My motherboard has 3 16x PCIe slots, but realistically only one is used for the GPU as the other two are under the mastodon of a cooler needed by the GPU.

Discrete GPUs generally consume two PCI slots, not three, and even the mATX form factor allows for four PCI slots (ATX is seven), which gives board makers an obvious thing to do. Put one x16 slot at the top and the other(s) lower down and use the space immediately under the top x16 slot for an x1 slot which is less inconvenient to block or M.2 slot which can be used even if there is a GPU hanging over it. This configuration is currently very common.

It also makes sense to put one of the x16 slots at the very bottom because it can either be used for a fast single height card (>1Gb network or storage controller) or a GPU in a chassis with space below the board (e.g. mATX board in ATX chassis) without blocking another slot.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#595

Post by randusername »

dabockster wrote: post #476
audunw wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels like it'd just create a market for a big rack-mountable multi-bay PCIe enclosure, with its own internal power supply, that you could connect with one ore more thunderbolt cable. I don't see any reason why a solution built around a Mac Studio should have to be significantly more cluttered. I don't know if such a solution exists right now, but I'm thinking there's a fair chance it will soon as the Mac Pro disappe…

Thunderbolt is really an unsung hero here. It is surprisingly nice to be able to move various components around my desk that would have otherwise sat in a huge tower hogging all the PCIe slots they can find.

Agreed, I've been doing experiments and it's wild to me what "just works" in a secondhand eGPU case or music production PCIe boxes.

Dual 10G NIC cards, way cheaper than a comparable dongle 36 HDDs in JBOD, absolutely! 12 optical drives, sure!

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#596

Post by aiisjustanif »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #580
linguae wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I love alluring designs such as the NeXT Cube (which I have), the Power Mac G4 Cube (which I wish I had), and the 2013 Mac Pro (which I also have), sometimes a person needs a big, hulking box of computational power with room for internal expansion, and from the first Quadra tower in the early 1990s until the 2012 Mac Pro was discontinued, and again from 2019 until today, Apple delivered this. Even so, the…

> sometimes a person needs a big, hulking box of computational power with room for internal expansion Between cloud computing and server racks, is this still a real niche?

Yes: A prominent examples is for those that don’t know how make servers and do a lot of video editing that want high disk speeds and processing power.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#597

Post by AnthonyMouse »

chongli wrote: post #336
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An Ultra class chip has like 16 memory channels, which even in a 1-DIMM per channel routing would have trace lengths long enough to bottleneck operating frequency. CAMM fixes this, right? > Actually, it's a detriment, because price-discovery-enforcing scalpers can rip RAM out of perfectly working computers and resell the RAM. It's way harder to scalp RAM that's soldered on the board. Scalping isn't a thing unless y…

Ticketmaster is a reputation management company. Their true purpose is to take the reputation hit for charging market value for limited availability event tickets. Artists do not want to take this reputation hit themselves because it impacts their brand too much.

Which is why it's quite appropriate for their reputation to be absolute shit and for members of the public to make sure the stink spreads to anyone who chooses to do business with them as a disincentive to doing it.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#598

Post by NetMageSCW »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #590
nsteel wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they don't use DDR5. LPDDR5 is always soldered. LPDDR5 requires short point-to-point connections to give you good SI at high speeds and low voltages. To get the same with DDR5 DIMMs, you'd have something physically much bigger, with way worse SI, with higher power, and with higher latency. That would be a much worse solution. GDDR is much higher power, the solution would end up bigger. Plus it's useless for sy…

> LPDDR5 is always soldered. No it isn't: https://www.newegg.com/crucial-32gb-ddr5-7500-cas-latency-cl... CAMM2 is new and most of the PC companies aren't using it yet but it's exactly the sort of thing Apple used to be an early adopter of when they wanted to be.

It looks like LPCAMM2 is shipping from one vendor and only started shipping in October- that’s a bit quick and early for Apple to adopt.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#599

Post by mjburgess »

heraldgeezer wrote: post #552
mjburgess wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Upgrades" havent been a thing for nearly a decade. By the time you want to upgrade a machine part (c. 5yr+ for modern machines), you'd want to upgrade every thing, and its cheap to do so. It isnt 2005 any more where RAM/CPU/etc. progress benefits from upgrading every 6mo. It's closer to 6yr to really notice

You can keep CPU and RAM for way longer than the GPU if you game... Your point kind of disproves your point.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#600

Post by NetMageSCW »

kllrnohj wrote: post #536
audunw wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels like it'd just create a market for a big rack-mountable multi-bay PCIe enclosure, with its own internal power supply, that you could connect with one ore more thunderbolt cable. I don't see any reason why a solution built around a Mac Studio should have to be significantly more cluttered. I don't know if such a solution exists right now, but I'm thinking there's a fair chance it will soon as the Mac Pro disappe…

The Thunderbolt offerings on the current Mac lineup offer dramatically less bandwidth in total if that matters for a given use case. Thunderbolt 5 is the equivalent of PCI-E Gen 4 x4. So if all 4 of the Thunderbolt 5 ports on a Mac Studio can run at full speed, that's still only the equivalent of a single gen 4 x16 slot. That's less than half the bandwidth of a basic consumer x86 CPU, to say nothing of the Xeon that…

Reports as pointed out here have shown that x4 to x16 for most GPUs and common loads is a 1% to 10% loss of performance - hardly pathetic. In many (gaming) cases, it would be unnoticeable.
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