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The Mac Pro Review

anandtech.com

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Re: The Mac Pro Review

#61

Post by abtinf »

corresation wrote: post #57

The one strange assumption that most Mac Pro reviews start with is a baseline of two compute cards -- that the Mac Pro is competitive when compared with other machines with two high-end compute cards. But I don't want two high-end compute cards, and I suspect that many who are trying to convince themselves that they'll benefit from it will gain no value from it. For many, many workloads, modern compute still represen…

For the Mac Pro target market, 2xGPU combined with massive memory bandwidth is a blessing. Final Cut, Photoshop, and other creative software are GPU accelerated.

The Xeon Phi is significantly more expensive, draws significantly more power, and is significantly less useful for creative software loads.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#62

Post by MBCook »

makomk wrote: post #44
yapcguy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Anandtech but they have come into criticism recently, from some of their long-time readers, for fawning over Apple products.

I can see why. They've been quite selective in what they compare the Mac Pro to in this review, for instance, because otherwise it wouldn't have come out so well. When they're arguing that it doesn't need expandability, they compare it to laptops and desktops that aren't expandable. Yet when it comes time to justify the pricing, they exclusively compare it to workstations that are aimed at a completely different mark…

I didn't see a big problem with it.

They compared it's price to a few workstations to show that the price isn't unreasonable for similar hardware (i.e. Apple isn't adding a $1200 workstation tax).

For the rest of the review they compared it to other Macs, because chances are that's what buyers are going to compare it with. If you want a Mac, those are your choices. I really doubt too many people who are in the market for an HP or Dell workstation are going to consider a Mac Pro.

Plus there is the problem of benchmarks. The OS can make a big difference, so you'd either have to run every benchmark twice on each system (once on OS X, once on Windows or Linux), and then the non-Macs can't run OS X. It would be a ton of extra work, but I'm not sure how much gain it would give.

Again, I think the number of workstation shoppers who will consider this machine is small. I expect the vast majority of it's sales will be to Mac users who want something more powerful than an iMac or a MacBook Pro.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#63

Post by caycep »

guelo wrote: post #15

Wow. For me, the big takeaway from this review are the benchmarks showing the iMac and MBPs beating out the Mac Pro. That shows that this machine is really for niche markets like professional video editing. Makes you wonder why Apple even bothers.

I think many of the design/art fields that they cater to has a need for this sort of MP-capable machine. That and it's also probably a neat exercise for technology development - I'm sure there's some nice engineering data and expertise that came out of this that might "trickle down" somehow.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#64

Post by revscat »

Cookingboy wrote: post #36
Watabou wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like your dislike of Apple somehow means that Anandtech is the one who is biased? Really? Come on now.

He wasn't speaking for himself, he was talking about some of their readers.

Readers who are complained about far more often than they are actually seen.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#65

Post by MBCook »

revelation wrote: post #27
melvinram wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DIY PC route is still going to be more affordable. If we go the Ivy Bridge E route and opt for a Core i7-4930K, you get more cores than either of the options above for around $600 for the CPU. Adding in another $330 for a motherboard, $180 for 12GB of DDR3-1866 memory, $1400 for two W7000 GPUs and $220 for a fast SATA SSD (Samsung 840 Pro) we’re at $2730 for a configuration that would cost at least $3499 from App…

Only because of the workstation GPUs. You can get better performance for much less if you don't need the special labeling.

But that's not apples to apples.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#66

Post by dhruvmittal »

guelo wrote: post #15

Wow. For me, the big takeaway from this review are the benchmarks showing the iMac and MBPs beating out the Mac Pro. That shows that this machine is really for niche markets like professional video editing. Makes you wonder why Apple even bothers.

I think the video editing market is growing fairly rapidly, as it gets easier to take and share high quality video. Of course, most of that growth is entry level youtube-channel stuff, but as those barriers fall so will those to the professional level.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#67

Post by corresation »

abtinf wrote: post #61
corresation wrote: post #57

The one strange assumption that most Mac Pro reviews start with is a baseline of two compute cards -- that the Mac Pro is competitive when compared with other machines with two high-end compute cards. But I don't want two high-end compute cards, and I suspect that many who are trying to convince themselves that they'll benefit from it will gain no value from it. For many, many workloads, modern compute still represen…

For the Mac Pro target market, 2xGPU combined with massive memory bandwidth is a blessing. Final Cut, Photoshop, and other creative software are GPU accelerated. The Xeon Phi is significantly more expensive, draws significantly more power, and is significantly less useful for creative software loads.

For the Mac Pro target market

Which is what? It's just anecdotal but most of the people I know with Pros got it as a high end development workstation, building iOS apps, etc. Final Cut Pro is pretty much the only app that benefits from the dual GPUs, and even then the gain is relatively marginal over a machine four years old. And that's paying for very high priced "workstation" GPUs (I called them compute cards because that is what they are geared for, though as with all compute cards they are derivatives of GPUs. They're really price ineffective as GPUs), when you can get almost all of the same advantages on a basic ATI card for a couple hundred dollars.

Virtually every review of the Pro seems to be giving it a very soft glove approach for some reason. It is an enormously expensive monument to the dual compute GPU, for marginal gains in most apps.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#68

Post by morganherlocker »

MBCook wrote: post #62
makomk wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see why. They've been quite selective in what they compare the Mac Pro to in this review, for instance, because otherwise it wouldn't have come out so well. When they're arguing that it doesn't need expandability, they compare it to laptops and desktops that aren't expandable. Yet when it comes time to justify the pricing, they exclusively compare it to workstations that are aimed at a completely different mark…

I didn't see a big problem with it. They compared it's price to a few workstations to show that the price isn't unreasonable for similar hardware (i.e. Apple isn't adding a $1200 workstation tax). For the rest of the review they compared it to other Macs , because chances are that's what buyers are going to compare it with. If you want a Mac, those are your choices. I really doubt too many people who are in the marke…

> I really doubt too many people who are in the market for an HP or Dell workstation are going to consider a Mac Pro

Especially with the gap in Mac Pro releases over the past few years, I have seen many people deciding between Mac Pro and a custom built hackintosh. For the stuff that really justifies a Mac Pro, these were the only two options for some time (short of moving off of an OSX stack). Sure, someone custom building a multi thousand dollar work station is not your typical consumer, but neither is your typical buyer of a spec'd out Mac Pro.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#69

Post by m_mueller »

gfodor wrote: post #32
guelo wrote: post #15

Wow. For me, the big takeaway from this review are the benchmarks showing the iMac and MBPs beating out the Mac Pro. That shows that this machine is really for niche markets like professional video editing. Makes you wonder why Apple even bothers.

It's a "forward looking" architecture (to steal the line from the iPhone 5S pitch.) They're betting big on GPU compute. I wouldn't say it is for "niche markets", though perhaps today it is only useful to smaller markets, it's that this computer is going to over time get faster and faster relative to the 2013 iMac and MBPs as more apps take advantage of the GPUs. It's kind of a unique phenomenon and makes the benchmar…

As someone doing GPGPU I just hope that they'll release an NVIDIA option. Scientific GPGPU heavily relies on CUDA support, OpenCL just isn't there yet, if ever.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#70

Post by corresation »

gfodor wrote: post #32
guelo wrote: post #15

Wow. For me, the big takeaway from this review are the benchmarks showing the iMac and MBPs beating out the Mac Pro. That shows that this machine is really for niche markets like professional video editing. Makes you wonder why Apple even bothers.

It's a "forward looking" architecture (to steal the line from the iPhone 5S pitch.) They're betting big on GPU compute. I wouldn't say it is for "niche markets", though perhaps today it is only useful to smaller markets, it's that this computer is going to over time get faster and faster relative to the 2013 iMac and MBPs as more apps take advantage of the GPUs. It's kind of a unique phenomenon and makes the benchmar…

This has kind of been the claim for years now, though, with a burgeoning market of compute apps just around the corner. Only it isn't so easy, and compute applications only apply for a specific set of problems, not only because of the GPU geared restrictions and architecture of these designs, but because of the islands of memory forcing endless memory copies back and forth. Unified memory should go a long way to making compute more generally usable, though of course that does nothing for the person paying $6000 for this unit.
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