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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#621

Post by steve_adams_86 »

nottorp wrote: post #591
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ha, you nailed it. That's exactly what it was. Thanks for jogging my memory.

Back then Maya seemed like this unobtainable, magical machine for producing impossible imagery. When I finally got my hands on it, I was so disappointed to realize I still needed skills to make it do the cool things. I was ~16 and pretty clueless. I just knew Maya was used for the crazy stuff I was seeing in cut scenes from games or special effects in movies.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#622

Post by chongli »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #597
chongli wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ticketmaster is owned by Live Nation which owns at least 338 major concert venues [1]. Their market power in the venue business allows them to force artists to use Ticketmaster for ticket sales. The artists don't mind though, as they can tell their fans they have no other choice but to use Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster absorbs all of the reputational stink and the artists likely earn more money than they otherwise would have if they were forced to sell tickets at the low prices their fans want.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Nation_Entertainment

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#623

Post by testing22321 »

bombcar wrote: post #126
WillAdams wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ages ago, when new Mac hardware came out, I'd amuse myself by putting together an "ultimate Mac workstation" in the configurator --- once upon a time, one could hit 6 figures pretty easily --- these days, well I panic bought a duplicate computer because I was worried a chipped/cracked display was going to make it unusable (turns out a screen protector has worked thus far). I agree with the reasoning, and would like t…

> maybe the mainstream stuff is good enough? Even Siracusa admits that - he's found it hard to articulate what a true "Mac Pro" would do that you can't do with other things. Back in the heyday of the $100k Mac Pro you could certainly imagine it doing things that wouldn't be easily done by anything under $50k, and it would look good doing it.

Whenever this comes up, someone chimes in to say they’re working a some big Hollywood blockbuster, and the production company bought maxed out Max Pros because they are better and faster than anything else.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#624

Post by timtim51251 »

chatmasta wrote: post #165

I bet there’s gonna be a banger of a Mac Studio announced in June. Apple really stumbled into making the perfect hardware for home inference machines. Does any hardware company come close to Apple in terms of unified memory and single machines for high throughput inference workloads? Or even any DIY build? When it comes to the previous “pro workloads,” like video rendering or software compilation, you’ve always been…

Once you start adding RAM and storage, the price of the Apple explodes. There is zero expandability and options outside of what Apple provides. So you can easily build a better PC and still at a lower price point for higher end configs. So your argument is a fanboy argument and not based on reality.

Is the Mac Studio great? Yeah, for Apple users.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#625

Post by rayiner »

angoragoats wrote: post #429
rayiner wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Silicon has an integrated thunderbolt controller so that should have less latency than PCs that use a discrete thunderbolt controller.

Maybe; I'm unable to find any benchmarks that specifically compare PCs with TB to Macs to test this. But there is certainly still overhead with TB no matter what, and therefore it'll never be as fast as Oculink.

Sure, but how big of a difference is there? Even inside a desktop PC, you typically have PCIe ports directly off the CPU and ones off the chipset, and the latency for the latter is double. But the difference is immaterial in practice.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#626

Post by AnthonyMouse »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #598
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It wasn't too quick and early for Dell and Lenovo to adopt.

It's the new thing. All three of the DRAM manufacturers intend to produce it:

https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20240916PD207/samsung-lpcamm...

And it's called "CAMM2" because it's not even the first version. Apple could have been working with the other OEMs on this since 2022 and been among the first to adopt it instead of the last:

https://www.techpowerup.com/294240/dells-ddr5-camm-appears-i...

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#627

Post by angoragoats »

rayiner wrote: post #625
angoragoats wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe; I'm unable to find any benchmarks that specifically compare PCs with TB to Macs to test this. But there is certainly still overhead with TB no matter what, and therefore it'll never be as fast as Oculink.

Sure, but how big of a difference is there? Even inside a desktop PC, you typically have PCIe ports directly off the CPU and ones off the chipset, and the latency for the latter is double. But the difference is immaterial in practice.

GPU performance can be perceptibly slower with TB5 compared to Oculink. Here’s one article showing a 14% difference in one test setup:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/oculink-outp...

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#628

Post by lowbloodsugar »

angoragoats wrote: post #616
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much does it cost to have an electrician wire up 240v circuit just to power the thing?

The machine I’m describing works just fine on a dedicated 15A 120V circuit.

5x3090 in 1600W?

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#629

Post by simondotau »

Melatonic wrote: post #539
kranke155 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new M chips beat basically any PC on video editing. Their new ProRes accelerator chiplet is so good they can’t even compete.

Goodluck storing all those 8k videos, plates, and other content on soldered in SSD

1. Thunderbolt 4 exists.

2. Even with today's prices, storage is a relatively minor expense for professionals working at this level.

3. When material above 4K is used in a serious workflow, it tends to be at the acquisition phase only. In post production, raw files get transcoded to a proxy format (e.g. ProRes 422 Proxy) for editing.

4. In multi-user workflows, media is commonly accessed directly from shared network storage instead of duplicated onto individual machines.

5. Effects work is normally handled on a shot-by-shot basis. Even if they're working on local copies, we're talking mere minutes of raw material, if not seconds.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#630

Post by wpm »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #611
wpm wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thunderbolt absolutely is a slouch. Every PCIe card I have requires it's own $150+ PCIe to Thunderbolt Dock and its own picoPSU plus 12V power supply. External PCIe is convenient for portables. Not for desktops. It's a piss-poor replacement for a proper PCIe slot.

Why don’t you just get a multi-slot PCIe box?

I could.

It would be even cooler if that box was also housing my computer and powered by the same power supply.

And then the PCIe lanes could just run to the CPU/SoC instead of having to be wrapped in Thunderbolt.

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