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The Mac Pro Review

anandtech.com

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Re: The Mac Pro Review

#81

Post by MBCook »

altero wrote: post #76

Configuration is kind of joke. 16GB RAM and zero free slots on high end desktop? My PC had the same price three years ago, but it has 5GHz CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB on SSDs and 5 TB on spin HDDs.

The slots thing is a design decision. Apple doesn't think people need them, I think they may be right. The Thunderbolt connectors are direct to CPU, not even the north-bridge in the way.

I remember when they said people wouldn't need ADB or SCSI. Or floppies. Or serial ports. It worked out.

If your 5 GHz CPU a Xeon with ECC? The RAM can be upgraded (those are options), the SSD can be upgraded (1 TB is an option) and it's faster than SATA, and you can attach as many disks as you want in Thunderbolt arrays. Did you have dual GPUs for that price?

It's a nice looking machine, very quiet, and very innovative. Maybe it will be a misstep, but I'm glad Apple is trying something interesting. I want to see what happens with this.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#83

Post by icegreentea »

xenophanes wrote: post #77
corresation wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you debating nomenclature? One of the GPUs is effectively dedicated to compute, while the other is architecturally chosen to optimize compute. These cards are geared to compute and not graphics.

Your post was unclear and I asked what you meant. I didn't debate anything. i was extremely clear and explicit about this. i asked a question, said i didn't know, said i was curious, didn't dispute anything you said. Only a domain expert could be expected to automatically know whether double GPUs is effectively the same thing as double CPUs or not. Apple has put a lot of effort into making their GPU structure effecti…

His entire point boils down to "GPU Compute (of all forms) is overweighted in comparisons between the Mac Pro and other workstations".

He got antsy because from his perspective, your question definitely seems kinda out of the air. In his original comment, he's basically implying that any GPU based compute solution (so these can be plain gaming optimized GPUs, the "professional" GPUs, or compute optimized GPUs) aren't worth is for the majority of use cases.

The "second card" he talked about was the Xeon Phi, and he makes the differentiation between it and other "GPU based" compute solutions since Xeon Phi consists of a "large" (sub 100) number of relatively simple, but full blown CPU cores (for example, the current Xeon Phi is based on an old Pentium core, the next gen is supposed to be basically an Atom core). This should, in theory, make it easier to exploit parallelism.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#84

Post by interpol_p »

corresation wrote: post #67
abtinf wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becau…

Buying a Mac Pro to "build iOS apps" or even to do heavy Photoshop work is a waste of money. The people that bought them for those reasons did not make an educated decision. A 15" rMBP or iMac is perfectly fast for those tasks.

The Mac Pro is a reasonably priced dual compute GPU workstation. But it's enormously expensive when compared to what most people actually need.

I'd say that if you are doing 4k Final Cut Pro work or writing your own OpenCL software, this machine is for you. In the future it may be suitable for people using GPU-based 3D renderers (I don't think there's any great ones on OpenCL at the moment).

Aside from the above niche target market, the Mac Pro target market doesn't exist yet. Apple seems to be using this machine to push the development of OpenCL and to push the development of "Pro" software for Mac OS X in the direction they want to see it go.

Personally, I think it's a very exciting direction to take pro software. I hope many developers jump on board. Once that happens I think we'll start to see a larger target market for the machines.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#85

Post by yapcguy »

coldtea wrote: post #79
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 like Anandtech but they have come into criticism recently, from some of their long-time readers, for fawning over Apple products. Which, instantly, should be reason enough to understand that said criticism is BS. Apple products are among the best in the industry, period. Not just from the industrial design part of it, but overall: coherence of product vision, attention to important characteristics for the target…

Rob Pike wrote a blog post "Thank you Apple" (sarcasm) because of the problems he was having with his iMac and Apple's software.

http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/09/thank-you-apple.ht...

Linus Torvalds is said to be using the ChromeBook Pixel as his primary machine.

http://www.geek.com/chips/linus-torvalds-is-making-the-chrom...

As for Miguel De Icaza, he's eating his own dog food, as he now makes his money selling an IDE for iOS development, so of course he's going to choose the Mac because that's where the toolchain is.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#86

Post by freshyill »

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.

"Some say…" is the Fox News way of saying "we just made this up on the show that preceded this one".

Unless someone can actually call their conclusions and numbers into question using actual facts, then it's just anti-Apple whining, whether it's him or "some readers".

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#87

Post by duskwuff »

wmf wrote: post #51
sliverstorm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the odds the Haswell Xeons will use the same socket as the current Xeons?

Zero since Haswell-EP uses DDR4.

That being said, I wonder what the chances are that Apple will use the same socket for the Haswell-EP CPU daughterboard. Is there anything obvious that'd prevent them from doing that (e.g, chipset compatibility)?

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#88

Post by yapcguy »

Watabou wrote: post #31
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.

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

Look, it's not just me sitting here complaining.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2270612

Pretty much every review of Apple gear has people moaning about bias in the comments.

I'm not saying there is any favoritism, but certainly the perception amongst Anandtech readers is that there might be.

At the end of the day, there's no reason why the writers at Anandtech would be any more immune to access journalism than other folk who have tried and failed.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#89

Post by patrickg_zill »

It is a well written review.

Note that the D700 specs match closely with the R9 280, 280X, or 290, cards which sell retail for $349 to $449 or so each (the Mac Pro has 2 of these in the 2x D700 config). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Radeon_Rx_200_Series . The 2048 shaders would match with the 2048 number for the 280X, I think (if I am reading the chart right).

The W7000 is the much more expensive "pro" version which has ECC RAM on the card and much less volume in terms of sales.

It's funny though, I remember as a kid, thinking how cool it was that you could have a backpack-able computer (the original Macintosh could be ordered with a padded backpack). Now at 11 lbs and not very large, you could almost do the same again!

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#90

Post by jsz0 »

thearn4 wrote: post #5

Do a lot of folks here generally like Mac desktops? I've grown to like Macbooks because I do like working on a portable UNIX-y platform, and have had generally bad luck with Linux laptops in the past. On desktops though, I'm willing to put more effort into settling software update issues/device conflicts, since I probably have to do that anyway to write performance-optimized code (depends on the exact purpose of the…

Mac desktops are great if you can find a model/configuration that fits your needs. If you don't need any GPU power it really opens up your options. It gets tricky when you want a more well balanced system. You go from about $800 to $2k+ with a iMac 27" + GPU upgrade when you could be perfectly happy with an imaginary Mac Mini + discrete GPU.
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