Upcoming 12-Core Xeon CPU Destined for Apple's New Mac Pro Posts Impressive Benchmark Scores

mabhatter said:

There is no reason to make a Dual CPU version because the apps that can utilize 24 cores are nonexistent outside labs.

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Totally untrue.... we use both Maya and Cinema4D... both of which will use every single core available at maximum capacity.

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Piggie said:

Is OpenCL as "good" as CUDA ?

Faster? More Features? anything?

I don't have an issue with either, but would like it we were using the best one.

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yes and yes.... go look up OpenCL vs CUDA online... plenty of tech comparisons on both. OpenCL has the overall advantage, though CUDA has some small advantages in some areas.

AZREOSpecialist said:

Apple isn't stupid. The reason they aren't offering a dual CPU configuration is because most Mac Pros are sold in a single CPU config. That's the reality, unfortunately. While there may be some users who buy dual CPU configurations, those who actually need the dual CPUs is a small subset of the already small subset of buyers who purchase the dual CPU configs.

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I would be surprised if that's the reason - I don't think I've ever encountered a single CPU Mac Pro. While the upcoming Mac Pro will have a single 12-core CPU, the current Mac Pro only offers 4 or 6-core Xeons in a single CPU configuration, and the performance of them is basically on-par with an iMac. Why spend the extra money for the Mac Pro if you aren't going to a dual CPU configuration?

mabhatter said:

There is no reason to make a Dual CPU version because the apps that can utilize 24 cores are nonexistent outside labs.

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Aside from the fact that there are applications which will be able to use all cores effectively, even if you are not using a single app which can utilize 24 cores, it's certainly possible to use 24 cores across multiple apps.
Being able to encode video (or multiple videos) and still having a usable system would be pretty nice.

mabhatter said:

Intel has i7 kneecapped at the motherboard IO level so it can't handle 6 thunderbolt ports.

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I could be mistaken, but I think the current Haswell CPUs have 128Gb/s PCI-E bandwidth - that's more than 6x 20Gb/s Thunderbolt ports have.
Thunderbolt doesn't really get interesting until they move away from copper connections.

drayon said:

Whatever happened to Quartz 2D extreme and resolution independence, nothing, we've been waiting since Tiger!!!

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What's wrong with the current approach of Apple re-drawing everything at 2x and then letting the GPU downscale everything to give you a blurry image and more workspace? It's RETINA!

Piggie said:

Anyone dare to consider if it would make a good high end gaming machine?
Or would a typical high spec PC still blow it out the water?
It would be nice to see games run faster an an Apple machine for once, even if it did cost a lot.

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Xeons aren't good gaming CPUs. You could build a PC for 1/3 the price and it will outperform the new Mac Pro for games. (even less if you were planning on gaming in OS X)

hudson1 said:

Just do what every other Mac or Windows user in the universe does.... put your applications on the internal drive. Whether you do this or not, Apple isn't going to add a feature to OS X for the one person who chooses not to do this.

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Apparently you've never backed up your Mac. (or perhaps only used Time Machine as a "backup") If you have a clone of your boot drive connected to the machine, when you go to "Open With" it brings up a list of applications from both drives.

therealtycho said:

EXACTLY!!!!!
I, (like you), make a living crunching numbers for NASA!
How are normal guys like us supposed to survive without 24 cores instead of 12?
I guess Apple abandoned us. Glad to see I'm not alone!! I would've felt RIDICULOUS complaining about something like this.... were it not for my NASA job..! Take care, my mathematician friend!
Oh... /sarcasm

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With the new Mac Pro being limited to a single CPU, it's only a minor upgrade from a high-end dual CPU machine - even if it has 12 cores.

People seem to be forgetting that the current Mac Pros, which the new ones are being compared against, are three years out of date.

WardC said:

Now Apple appears to be offering us no more than a souped up headless iMac with a Xeon processor and a tricked out custom graphics card set, that appears to be soldered onto the board.

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Huh? Actually, it doesn't "appear" that they're soldered into the board at all. It appears that both graphics cards and the cpu are daughter cards, plugged into the logic board, which appears to be at the base of the machine. Mind you, they look pretty clearly proprietary, so soldered-in or not is perhaps a moot point...

WardC said:

The fact of zero internal expandability has me a bit perturbed about the thing...it's a MiniPro, not a Mac Pro. This is a power mini with better parts than a Mac Mini...a true Pro would have better internal expandability options and not require 20 cables coming out of the thing to get PCIe and hard disks.

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It's so obvious that they're trying to work toward a totally modular system for their pro market. FWIW, I think it's an interesting, if risky, move. I don't see it as any less "pro," though. To me the whole notion of "pro" is changing dramatically. And don't even get me started on that whole frakking "prosumer" bullshirt. The old version of "pro" is an industrial model -- big studios and post houses with everybody working in one place -- and it's on its way out. The new pro will work in a different setting. They'll move between laptop and desktop, and they'll probably want their storage separate for that very reason. It makes a lot of sense, really. Sure, there are more cables, but they're trying to mitigate that irritation with a single interface (TB). There will obviously be a transition, and it may not even pan out. But I applaud them for trying to innovate; precisely what everybody has been bitching about them not doing…. It's strange, to me, that the biggest complaint about the Mac Pro is that it's not just a continuation of the same old thing. Kinda funny...

Beta Particle said:

Apparently you've never backed up your Mac. (or perhaps only used Time Machine as a "backup") If you have a clone of your boot drive connected to the machine, when you go to "Open With" it brings up a list of applications from both drives.

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Yes, I use Time Machine so I don't have this "problem". So far it's worked exceedingly well for me. Does a cloned external drive really need to be plugged in 24/7?

Dual CPUs?

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple has crunched the numbers and realized that, at least for the foreseeable future, 12 cores is the "sweet spot," when taking software engineering, OS X multiprocessing, heat, and cost into account. I could be wrong, but that's my guess. It would be interesting to see the comparison with proper dual CPU machines in real world tasks. I'd guess the improvement is much less impressive that people would expect (i.e., for the money). Also, with OpenCL coming into play, they've got a lot more than 12 cores of processing available. It's really mostly about software engineering, at this point, and that's not really in their hands.

Just my 2¢ on the subject.

Their Mac Pro BTO page should be interesting.

hudson1 said:

Just do what every other Mac or Windows user in the universe does.... put your applications on the internal drive. Whether you do this or not, Apple isn't going to add a feature to OS X for the one person who chooses not to do this.

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It's a clone of my internal hard drive for backup purposes, so it has my applications on it. I can't control that. It might even do that for a Time Machine backup, but I haven't tried.

Besides, that's a "you're holding it wrong" answer to an actual bug in Finder.

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mabhatter said:

For starts, the current Mac Pro takes two processors to access fewer cores. There is no reason to make a Dual CPU version because the apps that can utilize 24 cores are nonexistent outside labs.

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Any video encoding or rendering job benefits completely from more cores even if you have hundreds. Even if you're exporting a video from iMovie for uploading to YouTube, more cores is better. Any well-made batch image processing program would also use as many cores as possible... and pretty much anything that involves rendering. Virtual machines, of course, benefit from more cores greatly.

I am still amazed how little people understand about processor speeds between generations. How can anybody expect better than a 30% performance increase between twelve cores on this generation and twelve cores on the previous generation? That is all CPU's ever gain in preformance between genrations when you factor in amount of cores and clock speed.

The big deal with this machine is not the raw CPU speed but the fact that it can do tasks 30% faster at half the size and half the power with half the fan noise. The other big deal is the dual GPU's which is where a lot of processing is moving in pro applications. Both FCPX and Adobe Premiere Pro see massive performance gains with better GPUs. By having two monster video cards the hope is that most of the applications used on this new machine will make great use of off loading a lot of processing to the video cards. That is where you will see 50% of the performance boost from this machine. The CPU itself is just ok and yes it would have been that much better with a dual CPU configuration. Apple is banking on the dual GPUs to really matter where pros need it. This also happens to be the area that will really jack up the price, fast.

mrwheet said:

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple has crunched the numbers and realized that, at least for the foreseeable future, 12 cores is the "sweet spot," when taking software engineering, OS X multiprocessing, heat, and cost into account. I could be wrong, but that's my guess. It would be interesting to see the comparison with proper dual CPU machines in real world tasks. I'd guess the improvement is much less impressive that people would expect (i.e., for the money). Also, with OpenCL coming into play, they've got a lot more than 12 cores of processing available. It's really mostly about software engineering, at this point, and that's not really in their hands.

Just my 2¢ on the subject.

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Agreed. I run a few apps that probably can deal with 64 threads, and scale very well. But the vast vast majority of software doesn't know what to do with more than 4 threads. Look at all the Adobe apps, I think they can deal with 8 in the best cases in the absolute latest versions. In the present and immediate future the majority of users benefit from less cores at higher frequency. The majority of software needs to catch up, and software developers may even turn to the GPU for that. In another year or 2 there will probably be 16 cores on a single CPU.

It's somewhat disappointing that Intel hasn't improved their single-core performance these years. Agreed, most software is multithreaded now, and some number crunching tools are now GPU-accelerated, but, still, I miss 4x single core performance increase for the CPUs released in the, say, last 4 years.

and i thought intel had the best computer chipsets, i hope that apple also focus on the internals, redesign is a good thing, but good internals is just as important.
cant wait for the new mac pro, i hope it crushes the competition.

too bad the trashcan cant hold 2 of these.. Apple has turned its back on the pro users, as someone who needs cuda and dual cores my next powerhouse will be a PC because apple gives me no choice.. their new RMBP wont have a dgpu either.. they should just rename their their "pro" line to "premium" because thats all it is.. so I will just sit here and wait for the macbook premium to come out and build myself a nice dual CPU hackintosh with 2 cuda geforce cards for the same price as an iTrashcan premium.

blitzer09x87 said:

cant wait for the new mac pro, i hope it crushes the competition.

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computing power per $ spent?.. highly unlikely...

0x0x0x0 said:

computing power per $ spent?.. highly unlikely...

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Until they release pricing, we don't know. It's not like a PC that uses the same $3000 twelve core chip is going to be cheap either.

milo said:

Until they release pricing, we don't know. It's not like a PC that uses the same $3000 twelve core chip is going to be cheap either.

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Yes we do- Apple has historically been more expensive than competition for $ per unit (whatever way you measure) computing power. I didn't say competition was going to be cheap, I said per unit, Apple is going to be more expensive...

pretty impressive, didn't there was something which could beat haswell, i hope the new mac pro comes out by next month, i cant wait for it.

I know it is going to be fast, I just want to know how much the new iMac Pro is going to cost.

I think someone is going to retro fit the new MacPro with the old Mac Pro. It should look nice.

drayon said:

Slight advantage? bahaha smoke some more:

http://www.tomshardware.com/print/best-workstation-graphics-card,reviews-3493.html

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Don't get me wrong, I'm actually a future buyer of the W9000 to run SolidWorks on a Lenovo D20 that currently has a Quadro 4000. Just that it would be more useful today to have a better optimized graphics driver from AMD for SolidWorks.

0x0x0x0 said:

Apple has historically been more expensive than competition for $ per unit (whatever way you measure) computing power.

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False. At various times the mac pro has been cheaper than PCs using the same CPU and similar specs. Same goes for some other macs over the years.

The big issue with macs is that they tend to be released at a given price point and then when the months (or years) pass without an upgrade, Apple doesn't drop prices even though the components are getting much cheaper as well as competing machines. But at release, macs are sometimes cheaper.

these benchmark results can be easily altered and modified, we'll get a better view after the mac pro hits the market, but one thing is for sure, it'll be the winner in benchmark scores.

milo said:

False. At various times the mac pro has been cheaper than PCs using the same CPU and similar specs. Same goes for some other macs over the years.

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Really? Care to give some examples? Apple is and always was a hardware co.- they use software as a means to sell their hardware. In the "PC" world none of the manufacturers have as high a markup on their hardware as Apple because there is competition, and most, if not all, "big" hardware vendors in that field make money off service contracts...

bnnentertainmen said:

these benchmark results can be easily altered and modified, we'll get a better view after the mac pro hits the market, but one thing is for sure, it'll be the winner in benchmark scores.

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these benchmark results can be easily altered and modified, we'll get a better view after the mac pro hits the market, but one thing is for sure, it'll be the winner in SOME benchmark scores.

we just need 2 in one mac pro

Waited five years, so another 5 months won't kill me.