Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
MP All Models 64 Cores 128 Threads 2.9GHz up to 4.3GHz just $3,990
- Thread starter Darajavahus
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Benchmarks?
Some people go ga-ga about core counts, without considering two important factors:
- While some important applications are 'embarrassingly parallel', many (most?) applications have sections of linear code that prevent them from running twice as fast with twice as many cores. (See Amdahl's law.) A 64 core processor might not be significantly faster than an eight core processor.
- Even for many embarrassingly parallel tasks, if a 64-core processor doesn't have eight times the memory bandwidth of a eight core processor you won't get 8x the performance.
So, let the Red Team fanbois cheer on - but let's see real world application performance. (And Geekbench is so far from real world it isn't funny.)
Last edited:
Inb4 guy with no intention of buying 1.5TB of ram mentions ram. Jokes aside, this really makes that 7k price tag on 28 cores look like a real head scratcher, unless you absolutely need MacOs and a lot of ram and are into bad perf/price ratios.
Last edited:
Yeah, I don't know how you can go for the mac pro when 3990x exists now. Even if you need mac os there are ways.
Apple could easily scale their main two programs (FCPX and Logic Pro) to these processors, they’re already halfway their using solely AMD graphics (except for Intel internal graphics).
2020 will be the year Apple fully switches to AMD. New Mac Pro next year 2021 i
I think. It just doesn’t make sense to stick with solely Intel at this point
2020 will be the year Apple fully switches to AMD. New Mac Pro next year 2021 i
I think. It just doesn’t make sense to stick with solely Intel at this point
That depends what you pay per processor ... the bean counters will make sure of that.
It looks like AMD is still playing catchup in OEM markets, that's how it looks.
AMD has to offer compelling reason for Apple to chose to replace Intel, I feel they are making a lot of headway, but I think there are some underlying reasons Apple choses to stick with Intel, and these reason are not always known by consumers.
Intel has some sort of completive advantage over AMD when it comes to Apple products, and likely they are not going to reveal anything that keeps their competitive advantage in place.
So it's really up to AMD to figure out how to press Apple to negate Intel's advantages.
Just imagine CPUs got so fast that there's no more time to leave the office and get a coffee.
It should be easy to see what effect this has on Mac Pro sales by watching the market for Mac Pro compatible memory. Demand has been high enough to significantly impact prices, so if Mac Pro demand nosedives as a result of this announcement, then prices should return to the baseline they were at before the launch of the Mac Pro.
Not holding my breath. I expect demand for the Mac Pro to continue without a blip.
Not holding my breath. I expect demand for the Mac Pro to continue without a blip.
I would love to see AMD CPUs in Macs but isn't it more likely that Apple will transition to an Apple designed ARM-based chips for their CPUs since they have ARM-based chips?
There was a brief moment in time back in the FCP6/FCP7 days where nearly everything was accelerated with DVCPRO/DVCPRO50 with the right AJA configs and this was almost a real life problem. There was a freelancer who would come in and knew if they added a specific effect with all parameters set to zero (no visual impact), the software would still require "render" of the timeline and really seemed to abuse that trick way too much.
Years ago I had a chance to interview a CPU lead architect. He and his team were in the middle of designing a 16-core CPU. He explained that they were also including two 10Gb NIC onboard, because the biggest challenge for a CPU is keeping it busy (and there's more to that statement than NICs). End-to-end throughput for a targeted workload is what matters, and hard to uncover points of contention. A couple of years ago, after a friend bumped up his CPU and memory and still lamented that it was only 30% used in encoding jobs, I suggested he put in an SSD. The CPU utilization went to 95%+.
CPUs of any sort to my knowledge have very very low failure rates, regardless of brand. In 25 years of playing with these things, I've only had fans, HDDs, RAM, and graphics cards fail. None of these failures were really rampant, but they've happened. Never had a CPU fail, and I must admit that I've *****ered with them the most. Xeon's aren't any more indestructible than any other Intel chip, just like AMD isn't any less indestructible than anything else.
If you're worried about failure points, then we all know that failure is closely correlated with heat. Intel as of late has been putting out lots of heat due to the old manufacturing process that AMD has far left behind.
A 7,1 Mac Pro user on here just posted his temperature doing a CPU intensive task, and it hit 97c. I'm not a fan of that temp, but it is likely within the heat envelope of that chip. "still", though.
If you're worried about failure points, then we all know that failure is closely correlated with heat. Intel as of late has been putting out lots of heat due to the old manufacturing process that AMD has far left behind.
A 7,1 Mac Pro user on here just posted his temperature doing a CPU intensive task, and it hit 97c. I'm not a fan of that temp, but it is likely within the heat envelope of that chip. "still", though.
Last edited:
That is an old CPU with 16 cores / 32 threads. The new AMD CPU has 64 cores / 128 threads for $3990. Not saying AMD leads in every department, but CPU tasks performance per dollar is just depressing with Intel.
Would love to see independent render benchmarks and comparisons, but during their presentation AMD did great in Vray compared to a $20000 dual CPU combo from Intel:
It also runs R3D 8K files realtime on the CPU
According to AMD the new 3990x achieves around 25000 points in Cinebench R20.
Which would be ~3.6 times faster than your brand new Mac Pro.
If those figures aren't depressing for Intel, I don't know what would be. These are ridiculously high performance figures for the money.
To be fair, he has a 16 core CPU. So if I were him, I'd be curious on what the latest threadripper 16 core could do.
That would be the R9 3950x, NOT the old as hell 1950 or whatever that is showing in the results. Actually, it's kinda funny that the 1950x ties with the latest Mac Pros...lol
The R9 3950x:
It gets 9166 in multiscore R20
It gets 524 in singlecore R20
The R9 3950x costs $749 MSRP.
The W-3245 costs what, $2200?
Poor Intel!
That would be the R9 3950x, NOT the old as hell 1950 or whatever that is showing in the results. Actually, it's kinda funny that the 1950x ties with the latest Mac Pros...lol
The R9 3950x:
It gets 9166 in multiscore R20
It gets 524 in singlecore R20
The R9 3950x costs $749 MSRP.
The W-3245 costs what, $2200?
Poor Intel!
Just curious what the purpose of these sorts of threads is. Do I wish I could get a super-fast AMD processor in a Mac that costs a fraction of an Intel processor? You bet. Is that something Apple is going to offer any time soon? Not likely.
It seems like these posts (and similar comments on other threads) are just supposed to make me feel bad or stupid that I'm getting ripped off by Apple for preferring to buy a workstation that runs the Mac OS.
It seems like these posts (and similar comments on other threads) are just supposed to make me feel bad or stupid that I'm getting ripped off by Apple for preferring to buy a workstation that runs the Mac OS.
Buy and use what you want. People will talk about what they want. Threadripper or not, the price/perf is just ridiculous if you would like a higher core count, just as the 8 core is ridiculously price. Hence, the ridicule. Threadripper's release is sensational to say the least, which brings about a lot of comments. It's going to be talked about and the comparison will be made. If you need to be reassured in your mac purchase, there are plenty of threads and videos highlighting it's benefits within the Mac eco-system...where it shines and is stellar.
Last edited: