Base and Middle Tier Mac Pro Models Offer CPU Performance Similar to iMac Pro

[Digital Skunk]

I brought up HANDBRAKE in regard to "sustained performance." A big thermal load is a big thermal load.

Again, my 9700K will run a big AVX load like HANDBRAKE, all 8 cores at 4.8 GHz ALL DAY LONG and the core temperatures don't exceed 65C. The Mac Pro's "sustained performance" is nothing special.

32 core Threadripper 3970X, overclocked, can run full bore indefinitely and stay under 75C. Again, the Mac Pro's "sustained performance" is nothing special.

And that's totally fine, but I wouldn't use Handbrake as a benchmark for performance across the board and as a comparison for Xeon or any other system. The same goes for the video game titles we hear over and over again.

Handbrake is coded very well, but it's open-source, on version 1.x and took a decade to get out of beta. It also doesn't encode/decode anything but lightweight video formats. And to be honest, most people download it to decode DVDs and remove DRMs. MPEGStreamclip is at least faster at encoding, and Apple's Compressor is even faster and is lighter on the overall system.

 

[IG88]

And that's totally fine, but I wouldn't use Handbrake as a benchmark for performance across the board and as a comparison for Zeon or any other system. The same goes for the video game titles we hear over and over again.

Handbrake is coded very well, but it's open-source, on version 1.x and took a decade to get out of beta. It also doesn't encode/decode anything but lightweight video formats. And to be honest, most people download it to decode DVDs and remove DRMs. MPEGStreamclip is at least faster at encoding, and Apple's Compressor is even faster and is lighter on the overall system.

I see your point. Yeah if you're buying a $6K+ Mac Pro to run Handbrake, you're doing it wrong. So in that light, it's not a good benchmark.

I will say that Apple's cooling design does appear impressive. No fan directly on the heatsink, front fans provide enough airflow. And it's apparently quiet.

 

[Adult80HD]

I see your point. Yeah if you're buying a $6K+ Mac Pro to run Handbrake, you're doing it wrong. So in that light, it's not a good benchmark.

I will say that Apple's cooling design does appear impressive. No fan directly on the heatsink, front fans provide enough airflow. And it's apparently quiet.

It's ridiculously quiet. Mine came yesterday and at the moment it's on top of my desk about 18" from my head, and I can barely hear a whisper from the fans. Almost dead silent. Even when I ran some CPU benchmarks to cap out the CPU's, it never got louder.

 

[MauiPa]

Right now AMD is totally cleaning Intel's clock with the Threadripper. The processor you mentioned can be had now for as low as $899.00 currently, specs that easily match the Xeon W 3245 (a price search pulls up $2400.00 currently). The 16 core Xeon 3245 has a single core score of 1107 vs. 1,309 for the AMD 3950X and 14,174 (AMD) vs. 14,285 (Xeon) for multicore.

From a processor perspective, I'm not sure what Apple's game plan is right now (are they just biding their time with Intel until they can use their own ARM chips in the Mac Pros?) or if they are locked in with Intel, but currently I don't see any reason for them not to jump ship completely to AMD. Sure they'd have to do some redevelopment on their Logic Board (they even call it that anymore), but it would allow them to shave a considerable amount off of the cost of the low to mid-range Mac Pros and see some nice performance gains.

I used to go with AMD when building my rigs, then moved to Intel once it became clear they were the performance leaders in the Core 2 and i7 years, but will be moving back to AMD for my next build unless Intel can overtake them again at some point.

Comparing a xeon class chip to anything else is apples and oranges. Not sure specifically on the AMD, but vs the i9. 3 times memory bandwidth (6 lanes vs 2, and in actual bandwidth), way more pcie lanes, ECC memory support, way better thermal capacity. No one, literally no one, would buy Xeon's solely for their Geekbench score.

 

[Killroy]

This is my 12 core 2019 Mac Pro.numbers

Why are your 12 core numbers so low?