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.
Base and Middle Tier Mac Pro Models Offer CPU Performance Similar to iMac Pro
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I did say “happier”, maybe I should have omitted “everybody”
I know right, everyone knows the Xeons in the Mac Pro are custom silicon (extra large cache), so Apple could have created much faster xeons while they were at it. Wait. That makes no sense, they did use best xeons. Hmmm. Sounds more like intel is lagging in releasing faster chips at cheaper prices
Jonathan Morrison posted a great video last night that highlighted a major element that makes the base model make a lot of sense to people - initially video editors at the present time. He was demonstrating the use of the afterburner card for video processing and was only running one of the base video cards to show that CPU activity and GPU activity was barely a blip as he was previewing four and then eight 4k video streams in real time. The afterburner card was handling all the processing so the CPU and GPU were basically tasked with simply keeping the computer on and running while it did its thing.
So for video editors, skipping the multi core, RAM, and GPU upgrades and simply adding an afterburner card seems to make a lot more sense. If afterburner can be used for other processor intensive processes - audio mixing, photoshop rendering and whatnot, etc. then it would seem that the base model Mac Pro is worth the price tag for the upgradeability and afterburner slots alone.
So for video editors, skipping the multi core, RAM, and GPU upgrades and simply adding an afterburner card seems to make a lot more sense. If afterburner can be used for other processor intensive processes - audio mixing, photoshop rendering and whatnot, etc. then it would seem that the base model Mac Pro is worth the price tag for the upgradeability and afterburner slots alone.
The W3223 is a 2019 part. Its just a relatively low end processor. Not very surprising as this is what Apple has done for years to keep their costs down.
You can't really "see the relative TDP" though, because CPUs don't scale like that.
It would, and if you compare the A13 with a Core-Y, Apple is clearly doing better. It doesn't have to follow that a Xeon competitor would have the same advantage, though.
Exactly.
Base model is for someone that already know how to add RAM and internal storage to fulfill his needs. And dont really need a powerful GPU or more than 8 cores (i.e. app developers).
A Threadripper is not a workstation CPU. Look at EPYC.
You wanna compare Threadripper, compare it to Core.
Nope.
Totally wrong.
A workstation isn’t defined by benchmarks.
That’s the problem with geek’s forums: they all seem to believe a workstation is like their gaming computer.
I originally assumed the Afterburner card was included and that it explained the $6000 base price. But another $2K? Ouch. It seems like $8k can buy you a lot more video editing power with commodity hardware.
First, the rack mounted version very likely using 95+ % of the same internals and the same logic board. So it can be configured with the same major component base options. For data center usage the 580X may not matter, the RAM can be configured themselves, two 10GbE already probably saves some money hooking into the backbone (may need another card if using 40+ GbE for SAN backbone). When booting a macOS instance using Apple's variation of bhye really don't need more than 256GB (the 'hypervisor' drive is on verge of being too big. Could boot a hypervisor off a 64GB USB thumb drive on term USB slot).
Can split 8 cores into 2 cores slices for four customers each and start billing them. ( Hence, start paying for the Mac Pro. it isn't that hard. )
Second, similar set of customers who will use the lowest cost version to add their own stuff. 2-4 Avid HDX cards , or 2-3 NVMe M.2 drive carriers. , SAS HBA card + 4 10GbE card , or their own AMD GPU cards, 2-3 SDI video capture cards for a live video capture station for high end cameras , etc. etc. All of that coupled to a macOS software stack that they know works and smoothly generates revenue at their workplace.
It isn't all about getting the fastest single threaded, drag racing score on tech porn benchmark 23.
Is the entry model going to be the "highest selling" configuration ? Probably not (at least in the tower format).
A bigger question in terms of price/performance is who is going to buy the 24=28 models. Their price performance is more than whacked until get into the > 1TB or RAM range. A substantive number of folks who need 24-28 cores may not need > 1TB ( lots of workloads in the 96-768GB range. ) . That is exactly why Intel has two other entries that Apple isn't using that do not come with the $3K > 1TB tax on them.
Apple's 24 core $6,000
W-3265 $3,349
W-3265M $6,363
sure Apple cut off about $363 , but it still a $2,651 tax for capabilities not using in the slightest at sub TB RAM ranges. Throw that against a 32 core Threadripper on most embarrassingly parallel workloads and price/performance probably getting whipped pretty bad. For folks who primarily want as many as they can afford x86 cores that isn't the right component to use.
Apple could add two more BTO options if it turns out horribly in first half of 2020 for those options. But 'out the gate' if had seriously looked at the competitive landscape, hard not to see why those two have major problems.
"Workstation" is a nebulous term. There used to be a big difference between a workstation and a home PC. In the early 90s, a workstation ran an OS with preemptive multitasking - Unix or Windows NT. It had ethernet. All that stuff made it into regular PCs.
What makes a workstation today? ECC RAM? All Ryzen CPUs support ECC now. An enterprise support contract? Apple will sell you that even for an iMac, so is an iMac a workstation?
People want to believe there's some magic secret workstation sauce in the Xeon, but there's very little in it to justify its existence today. It's just a higher priced SKU for Intel.
Once again, remember to take the published geekbench scores with a grain. Geekbench uses an averaging convention without adjusting scores for other cou loads at the time of measurement. It is probably more realistic to search the cpu, find the high scores and use these (except on some custom builds under windows and Linux, where there is over clocking of cpu and/or ram). I can think of many reasons why scores would be lower (indexing, other programs running) but the only variable on the high end is slight differences in silicon
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.
You also don't have to buy it for the Mac Pro either.
No offense but AMD is so far ahead of intel right now that the Athlon64 days seem like a joke.
Ryzen 3950x is AMD's mainstream consumer part and it can compete with Intel's HEDT parts no problem, matching and even beating Intel's 18 core i9 in a few tests. And the latest 18 core i9 is faster than the 18 core Xeon parts because it can boost to higher clock speeds.
In comparison to the 9900k(3950x's real competition) we see almost double the performance in productivity apps at around the same power consumption so there's also a massive efficiency advantage in AMD's favor. Granted that, because the 3950x is a mainstream part it only supports dual channel RAM and doesn't have as many PCIe lanes as HEDT parts although the fact that it supports PCIe gen 4 does help alleviate the expandability issue a little.
And this is just the top mainstream part from AMD.
The newly launched 24 and 32 core Threadripper parts beat anything intel has to offer in the HEDT and the 32 core Threadripper beats in pure CPU performance any intel CPU you can buy right now.
And this is not all.
Rumors say that AMD(partly confirmed by AMD actually) will launch at CES this January a 64 core Threadripper CPU. This thing will humiliate Intel's entire HEDT and Xeon CPU lines.
And yeah like you said AMD is also generaly cheaper, but that's just the cherry on top of everything.
The $4425 Epyx you mentioned is a 64 core 128 thread, 256MB L3 Cache server monster that has no competition from intel and it still cheaper than the 28 core Xeon Apple offers with their Mac Pro.
So yeah it's a shame Apple doesn't offer a Mac Pro variant with an AMD CPU. The 7nm, Zen 2 architecture is really impressive.
Last edited:
Billing them for what exactly? What could this Mac Pro do faster than a *nix box in a data center? FileMaker Server? I'm not aware of any way to manually allocate cores or threads in FileMaker Server.
I mean, you're not going to do rendering or post-production in a data center. I suppose you could virtualize and assign cores that way, but again, what Mac-specific application would these customers need so badly which couldn't be delivered more powerfully and less expensively by hosting on another OS?
If running a macOS hosted in a cloud service ... this is actually legally clean. The other isn't.
When you rent compute/network/storage cloud services you pay for them. That is revenue.
These guys run 1,000's of Macs.
https://www.macstadium.com/
Apple doesn't need 2,000 hosting companies to sell these base Mac Pro too. They just need 10's (or 100's) to buy 50-150 each to sell enough to start to move the needle on Mac Pro sales. ( going to make a dent in the overall Mac market unit numbers? Nope. Enough that rather have them than not? Yes. Apple probably isn't going to break 5 digits on sales with the Mac Pro. And weren't before either. )
Macstadium isn't going to dump all their mini's for Mac Pros. But they have a decent number of MP 2013 deployed in their data centers. ( a contributing reason why Apple kept selling the MP 2013 up until the last minute for this kind of crowd. ). They'll probably switch some of the old ones out for rack versions because in some contexts it will be more space efficient ( especially if renting slices on a Mac host). Other hosts companies ( external / internal ) will do the same thing at different scales.
data center is loose. Businesses run their own "cloud" so it could be a rack in a room down the hall. Doesn't really make a material difference in weather there is a market there. Only in quantities of buy.
"Post-Production" of software for quality control metrics.... done all the time. That is pretty much the point. There is more to life than the narrow niches folks are trying to throw the Mac Pro into.
Probably going to depend on exact workflows and it's too early to make any type of conclusions.
We've still got 2009 MP's in use as main studio systems - they've been fantastic computers and we've been able to upgrade and duct-tape them together for far longer than anyone could have reasonably expected - (out of having no choice in the matter). But I've also been desperate to replace them for several years. The cost of replacement parts just keeps increasing exponentially (if you can find them at all) and High Sierra was as far as I was comfortable letting the OS go due to compatibility/stability issues (and even that was a bit of a stretch).
I literally just signed the courier receipt for the first of our shiny new 16-core MPs - and while I'm absolutely going to breathe a sigh of relief that somehow these workhorses survived without a catastrophic failure - I'll be a little sad to see the old ones go. I don't think it's going out on a ledge to say I don't expect to ever get that long a lifespan out of a workstation ever again (and we would have transitioned away years ago if Apple sold a system remotely close to what we needed).
I just hope Apple keeps the iMac Pro updated. I'm ready to acquire one if they come out with an update.
[automerge]1576686289[/automerge]
Games are single core. If you are crunching numbers or compressing video, you need as many cores as you can afford.