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High-End Retina 5K iMac Benchmarked Faster Than Low-End Mac Pro

LordVic said:
not necessarily.

The problem with the Mac Pro is that it is based on Server class CPU's. which have generally been a generation behind their consumer oriented brethren.

The new iMac's are using the latest, and fastest CPU's Intel has ever released.

the Mac Pro's are based on the latest Xeon Server CPU's which aren't generally the fastest. There is nothing Apple can do for the Mac Pro until Intel releases their next Xeons or, re-engineers the Mac pro again to use Consumer level components (Haswell I5's)

Being that the Mac pro's are using Xeon CPU's for their ability to run hotter, for longer periods of time, theirs not really the Apples to Apples comparison between CPU's since the usage scenarios are different.
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I'm hoping they'll be embarrassed by their prosumer model beating their pro model.

At least they won't be able to wait three years to do something about it.
 
Is it just because the Xeons are old now? Otherwise, it seems pointless to have a crazy expensive quad-core Xeon in the low-end Mac Pro if it's slower than an i7. Seems like they might as well stick an i7 in the low-end Mac Pro in that case.
 
Renzatic said:
Admittedly, after all the buzzkill surrounding the Mac Mini, it's nice having some good news around here.
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This is true, but the Mac Mini will also continue to do well. 90% of the users will be pleased. But they won't post it :D
 
Does the top end iMac really have an i7-4770K? That will surely invite some overclocking (eventually), even though one probably can't overclock much farther on it.

Wait, is that iMac the first Mac desktop to include a K variant of an Intel cpu? What is this, Apple? Trying to regain some face after not including the desktop AMD R9-290X?
 
jameskachan said:
Who cares how fast processors are these days. With all that screen res, all the time, I think the graphics performance and real world rendering and photoshop tests are more key.
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Real world rendering benefits from faster processors.
 
I thought the high end iMac always hovered around the low end mac pros in terms of performance?
 
iBug2 said:
It doesn't have to be. Pushing pixels is very easy. It takes like 1/10th of the GPU's memory bandwidth to push the pixels to the screen, even at that resolution.
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Oh, you should know what I mean :)

I mean that if you take an equivalent scene, with massive amounts of Depth of Field, Ambient Occlusion, etc, can the new GPU keep up with 4x the resolution as compared to its 2013. Games is a fair basis of comparison. I am not talking about the last step of the pixel pipeline, per se.

I just want to see a head to head comparison somewhere of GPU intensive calculation.
 
borgusio said:
This makes quite clear why the mini is not quad and no upgradable ram anymore...

All in all a quad mini with discrete graphics will be as good as a Mac Pro for 80% of the pro users aiming at the basic pro
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No, the Mac Mini is not quad now b/c they moved to a socket that doesn't support any appropriate CPUs.
 
Had they upgraded the Mac Mini with new quad core processors, there would probably also be a high-end Mac Mini that would outperform the low-end Mac Pro. Probably a reason why dropped the quad core option this year.
 
Very happy they included the high-end i7 4GHz this time around; this really puts things in perspective.

Now would please someone give us some GPU benchmarks? The suspense is driving me mad, lol.
 
AlecZ said:
Is it just because the Xeons are old now? Otherwise, it seems pointless to have a crazy expensive quad-core Xeon in the low-end Mac Pro if it's slower than an i7. Seems like they might as well stick an i7 in the low-end Mac Pro in that case.
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well people buy xeons for reliability. For people who depend on their computer to do their work in a predictable amount of time, it's worth it to go for reliability over performance.
 
I know this is much of a comparison, but my 2009, Octo-core, 2.93HGz scored 15,000 on GB3 (64-bit). I'm actually pretty excited about the Retina (GPU benchmarks withstanding).
 
Not that surprising, the top BTO iMacs have outperformed base MP in the past, might even be true for some other mac models.

For $2999 they really should have a six core in the base MP, or if they're not willing, drop the price on the base model. $2999 for quad core is pretty ridiculous these days.
 
brentsg said:
No, the Mac Mini is not quad now b/c they moved to a socket that doesn't support any appropriate CPUs.
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Is that supposed to let Apple off the hook? If the socket is more limiting than the previous generation with little benefit, it sure doesn't look like it was a good idea to switch to that socket.
 
Are we even doing films in 5k yet? I thought 4k was the big push. I guess apple trying to get a head start on everyone.
 
milo said:
Not that surprising, the top BTO iMacs have outperformed base MP in the past, might even be true for some other mac models.

For $2999 they really should have a six core in the base MP, or if they're not willing, drop the price on the base model. $2999 for quad core is pretty ridiculous these days.
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It is. The reason for the price tag being $3K is the form factor and the silly 2xGPUs in the standard configuration. Now Apple is the position that they do not have a reasonable price tag on a 4-core, 1xGPU headless mac.
 
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