New Mac Pro: Simultaneous Real-Time 4K Effect Rendering, +900MB/s Read/Write

[leftoverbacon]

Keeping it safe

OK, how can I mount this thing in a rack case?

(Think audio and video pros who do remote/road work)

 

[JayCee842]

Most impressive tiny trashcan ever.

Can't believe your comment hasn't been removed. I made a similar comment referring the Mac Pro to a trash can and it got removed by mods. They sent be a message and blah blah blah.

On a related note, this machine is one heck of a beast. The innovation behind it is just stunning and unbelievable.

 

[laurim]

This computer will be great to do live shows. As a JV, I will be able to manage many video feeds at high definition in real time. But that is just me.

Not just you. I do live shows playing my motion graphics on huge LED walls and projection screens. I like to layer movies on top of each other, ProRes 422 on the bottom and 4444 on top. Many of my movies are more than 1920x1080 so it's great to see how much this computer can play!! And the vastly smaller unit means I can take it on the road with me.

 

[linuxcooldude]

People keep acting like being able to edit 4K video is impressive. Sorry to break it to you, but my 4-year old Windows PC which only cost $2000 to build easily handles 6 layers of 5K RED RAW (native, not transcoded) with 3D motion, color correction, and effects simultaneously in Premiere Pro without breaking a sweat. Being able to process 4K video isn't anything new or that hard to pull off. And to top it off, when I need extra storage I just throw another hard drive in the machine, something this machine just can't do.

The new Mac Pro looks pretty great, and Apple has certainly done some cool things with the engineering of the product, but from a technical point of view it really isn't that impressive. PCs with similar capabilities have been around for quite a while.

Don't really care what a PC could do 4 years ago, I'm more concerned on what the new Mac Pro can do NOW.

 

[lilo777]

Of course people tested its 4K video editing capabilities as soon as they got their hands on it. But it is far from a single purpose machine.

What are general workstation duties?

This is a Mac Pro that runs OSX and Mac software just like any Mac Pro before it.

Something like copy/compress/decompress 6GB folder, iMovie, ITunes encoding? BTW, according to MacWorld new 8 core MacPro is slower at these tasks than 15" MBP and quadcore iMac

 

[alvindarkness]

I couldnt tell if it was dropping frames or not, as ironically my macbook pro was dropping frames just playing the flash video.

 

[Asclepio]

who use FCX besides wedding camera men?

 

[lilo777]

who use FCX besides wedding camera men?

Wedding camera women?

 

[linuxcooldude]

Something like copy/compress/decompress 6GB folder, iMovie, ITunes encoding? BTW, according to MacWorld new 8 core MacPro is slower at these tasks than 15" MBP and quadcore iMac

I'm not going to buy a $3000+ machine for iMovie & iTunes encoding. The Mac Pro excels at software that is Multi-core & GPU Accelerated. Thats what it was designed for.

 

[Michael Scrip]

Something like copy/compress/decompress 6GB folder, iMovie, ITunes encoding? BTW, according to MacWorld new 8 core MacPro is slower at these tasks than 15" MBP and quadcore iMac

The new Mac Pro was the clear winner in half of the tests... the most strenuous tests. And the other test results were only tiny small percentage slower. Two seconds in some cases.

But remember... not all software tasks can take advantage of 8 cores.

And finally... notice how they titled the article... "New Mac Pro is the speedster we've been waiting for (finally)"

They were clearly impressed with it.

 

[hpe]

Graphics performance

ok, playback is fine. But what about the GPGPU performance of these things?

I se comparisons to W9000 cards and 2 of those would cost more than the new MP!

However, when you compare W9000 (released Aug 2012) to a new card, say R9 290X (released Oct 2013) you get:
card: R9 290X - W9000
core speed: 1000 MHz vs 975 MHz
memory: 4096MB vs 6144 MB
memory speed: 1250 MHz vs 1375MHz
memory bus: 512 Bit vs 384 Bit
memory bandwidth: 320GB/s vs 264GB/s
shader units: 2816 vs 2048
shader performance: 1830.4 vs 1331.2
OpenGL: 4.3 vs 4.2

so except for memory size, I call R9 290X the winner. Where do the D300, D500 and D700 stack up? As many have pointed out, they are not (at least not easily/cheaply) upgradeable so the choice become important to the people considering the new MP. Sure the new MP has two but still.

 

[Owensmouth]

But how well will it run Excel?

 

[laurim]

who use FCX besides wedding camera men?

Major films edited with Final Cut Pro:

The Rules of Attraction (2002)[6]
Full Frontal (2002)[6]
The Ring (2002)
Cold Mountain (2003) (Academy Award nominee for Best Editing – Walter Murch)[6]
Intolerable Cruelty (2003)
Open Water (2003)
Napoleon Dynamite (2004)
The Ladykillers (2004)
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)
Super Size Me (2004)
Corpse Bride (2005)
Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story (2005)
Happy Endings (2005)
Jarhead (2005)
Little Manhattan (2005)
Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)
300 (2007)[6]
Black Snake Moan (2006)
Happy Feet (2006)
Zodiac (2007)
The Simpsons Movie (2007)
No Country for Old Men (2007) (Academy Award nominee for Best Editing – Roderick Jaynes)
Reign Over Me (2007)
Youth Without Youth (2007)
Balls of Fury (2007)
Gabriel (2007)
Enchanted (2007)
Traitor (2008)
Burn After Reading (2008)
The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) (Academy Award nominee for Best Editing - Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall)
X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)
(500) Days of Summer (2009)
Where the Wild Things Are (2009)[6]
A Serious Man (2009)
Tetro (2009)
By the People: The Election of Barack Obama (2009)
Gamer (2009)
Eat, Pray, Love (2010)
True Grit (2010)
The Social Network (2010) (Academy Award winner for Best Editing - Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) (Academy Award winner for Best Editing - Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall)
Twixt (2011)
Courageous (2011)
John Carter (2012)
Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012)
Indie Game: The Movie (2012)

 

[chirpie]

Major films edited with Final Cut Pro:

The Rules of Attraction (2002)[6]
Full Frontal (2002)[6]
The Ring (2002)
Cold Mountain (2003) (Academy Award nominee for Best Editing – Walter Murch)[6]
Intolerable Cruelty (2003)
Open Water (2003)
Napoleon Dynamite (2004)
The Ladykillers (2004)
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)
Super Size Me (2004)
Corpse Bride (2005)
Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story (2005)
Happy Endings (2005)
Jarhead (2005)
Little Manhattan (2005)
Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)
300 (2007)[6]
Black Snake Moan (2006)
Happy Feet (2006)
Zodiac (2007)
The Simpsons Movie (2007)
No Country for Old Men (2007) (Academy Award nominee for Best Editing – Roderick Jaynes)
Reign Over Me (2007)
Youth Without Youth (2007)
Balls of Fury (2007)
Gabriel (2007)
Enchanted (2007)
Traitor (2008)
Burn After Reading (2008)
The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) (Academy Award nominee for Best Editing - Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall)
X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)
(500) Days of Summer (2009)
Where the Wild Things Are (2009)[6]
A Serious Man (2009)
Tetro (2009)
By the People: The Election of Barack Obama (2009)
Gamer (2009)
Eat, Pray, Love (2010)
True Grit (2010)
The Social Network (2010) (Academy Award winner for Best Editing - Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) (Academy Award winner for Best Editing - Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall)
Twixt (2011)
Courageous (2011)
John Carter (2012)
Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012)
Indie Game: The Movie (2012)

I think the post was a bash against "X" specifically. But nice list anyway. ^_^

 

[Michael Scrip]

ok, playback is fine. But what about the GPGPU performance of these things?

I se comparisons to W9000 cards and 2 of those would cost more than the new MP!

However, when you compare W9000 (released Aug 2012) to a new card, say R9 290X (released Oct 2013) you get:
card: R9 290X - W9000
core speed: 1000 MHz vs 975 MHz
memory: 4096MB vs 6144 MB
memory speed: 1250 MHz vs 1375MHz
memory bus: 512 Bit vs 384 Bit
memory bandwidth: 320GB/s vs 264GB/s
shader units: 2816 vs 2048
shader performance: 1830.4 vs 1331.2
OpenGL: 4.3 vs 4.2

You just listed a bunch of specs.

so except for memory size, I call R9 290X the winner. Where do the D300, D500 and D700 stack up? As many have pointed out, they are not (at least not easily/cheaply) upgradeable so the choice become important to the people considering the new MP. Sure the new MP has two but still.

Without benchmarks... it's difficult to declare a winner.

 

[Arcady]

This thing is too expensive. They hired americans to put $700 worth of parts in a case shaped like a trash can, and they want $4000 for it.

Nobody will buy this, except the 25 pros that haven't moved to PC already.

 

[laurim]

This thing is too expensive. They hired americans to put $700 worth of parts in a case shaped like a trash can, and they want $4000 for it.

Nobody will buy this, except the 25 pros that haven't moved to PC already.

Didn't know it only took 25 buyers to make the delivery date slip several months…

P.S. I am thinking about buying two of these

 

[Stephen123]

It's expendable, though with a hefty price tag and less elegant way than in the past.

True it's a bit more expensive to expand. But for the pro market, it's significant that it is much, much more expandable than any previous Mac.

 

[eltaurus]

OK OK ... video editing is not that heavy ... Real performance matters in 3d content creation tasks. But with one CPU its not that good for rendering .. and opencl will take time to start rendering ..Cuda is bit mature I wish it has nvidia GPU ... but no problem i will wait for next version of MP. until then i will built my own system.

3d rendering ... etc

 

[crazy dave]

ok, playback is fine. But what about the GPGPU performance of these things?

I se comparisons to W9000 cards and 2 of those would cost more than the new MP!

However, when you compare W9000 (released Aug 2012) to a new card, say R9 290X (released Oct 2013) you get:
card: R9 290X - W9000
core speed: 1000 MHz vs 975 MHz
memory: 4096MB vs 6144 MB
memory speed: 1250 MHz vs 1375MHz
memory bus: 512 Bit vs 384 Bit
memory bandwidth: 320GB/s vs 264GB/s
shader units: 2816 vs 2048
shader performance: 1830.4 vs 1331.2
OpenGL: 4.3 vs 4.2

so except for memory size, I call R9 290X the winner. Where do the D300, D500 and D700 stack up? As many have pointed out, they are not (at least not easily/cheaply) upgradeable so the choice become important to the people considering the new MP. Sure the new MP has two but still.

You're mistaking consumer card versus workstation card - the expense for a workstation card is more in the drivers and less in the hardware.

Consumer cards balance speed vs. cost with an emphasis on graphics and games. Workstation cards balance robustness with speed with much of the cost going into drivers. The result is that workstation cards are often much more expensive for little, if any gain in raw power (in terms of number of cores). However, the result of having more stable and powerful drivers give the workstation cards a huge edge in workstation tasks. Further tests reveal that workstation cards a better at gaming than consumer cards are at delivering on workstation tasks, but workstation cards are much, much, much more expensive.

-------

This seems to go with a lot of the discussion surrounding other features like the CPU which is especially puzzling since the Intel Xeon X5 processors are the latest workstation processors from Intel and will be what future workstations from HP, Dell, etc ... will be using as well. Again workstation CPUs are not necessarily directly comparable to consumer CPU variants. They have different requirements and different strengths. They emphasize different attributes and again workstation CPUs tend to be more costly for the power.

------

Finally, why are people saying nothing is upgradeable? especially to the point where people are actually, weirdly, defending the machine not being upgradeable? The only reason given on both accounts seems to be "because it's Apple". But the SSD and RAM are definitely upgradeable and everything about the CPU and GPU seems to suggest that they are upgradeable as well. Some of the review have mentioned that the GPUs are upgradeable.

However, we should probably wait for a teardown to see how upgradeable these systems really are and if Apple has made it excruciatingly difficult then that is a point against the system as a workstation - though not for everyone. However, at the moment I've not seen any evidence that they aren't upgradeable ... unless someone can point it out?

 

[darkgoob]

In before the "I can build a PC for cheaper" comments

I can build this computer cheaper. In fact I built last year in my personal CNC machine shop and chip fab in my garage: every component of this computer. I already have three of these at my house. They are cool I made them. I made the new Mac Pro, did I mention that?

 

[saberahul]

In before the "I can build a PC for cheaper" comments

You beat me to it

 

[darkgoob]

Finally, why are people saying nothing is upgradeable? especially to the point where people are actually, weirdly, defending the machine not being upgradeable? The only reason given on both accounts seems to be "because it's Apple". But the SSD and RAM are definitely upgradeable and everything about the CPU and GPU seems to suggest that they are upgradeable as well. Some of the review have mentioned that the GPUs are upgradeable.

However, we should probably wait for a teardown to see how upgradeable these systems really are and if Apple has made it excruciatingly difficult then that is a point against the system as a workstation - though not for everyone. However, at the moment I've not seen any evidence that they aren't upgradeable ... unless someone can point it out?

"Upgradeable" assumes the parts to upgrade it will be available. The old Mac Pro technically had an upgradeable CPU board, but Apple never offered any upgrades for them!

Yeah the GPU boards and SSD board are removable but so is the GPU of an iMac. Would you call the GPU of an iMac "upgradeable"? No, because you can't get the parts!

This thing is designed so you have to buy a new one to upgrade it! That's the WHOLE POINT.

 

[\-V-/]

This thing is too expensive. They hired americans to put $700 worth of parts in a case shaped like a trash can, and they want $4000 for it.

Nobody will buy this, except the 25 pros that haven't moved to PC already.

I hope you realize that blatantly making things up does not make them true.

 

[inscrewtable]

If something is placed on top of the machine's vent hole, like a book, the Mac Pro will shut itself off before any damage can occur.

How? because it gets too hot, or because there is a proximity sensor of some kind.