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

linuxcooldude said:
Unigine Heaven benchmark was designed to test gaming cards, not so much workstation graphics.

Workstation graphics, while they can play games, are focused on different set of computations then gaming cards do.

So basically, your benchmarking on how well a workstation card will play in games. Instead of how well it will work in the various programs designed for scientific, mathematics, 3D rendering and so on.
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Oh I agree a "workstation" will not be optimized for games.
I think most Apple fans would love it to be still very good.

Let's be honest for a moment, if the MacPro scorched at Gaming also, it would make many Apple fans go wild as it's what's been looked forward to for literally decades.

And, what pretty much almost killed Apple, whilst the PC was and still is THE Business computer around the world, change the graphics card and it becomes the best gaming computer around the world.
 
Piggie said:
change the graphics card and it becomes the best gaming computer around the world.
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Changing the graphic card is not the only hurtle one has to overcome. Microsoft uses its own proprietary DirectX for most of the games on the PC rather then OpenGL. Move most games to OpenGL and you can run them on any platform. So that means a limited selection of games compared to the PC platform.
 
Matt Leaf said:
Fantastic stuff, but in my mind the inclusion of a stock 256gb drive nagates any of the internal write speeds. You'd barely have enough for all your apps and etc on a drive that small. Even 1TB is a compromise. Really looking forward to the second or third iteration of the nMP when it comes with stock options of 2 or 3 tb. That's a fun drive to use for rendering, but currently you'd need external HD's and really you'd want those to be as fast as the internal, or close to it, in order to experience the benefits. I'm probably wrong about that, but either way I'd still want a much larger internal to match all this performance...
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But with TBII, external options can be every bit as fast as anything you could put inside. Why not get the stock storage option and choose exactly what you need for external storage?
 
bluespark said:
But with TBII, external options can be every bit as fast as anything you could put inside. Why not get the stock storage option and choose exactly what you need for external storage?
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Sometimes I wish Apple would just make a shell and then I'll put all the cards that I want in. Modular and future proof would be nice also
 
SimonTheSoundMa said:
Avid say Apple are 5+ years late to the game. Hello Symphony Nitris!
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Avid......."you must buy HP z820 if you want our storage to work properly"....Media Composer is great software, but it still imports and exports video with just one CPU thread.
 
osofast240sx said:
Sometimes I wish Apple would just make a shell and then I'll put all the cards that I want in. Modular and future proof would be nice also
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Heh. Probably completely impractical and unfeasible, but I got this image of a second tower (of course it would need a larger diameter), same external finish, that you connect to the nMP via Tbolt2. Inside is a central spindle with mounting slots around it so you add your cards like vanes radiating around a spine.

Again, probably no way to make that work in practice but I liked the visual.
 
pgwalsh said:
I can only imagine. While I built one, I never had the stability I wanted. Plugins like U-he Diva need a lot of CPU for full quality and multiple instances. As I'm only a hobbyist, I like to use the machine for other things as well, but my iMac doesn't cut it and find myself maxing out the cpu too easily.
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What kinds of things are you doing to max out your CPU?

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osofast240sx said:
Sometimes I wish Apple would just make a shell and then I'll put all the cards that I want in. Modular and future proof would be nice also
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Why not just go get one of those stickers that comes with apple computers and slap it on your DIY pc and call it a day?
 
flat five said:
for that whole plan to work out, the computers have to be upgradable.. most of the the tinkerers buy used/refurbs and replace the GPUs and sometimes the CPUs..
a three year old mac pro isn't going to be worth much on the used market if it's stuck at the original configuration.
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Oh really? eBay 3 year old MacBook Pro or MacBook Air and compare resale value to a PC laptop..
 
MagnusVonMagnum said:
Speed alone isn't everything. No internal PCI expansion = DOA for many people.
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I don't think we've ever managed to get an answer out of people that say this. What is the fuss about it being internal?:confused:

I'd assume if your job as a pro required the use of the equipment it shouldn't matter if its in the chassis or zip tied to your housecat, it's a friggin tool.
 
NT1440 said:
You're right, no one on the planet uses FCP, and nothing about this is impressive in any way whatsoever. :rolleyes:

Explain to me what separates your "real" editing from the pros that happen to use a different program that the one you prefer?

Not to mention that the onus to optimize software is on the developers end/
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Agreed... the other guy is just trolling.
 
Right that's it. This thread has exhausted itself. As it will the majority of all the readers' bank accounts ... Let's wind it up. And get the next topic uploaded please. Thanks :)
 
DJJAZZYJET said:
Reads are always faster than writes.


What could be related to that are the different SSD manufactures. It seems to have plagued every Apple SSD equated product, for some reason Apple buys two different SSD's from different companies, and they both perform at different rates, making some macs faster and some slower. This happened a lot with the macbook air.
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Sorry, I mistyped...

They are reporting faster writes than reads-- thus my confusion... Not by a lot, but even the fact that they're close is odd to me.
 
No speakers??

Sorry, this MP isn't for me. For $4,000, I expected built-in speakers! :D:D
 
NT1440 said:
I don't think we've ever managed to get an answer out of people that say this. What is the fuss about it being internal?:confused:

I'd assume if your job as a pro required the use of the equipment it shouldn't matter if its in the chassis or zip tied to your housecat, it's a friggin tool.
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Well, for one thing Thunderbolt is still far slower than the fastest PCI standards and newer ones are on the way. Unless I missed something and the new Mac Pro has multiple independent Thunderbolt controllers (not just ports), it becomes even more limited once you max out your only 20GBps Thunderbolt channel. Now maybe I personally don't need that, but from the threads I've read there are plenty of Pros that do use a ton of expansion and now they'll have to either buy new external ones or an external PCI case that will be hampered in bandwidth compared to even their OLD Mac Pro. So tell me again how that is an improvement rather than me having to explain WHY it's bad as I just did?

If Apple offered a traditional Mac Pro case with all the upgrades the new Mac Pro has plus the internal expansion options for about the same price, do you expect me to believe there is even ONE person here that would buy this trash can design instead of the traditional tower case with identical specs for the same price? I don't think so. Even if you never use internal expansion, it's nice to know it's there JUST IN CASE you do. USB4 comes out sooner than expected? Plug in a card and you're good to go. Thunderbolt 3 comes out? You could add it with a card. You can't add ANYTHING faster than a 20Gbps Thunderbolt channel to the new Mac Pro PERIOD. You're done.

The worst thing is that is ALL comes down to a stinking CASE and matching motherboard. Do you know how much a case costs? Like NOTHING. $100 will get you a DAMN NICE ONE. Do you think it would have cost them much to have a motherboard with PCI expansion added to the design? Of course not. So therein lies my contention. They could have EASILY offered BOTH the new trash can case and a traditional tower and let the user pick the one they want/need. There would be no arguments then and very quickly no doubt that the traditional tower would win hands down over the trash can. Ironically, it would probably be cheaper as well since it wouldn't need that custom design setup to work and the graphics card would be replaceable with a traditional connector to boot.

There is NO down side WHAT-SO-EVER to this other than the fact it would highlight just how bad a move this was for Apple (kind of like how having a PowerMac style consumer "XMac" would show how little demand there TRULY is for the iMac if a similar priced alternative were available). Apple doens't want to admit that STYLE doesn't mean CRAP to power users and professionals. This isn't a freaking iPhone for god's sake but THAT is how they are treating it. And the only people I see getting uber excited over it are the very people that likely won't be buying one. They just want it for the cool factor and how they wish they could afford to drop $3k+ on one just to show it off to their high school friends. :rolleyes:
 
As far as how many TBolt2 channels the nMP has, as opposed to how many ports, I don't know more than anyone else (or so it seems thus far since all I see here is supposition) but I wonder: from what I've read (at anandtech, for example), a single TBolt2 channel is just enough to drive a 4K display (or be roughly the same as four PCIe channels). So, if the nMP can drive three 4K displays at once, plus do whatever else, does it not make sense that it must have at least three full TBolt 2 channels?

Just wondering.
 
MagnusVonMagnum said:
Well, for one thing Thunderbolt is still far slower than the fastest PCI standards and newer ones are on the way. Unless I missed something and the new Mac Pro has multiple independent Thunderbolt controllers (not just ports), it becomes even more limited once you max out your only 20GBps Thunderbolt channel. Now maybe I personally don't need that, but from the threads I've read there are plenty of Pros that do use a ton of expansion and now they'll have to either buy new external ones or an external PCI case that will be hampered in bandwidth compared to even their OLD Mac Pro. So tell me again how that is an improvement rather than me having to explain WHY it's bad as I just did?

If Apple offered a traditional Mac Pro case with all the upgrades the new Mac Pro has plus the internal expansion options for about the same price, do you expect me to believe there is even ONE person here that would buy this trash can design instead of the traditional tower case with identical specs for the same price? I don't think so. Even if you never use internal expansion, it's nice to know it's there JUST IN CASE you do. USB4 comes out sooner than expected? Plug in a card and you're good to go. Thunderbolt 3 comes out? You could add it with a card. You can't add ANYTHING faster than a 20Gbps Thunderbolt channel to the new Mac Pro PERIOD. You're done.
:
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The Mac Pro presumably has more than one Thunderbolt channel, as the latest chipsets (according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface) ) support 2 and 4 channels. Also there is a 6 device limit per channel, yet the new Mac Pro supports 6 devices on each port (though perhaps that's a limitation of the specs of each port and not the protocol or whatever). Anyway, I don't know if there are six 20 Gb thunderbolt channels, but I will swallow my iMac if there are less than two :)

You're not going to plug a Thunderbolt 3 card into anything anyway since it doesn't work that way- just like you can't plug in a PCIe expansion chassis into an old PCI-X PC- I mean there would've been Thunderbolt 1 or 2 PCIe cards if that were the case. You may have a point with USB 4, but that is probably still going to be a subset of Thunderbolt 2's capability, or so far from release you'd be looking at a new computer anyway. I think Thunderbolt 2 has enough bandwidth for just about every pro device that currently uses a PCI card, with the exception of a high end video card - which Apple already includes, and could possibly be upgraded internally anyway. Do you have any examples of high bandwidth cards that would be hampered by Thunderbolt 2? I'm interested to know what they are.
 
phpmaven said:
The target market for this box doesn't care about internal expansion the way the average consumer does. Most pros are used to having all kinds of external equipment in their shops. I doubt they care much about this.
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Exactly. Show me a fancy internal card for a "pro" that doesn't have something hanging out of the back of it anyway... But now you can move that device to another Mac Pro (or your MacBook Pro!), probably without even shutting down the computer.
 
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