Roundup: First-Look Impressions of the New Mac Pro

[albebaubles]

1. iMac (pro). If I work a whole day on a machine and I have two monitors connected, they need to be identical for ergonomical reasons.

Really? that's nonsensical. guess you've never used a laptop with an external display at the same time?
[doublepost=1559752206][/doublepost]

I haven't read ALL 400 posts here, but I don't see much love for the "trashcan" Mac Pro. Am I the only one that liked it? It took getting used to and is now quite outdated, but I'll probably keep upgrading mine and keep it for several more years. The iMac Pro is tempting, but I use professional calibrated displays for my photo, video, and film work, so I don't want to move to an all-in-one. After years with towers (G3, G4, G5, Intel, etc) I missed just jamming cards and hard drives in at first, but I learned to work with the trashcan and it has fit my needs for a while. Plus the prices on all those afore-mentioned computers were much easier for my budget to handle. The size and weight of the trashcan also allowed it to be moved around quickly and easily on film sets (and it's kinda pretty). I'm not complaining about the new Mac Pro- it should fill a niche for a lot of people, and I'm sure it's worth the money for them, but I do wish there was a slightly lower price for entry. Maybe there will be by the time I need to trade in the sexy little trashcan.

I finally retired my trashcan last week for a new MBP. I liked the machine a lot, but it has always run hot.

 

[0388631]

First Catalina hackintosh was on KVM:
https://passthroughpo.st/first-successful-catalina-hackintosh-install-was-in-qemu-kvm/

Edit: on AMD no less:
https://twitter.com/FoxletFox/status/1135724779644817409

VMs tend to be slow. What's so special about a slow jittery VM of macOS?
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NVME Samsung 970 EVO is $100

Pro, not Evo.

 

[Nugget]

VMs tend to be slow. What's so special about a slow jittery VM of macOS?

You are misrepresenting this situation. The KVM with pass-through GPU approach for running a Hackintosh is quite performant, nearly indistinguishable from running on bare metal for the same hardware.

You still have to live in fear of every software update and the usual Hackintosh edges are ragged (iMessage support, etc). But poor performance is not a valid criticism of the approach.

 

[LordVic]

VMs tend to be slow. What's so special about a slow jittery VM of macOS?
[doublepost=1559752394][/doublepost]
Pro, not Evo.

Thanks for the correction. The 970 Pro no longer comes in 256gb size that I can find. But the 512Gb version is $160

With that change, total price comes to about $3100, with double the storage capacity at least of the Mac Pro.

not really changing the value proposition all that much.

 

[balloz]

VMs tend to be slow.

Hey look, guys. He doesn't know about IOMMU virtualization

 

[dandeco]

Wow, does that new Mac Pro look cool. It's obvious Apple was indeed listening to us! Look at all those PCI slots, the powerful graphics, and going with a rectangular tower shape reminiscent of the PowerMac G5/original Mac Pro. I'd love to get one when it comes out, if only I had lots and lots of spare dough. Oh well, the 2018 Mac Mini would seem suffice enough for me once I have to replace my 2012 quad-core Mini.

 

[al4nd]

Anyone saying this is priced too high should go to HP or Dell and price out a similarly-powered workstation. A Precision 7920 with about as similar specs as I could manage in a short time is $6,101.90 with Ubuntu (more if you want Windows) - this isn't even quite comparable to the Mac Pro from a design and performance standpoint.

The point is that this is priced competitively with other workstations. What Apple is missing is a Mac Pro that's not workstation class (something using i7/i9 processors and normal RAM) but this is fairly priced.

Which is what I want, an expandable machine with good thermals that is not workstations class. I can get them from HP and Dell, but I would prefer to use Mac OS

 

[jlocker]

https://www.apple.com/feedback/

 

[0388631]

Thanks for the correction. The 970 Pro no longer comes in 256gb size that I can find. But the 512Gb version is $160

With that change, total price comes to about $3100, with double the storage capacity at least of the Mac Pro.

not really changing the value proposition all that much.

Honestly, those prices will seem expensive by 4Q anyway. They keep going down!
[doublepost=1559757006][/doublepost]

You are misrepresenting this situation. The KVM with pass-through GPU approach for running a Hackintosh is quite performant, nearly indistinguishable from running on bare metal for the same hardware.

You still have to live in fear of every software update and the usual Hackintosh edges are ragged (iMessage support, etc). But poor performance is not a valid criticism of the approach.

Thanks. I was under the impression it was no different than VMWare Workstation.

 

[jlocker]

Honestly, those prices will seem expensive by 4Q anyway. They keep going down!
[doublepost=1559757006][/doublepost]
Thanks. I was under the impression it was no different than VMWare Workstation.

Makes me wonder down the road if Apple will use the Security chip T2 down the road to lock down the OS X operating system, That is why i buy a Mac so i do not have to worry and keep upgrades to Apps and OS working smoothly over time.

 

[jmassa]

Wow. I used to think folks on Mac forums understood technology. Guess I'm mistaken. Some of you do, but holy cow, the rest of you?

Do you know what a workstation is? Do you know the difference between Xeon and Core CPUs? Do you even know what ECC RAM is?

Apple has built a kick-ass workstation here, at an incredible price (it's about damn time). This is NOT an iMac Pro sans display. It's in a completely different category. This Mac finally competes with the likes of HP and Dell workstations, and bests them in many ways (i.e. gobs of Thunderbolt ports, 10Gb ethernet, "Afterburner" accelerator card option, MPX module options, etc.).

Run on over to hp.com, and custom configure yourself an HP Z4 (single socket Xeon CPU box) with identical specs to Apple's entry level config (or as close an equivalent as possible) and then ask yourself if you have any clue how much workstations cost!

I did that very thing... Matched up each component to exact or near exact items in new Mac Pro. The result? HP Z4 = aprox $7200.00.

Time to educate yourselves.

Well, is not just a question of price, I'm a computer systems engineer and I can build something similar at half the price or less. But the point is that the base configuration price put out of the game to many audiovisuals facilities like mine, we don't need such a huge system, there's nothing between Mac Mini and the Mac Pro to deal with, I mean, something without monitor not an iMac, a desktop workstation.

And well I can tell you about color grading monitors, is an insult to ask $1000 just for a base, even a good VESA dual monitor arm costs 3 times less, and where are SDI inputs and all the functionality of a cinema/broadcast monitor to ask for that price? Do you want data?, 10 true real bits, 95% DCI P3, 100% SRGB and 600 nits peak, $400, you can get 100% DCI P3 4K/5K monitors about $1000-$1300. Please think twice before telling that we don't know about tech.

I'll tell you a story, "Silicon Graphics", the best grahic computers for 3D and VFX on the 90's, they fell down, what was the reason? Their prices were rising up with same excuse that Tim Cook was justifying the price of the new Mac Pro, investment in high technology design. I'm sorry but Steve Jobs designed products for the people, not for the elites, it seems that Apple has lost its track. You can't start a base configuration + monitor on $12,000, even if it's a fair price on what you get. You can not double the price of the base configuration suddenly. Old Mac Pro + LG 5k Ultrafine about $4,300 , compared to $12,000, 3X the price, you're not right, it's an insane decision with not so clear price/value. When you start selling less volume with highger prices every other day, your are digging your own grave.

 

[0388631]

Makes me wonder down the road if Apple will use the Security chip T2 down the road to lock down the OS X operating system, That is why i buy a Mac so i do not have to worry and keep upgrades to Apps and OS working smoothly over time.

Lock it down so you're forced to buy only their hardware?

 

[jmassa]

How much are the optional wheels? I need to start saving.

I think the Ferrari wheels are gonna be a deal compared to Mac Pro wheels for sure.

 

[0388631]

Thanks for the correction. The 970 Pro no longer comes in 256gb size that I can find. But the 512Gb version is $160

With that change, total price comes to about $3100, with double the storage capacity at least of the Mac Pro.

not really changing the value proposition all that much.

One thing to note about the X570 boards is the VRMs are higher quality than X470 and X370, and are much, much beefier. Makes me wonder what AMD has in store in the coming months.

 

[jmassa]

I'm glad the 2% got what they've been wanting! Good job, apple.

You got it!

 

[Zdigital2015]

The CPU is a bit of a hard one to price out for comparisons since it's not retail available yet. But if we compare it to the previous offerings in the same range, I expect pricing to be about $900-$1000.

the previous generation comparable product, the Xeon E5-2667 V3 is an 8c/16t CPU at 3.2-3.6ghz and 135w. And it's retail is $900ish currently.

I believe that this new chip is the replacement for that one, so will likely fit into the similar retail position. Though will keep an eye on the chip pricing when its launched.

just saw @Zdigital2015 post that is probably even more accurate than my assumption.


So given $900 for the CPU
Motherboard is also a bit hard since we're talking about server class board. But there's a few that would fit this build at around $600
Throw in any $100 cooler
16GB of DDR4 memory w/ ECC is about $130
NVME Samsung 970 EVO is $100
Radeon RX Vega 64 is $400
pick your own case... I've priced mine at $500... because why not
1600w PSU (EVGA) $330

Total Price: $3,060

So utlimately, the question is and this will be personal to each person. IS Apple's design of their case, MacOS and their service/support worth about 100% of the cost of the rest of the hardware?

Not to start a flame war, but that is not a $600 motherboard, that's a $2000 motherboard. Apple uses the same motherboard whether its 8-cores or 28-cores, so there is a bit of unfairness to those with a an 8-core or 12-core, but it is what it is.

The Asus Dominus for the 28-Core W-3175X goes for $1800 and it isn't as big or as sophisticated as the Mac Pro's motherboard.

Source: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E168131...nus&cm_re=Asus_dominus-_-13-119-192-_-Product

 

[handsome pete]

Low budget?

https://www.red.com/shot-on-red

Arri Alexa XT: https://shotonwhat.com/cameras/arri-alexa-xt-camera

Arri Arriflex: https://shotonwhat.com/cameras/arri-arriflex-series-cameras

RED: https://shotonwhat.com/cameras/red-digital-cinema-cameras

To be fair, even though film may be listed on Red's site, you have no idea to what capacity their camera was used. Just pulling Captain Marvel on their page as an example, that was shot with Arri, Panavision, and Red cameras.

I'm guessing he was more alluding to Red being popular on the indie circuit. Though it does have its big budget bone fides.

 

[HurtinMinorKey]

With what specs?

Dell's offering for similar specs is around $5,000 USD. The same machine also is configurable for up to 3TB of memory, 112 threads (56 cores), and quad GPUs as well. This config blows past the $100k mark, however.

It's going to be interesting to see what the maxed out Mac Pro will come to. I have a feeling it will be a fair bit more than the $35,000 predicted.

You can make a Threadripper 2950 (16 cores) system with ECC. Combine whatever GPU you want (unless you have a specialized need, gaming GPU will kill the 7100), and you have a monster that kills the base Mac Pro for ~$3000 easy. Even if you didn't want it to build it yourself, you could probably find something close to this through Alienware for only a few hundred more.

 

[0388631]

To be fair, even though film may be listed on Red's site, you have no idea to what capacity their camera was used. Just pulling Captain Marvel on their page as an example, that was shot with Arri, Panavision, and Red cameras.

I'm guessing he was more alluding to Red being popular on the indie circuit. Though it does have its big budget bone fides.

His post is also anecdotal in nature without any factual basis.

 

[LordVic]

Not to start a flame war, but that is not a $600 motherboard, that's a $2000 motherboard. Apple uses the same motherboard whether its 8-cores or 28-cores, so there is a bit of unfairness to those with a an 8-core or 12-core, but it is what it is.

The Asus Dominus for the 28-Core W-3175X goes for $1800 and it isn't as big or as sophisticated as the Mac Pro's motherboard.

Source: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813119192?Description=Asus dominus&cm_re=Asus_dominus-_-13-119-192-_-Product

Do we know exactly what the Mac Pro motherboard has/looks like yet? I'm unable to make a reasonable guess on it without knowing those details.

For example, Many of the board I've looked at for these CPU's, are Dual socket boards. Which vastly changes things regarding costs.

most of my judgement right now is reserved until these things do get into the wild and get taken apart to see exactly what Apple has used. But you don't need a $2000 motherboard for most of the functionality.

 

[neuropsychguy]

Which is what I want, an expandable machine with good thermals that is not workstations class. I can get them from HP and Dell, but I would prefer to use Mac OS

Me too but that's not this machine.

 

[jmassa]

Not to start a flame war, but that is not a $600 motherboard, that's a $2000 motherboard. Apple uses the same motherboard whether its 8-cores or 28-cores, so there is a bit of unfairness to those with a an 8-core or 12-core, but it is what it is.

The Asus Dominus for the 28-Core W-3175X goes for $1800 and it isn't as big or as sophisticated as the Mac Pro's motherboard.

Source: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813119192?Description=Asus dominus&cm_re=Asus_dominus-_-13-119-192-_-Product

Well may be that's the problem, Apple has to offer 2 different sytems, why? They didn't realize that workstations for fim/broadcast work heavily on the gpu, and over 12/16 cpu cores you don't see too much difference in that systems, lets say Davinci Resolve for color grading, so I'm not gonna need 28 cores. So offer 2 systems with 2 different mother boards. They got wrong analyzing who are their customers. They have to offer a $3400 aprox. option for Mac Pro. And forget about the monitor, plenty of options for 10 bit 4k/5k, 6K is in the middle of no where, you work 4k film or 8K in major film productions, but not 6K...

 

[Zdigital2015]

Do we know exactly what the Mac Pro motherboard has/looks like yet? I'm unable to make a reasonable guess on it without knowing those details.

For example, Many of the board I've looked at for these CPU's, are Dual socket boards. Which vastly changes things regarding costs.

most of my judgement right now is reserved until these things do get into the wild and get taken apart to see exactly what Apple has used. But you don't need a $2000 motherboard for most of the functionality.

The motherboard for the Mac Pro is clearly visible in numerous pictures here - https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/ - which show the eight (8) PCIe expansion slots, the LGA socket, the 12 DIMM slots on the backside of the motherboard, the NAND module slots, the MPX module for the Vega II GPUs, the PCIe expansion extension that provides the 475 watts of power for the MPX modules, the Northbridge, the two SATA connectors at the top along with an AUX power port and USB-A (diagnostics, comms, ?), the fans, the PSU at the bottom, the Afterburner card, the T2 chip and the Thunderbolt 3/USB-A PCIe card in the top PCIe slot.

As far as what the Mac Pro has, it's all there for you or anyone else to see, so I'm not sure what you mean by "see exactly what Apple has used"? The PCH/Northbridge is going to be the C621 as that is the only chipset that is on Intel's ARK that is compatible with the Xeon W-32XX-Series CPUs. There is also Titan Ridge TB3 controller somewhere for the two TB3 ports on the top of the case. Beyond that is the usual assortment of support chips for 802.11AC, Bluetooth 5.0 and two 10GbE ports.

Regardless, at the end of the day, you need a $2000 motherboard to deal with a 28-core CPU. The W-3275M is not at all dissimilar from the W-3175X. The 3275 has a slower base clock speed, has a 50w lower TDP, but uses faster DDR4 DRAM, has 16 extra lanes of PCIe 3.0 and can handle 4x the amount of installed memory (2TB versus 512GB). The W-3275M is essentially a Xeon Platinum 8280M stripped of its OPI link/SMP capability with an extra 16 lanes of PCIe 3 grafted on.

To drive a 28-core CPU, you are going to need a motherboard as capable as the one Apple designed. Is it overkill for an 8-core CPU? Yes, it is. But Apple wasn't making two motherboards. The upside is that the MB can support from 8-28 cores and users can upgrade in the future without fear that it won't work. The downside is that if you only get 8 cores, you're paying for that motherboard whether you ever upgrade or not. Apple made that choice for users, like it or not, it is what it is.

 

[jmassa]

The motherboard for the Mac Pro is clearly visible in numerous pictures here - https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/ - which show the eight (8) PCIe expansion slots, the LGA socket, the 12 DIMM slots on the backside of the motherboard, the NAND module slots, the MPX module for the Vega II GPUs, the PCIe expansion extension that provides the 475 watts of power for the MPX modules, the Northbridge, the two SATA connectors at the top along with an AUX power port and USB-A (diagnostics, comms, ?), the fans, the PSU at the bottom, the Afterburner card, the T2 chip and the Thunderbolt 3/USB-A PCIe card in the top PCIe slot.

As far as what the Mac Pro has, it's all there for you or anyone else to see, so I'm not sure what you mean by "see exactly what Apple has used"? The PCH/Northbridge is going to be the C621 as that is the only chipset that is on Intel's ARK that is compatible with the Xeon W-32XX-Series CPUs. There is also Titan Ridge TB3 controller somewhere for the two TB3 ports on the top of the case. Beyond that is the usual assortment of support chips for 802.11AC, Bluetooth 5.0 and two 10GbE ports.

Regardless, at the end of the day, you need a $2000 motherboard to deal with a 28-core CPU. The W-3275M is not at all dissimilar from the W-3175X. The 3275 has a slower base clock speed, has a 50w lower TDP, but uses faster DDR4 DRAM, has 16 extra lanes of PCIe 3.0 and can handle 4x the amount of installed memory (2TB versus 512GB). The W-3275M is essentially a Xeon Platinum 8280M stripped of its OPI link/SMP capability with an extra 16 lanes of PCIe 3 grafted on.

To drive a 28-core CPU, you are going to need a motherboard as capable as the one Apple designed. Is it overkill for an 8-core CPU? Yes, it is. But Apple wasn't making two motherboards. The upside is that the MB can support from 8-28 cores and users can upgrade in the future without fear that it won't work. The downside is that if you only get 8 cores, you're paying for that motherboard whether you ever upgrade or not. Apple made that choice for users, like it or not, it is what it is.

What every computer engineer knows is that if you try to design something for every kind of uses you get it wrong. You don't need a server motherboard for a workstation. Why to pay for something that you may use someday?, that's a wrong decision from Apple, what CTO decided that? You are gonna lose customers doing that, on a budget I don't pay for servers in my company if I need workstations, I don't pay $3,000 more for a "just in case", seriously Apple...

 

[td2243]

Low budget?
https://www.red.com/shot-on-red

Yep, many of those films are probably between 1-5mil. That’s not big budget at all and considered Tier 1.

You said “most” are using RED camera. That just isn’t the case at least in my experience.