It wouldn't be irrelevant to Steve's Apple. You know it. Of course performance is king, but come on.
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Roundup: First-Look Impressions of the New Mac Pro
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Could be that future RAM sticks can be bigger, so Apple can't offer a 2TiB option but can promise it will support it. The older Mac Pros ended up supporting more RAM later than what Apple said originally.
Bummer about the Xeon processor.
I build scientific software and for the last 11 years my organization has been Mac Pro based. We’ve probably bought 50 trash-cans and 100 cheese graters over the years.
Today: we ordered a Linux box from System76 with a 32 core AMD Threadripper, 128GB of RAM, 2x 1TB NVMe drives and Nvidia RTX 2070 for... $6700.
That’s only $700 over the new 8-core Mac Pro... and (for our workflows of compiling and running highly scalable parallel software) it is about 4x the machine.
Also: next year we’ll probably be able to update our workstations with 64 core threadrippers for a minimal amount.
Yes: we lose out on OSX (which most of us love)... but we just can’t justify it anymore.
To be clear: I think Intel is more of an issue here than Apple. As Apple pointed out the new Mac Pro is in the same price range as other Xeon based workstations... but that’s completely ignoring the fact that AMD threadripper based workstations are blowing out Intel right now.
Apple needs to ditch Intel and go with Arm...
I build scientific software and for the last 11 years my organization has been Mac Pro based. We’ve probably bought 50 trash-cans and 100 cheese graters over the years.
Today: we ordered a Linux box from System76 with a 32 core AMD Threadripper, 128GB of RAM, 2x 1TB NVMe drives and Nvidia RTX 2070 for... $6700.
That’s only $700 over the new 8-core Mac Pro... and (for our workflows of compiling and running highly scalable parallel software) it is about 4x the machine.
Also: next year we’ll probably be able to update our workstations with 64 core threadrippers for a minimal amount.
Yes: we lose out on OSX (which most of us love)... but we just can’t justify it anymore.
To be clear: I think Intel is more of an issue here than Apple. As Apple pointed out the new Mac Pro is in the same price range as other Xeon based workstations... but that’s completely ignoring the fact that AMD threadripper based workstations are blowing out Intel right now.
Apple needs to ditch Intel and go with Arm...
But will it require a clutch replacement every 15K-30K miles?
I think the iMac Pro IS the midrange... at least for now. If you’ll remember the modular Mac Pro suddenly became a priority after the iMac Pro was announced and people who were waiting for a new tower were livid.
It’s possible that they just let the iMac Pro peter out and in a couple of years get replaced by an entry level Mac Pro. Or they could discover that some people will opt for the iMac Pro after all when given this top tier machine as a comparison and just keep sailing as they are now.
I'm curious, what workload do you run that requires such server farms but also is preferable to run on macOS, and also you use both CPUs and GPUs? My friends in ML + biotech research and I have always gone with heavy Nvidia GPUs + midrange Intel CPUs + Linux, but we were just students.
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The iMac Pro isn't upgradeable, so it's not a good option. Also, the thermals on it are a nightmare, and it has Meltdown-vulnerable (in other words, slower due to patches) CPUs.
Yeah, better ask your mechanic if they work on Macs. You’d hate to have to send this in to Apple whenever you need an oil change.
Lol. I'm making a Maserati joke in reference to the guy's avatar. What you and I said are applicable to the DuoSelect Quattroporte, though it's still a really nice car. Either a Mas dealer or some hard-to-find uncertified guy has to replace the clutch.
Yeah, but That doesn’t mean it’s not slotted as the midrange option. I was trying to say that in their product lineup there already appears to be a midrange performance option (however imperfect it may be), but it was the backlash to the introduction of that midrange option as a Pro option that kicked off this new design so they may simply be content to allow the iMac Pro to fill out the midrange gap until they see how things shake out.
You guys whining about price are not the audience. This is for super professionals who value reference quality displays and insane workflows.
This isn’t for browsing Instagram and Facebook. Price a real work machine and you’ll see this isn’t out of the ballpark.
One of my work machines is an HP workstation and retailed for $8,500, no screen.
This isn’t for browsing Instagram and Facebook. Price a real work machine and you’ll see this isn’t out of the ballpark.
One of my work machines is an HP workstation and retailed for $8,500, no screen.
It shows that some people who are always whining for Apple to make a Mac Pro don’t actually need or even know what a pro machine is.
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbre...pro-how-much-top-spec-price-estimate-ballpark
My personal guess is that a maxed out config could go close to 50,000 US$.
Depending on the application, the sweet spot is probably 12~16 cores using large enough chips that a future upgrade is possible, 128~256 GB, 1~2 high end GPUs, 2~4 TB SSD and that may cost closer to 12,000~20,000 US$?
Cheers,
Bernard
My personal guess is that a maxed out config could go close to 50,000 US$.
Depending on the application, the sweet spot is probably 12~16 cores using large enough chips that a future upgrade is possible, 128~256 GB, 1~2 high end GPUs, 2~4 TB SSD and that may cost closer to 12,000~20,000 US$?
Cheers,
Bernard
Exactly. Most of the bills for these are likely going to be paid by companies, not a single person.
The guys over at Disney/Pixar might have use for some of these, as an example.
Heh, I paid around $9K for my iMac Pro, and even I'm going "WTF?" ONE THOUSAND dollars for a monitor stand? Even a top of the line Ergotron VESA arm is only $250.
I saw it and hated it until I saw this post. huuuummm. now I love it!
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NOOOOOooo. make it BIGGER! it's a good day to bash or love Apple. choose your pistol
Well... I'm pretty sure the display is literally one of a kind. There's no way to justify the cost of that $20 piece of milled aluminum underneath it though.
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We asked for an upgradable tower... They gave us the modern reincarnation of the Avid workstation.
Multiphysics, unstructured-mesh, finite element simulation software. Doing that with GPUs is still mostly research at this point (although, depending on the physics, we can sometimes use GPUs a bit for acceleration).
This isn’t our “server farm” though: just our personal workstations. We currently have two clusters: 20k cores in one and 35k cores in the other (both Intel based for now). This fall we’re buying a 100k+ core cluster
Our software can scale to use all 100k of those cores...
We choose to use OSX for our workstations simply because it’s the nicest Unix-based OS out there. It’s great to be able to use Word and Emacs side-by-side
Also: Linux on laptops still sucks... so it’s great to be able to have the same environment on our workstations and laptops by using Mac Pros and MacBooks. For the foreseeable future we’ll now do Linux workstations... but we’ll stick with Macbooks for a long time yet...
Yep. Entry level on this thing should have been at least $1000 less than a comparable iMac Pro. But they're not even matching the iMac Pro base config.
I agree with the $8500 workstations. We usually budget $10k for our new workstations.
My problem with the new machine is not the “price” it’s the “value”. For $6k you can get a 32 core threadripper based workstation that is far-and-away better than the entry level Mac Pro (128GB of RAM, TBs of NVMe HDs, etc).
I expect the 28 core version of this new Mac Pro to be around $15k....
Nothing wrong with an expensive workstation: but when you’re putting down that kind of cash it would be dumb not to look around.
Edit: oh, and that value is going to quickly get worse. AMD will have their 64 core EPYC processors out later this year... and next year there will be 64 core threadripper based workstations that will run circles around these Mac pros...
Edit2: “for certain, CPU intensive, workflows”... like mine
Um... No. Since buying my iMac Pro, I've been regretting not going for the 2TB option. I only ever use the internal SSD RAID for working files, and regularly offload finished work to external HD Backup RAIDs. But I'm still constantly running out of free space (3.3GB available as I write this). I've had to buy an external SSD RAID as a secondary working drive because of this. But it's only half as fast as the internal SSD raid on the iMP.