The Mac Pro Criticism

[Tesselator]

Yeah, anyone who says "anything server class is not going to need 12 cores" is probably talking about a file server - even including many web server setups.

There used to be a time 15 or more years back when this was pretty much the only case. All server boxes were underpowered or average-powered with loads of drive bays and lots of local-bus slots (for NICs and yet more storage). In those days Workstations were typically faster and more robust than Servers.

 

[echoout]

Yep, a lot of the audio chaps have precisely the same problem - they were crying out for more PCIe slots, more internal storage, and please please please make them rackmountable. None that I know of care two hoots what the thing looks like: that's what machine rooms are there for.

I've already posted this once today, but I'll bung it in here for a laugh:

Image

Lots of nice neat PCs and extraneous hardware, then Magma expansion chassis to try and cope with the limited slots in the current shape MPs, which themselves have to be dumped on shelves as there's no other way of mounting them. Yes this tube thing will take up less space, but it'll still be dumped rather than tidily racked away.

In my own rig, I love the way my PCs slide out on rails, I flip the lid off, change things and slide them back in. Crawling around unplugging and shouting at the MP is a pain.

On the other hand, I'm not a detractor in the sense I am muchly relieved that the nMP has arrived at all. Yes I'd love it to have more power (to be the quantum leap the older ones were in their time), but I'm just glad the pro market isn't entirely forgotten in this world of iThings.... will wait to see the prices to find out if my studio will remain Mac-centric though... as others have said, "not being able" to afford one is very different from "choosing not to".

Thanks for the level-headed perspective. I'm in wait-and-see mode on the MP. Monday was enough to make me place an order on a z820 today and see what the future brings on the Apple front. I've lived with Thunderbolt for a year and can't imagine doing it any longer for my motion design work. Still depend on my MBP and I'll be back after this form factor matures.

 

[Tutor]

Where do Apple and Mac Pro users stand on OpenCL vs. CUDA for GPGPU computing?

Apple and Mac Pro users aren't and haven't been sending a clear, unified message to software developers to favor Open CL over CUDA. Thus, unless the newly announced 2013/2014 Mac Pros sell like hotcakes because they are reasonably priced, the new Mac Pros probably won't significantly affect the status quo.

I. Current Mac Pros have a mixture of ATI and Nvidia Cards, such as GT 7800, GT 120 or ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB GDDR5, tho' MacRumors threads (even those covering Apple's latest announcement) would tend to indicate an affinity for Nvidia GTX cards as upgrades.

II. iMac uses (1) NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M graphics processor with 512MB of GDDR5 memory; (2) NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M graphics processor with 512MB of GDDR5 memory; (3) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M graphics processor with 512MB of GDDR5 memory; (4) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675MX graphics processor with 1GB of GDDR5 memory; or (5) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX with 2GB of GDDR5 memory.

III. MacBook Pro uses (1) Intel HD Graphics 4000 and (2) NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory and automatic graphics switching.

IV. MacBook Air uses Intel HD Graphics 5000.

V. Mac Mini uses Intel HD Graphics 4000.

VI. 2013/2014 Mac Pro, as announced, will have ATI Fire Pro cards.

 

[Lancer]

I like the new Mac Pro but yes it will come down to price. I've got a 27" 2012 iMac but the Pro would look so good on my desk next to a matching 30" 4k LED. Can we assume it will have similar HDD/SSD drives like the iMac with maybe Fusion as well? Then you'd just need external HDDs or a RAID for more space.

I'd love to see a 3rd party RAID with matching design, maybe with a BluRay burner.

 

[ThisIsNotMe]

Apple and Mac Pro users aren't and haven't been sending a clear, unified message to developers to favor Open CL over CUDA. Thus, unless the newly announced 2013/2014 Mac Pros sell like hotcakes because they are reasonably priced, the new Mac Pros probably won't significantly affect the status quo.

Developers are already moving support to OpenCL like Adobe, BlackMagic, Autodesk, ect.

 

[goMac]

Apple and Mac Pro users aren't and haven't been sending a clear, unified message to developers to favor Open CL over CUDA.

Sure they have. They ship OpenCL with OS X. They do not ship CUDA with OS X.

That's Apple telling developers what they should favor.

 

[thekev]

Yeah, anyone who says "anything server class is not going to need 12 cores" is probably talking about a file server - even including many web server setups.

There used to be a time 15 or more years back when this was pretty much the only case. All server boxes were underpowered or average-powered with loads of drive bays and lots of local-bus slots (for NICs and yet more storage). In those days Workstations were typically faster and more robust than Servers.

That was before hypervisor solutions became popular?

Apple and Mac Pro users aren't and haven't been sending a clear, unified message to developers to favor Open CL over CUDA. Thus, unless the newly announced 2013/2014 Mac Pros sell like hotcakes because they are reasonably priced, the new Mac Pros probably won't significantly affect the status quo.

That is kind of my opinion with thunderbolt. What makes people think an updated mac pro will be the crux in expanding thunderbolt offerings. Apple really should be capable of direct communication with their developers, but that will probably never happen.

Developers are already moving support to OpenCL like Adobe, BlackMagic, Autodesk, ect.

Black Magic has supported OpenCL for a while, often with a reduced feature set and only on OSX. With the others there's no way to determine a real timeline. It's only interesting if it will work when the new machines ship.

 

[Tutor]

Sure they have. They ship OpenCL with OS X. They do not ship CUDA with OS X.

That's Apple telling developers what they should favor.

go Mac,

Even Nvidia doesn't ship CUDA on the disk that comes with any of their cards. You got to do better than that one.

 

[calaverasgrande]

the lamest thing about the debut of the new mac pro is that they told us it would be this fall. But not how much!
How am I supposed to save up to buy one the first day that they are released if they dont tell me how much?
I guess I'll just have to ballpark it at $2500-5000.
If it comes out cheaper I'll buy that Eames chair I always wanted.
I am guessing it will be cheaper.
Apple loves to smugly drop prices. 😀
I just hope it comes in white.

 

[cnev3]

I guarantee you that within 3 years there will be PC desktops with a cylinder case, and a single center fan.

 

[theSeb]

They never said anything about fall. They said later this year. It could even be December.

 

[Nameci]

I like the new Mac Pro but yes it will come down to price. I've got a 27" 2012 iMac but the Pro would look so good on my desk next to a matching 30" 4k LED. Can we assume it will have similar HDD/SSD drives like the iMac with maybe Fusion as well? Then you'd just need external HDDs or a RAID for more space.

I'd love to see a 3rd party RAID with matching design, maybe with a BluRay burner.

Sorry, right there. No HHD/SSD drives combi or fusion drive for ya. Its PCIe Flash storage for ya there mate.

 

[Tutor]

Developers are already moving support to OpenCL like Adobe, BlackMagic, Autodesk, ect.

My post has an ambiguity within it, just as does your response. Nvidia cards have two-two-two compute technologies in one. They have both OpenCL and CUDA compute capability. ATI cards and Intel on-CPU-chip-video have only OpenCL compute capability because, unlike OpenCL, CUDA is proprietary. When you say, "Developers are already moving support to OpenCL like Adobe, BlackMagic, Autodesk, ect.," are you saying that they are removing support for CUDA and replacing CUDA support with support for only OpenCL or are you saying that they are simply adding support for OpenCL also or if they've only supported OpenCL in the past that they are sticking with past practice? My post was in response to those who say that by Apple's using ATI Fire Pro cards in the new Mac Pro that would somehow spur OpenCL support where it hasn't previously existed and I don't believe that that will be the case unless Apple prices that newly announced system reasonably for what it truly is (a few have coined it as the xMac) and not try to adhere to it's past practices of taking us to our corner drug store in a $1,000 per minute toll limousine.

 

[Bergante]

Or decent audio cards.

The very best professional audio interfaces are Firewire based (Metric Halo, Prism, RME, MOTU), there are some RME and MOTU USB based models, and Universal Audio has even a Thunderbolt option.

Anyway, the Firewire controller for Thunderbolt is cheap and it works perfectly according to manufacturers such as Metric Halo. So, where's the problem?

Regarding internal PCIe slots and audio processing, we have reached a point in which "accelerator" DSP cards aren´t really needed, being effectively a dongle to ensure that you can't pirate the audio processing plugins.

 

[Bergante]

- This is a brand new conundrum Apple has suddenly created. Right now, and for quite some time, you could develop against CUDA or OpenCL using a Mac Pro. Or hell, if you really wanted to, you could have an ATI/AMD and an nVidia in the same machine. Now you can't as far as we can tell. How is that not brand new?

Macvidcards said that it's unlikely that you need all that x16 bandwidth for a card running CUDA/OpenCL. So, what's the problem if you want to use NVIDIA cards and you put one or two in an external cage via Thunderbolt? Performance should be the same. Right?

Or I am missing something.

Anyway, with OpenCL being an open and vendor independent standard, unless you are developing internally or for a very specialized community, OpenCL makes much more sense.

And after last year announcement of the adoption of a LLVM compiler for CUDA, I wonder how long before they somewhat converge.

 

[Tesselator]

That was before hypervisor solutions became popular?

Ya, way before virtualization. This kind of server config still exists too. Right, how many posts have you read recently where the person is telling how they're going to designate their old MP1,1 or G4 as a file server when they get their new mac? Even Tutor is probably using one low-spec machine as a render manager which also doubles as a file server. At least that's pretty common anyway. <shrug>

Until not too long ago I was using an ancient Dec Alpha like this myself.

 

[thekev]

Ya, way before virtualization. This kind of server config still exists too.

I get you. It makes sense too given that they don't require a lot of cpu power compared to raw bandwidth.

 

[Tutor]

Ya, way before virtualization. This kind of server config still exists too. Right, how many posts have you read recently where the person is telling how they're going to designate their old MP1,1 or G4 as a file server when they get their new mac? Even Tutor is probably using one low-spec machine as a render manager which also doubles as a file server. At least that's pretty common anyway. <shrug>

Until not too long ago I was using an ancient Dec Alpha like this myself.

Tesselator,

(1) Stop making me reveal my age. I love my Dec Alpha and it still runs Lightwave 3d - for which it was purchased - like a charm (albeit a slow charm by today's standards) and much faster than my Commodore Amiga 4000, 3000 and 2000 Video Toasters.
AND
(2) Stop invading my privacy. True, I do use one of my 2007 Mac Pros as a file server/render manager for CPU rendering, but only I was supposed to know that.
(3) You're giving away for free too many of my secrets. When will it end! Just kidding.

BTW - You know, don't you, that Intergraph was and is headquartered in Huntsville, Alabama. They made some mean machines in their day that ran Alias Wavefront in the mid to late 90's, when AW branched off from being SGI only. How times and Maya have changed?

 

[7709876]

I guarantee you that within 3 years there will be PC desktops with a cylinder case, and a single center fan.

Apple are launching one in the "Fall" - you win!

🙂

 

[Tutor]

Apple are launching one in the "Fall" - you win!

🙂

LOL. I was waiting for that kind of response since even if he had said a Windows PC you could have made the same response. One cannot escape the fact that since 2006 the Mac has been and is a PC that runs Windows. Of course, it would have been different if he had said a Dell or HP.

An Aside - Too often, we want to point out differences rather than commonalities. Some think of differences as indicators of strength, but I firmly believe that commonalities is the ultimate power.

 

[calaverasgrande]

Until atrocious peecees took over the market, workstations were small. And yes, if you had a Sun workstation and you needed additional storage (or even an optical drive) you needed to clutter your desk with external enclosures and thick, difficult to handle SCSI cables.

Of course, in larger installations you relied on centralized storage served through NFS and the users just had the cute little box.

With the new Mac Pro you can go back to that. I guess soon we will see Thunderbolt->10 GbEthernet controllers so that these machines will be able to work with large storage subsystems.

At the same time, the power consumption of a room with several of these Mac Pros, even the necessary air conditioning power for an office, will be greatly reduced.

The deal breaker to move from internal expansion to external is simple: I/O bandwidth and flexibility. In the old times of the Unix workstations, SCSI was the same regardless of being internal or external. When the industry moved to cheaper alternatives such as ATA and SATA, external storage (based on USB or Firewire) was subject to the external bottleneck, so it was important to have internal storage expansion.

But, today? Thunderbolt attached PCIe controllers should be indisguishible from internally attached controllers. There's no penalty beyond a thin cable on your desk.

And the same happens with PCIe peripherals. Even Firewire is much more limited than PCIe, so *internal* PCIe was the obvious choice for many peripherals. Thunderbolt transports PCIe in a way completely transparent to the drivers, as far as I know, so that means there is no penalty.

Does it make sense to keep manufacturing huge and heavy computers? Not at all. People could as well start a petition to Apple for the inclusion of parallel printer, VGA and RS232 ports 😀 😀

except PCIe is faster than Thunderbolt, even Falcon Ridge. An internal PCIe raid controller connected to internal drives or an external SAS array will easily achieve throughput higher than TB can.
Of course that is only salient to people who are doing very heavy video work or some kinds of analysis.

 

[Asgorath]

As long as their is a PCI driver, I don't think you need to write a special Thunderbolt driver. It'll just work.

Are you sure the OS can handle things like hot-plugging of these devices?

 

[deconstruct60]

They never said anything about fall. They said later this year. It could even be December.

Technically, Fall runs all the way to last day before Winter Solstice ( Dec 21). Fall is in December too. 🙂 Colloquially no. However, Apple has never said Fall or Q3 2013. Those are always the echo chamber quoting back "telephone game " transformations of what Cook said back in 2012.


Thunderbolt 2 was not suppose to ship in volume until around 2014.

"... Thunderbolt 2 is currently slated to begin production before the end of this year, and ramp into 2014. ..."
http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2...ndwidth-enabling-4k-video-transfer-display-2/

Back in 2012 Fiber Thunderbolt cables were also" slated to begin production before the end of this year" ..... that turned out to be Dec 18th. It made such a splash Mac rumors didn't post until New Year Eve.

https://www.macrumors.com/2012/12/3...ass-production-available-up-to-30m-in-length/

Good luck finding any of those outside of japan though....


Sure Apple could snarf all of the initial production runs, but any hiccup in getting that production started that will slide the Mac Pro. ( you know like how Apple thought they could ships the iMacs on time in 2012 even though had no volume production line going on some major parts. )

 

[deconstruct60]

Are you sure the OS can handle things like hot-plugging of these devices?

That's actually the driver's job. That is why when drivers are written unaware they have to handle this stuff.... it doesn't work. Hot-plug might "sort of kind of work". It is more so "hot unplugging" that is likely have more unpleasant side effects.

Some of this stuff will "happen to work right" if the Thunderbolt device is plugged in and powered up before boot and never removed.

 

[tjlazer]

I have had a few days to think about this new Mac Pro and here is what I think. This new Mac Pro is just a glorified super Mac mini! If that is a Mac Pro then I don't know anymore.

Yes times need to change and maybe the previous Mac Pro might of been too much of a monstricity and too PC High towerish for 2013, but the solution is not the iCylindar. Sorry. It should be called and marketed as a super Mac Mini, and a smaller cheaper Mac Pro should of been created. One with a swinging door on it and PCI express slots and 3.5" and 5.25" drive bays. A machine you can easily replace the HD, RAM, CPU, GPU and upgrade on your own at will.

I guess I am too old school and earth friendly. Welcome to the disposable computer age. Thats how the new iMac's, iPhone's and iPads are so why not follow suit for the Pro computer? Sad.... 😕