Could you please name some real examples instead of those funny metaphors, just to make me sure?
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The Mac Pro does put the iMac to shame.
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Well one technical example that I do myself sometimes is rendering video in Final Cut Pro. Often you're moving things around and have to re-render the most recent version of your timeline, which depending on how quickly you're moving things around or adding new clips, can take quite a while unless you have a really powerful CPU. Ideally it should be instant so that you can continue work immediately, and the closest you can get to instant, the better.
I know there are similar examples in professional photography, which I am not as familiar with, and also in audio recording and mixing, which I do a little bit of in Garageband.
http://www.fcp.co/hardware-and-soft...-the-range-imac-to-test-part-2-living-with-it
Not bad if you ask me. Your first post seams like its partly buyers remorse, partly trying to make yourself feel better and partly confused.
Not bad if you ask me. Your first post seams like its partly buyers remorse, partly trying to make yourself feel better and partly confused.
Guys, lighten up. The original poster was simply posting his opinion and stupid people are entitled to his/her opinions too.
I have no buyers remorse at all. The Mac Pro setup I would get would cost at least $7k or $8k, so having spent only $3.5k, I can't complain. I'm just saying, the iMac and the Mac Pro reside on different planets of computing power. That's all I'm pointing out. And I know that might sound obvious, but there are a handful of people who don't realize the extent of the gulf, hence, this thread.
I always thought it was obvious...iMac on the reception counter Mac Pro in the back with the editors! I don't really think you'd need to spend $8K to beat the pants off a maxed out iMac though. I think even the basic Mac Pro could do it with ease. Xeon's are a different animal than any i7.
That's probably an accurate assessment for the 2013 nMac Pro vs 2013 iMac for most serious tasks. My situation is a little different as I have the option of using two or three computers(Mac or PC) as a master/slave(s) using Vienna Ensemble Pro.
The adoption of OpenCL gives the nMacPro a long term advantage with it's powerful GPUs but will OpenCL take off.
Without OpenCL adoption the nMac Pro's value is questionable for my needs. The iMac and Mac Mini would be a better choice.
Where do you get this idea? This isn't true at all and this statement just shows you know absolutely nothing about computer architecture. In fact, the top end iMac will be basically the same as the base new Mac Pro for CPU intensive tasks.
Weird stuff on this board at times.
Well then I probably wasn't talking about the base new Mac Pro was I?
It wasn't until 2010 that an iMac came out that rivaled the horsepower of the 2006 Mac Pro.
What a strange post on your part.
The iMac is indeed a consumer product that takes the worries for the most part out of having to buy accessories. Everything a typical user needs is neatly put together in one slick package. For typical use, it as way more than enough horse power, a nice screen and of course, the world of Mac applications running on OSX.
The present Mac Pro is built for prosumers and professionals. This is an apples and oranges type comparison. (I'll skip gamers for the moment).
For anyone needing to do typical computer stuff such as surf the web, write emails, a quick stint in iPhoto or some SOHO type apps will be more than happy with the iMac.
For me personally, the iMac is not my choice of computers as I require a graphics monitor and as such find the lesser Mac Mini with my graphics monitor to be a reasonable fit. I have owned a Mac Pro before and have used applications that really do take advantage of its superior "power" in both graphics and CPU (as well as more RAM) but over all, it is absolutely not a "must" for any typical user.
Last - my next computer will either be the next Mac Mini or perhaps the new Mac (mini) Pro. In the meanwhile, I'll be helping 2 of my neighbors out who have iMacs and are extremely happy with them. (New network for one plus their new ATV3 and the other person wants to use NAS for extensive media storage etc.). Would I recommend they stay with the iMac ...YES. One is a writer and the other one is for a family with everyone having different needs yet the iMac works quite well for them. They don't need a Mac Pro, they don't need the new Mac (mini) Pro as they would have no real benefit in the bigger picture.
That's a bit of a irrelevant comment without any backup. It's a very relevant comment to contemplate for those who complain about power but don't want to fork out the fees for a real mac pro. The whole debate to getting one and pros and cons are best left to another topic though
To the OP:
Return your iMac and wait on the release of the nMP!
If you think its so great why aren't you buying it!? It's worth the extra$$ in every way just as you said! Maybe you're trying to talk yourself out of something you really want.
Return your iMac and wait on the release of the nMP!
If you think its so great why aren't you buying it!? It's worth the extra$$ in every way just as you said! Maybe you're trying to talk yourself out of something you really want.
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Strange, i've just spent an hour this weekend in awe of a friends Logic setup running hundreds of plugs and VI's .....on his hackintosh. I'm not sure how you can explain this audio/midi marvel? Personally, I wouldn't want to run one for the tinkering and time but as already mentioned, that's another thread.
Lets see ---
Only for very specific, very specialized tasks will even the 12Core nMP out perform a lowly top of the line late 2013 imac. You need to be VERY specific if you are going to assert it to be at all faster.
What tasks do you have that can truly run 12 real cores full out? I actually don't know of any. I do pro audio and it will take an very big session to max a quad -an enormous one to max a Hex and a true Hollywood dub stage to go further. Now I do believe hi end video can have these kinds of demands but I know very little about it.
Maybe the OP can get very specific (and cut out the broad rhetoric) and state a real use that he cares about that would justify this lament. I am happy to sympathize and am one of the first to jump on board and say "YES, a nMP would be a lot better for you!" but you got to give me a reason
Only for very specific, very specialized tasks will even the 12Core nMP out perform a lowly top of the line late 2013 imac. You need to be VERY specific if you are going to assert it to be at all faster.
What tasks do you have that can truly run 12 real cores full out? I actually don't know of any. I do pro audio and it will take an very big session to max a quad -an enormous one to max a Hex and a true Hollywood dub stage to go further. Now I do believe hi end video can have these kinds of demands but I know very little about it.
Maybe the OP can get very specific (and cut out the broad rhetoric) and state a real use that he cares about that would justify this lament. I am happy to sympathize and am one of the first to jump on board and say "YES, a nMP would be a lot better for you!" but you got to give me a reason
I'd bet they're going to be bought by visual effects and related post production studios for whom time is money and can easily justify the cost.
I have no idea what you are trying to say. Will you please translate your thoughts into English, not the language, the thought process.
In many situations the new Mac Pro will not be hugely faster than a top-end iMac. In a few cases it might actually be slower.
This can be seen from actual benchmarks already posted, plus common sense. A 3.7Ghz i7 quad-core Mac Pro will not be dramatically faster in CPU tasks than an i7 quad-core 3.5Ghz iMac. They both have the same 3.9Ghz CPU turbo speed.
Yes the new Mac Pro will eventually be available with a 2.7Ghz 12-core Xeon E5-2697 v2. If you search hard enough you could probably find a few tasks where a larger number of slower cores might help, e.g, heavily parallelized CPU-bound algorithms. Those few situations would be significantly faster than a 3.5Ghz i7 iMac. But that Mac Pro CPU chip alone cost $2,700 -- as much as the entire iMac.
Likewise the Mac Pro has a very fast GPU, and provided you could find an application which fully leverages that in scenario you actually need -- that one situation would be much faster.
Unfortunately most activities don't fall into areas which (a) a larger number of slower CPU cores will help, or (b) a very fast GPU will help.
Apple is trying to enhance FCP X to more fully utilize the GPU in the new Mac Pro. How successful they will be, nobody knows. The GPU already assists effects like blur and sharpen. Are those really slow on a current high-end iMac? If not it doesn't matter how fast the GPU, they won't get much faster.
Using the GPU for a wider range of tasks like transcoding is an active area of research. How achievable this will be in FCP X remains to be seen.
Rendering (as currently designed) is CPU-bound, so more concurrent cores would help. If you tracked the activity of a video editor all day long, what % of time is he actually waiting on a render? That one activity could be made faster. Is a machine whose CPU cost as much as an entire iMac worth a (maybe) significant speedup in that one area? For some people yes, but it comes at a very high price, and it doesn't mean *everything* is faster -- just the narrow tasks that lend themselves to further parallelization or GPU acceleration.
Anyone with a late-model iMac can see this for themselves. Run Activity Monitor and watch the CPU cores. How many times are all cores simultaneously pegged at 100%? If they aren't there's still CPU headroom available, and faster cores generally won't help.
What about I/O? I have an 8TB Pegasus Thunderbolt R4 on my 2013 iMac right now. It does 800 megabytes/sec. How would connecting that to a Mac Pro make it any faster? If I had several 12 TB Pegasus R6 arrays, I'd probably want a Mac Pro for the expansion and additional threads, but that's a tiny % of the user base.
The new Mac Pro is innovatively designed, and has lots of external expansion. However it will not be generally 300% to 500% faster than a top-end iMac. Rather you could probably seek out a certain Mac Pro configuration and workload which would be significantly faster -- at a high cost.
It depends entirely on how parallelized the code is. This is more than whether the app is multi-threaded. The time-consuming computational part must (a) algorithmically lend itself to parallelization, and (b) the programmer must effectively harness multiple threads for that task. Neither one is a given.
Algorithms break down into serial and parallel portions. It has long been known that even a small % of serialized code will limit available multi-threaded speedup. This is called Amdahl's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law
You can see from the graph if the code is 90% parallel (only 10% serial), that a 32-core machine will only be 8 times faster than a single core machine.
However additional cores can help beyond a single program. They are available for running multiple independent programs. A 12-core Mac Pro could more effectively do concurrent activities without bogging down: render, editing, download, transcode, etc.
To the user this would not appear as a single activity being magically faster (than an iMac). Rather the performance would degrade slower under greater multi-program loads. The machine would feel like it has "lots of torque" and doesn't bog down under heavy loads.
Of course if your independent tasks are so isolated they could be done on two different iMacs, you'd have to ask whether two iMacs are better than a single Mac Pro (possibly the same total price, depending on configuration).
Specific narrow tasks like 3D CAD/CAM could be greatly accelerated by the Mac Pro GPU. If you need that it would be worth the price.
4k video editing pushes around lots of data. Also newer high-compression codecs like H.265 (needed for 4K capture) require lots of CPU to handle. A Mac Pro could work well for this.
If Apple figures out how to fully harness the Mac Pro GPU for video transcoding, that by itself could be worth the price -- if that activity is your frequent job. It conceivably could be 5x or 10x faster than the fastest iMac.