Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
MP 7,1 Waiting for Mac Pro 7,1 A1991 (no more)
- Thread starter Mago
- Start date
-
- Tags
- macpro 2016
- Sort by reaction score
AidenShaw
macrumors P6
Probably not possible for the RX 480 to get close to the 1070. Perhaps a RX 490 that is a fully unlocked Polaris 10 chip could get close or beat it. Hopefully Monday at E3 we hear more about the RX 490.
Rumors suggest that retailers are already receiving shipments of the RX 480. If Apple wants to ship a mac pro based on Polaris chances are AMD has the volume for a release in the next few weeks. I think we have reached the point that Apple has all the tech they need to release a mac pro. Now its just a matter of when they decide to release it. By this I mean that Broadwell-EP, GP-104/Polaris and Thunderbolt 3 are all out (or very soon to be). I am not holding my breath for a WWDC announcement. The only reason I am holding out a little hope is that since Apple moved Mac Pro manufacturing to the U.S. it is much easier to keep rumors quiet without worrying about part leaks from China. That and rumor sites focus on iPhones and iPads these days.
It would be great for AMD if they had lots of RX 480s out there on day one. GTX 1070s and 1080s are in short supply and stores are price gouging buyers.
GP104 I agree, that would be a great chip in the mac pro especially for anyone who wants to do gaming, graphics or CUDA. If Fiji was limited to 125 W it would likely be very close in compute performance to Polaris 10. Remember that under load the AMD nano down clocks itself into the 850-900 Mhz range which is at 175 W. Drop that to 125 and its probably down to 700-800 Mhz.
It's ideal for iMac indeed. iMac will benefit the same 2.5x performance gain from M390 because it is slightly under clocked version of D300. For same price there should be 2x - 2.5x. And with GDDR5/X finally there will be bandwidth to feed the 5k display.
Last edited:
koyoot
macrumors 603
If you will not be able to buy RX 480 on 29th or 30th of June, then yes it will be paper launch.
fuchsdh
macrumors 68020
No, they removed it entirely, see: https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/features-not-available-in-after-effects-cc-2015-13-5/
As for "Most people set that incorrectly in prior releases due to not doing their workflow development homework per above"... Because the software is a hot mess of ****. Not sure why you're defending Adobe, when their own workflow was "I dunno, set an arbitrary amount of RAM and cores and fiddle with it constantly. **** if we know."
Time spending testing out literally hundreds of possible render setting configurations to figure out what will actually be fast is a pointless exercise in futility when the reality is After Effects is not using the horsepower I have right now. Getting non-stuttery realtime playback of SD footage is still barely realized in 2016, whether I'm on a 2008 Mac Pro or a 2015 Z840.
Maybe, one day, their software won't be a decade behind. Unfortunately since they don't have any direct competitors, that might not happen, but I'm hopeful Davinci Fusion and other apps continue to infringe on its niche and kick their asses.
It could be that Apple puts the full Polaris 10 with GDDR5/X only to the presumed 5k iMac Pro. Regular 5k iMacs can survive with Polaris Pro. (Except the Iris Pro 580 start up model). But still with Polaris Pro it will be twice as fast as M390.
AidenShaw
macrumors P6
"Price gouging" is an unfair negative statement. It's simply healthy supply and demand at work.
Ever tried to get a great deal on a just announced car? If the dealers can sell them even before they've arrived, there's no incentive to discount. Wait a few months, when they have lots of them on the lot, and get your deals.
Same with phones, childrens' toys in late December, and any other hot item with more demand than supply.
Ever flown on a commercial flight? Prices are all over the map depending on the time and demand - yet the basic cost of a seat mile doesn't change.
[doublepost=1465595412][/doublepost]
If I can't buy it the day that it's announced, isn't that a paper launch?
You called Nvidia's Pascal announcements "paper launches", yet so far they've over-delivered on Pascal.
koyoot
macrumors 603
Aiden, I genuinely suggest getting know with supply on GTX 1080 and 1070. Very few GPUs are and were to buy since the launch. We are talking about 10-20k GPUs available all over the world. Sites have had up to 10 GPU units at start.
And you can see it by yourself here, for example: https://www.nowinstock.net/computers/videocards/nvidia/gtx1080/
And you can see it by yourself here, for example: https://www.nowinstock.net/computers/videocards/nvidia/gtx1080/
AidenShaw
macrumors P6
How many Polaris GPUs are available to buy?
How many tens of thousands of units need to ship before "paper launch" becomes "launch"?
AdamSeen
macrumors 6502
We can guess. Steam hardware usage gives you a glimpse: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=mac
1.5% of the mac market after 2.5 years - I'd estimate somewhere in the region of 150,000 units.
koyoot
macrumors 603
Nothing, because there was no launch. Launch is on 29th June.
I also cannot call Pascal Paper launch because there was few GPUs to buy.
Interesting. Another factoid from that page: The total of all 6, 8 and 12 core Mac systems is 0.65%.
Of course, this data starts with the assumption that "Pro's" are into games.
Of course its supply and demand but paying $100 extra for a founders edition card is not exactly building up a lot of customer good will. Especially when it comes to the GTX 1070 I have to imagine not a lot of customers will want to pay an extra $70. If AMD can have a strong launch on the 29th and the 1070 is still in short supply AMD will sell a lot of cards. Thats a lot of ifs but its not impossible.
AidenShaw
macrumors P6
The well-heeled nerds will gladly pay the price for a few weeks of bragging rights. The rest of the nerds will gladly wait on the sidelines for faster and cheaper cards.
Like it says on the shampoo bottle. "Wash, rinse, repeat." It's always been like this. Polaris and Vega will be the same. Premium price for early adopters - but wait a while and get faster product for less.
fuchsdh
macrumors 68020
As a Mac gamer I hope that the pro GPUs are decent enough for gaming, but Mac gaming has and always will be a sort of pointless market for Apple to chase. It sucks, and it'd be nice for someone at Apple who cares about games to put in some good-faith effort, but it'd be a passion project, not something with returns. As long as the Mac Pro has been a system, the only way it's made sense to use it for games is if its main job was something else, so you could justify the cost by doing billable work on it. Even a mythical xMac wouldn't really have fit the bill, when PC guys aren't going to spend more when they roll their own kit anyhow.
https://update.omnigroup.com/
switch to Hardware -> CPU subtype
E5 Quad + 6 + 8 + 12 add up to 0.9% ( 4 & 6 core making up 77% of that 9% *** )
I'm sure some folks are going to tap dance on how "nobody" uses Omni Group software either. no games , no Omni. But those two are pretty close given the noise likely present in those samplings. Fact is Apple doesn't show up as a major player in workstation top 3-4 player lists either. That whole market is pegged in the 1M/year range. So they aren't moving the needle much on those metrics either. Not sure how many > 1% results folks will have to rack up until the reality sinks in.
IMHO, very highly likely less than 100K/year ( on a good year). Probably closer to 60-80K on refresh years and substantially below that in these "hide down a rabbit hole" years with dated hardware.
Not quite low enough to say "nobody" buys them (hence be axed ) , but also so low that not particularly motivated to put much effort into them on a yearlly (or even 2 year cycle effort).
(***) Steam very similar by core type breakdown when group 4&6 versus 8-12. The first two pair dominating the second two. Steam has potention to loop in previous Mac Pro too I think. Deployed Mac Pros isn't as illuminating as how many are sold per year.
[doublepost=1465625109][/doublepost]
Are those working dies or just dies can cut from the wafer? fabs typically just drop the die and you have to pay for it whether the dies work well or not.
Demand is high but added on top of that is that Apple likely can only take a selected smaller subset due to running the GPU at tighter Mac Pro thermal envelope(s) than the mainstream card vendors do. Like the last time, it will probably take extra binning to get the even smaller subset for Apple to take. Throw on top an initial demand bump and it is quite likely the available supply for Apple is more that just small and limited. It may not be there at all. [ I highly doubt Apple, with their Scrooge McDuck ways, is going to outbid the others one price for a limited supply. ] I'll be very surprised if Apple is on any initial demand bubble wave for a GPU product. They were when had the older Mac Pro design. This one is even more prohibitive to being on the bleeding edge in the time to market dimension. [ later stability and control can leverage later, but extremely rarely on the bleeding edge time wise. ]
Last edited:
koyoot
macrumors 603
I don't remember. I think he said that they will have GPUs from those dies just from one fab.
Nvidia has Founders edition. Will AMD have something similar? How about "Apple First" Mac Pro edition.
I mean, really, it would be a PR win for both companies, if Apple and AMD praise together these new Polaris chips at WWDC. Then, all tech sites writing about GPU's, would have to talk about Mac Pro or Macbook Pro. And because these display cards are so unique, they can be tested on Mac's only. Apple has the software (new FCPX...new API's...macOS...async computing) to take advantage of these otherwise mediocre GPU's.
Apple picks the demos ("unprecedented 4k and VR editing power"), AMD delivers its "founders edition". And for the next two weeks it's the only source of Polaris information. Then the NDA's break and the GPU wars will officially start.
I mean, really, it would be a PR win for both companies, if Apple and AMD praise together these new Polaris chips at WWDC. Then, all tech sites writing about GPU's, would have to talk about Mac Pro or Macbook Pro. And because these display cards are so unique, they can be tested on Mac's only. Apple has the software (new FCPX...new API's...macOS...async computing) to take advantage of these otherwise mediocre GPU's.
Apple picks the demos ("unprecedented 4k and VR editing power"), AMD delivers its "founders edition". And for the next two weeks it's the only source of Polaris information. Then the NDA's break and the GPU wars will officially start.
koyoot
macrumors 603
Few information from reddit. 3 SKUs based on Polaris 10: RX 470, RX 480 and... RX 490. The rumor is that the last GPU has 48 CU's(3072 GCN cores) and GDDR5X and... 299$ price tag. We will see if this is true. However it is another time when we see similar rumor.
Polaris 11 also 3 SKUs: R 460, R450 and R 440. No X naming on the end, to streamline the naming scheme.
Gaming power draw for RX 480 is around 95-100W. Way below maximum power draw possible for the design. Gaming performance of RX 480 between R9 390X and Fury, much closer to Fury than R9 390X.
Also, RX490 might have higher core clock than RX 480(which has 1266 MHz).
Suddenly Mac Pro 2016 looks more appealing, if this rumor has any truth, and 490 rebranded as FirePro would end up in MP.
If all this about RX 490 is true then Mago's DN rumors might also be true: 3072 GCN cores, with 1.35 GHz give 8.2 TFLOPs of compute power.
Edit. It makes more sense, now. If the 232 mm2 die is really 48 CU design, than it was most logical to stack up the most of what is possible of cut down dies, at first for hard launch, and then later launch the RX 490 with full dies. Previous word about 177000 dies/GPUs makes more sense if it accounts only for RX 480.
Yeah, HD 4850/4870 times all over again...
Polaris 11 also 3 SKUs: R 460, R450 and R 440. No X naming on the end, to streamline the naming scheme.
Gaming power draw for RX 480 is around 95-100W. Way below maximum power draw possible for the design. Gaming performance of RX 480 between R9 390X and Fury, much closer to Fury than R9 390X.
Also, RX490 might have higher core clock than RX 480(which has 1266 MHz).
Suddenly Mac Pro 2016 looks more appealing, if this rumor has any truth, and 490 rebranded as FirePro would end up in MP.
If all this about RX 490 is true then Mago's DN rumors might also be true: 3072 GCN cores, with 1.35 GHz give 8.2 TFLOPs of compute power.
Edit. It makes more sense, now. If the 232 mm2 die is really 48 CU design, than it was most logical to stack up the most of what is possible of cut down dies, at first for hard launch, and then later launch the RX 490 with full dies. Previous word about 177000 dies/GPUs makes more sense if it accounts only for RX 480.
Yeah, HD 4850/4870 times all over again...
Last edited:
azentropy
macrumors 601
Still hanging onto my 2009 Mac Pro which has been maxed out CPU wise (updated to 5690's ) and have 64gb memory. Also have 5 internal drives (3 SSD and two RAID 0 configured HDD) plus an internal blu-ray. Like many the 2013 redesign eliminated many of the reasons why I loved the Mac Pro. Mainly the internal expansion. Can't add drives, can't upgrade video etc. Plus I really want a 5K monitor which still isn't well supported. My 2009 sits very nice on a stand on the floor with everything self-contained.
I probably would have just switched to a 5K iMac by now and taken an overall performance degrade (single core much faster now, but going from 12 core to 4) however the non-adjustable height of the stand is a no go for me. I've tried using my current 27" monitors at the height that the 5K 27" iMac would be on my desk and hated it as it was too hight. I know for a while they had an option to get one with a VESA mount, but seems like they discountinued that again too.
Anyway, seems like any way I would go right now would be a step back for me in a couple areas one way or another unless they introduce a new Mac Pro design and decide to scrap the cylinder.
/rant
I probably would have just switched to a 5K iMac by now and taken an overall performance degrade (single core much faster now, but going from 12 core to 4) however the non-adjustable height of the stand is a no go for me. I've tried using my current 27" monitors at the height that the 5K 27" iMac would be on my desk and hated it as it was too hight. I know for a while they had an option to get one with a VESA mount, but seems like they discountinued that again too.
Anyway, seems like any way I would go right now would be a step back for me in a couple areas one way or another unless they introduce a new Mac Pro design and decide to scrap the cylinder.
/rant
"Founders edition" is n't PR stunt. It is a mechanism for Nvidia to profit ( not for the resellers) from initial scarcity ( initial demand bubble that doesn't match supply). Before ramp to fully, easy availability raise the price. Once supply and demand are likely to reset at long term price .... go to normal pricing.
Huge flaws here is that Apple doesn't do bubble pricing. Things are priced to long term, steady state market. Apple sets prices and then never ( almost never ) changes them.
There can't be a "Founders edition" because Apple isn't going to sell the GPUs piecemeal. To buy a whole Apple system to get to a specific part is kind of loopy even for a PR stunt. Apple doesn't sell parts , they generally sell whole systems.
But Founder editions aren't unique. Scarce (limited supply)? yes. Unique? no. 3-4 months from now (when demand bubble is gone) there will be 100's of thousands of these cards easily available.
What Apple needs is actually a complete software stack that actually more completely leverages the GPU in both "display output" and "computation" aspects. It is very solid , works well , and is substantively faster than the previous Mac model. The fact that Apple is doing anything in the workstation space ( after another 3 year rabbit hole disappearance) is "news".
Gimmicks like "Foundation edition" is just hocus pocus. If there is any demand scarcity Apple can do hat on their on by settle the Mac Pro factory run rate levels below initial demand. They can do that with mainstream parts.
[doublepost=1465660291][/doublepost]
Are FirePro versions of 490 coming immediately after 490 launch? Given AMD's previous track record ..... probably not. The FirePro is heavily based upon there being bootcamp Windows FirePro drivers. If there aren't any for mainstream Windows, it seems extremely unlikely there will be some for bootcamp Windows. "FirePro" but when boot into Windows it is just "plain jane" 490 kind of blows up the branding (and hence the pricing increase ).
t0mat0
macrumors 603
Is still available as VESA mount - have to go through buy link. Not initially obvious before climbing that think though.
For USA -
http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/imac-vesa
Of the Macs, the iMac seems to get the most attention. We await the hardware event of WWDC is software only. At this rate a refresh of iMac might come at same time or befoee as MBP/Mac Pro's.