Any developers out there using (or tempted by) the nMP?

[thekev]

Yeah I hate the asymmetry of the MBP and two monitors. Having the MBP front and center makes the main display your worst, but at least it's symmetrical. If you put it off to the side the whole thing is off kilter.

I have a mac pro as well, but I don't work on my own so much these days, so I've been perpetually putting off upgrading hardware. It is a 1,1, and I have to be careful on settings in certain applications and things to minimize lag. Anyway I have done a similar setup to you on my 2011 macbook pro. I have two screens, and I always semi-retire the older one with shifted colors and things when it gets old, then make the newer one the primary display. It doesn't matter as much if an old display is just holding notes and reference material, but I don't know of a way to hook up both a 1920x1200 and 1600x1200 (old one) display to a mbp, so the older one basically stays tied to my mac pro in spite of having both mini displayport to displayport and dvi-d (I think dvi-d) cables.

Aside from that the notebook runs small Xcode projects well, but I've never put anything through it that's large enough to really bog the thing down. I wouldn't even attempt the project you mentioned. The quad nMP would be less of a mess when it comes to storage if I ditched the older eSATA stuff, but it's not in my budget for now.

I've got 16GB in there which seems plenty enough.

It's only a hindrance for a subset of what I do, basically if I have to deal with heavy 3d scenes or photo comps, which I rarely do these days, ram can be a precious commodity due to seemingly geometric memory footprints.

 

[JoeG4]

Haha, yeah I want one and might get one next year. The problem is, being a programmer I don't really need it. The new mac pro really is the ultimate FCP X Users' machine for people that edit 4k video.

OTOH, I like my towers, and a cute little can shaped tower is awesome. I think it's pretty lame how lazy Apple was in launching it though. No new keyboard, no new monitors. It doesn't come with anything which sucks A nice backlit keyboard would be cool! I want an excuse to replace my K810 NOW!

 

[saschke]

Anyone stating that the new Mac Pro is generally overkill for developers hasn't worked with a large remote team on a project with an elaborate web stack. Just sayin'

 

[haravikk]

Just wondering whether any software developers have got their hands on a nMP, or are weighing up the pros of cons of the system against other Mac/non-Mac options?

Absolutely weighing up the pros and cons, pros being that it's awesome, and cons being that I can't really afford one

As for whether you need one for software development… as a general rule I'd say no; I mean a Mac Mini is fine for most development work to be honest as it can happily handle background databases, web-servers and still run your favourite development suite. Even when it comes down to compilation, most compilers now are so good at compiling in small pieces that I'm not sure you need much horsepower anymore, unless you're compiling a really complex project from scratch.

That said, it'll depend on the software you're working on, and whether you do anything else. For example, if you're developing the kind of software that people will use Mac Pros to run, then it makes sense to have one. But if you mostly develop iOS apps then I'm not even sure you'd really need a high Mac Mini let alone a Mac Pro.

 

[forcesteeler]

The Average developer does not need a New Mac Pro, Your just throwing money in the garbage. The New Mac Pro is for mainly Graphic Artist and Video Editors, especially when your trying to edit 4K Video or Red Format. Which require the most update Powerful CPU and GPU's.

Mac Standard Mac Pro 1.1 with 16GB of Ram or better should be enough. Unless your trying to develop the next Call Of Duty.

 

[TyPod]

The Average developer does not need a New Mac Pro, Your just throwing money in the garbage

I see what you did there.

 

[Anim]

The Average developer does not need a New Mac Pro, Your just throwing money in the garbage. The New Mac Pro is for mainly Graphic Artist and Video Editors, especially when your trying to edit 4K Video or Red Format. Which require the most update Powerful CPU and GPU's.

Mac Standard Mac Pro 1.1 with 16GB of Ram or better should be enough. Unless your trying to develop the next Call Of Duty.

I think your assuming developers are "pure coders" ?

Anyway, I have a different perspective.

I am a one man band developer and do everything from art, audio, animations, 3d models, texturing and coding to develop the apps I work on.

I would just get the fastest machine all round I can afford and thats that. Really enjoying your work and the equipment you work on gets positive results.

Even coders can make use of 3 high res display. One for Debug output, another for running the app and the middle one for the IDE. There are always benefits to be found by upgrading even if it's to make your developers feel happy.

As an example:
I sat next to a load of CAD engineers a few years ago, they had single 17" 4:3 aspect LCD monitors, because the company thought that was good enough, it had worked for years already so why change it? and on the end of the row was me, with a 27" iMac writing native iOS apps, listening to iTunes while working away or having Skype conversations with clients, in my lunch break I played games or tinkered around on the machine. I was a happy developer and in hindsight the CAD engineers were a quiet bunch who just got on with the 9-5 "job" then went home.

The point to all that is yes, you can get by with standard equipment but wheres the fun in that? Get a sexy beast of a machine and marvel at all the things it can do, promote innovation and a much happier working environment for the user.

 

[JoeG4]

You do have a very valid point. Besides, how often do people only buy the bare minimum for their needs?

That said, I do work in CAD from time to time and I doubt any of my classmates would want a 17" screen on their workstation. That sounds like something for nightmares!

 

[Anim]

You do have a very valid point. Besides, how often do people only buy the bare minimum for their needs?

That said, I do work in CAD from time to time and I doubt any of my classmates would want a 17" screen on their workstation. That sounds like something for nightmares!

Unfortunately companies on a budget do it (edit: or tight arses) , they have to I guess. These were Pro/E guys. I felt sorry for them, some would come over and sit watching while i was working away (usually on animation/renderings) until management took notice. I set a few of them up with dual monitors found lying around unused because their workstation cards could support it and they didn't know or dare to ask. Now they could write more efficient emails to clients while the cad model was still visible rather than writing it all down on a pad first wasting time.

They did have one 12 core machine in the corner though, that was mainly used for Mathematica I think. In the end one of the MD's claimed it as his workstation.

 

[resotek]

The Average developer does not need a New Mac Pro, Your just throwing money in the garbage. The New Mac Pro is for mainly Graphic Artist and Video Editors, especially when your trying to edit 4K Video or Red Format. Which require the most update Powerful CPU and GPU's.

Mac Standard Mac Pro 1.1 with 16GB of Ram or better should be enough. Unless your trying to develop the next Call Of Duty.

Who writes that fancy software that graphic artists and video editors use? Also, the move to GPGPU is going to extend far beyond the shoebox of graphic arts very soon. I would think any forward looking developer would be well served to get on the bandwagon early. The nMP will be a superb platform for said developers.

 

[iizmoo]

I'll be using it for development. Upgrading from a Core2Duo 2.4Ghz with 4 GB of RAM. The big bottleneck is in running tests. I have over 2200 RSpec tests that run in Rubymine with profiling for coverage. Some of the tests make use of password hash generation, take little while to do...

Right now that take more than 10 minutes to run while the rest of the computer pretty much lock up, and the database is on a remote server.

With the nMP, I'll host the db locally, and I'd like for the tests to run faster and I can tab out to do other things while it run. I expect the application to eventually have around 5,000 tests.

 

[goMac]

The core count is the main attraction for developers.

If you're a serious developer, 6 cores can be handy for compiling. 8 or 12? All the better.

A Macbook Pro is probably good enough for a developer, but by the same token a Macbook Pro is also "good enough" for a video editor. Both will provide basic functionality for both uses.

But if you're a serious, professional developer and you want a machine that's responsive and comfortable to use, it's easy to justify a Mac Pro with a display or two, especially if you're doing heavy development on media or GPU applications (which these days, is a lot of applications), or hosting several VMs (which is also not uncommon these days.) Just like if you're a serious video editor you probably want a workstation that's a bit more fluid than a Macbook Pro.

Anybody who says a Mac Pro 1,1 is sufficient for a pro developer has a screw loose. I wouldn't use anything that doesn't have SATA3 and an SSD, at a minimum, as a new development workstation. The file latency is too important. And if you're serious about your craft, get a machine with OpenCL, or even better, dual cards like the Mac Pro, and get to writing OpenCL code. Otherwise you're going to fall behind.

 

[johngwheeler]

Unfortunately companies on a budget do it (edit: or tight arses) , they have to I guess. These were Pro/E guys. I felt sorry for them, some would come over and sit watching while i was working away (usually on animation/renderings) until management took notice.

You're dead right. I work for one of the largest software companies in the world (the CEO is the 3rd richest man in the world, if that gives you a clue), and the standard computer for technical staff is a dual-core i5 laptop with 4 or 8GB RAM and a standard HDD (probably costing about $1000-1200). I don't work in the sharp end of product development, but I do assist customers with their project implementation and delivery, which requires development work, and the lack of decent computing resources is a constant source of frustration.

There just isn't an understanding that the capital cost of decent hardware is a drop in the ocean to the consulting and other project costs. Apparently any hardware purchases over $3000 have to go to the CEO's office for approval - and this in a company of about 120,000 employees. I joke not.

A few of my colleagues were able to get Lenovo W430 workstation laptops (quad-core i7, 32GB, SSD+HDD+mSATA), but only after predicting disaster for their project if they continued on the issued kit.

I (and quite a few colleagues) just buy our own gear for work, because I'd rather spend my own money than be forced to use substandard gear. It's a bit like soldiers or police officers buying their own body armour & boots, when the government issued stuff isn't available or good enough!

To be fair, quite a lot of our work in done on server environments, generally supplied by the client, but these are only for deployments - you still have to develop on your laptop, and deploy over the network/internet. Having the ability to run the server-side software locally (natively or in a large VM), would really speed up the code/deploy/test cycle.

I'd love for my employer to buy me a shiny new nMP - but I see pigs flying & hell freezing over before this happens :-(

John.

 

[forcesteeler]

Who writes that fancy software that graphic artists and video editors use? Also, the move to GPGPU is going to extend far beyond the shoebox of graphic arts very soon. I would think any forward looking developer would be well served to get on the bandwagon early. The nMP will be a superb platform for said developers.

Like i said in my post, If your a serious developer (Major Developer) I can justify buying a new Mac Pro if your developer High End Professional Software like the next Call of Duty, Or Your trying to invent a Photo Editing Program like Photoshop.

But for 70% of Developer out there, 2006+ and up Mac Pro Should be enough, Even a Mac Mini is good enough. Just Max out the Ram and you should be fine.

The Only Reason why a software developer will need a powerful machine like the new Mac Pro is if your coding and dealing with Multimedia Files. Especially Video.

 

[goMac]

But for 70% of Developer out there, 2006+ and up Mac Pro Should be enough, Even a Mac Mini is good enough. Just Max out the Ram and you should be fine.

A 2006 Mac Pro can't even run Mavericks officially, which is an absolute requirement for developers these days.

And again, I wouldn't do software development without an SSD these days.

 

[tomvos]

There just isn't an understanding that the capital cost of decent hardware is a drop in the ocean to the consulting and other project costs. Apparently any hardware purchases over $3000 have to go to the CEO's office for approval - and this in a company of about 120,000 employees. I joke not.

Same here - though we are a lot smaller company. What I really don't understand is why everybody who gets a car is sponsored about 40.000 EUR to drive a decent car, but then people are handed some 800 EUR PCs or Dell laptops which are really crappy (quad-core PCs or dual-core notebooks, 8GB, slow HDD). Nobody would accept a cheap car, but everybody is expected to take a cheap computer.

Well, back to topic. I use my MP at home (w3680, 5.1, 24GB, SSD) for running several VMs to learn about Oracle DB and especially about RAC. To simulate a complete test system I need two VMs for RAC, at least one VM for an application server and of course OSX. I tried this on a 2011 i5 Mac mini (dual core) and it was no fun at all.
The MP did such a setup without any hiccup. So I guess if you are a lot into development environments which consist of many machines acting together, the MP (whether old or new) is a decent machine.
Having a big and fast storage helps a lot if your are typically doing OLTP database work. And being able to expand via TB2 is a bonus that the old MP does not have - however there are other options to get decent speed in a oMP.

 

[Luba]

Well, there's go my theory that the decision makers on buying hardware are tech retards and don't understand the value of having good tools, but you work for a big software company. The leaders/decision makers at your company must understand tech hardware?

You're dead right. I work for one of the largest software companies in the world (the CEO is the 3rd richest man in the world, if that gives you a clue), and the standard computer for technical staff is a dual-core i5 laptop with 4 or 8GB RAM and a standard HDD (probably costing about $1000-1200). I don't work in the sharp end of product development, but I do assist customers with their project implementation and delivery, which requires development work, and the lack of decent computing resources is a constant source of frustration.

There just isn't an understanding that the capital cost of decent hardware is a drop in the ocean to the consulting and other project costs. Apparently any hardware purchases over $3000 have to go to the CEO's office for approval - and this in a company of about 120,000 employees. I joke not.

A few of my colleagues were able to get Lenovo W430 workstation laptops (quad-core i7, 32GB, SSD+HDD+mSATA), but only after predicting disaster for their project if they continued on the issued kit.

I (and quite a few colleagues) just buy our own gear for work, because I'd rather spend my own money than be forced to use substandard gear. It's a bit like soldiers or police officers buying their own body armour & boots, when the government issued stuff isn't available or good enough!

To be fair, quite a lot of our work in done on server environments, generally supplied by the client, but these are only for deployments - you still have to develop on your laptop, and deploy over the network/internet. Having the ability to run the server-side software locally (natively or in a large VM), would really speed up the code/deploy/test cycle.

I'd love for my employer to buy me a shiny new nMP - but I see pigs flying & hell freezing over before this happens :-(

John.

 

[forcesteeler]

A 2006 Mac Pro can't even run Mavericks officially, which is an absolute requirement for developers these days.

And again, I wouldn't do software development without an SSD these days.

I have a 2006 Mac and I Run Mavericks Perfectly. You should check this thread out.


https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1598176/

 

[Cubemmal]

You're dead right. I work for one of the largest software companies in the world (the CEO is the 3rd richest man in the world, if that gives you a clue), and the standard computer for technical staff is a dual-core i5 laptop with 4 or 8GB RAM and a standard HDD (probably costing about $1000-1200).

Sounds like Oracle is pretty tight fisted then

I don't work in the sharp end of product development, but I do assist customers with their project implementation and delivery

Well that's pretty typical then. The core engineering teams usually get the best - HP workstations (Xeon) where I work. Anybody out at your layer - application engineers we call them - get less. They spend more time talking to customers than we do, we're talking to our computers all day. Marketing gets the absolute worst stuff.

However my personal office is light years beyond what I get at work, and yes I use it every day.

 

[johngwheeler]

Well, there's go my theory that the decision makers on buying hardware are tech retards and don't understand the value of having good tools, but you work for a big software company. The leaders/decision makers at your company must understand tech hardware?

They do, and they also sell serious enterprise server hardware (the top-of-the range 480-core / 7,680GB RAM machine costs a bit over $1 million )

However, like many (all?) companies, they are keen to keep operating costs low, and so things like laptop PCs are negotiated with big vendors (Lenovo, Dell etc.) for bulk purchase at low prices. There simply isn't an attitude of "get the best we can for our people". It's more "what's the cheapest we can get away with". I'm sure this attitude is very commonplace in the current economic environment.

If I were in charge, my question would be "what do you need to do, and what is your justification for resource <x>". If the employee makes a good case, they should get what they need to do their job as well as they can. I'm clearly never going to be a business leader.....

 

[resotek]

The Only Reason why a software developer will need a powerful machine like the new Mac Pro is if your coding and dealing with Multimedia Files. Especially Video.

This is a broad generalization that again misses the mark. I think you're painting with way to broad a brush declaring who needs what. The platform is changing for a reason and the savvy developers are moving to try and stay ahead of the curve.

 

[johngwheeler]

Sounds like Oracle is pretty tight fisted then




Well that's pretty typical then. The core engineering teams usually get the best - HP workstations (Xeon) where I work. Anybody out at your layer - application engineers we call them - get less. They spend more time talking to customers than we do, we're talking to our computers all day. Marketing gets the absolute worst stuff.

However my personal office is light years beyond what I get at work, and yes I use it every day.

That's an accurate summary. In fact when I've been talking to some of the product development engineers and why stuff is running mind-numbingly slowly on "standard" hardware, they say things like "it runs fine on my 32GB / dual-SSD machine on a 10Gig network"..... Sometimes developers forget that you're trying to run resource-hungry applications (e.g. ERP & CRM systems) on an 8GB laptop instead of a 256GB 16-core server.

I've gone slightly off-topic here, but the point I wanted to make was that very often people involved in software development (maybe not full-time) could benefit from more powerful machines than the typical office desktop or laptop. I'd be happy even having a limited "pool" of more powerful machines that could be issued when part-time developers like myself needed them.

Like you, I have much better equipment at home than at normally get access to at work. I generally take my own Mac gear with me to work, as it's just nicer to use day to day. At least we have pretty lenient BYOD policies where I work - so it's not all bad. I would absolutely hate to be forced to use an anaemic Windows machine every day!

 

[johngwheeler]

But for 70% of Developer out there, 2006+ and up Mac Pro Should be enough, Even a Mac Mini is good enough. Just Max out the Ram and you should be fine.

The Only Reason why a software developer will need a powerful machine like the new Mac Pro is if your coding and dealing with Multimedia Files. Especially Video.

You're half right. Many, if not most, coding task can be done with a Mac Mini or MBP, by which I mean: (1) Run a fully-features IDE such as Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ etc (2) Build and deploy reasonably sized native or web applications to a local run-time environment (e.g. web server, app-server, JVM etc.) (3) run testing software.

However you run into limitations when the run-time environment you need to test your applications on requires more power than a typical dual or quad-core machine can provide. In many cases these environments need lots of memory or lots of cores. For example you might have separate VMs to simulate each part of a distributed architecture: a client VM (running functional tests), web-server VM, middleware VM, database VM. You could easily dedicate 8 or more virtual CPUs for development VMs.

These applications are nearly always web-apps and generally have zero requirements for video or multimedia; in fact most of the back-end servers will run better without any kind of GUI at all - which also saves compute resources.

There are lots of different kinds of development: mobile apps, desktop apps, script-driven apps, batch apps, business process apps, web-apps in various languages and "enterprise apps" - which is the space I work in. These are big distributed systems, and the software has now become so resource hungry that in some cases it isn't even possible to run a single-user test environment on a desktop computer.

This is the use case where a really powerful workstation computer can help. The only viable alternative that I can think of is just using a lesser machine as a terminal for deploying applications to remote server machines, either within the local network or provided by a cloud-infrastructure (SaaS, PaaS) service. This model is of course becoming hugely popular with enterprises everywhere, but it's not the easiest thing for developers due to the delays in uploading things over the internet every time you want to test your code.