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Any pricing guesses for the 12 core, 256gb, 32GB, D700? $6000?
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I don't think Apple will fully price the D700 though at W9000 prices. There is no risk of cannibalizing and they'd make way more money with a lower price. Two D700s costs AMD $400 or less to make. They'd make much more money by having 20% of users pay for a $1000 upgrade, than 0.2% of users paying for a $5000 upgrade, which is what we saw with several Mac Pro upgrades last time.
Remember the Fire Pro V8750 which is the D500 is $1500 per, and the 1650v2 lists for $600, lets say the extra memory cost is $100. The 1620v2 lists for $300, and two W7000 cards would be $600 per. So we have a $2200 price difference for the parts, that scales to a $1000 price increase which is 45% of the additional cost of the parts. Apple is giving us a discount.
If you extrapolate that to the 8 core 24GB 2xD700 model you'd be looking at a likely a $5999 price. With the 12 core 32GB 2xD700 $6999. That would be very reasonable.
The D300>D500 upgrade should cost $500 extra, and so the D300>D700 upgrade should cost $1500 extra.
Remember the Fire Pro V8750 which is the D500 is $1500 per, and the 1650v2 lists for $600, lets say the extra memory cost is $100. The 1620v2 lists for $300, and two W7000 cards would be $600 per. So we have a $2200 price difference for the parts, that scales to a $1000 price increase which is 45% of the additional cost of the parts. Apple is giving us a discount.
If you extrapolate that to the 8 core 24GB 2xD700 model you'd be looking at a likely a $5999 price. With the 12 core 32GB 2xD700 $6999. That would be very reasonable.
The D300>D500 upgrade should cost $500 extra, and so the D300>D700 upgrade should cost $1500 extra.
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the connector on standard cards is on the "long" edge of a card. The connector on Mac Pro Dx00 series cards is on the "short" edge of the card. These cards are in no way physically compatible with one another.
There are no edge sockets for external monitors either.
There is no double width anything with the Dx00 series. Part of the reason for "double wide" is cooling. The cooling solution is not on a Dx00 card. That is yet another reason why not even close to be physically compatible.
The Apple Fire Pro and AMD Fire Pro card are rigidly segmented cards. They are swappable in any way. So saying they are going to lead to market substitutions is not particularly well founded. Broad spectrum the functionality has overlap, but these are substitutable goods.
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How about because they are 100% physically incompatible with the rest of the Fire Pro product line? That would be a awfully good reason to come up with different numbers/names: because they are different.
The second shocker reason is that they are made by a different company. Rest of Fire Pro all made by (or more accurately commissioned by) AMD. Apple's.... design/commissioned by Apple. Mutating reference design and adding custom cooling assembly is a bit smaller 'd' design than refactoring the whole card.
Yes, you have completed my point.
One of two things is true:
1. D700 is 100% replacement for W9000 and if priced below retail for cards (ie, nMP with D700s is less than 7-9K$) it will quickly become fast selling mid-level workstation.....for Windows.
2. D700 does NOT have parity with W9000 and can thus be priced lower with no conflicts to AMDs sales in Windows world. Clocks hitting limits due to thermal issues a good example. Or perhaps Apple will have to do tech support?
In any case, what exactly is value of FirePro in OSX? Cards are clearly run by same driver kexts as consumer ones. They are just another device id to match in a list. So if they are really running same as $200 7870, what is the big plus? Where is value added ? Windows has completely separate drivers. Apple could intro special ones at debut, but why then are all 3 cards already in existing consumer drivers?
Any BTW, I think someone misunderstood my point on this. When I mentioned workstation buyers getting nMP with D700 if total was less than $7k I did not mean they would yank cards and put in real workstation. I meant that they would buy nMP and erase OSX and install Windows and get to work. From their perspective, getting $7K in cards for $6k would mean the rest of computer was FREE.
One of two things is true:
1. D700 is 100% replacement for W9000 and if priced below retail for cards (ie, nMP with D700s is less than 7-9K$) it will quickly become fast selling mid-level workstation.....for Windows.
2. D700 does NOT have parity with W9000 and can thus be priced lower with no conflicts to AMDs sales in Windows world. Clocks hitting limits due to thermal issues a good example. Or perhaps Apple will have to do tech support?
In any case, what exactly is value of FirePro in OSX? Cards are clearly run by same driver kexts as consumer ones. They are just another device id to match in a list. So if they are really running same as $200 7870, what is the big plus? Where is value added ? Windows has completely separate drivers. Apple could intro special ones at debut, but why then are all 3 cards already in existing consumer drivers?
Any BTW, I think someone misunderstood my point on this. When I mentioned workstation buyers getting nMP with D700 if total was less than $7k I did not mean they would yank cards and put in real workstation. I meant that they would buy nMP and erase OSX and install Windows and get to work. From their perspective, getting $7K in cards for $6k would mean the rest of computer was FREE.
I know a few people that would jump on this if their is a close performance parity. They won't care if it's an Apple computer if they can a workstation for nearly nothing compared to the cards on their own.
I would be one of them, although I'll be the OSX chap.
The drivers and feature set, along with the actual cards are still speculation though, and I do wonder if Separate drivers will be introduced.
If not, we'll still have to wait and see if all the features of a full FirePro card are available to the normal AMD cards being seen as D series FirePros.
Once again performance parity will come into play, along with price.
IF, we can get the consumer cards to work, and function as real FirePros with their entire feature set it will breathe further life into my current Mac Pro.
Although Apple are taking too long, and normal AMD 7 series cards are disappearing fast, with the "new" 270, and 280 cards out. Silly rebadges, but drivers recognise them differently!
Actually, Does anyone here have an AMD 270, or 280 to test in a Mac Pro and see what the OS X drivers say?
I tend to think Apple is going to price the FirePros low. And yes, it would cause Windows based editors to migrate over based on the FirePro prices alone. That's the point, isn't it?
I could possibly see an 8 core/D700 combo for $5k-$5.5k. $7k doesn't sound totally unreasonable for a 12 core.
Even better: buy the same FirePros, juice up the clocks with that cool system, and then watch Windows editors flock over.
I could possibly see an 8 core/D700 combo for $5k-$5.5k. $7k doesn't sound totally unreasonable for a 12 core.
Even better: buy the same FirePros, juice up the clocks with that cool system, and then watch Windows editors flock over.
Not much to back that up with the info they have now released so far though.
D300 versus W7000: Apple nuked 2GB off the card and prices appear to be pretty close. (i.e., the base Mac Pro price jumped up $400. Largely the D300s are doing that. )
"Good" versus "Better" configs differ by $1000.
About $300 on CPU and just for round numbers $100 for the 4GB DIMM. So $600 (or about $300/card). Looks smaller than the approximate $500 gap between W7000 and W8000 up until notice not getting a W8000. Nuke 1GB of VRAM (at least better than D300's 2GB though) and drop down to a Tahiti LE (instead of Tahiti Pro) GPU package. The Pitcairn XT and Tahiti LE cards only differ by about $50 in suggested retail. So $300 more is more than reasonable for the small hardware increase provided.
If Apple wasn't busy stripping VRAM off the cards they announced prices for I'd be inclined to say they were going to be aggressive with pricing. These cards have been stripped to boost margins. The D700 is the only card in their offering that isn't stripped relative to W7000-W9000 line up.
The 8 core likely is around at an additional > $2K addition all by itself. $2,999+ 2K -> $4,999 even with dual D300 cards. The D500 upgrade, if $600, would take that to $5,599.
Far more likely that the D500-> D700 jump is at least minimally double that of D300->D500. The core count is going way up and the VRAM is doubling (which so far Apple has been skimping on), so highly optimistically a $1,200 delta. That makes it around $6K just for 8 core dual D700.
It probably won't be the approximately $1,800 gap per card between W8000 and W9000 because dual D700 are going to have major power constraint problems. No way going to be able to charge full price for the second one because can't really run it at full power except for extremely narrow corner cases that likely consist just of extremely artificial benchmarks.
Yeah because after Apple adds the 30% to Intel's noise bleed high prices the that is over another $1K to go from 8 to 12 cores. It would be over $7K. Perhaps short of $8K
"Lower price than compeitition" FirePro cards has always been in AMD's strategy over last half decade or so. It wouldn't be strange to have it employed by a combined Apple/AMD effort here. However, "higher performance (juiced up clocks) at lower price" probably will not be what is guiding this though.
AMD's mainstream cards are coming down a bit now since there is no major architectural change coming any time soon. The Fire Pro variants don't walk on water. They have the same pricing pressures. By June 2014 the FirePro line up will be 2 years old. The target price competitive targets Apple should be using have to be the 2014 target levels not the 2012-2013 ones. The Mac Pro is going to have to live in 2014 price environment far more than a 2013 one.
I really want to see what they can do with the dual GFX cards for computing power. This way I can finally put the Quad/Hexcore limitation to rest. I was really hoping for a 6core minimum, but if these Dseries cards can accelerate the OS and Programs, the quad core will do. ...hhmmm, maybe a 6core still, just to be on the safe side.
How much VRAM is needed for apps like FCPX to really fly for example? I simply have no concept of what's good, bad, or ugly with respect to VRAM.
Believe that the D700 will be WELL below market price for PCI boards.
Apple's proprietary PCB layout prevents cannibalization from desktop market.
Have a feeling Apple really wants these puppies flying off the shelf.
Apple's proprietary PCB layout prevents cannibalization from desktop market.
Have a feeling Apple really wants these puppies flying off the shelf.
For professional Apps you simply want as much as possible, the same for High res work such as 4K.
FCPX at the moment doesn't use all that much in terms of CPU, or GPU cores, but they have said the new version is going to take full advantage of the new Mac Pro and it's CPUs, and GPUs.
I should probably get iStat or something to monitor my GPU, and VRAM usage during FCPX work. Although at the moment the only time my CPU get's to around 90% usage is during heavy and long Rendering and Transcoding. For everything else it stays around 50-60%.
I've often ran out of RAM, but then again I only have 24GB of it, and I'd say 32 be the minimum I'd want in my next workstation.
It isn't the apps. Photoshop runs just fine in 1-2GB or RAM. You could work through a series of 1MB jpegs and not particular push the RAM limits at all.
It is the data set size working on that is a RAM driver. If someone told your Mac Pro was going to be limited to 3GB of main RAM would kind of limitations would you think that imposed. If working on data that is 4-5GB big in main RAM then 4-5GB in VRAM is just as likely if want to operate closer to peak TFOPs rates.
THis is exactly why games are a poor benchmark on utility of additional VRAM since most games go through great efforts to reduce and compress what storing on the other side. Although do go large efforts to cache since mainstream sytsems' bandwidth to the cards is often also limited.
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How old is the CPU? If it doesn't have AVX then FCPX won't particularly think the CPU is capable of much significant "embarrasingly parallel" work and won't work in that mode.
aside from the graphics cards, can anyone explain to me why the 8 core xeons are THAT much more expensive.
i get that it's a different die, but will it be worth the extra performance?
is the cache size a big deal? it just seems a massive price difference - after all i could buy 2 6 core cpus and they'd still be considerabley cheaper (2/3).. i don't understand the thinking behind it. anyone?
(i guess it only makes sense since we cannot have dual cpus in this machine)
thanks
gernot
i get that it's a different die, but will it be worth the extra performance?
is the cache size a big deal? it just seems a massive price difference - after all i could buy 2 6 core cpus and they'd still be considerabley cheaper (2/3).. i don't understand the thinking behind it. anyone?
(i guess it only makes sense since we cannot have dual cpus in this machine)
thanks
gernot
It's a 2010 Westmere-EP Xeon W3680, it doesn't have AVX, and it's hardly in-capable of decent parallel work.
In multi-threaded work is still outpaces any intel Quad core, and isn't that far below the Sandy, and Ivy-bridge EP CPU's.
For FCPX specifically, AVX is actually kinda a big deal. Here's a little side story:
I did a test with FCPX on my modified Mac Pro 5,1 (2 X5690s) with one of Dave's 570GTXs. The test involved ingesting 2 20-minute AVCHD clips, merging them with a PiP effect, and then exporting the combined footage to h.264 MPEG4.
I performed the same test on my Retina Macbook Pro.
If the footage was time t in length, the time it took for the export:
Mac Pro: 2t
Macbook Pro: t
It literally took the laptop half the time it took the Mac Pro to do the work. Both have nVidia chips in them (and neither are particularly hot OpenCL performers). The Mac Pro has 48G of RAM with several RAID0 volumes for media, caching, etc. It is, in every way, significantly faster than the laptop which has 16GB and a single SSD. And yet the laptop ate the big Mac's lunch with FCPX.
So, yeah, don't doubt the bennies of AVX if you use FCPX. It makes a difference.
If I had to guess, I'd say: not terribly different than how it's running today.
If it suits your needs and you're happy with it, then keep chugging along with it. Just understand that FCPX on the newer Macs will probably outperform your ol' workhorse; in some cases, fairly significantly.
I'd say far more than significantly if the new FCPX is really optimised and developed to take full advantage for the new Mac Pro.
I look forward to seeing the difference in performance.
Was going to say the same thing; these D series cards are using a fully custom connector, form factor and cooling system so they're not even remotely compatible to AMDs vanilla offerings, so I really doubt their margins are threatened, and I'm sure AMD will make plenty of money anyway by licensing to Apple and supplying the GPU, memory etc.
Going for the Mac Pro means buying into a small form factor professional desktop that I'm sure will have great performance, but may not compete with a traditional workstation that can offer more cooling, upgradability etc., I doubt AMD are in any danger here, though Apple is unlikely to complain if professionals are enticed over the new Mac Pro, but I expect they'll be outweighed by those put off by it so I wouldn't expect a big difference either way.
I'd be surprised if they charge more than $4000 for the D700s for the quad core machine, probably less though as Apple is handling all the hardware and OS X driver support themselves which is nothing new to them; AMD will only, maybe, need to support users booting to Windows and thus using the AMD W9000 drivers. The question mark is how much Apple considers each card to cost to build, since they seem to be doing it themselves, presumably with some kind of license and parts agreement with AMD.