MP 7,1 Has anyone seen a benchmark?

[defjam]

@chfilm, @defjam, @gazwas :

i am a longtime 20+ years mac user! and i am still using a lot of macs.
but not anymore for anything workstation like.

I just posted the numbers because die hard apple fans here tell people
that the mac pro is a superfast computer and that the price is totally justified.
so let the price and benchmark comparison speaks for itself.

@ganzwas: no fantasies involved, i built this computer yesterday.
first time in my life doing this, it took me 1.5 days of work.

I have no objection to the comparison with other systems nor do I think the 2019 Mac Pro is something special (performance wise). Mac users have just awoken from a six year coma so to them this Mac Pro does seem as if it is. It's the fastest Mac to date but it is not the fastest workstation, Apple is just playing catch up (so to speak).

All that said many people who are buying it need the fastest / expandable Macintosh (note I said Macintosh and not workstation). They do so because they either need macOS (because they're workflow depends on it and cannot easily be moved to another platform) or they just prefer macOS. To them this Mac Pro is very welcome and worth the price premium.

One thing I can say is that I'm happy Apple has decided to make this type of system once again. No longer are Mac users forced to shoehorn their workflow into a non-workstation class system.

 

[chfilm]

ProRes is a proprietary intermediate codec for Apple software ... so the answer would be none.

In reality is no real argument for Mac Pro besides that it runs proprietary OS and proprietary Codecs... at faster speed than previous Apple PCs. Performance/Dollar ratio, when compared to non Apple PCs is mediocre at best.

What i am interested in is how did you survive on Macs until now?
I mean if it really were a business need to have 8 pic lanes, TBs of RAM and "Workstation-class" hardware... running multiple 4K streams simultaneously .... wouldn't you have had to change to non Apple PCs a long time ago?

“Proprietary codec for Apple software” - Prores comes out natively out of Red and Arri cameras, which are the industry standard for film/advertisement acquisition, worldwide, period.
Your post is laughable at best, and insulting towards @Kedbear at worst.
People like us so far had to deal with annoying proxy Workflows, but it was the reality. I’m working in a lot of production houses all over the country and I know only two places where they use a windows machine for editors. It’s just too painful to work on these machines, nobody wants to put up with that OS and these computers, even if their performance might actually be better sometimes. It’s weird and annoying but it’s how it is. I love OSX and the entire ecosystem, it’s little things like when the art director comes over and wants to quickly airdrop me a graphic from his MacBook or so, that’s just so much smoother on a mac only workspace.

 

[H. Flower]

Exactly.

 

[defjam]

People like us so far had to deal with annoying proxy Workflows, but it was the reality. I’m working in a lot of production houses all over the country and I know only two places where they use a windows machine for editors. It’s just too painful to work on these machines, nobody wants to put up with that OS and these computers, even if their performance might actually be better sometimes. It’s weird and annoying but it’s how it is. I love OSX and the entire ecosystem, it’s little things like when the art director comes over and wants to quickly airdrop me a graphic from his MacBook or so, that’s just so much smoother on a mac only workspace.

They should take another look. Windows has improved significantly over the years.

 

[Kedbear]

“Proprietary codec for Apple software” - Prores comes out natively out of Red and Arri cameras, which are the industry standard for film/advertisement acquisition, worldwide, period.
Your post is laughable at best, and insulting towards @Kedbear at worst.
People like us so far had to deal with annoying proxy Workflows, but it was the reality. I’m working in a lot of production houses all over the country and I know only two places where they use a windows machine for editors. It’s just too painful to work on these machines, nobody wants to put up with that OS and these computers, even if their performance might actually be better sometimes. It’s weird and annoying but it’s how it is. I love OSX and the entire ecosystem, it’s little things like when the art director comes over and wants to quickly airdrop me a graphic from his MacBook or so, that’s just so much smoother on a mac only workspace.

Exactly. I’m an Arri Alexa owner and 95% of my work across commercials, drama and documentaries originates on ProRes. ProRes is not an ‘intermediary codec’ but it seems like some people here don’t really understand some professional industries and why the Mac ecosystem is the standard.

 

[Marekul]

“Proprietary codec for Apple software” - Prores comes out natively out of Red and Arri cameras, which are the industry standard for film/advertisement acquisition, worldwide, period.
Your post is laughable at best, and insulting towards @Kedbear at worst.
People like us so far had to deal with annoying proxy Workflows, but it was the reality. I’m working in a lot of production houses all over the country and I know only two places where they use a windows machine for editors. It’s just too painful to work on these machines, nobody wants to put up with that OS and these computers, even if their performance might actually be better sometimes. It’s weird and annoying but it’s how it is. I love OSX and the entire ecosystem, it’s little things like when the art director comes over and wants to quickly airdrop me a graphic from his MacBook or so, that’s just so much smoother on a mac only workspace.

Truth is if hardware performance would not matter, no downsampling to a proprietary intermediary codec like apple prores would be needed for post production and you would all go with ARRIRAW or REDRAW. Like almost every high budget hollywood production.

Yes in your niche maybe everyone uses Final Cut and ProRes and it serves your needs best. but that doesn't change anything about the things i wrote.

 

[chfilm]

Truth is if hardware performance would not matter, no downsampling to a proprietary intermediate codec like apple prores would be needed for post production and you would all go with ARRIRAW or REDRAW. Like almost every high budget hollywood production.

Yes in your niche maybe everyone uses Final Cut and ProRes, but the doesn't change anything about all the things i wrote.

lol nobody in "my niche" which happens to be a very broad spectrum from small youtube commercials to theatrical releases and tv shows, nobody uses Final Cut, but just everyone uses Prores. EVEN ON WINDOWS!!!

Redraw, sure it's everywhere too, but masters are delivered as prores, always and everywhere that I have worked.
Arriraw is still kinda rare, sure on huge Hollywood blockbusters it's being used, but for everyday production it's just not needed if you ask me.

 

[Kedbear]

Truth is if hardware performance would not matter, no downsampling to a proprietary intermediary codec like apple prores would be needed for post production and you would all go with ARRIRAW or REDRAW. Like almost every high budget hollywood production.

Yes in your niche maybe everyone uses Final Cut and ProRes and it serves your needs best. but that doesn't change anything about the things i wrote.

It’s pretty clear you don’t have much experience in this field. A vast amount of productions from tv drama, features, commercials all originate on an Arri with ProRes. I would guesstimate at least 85% + of all content shot on Arris is shot ProRes. There are reasons beyond hardware limitations for this choice. Have you ever personally tested the difference between ARRIRAW and Arri’s ProRes for example?

 

[chfilm]

It’s pretty clear you don’t have much experience in this field. A vast amount of productions from tv drama, features, commercials all originate on an Arri with ProRes. I would guesstimate at least 85% + of all content shot on Arris is shot ProRes. There are reasons beyond hardware limitations for this choice. Have you ever personally tested the difference between ARRIRAW and Arri’s ProRes for example?

to chime in- We did test the two codecs on a super heavy greenscreen only, stereoscopic shoot, and opted against Arriraw. The keys pulled from prores were practically IDENTICAL to the ones from the raws at MUCH easier to handle data rates etc.

 

[Adult80HD]

What's interesting is I shared a benchmark article from Puget Systems a few pages back that showed the new 3200-series Xeons spanking the AMD Threadrippers on every benchmark except their After Effects benchmark, which tells you more about Adobe's software than anything. They even won out on the Photoshop tests. Despite that I keep seeing people say how the AMD processors are superior. It seems to me that for the intended market these new Mac Pros are using the best processors they can. Not one of the pro-Threadripper crowd even commented on the benchmark results.

 

[gazwas]

@chfilm Looking forward to your thoughts after you get your Mac Pro tomorrow. 😀

 

[chfilm]

@chfilm Looking forward to your thoughts after you get your Mac Pro tomorrow. 😀

Let’s hope DHL doesn’t f**k it up like they usually do 🤓
Do you already have yours? Do you want me to test anything? Sadly I have to afterburner, otherwise I’d really put this one through its paces!

 

[gazwas]

Not ordered mine yet, waiting until the 5700X is release as I’m mainly a stills photographer using Capture One but sooting increasingly more 4K and editing in FCPX so not sure I’ll see the benefit of Vega II yet. Want to see more tests before I buy hence my interest in this discussion. 😀

Fingers crossed for the delivery going to plan.

 

[The Other One]

Not one of the pro-Threadripper crowd even commented on the benchmark results.

The article you referenced is from August and is using the 2nd gen Threadripper processors. There's a significant performance boost with the newer 3rd gen TR CPUs, as illustrated here.

(Note: I'm not part of the pro-Threadripper crowd, so don't yell at me. I'm just pointing out a possible reason why nobody responded to your earlier post.)

 

[Quu]

What's interesting is I shared a benchmark article from Puget Systems a few pages back that showed the new 3200-series Xeons spanking the AMD Threadrippers on every benchmark except their After Effects benchmark, which tells you more about Adobe's software than anything. They even won out on the Photoshop tests. Despite that I keep seeing people say how the AMD processors are superior. It seems to me that for the intended market these new Mac Pros are using the best processors they can. Not one of the pro-Threadripper crowd even commented on the benchmark results.

Because that benchmark you showed is using the old Threadripper 2 chips and not the current Threadripper 3 ones which are much faster. That's why we dismissed it.

Also again just to hammer it home, for the price of the 8 Core Mac Pro you can get the 32 Core Threadripper 3 3970X. And I clearly showed a few pages back that you can get 4x the RAM, SSD, GPU and CPU for the price of the base spec Mac Pro by going with a Pugent Systems machine.

Doesn't have macOS. Doesn't have 1.5TB RAM ceiling, doesn't have dual 10Gb ethernet or Thunderbolt 3, no support for the Afterburner card. But if you configured a Mac Pro to the same roundabout specs (actually less powerful CPU and a little less RAM) as the machine I showed from Pugent it came out to $18,799. The Pugent system is $6,240 or so.

The point being if you want the best CPU or GPU performance, you have to look elsewhere, sadly. Apple doesn't offer an equivalent at any price. But the Mac Pro's overall system is quite balanced with the other features it offers like all those Thunderbolt 3 ports etc

I know 100% it's not all about raw performance the "intangible" quality of a Mac is a good enough reason for many people to want this system, it's a reason I buy a lot of Apple products instead of their often more affordable competitors.

 

[jinnyman]

AMD improved vastly from TR2 to TR3. TR2 killed the intel’s competition of similar chip back then also.
You know, one CPU segment of highend computing market is evolving so fast that even person like me has hard time following up. So I’d understand the meanless euphoria on win over TR2.

 

[Adult80HD]

So now we deflect..."Oh it's not the latest AMD chip" but where's the new benchmarks? The Puget Systems article is just four months old. If Intel jumped ahead at one point and at the moment the new TR3 jumps ahead at another then the whole argument of Apple using old outdated tech is built on a very flimsy basis of relative time windows of releases.

My point is this: The ridiculous harping on the AMD chips is not only completely irrelevant, since Apple doesn't offer them (and BTW, the major workstation vendors like HP and Dell don't, either), but also the results aren't nearly as clear-cut on the "superiority" of those chips anyway.

Constantly bringing them up in a Mac Pro forum is a futile exercise, and frankly it just gets annoying after a while.

 

[bob_stan]

+1

 

[Adult80HD]

The article you referenced is from August and is using the 2nd gen Threadripper processors. There's a significant performance boost with the newer 3rd gen TR CPUs, as illustrated here.

(Note: I'm not part of the pro-Threadripper crowd, so don't yell at me. I'm just pointing out a possible reason why nobody responded to your earlier post.)

The problem here is that for some unknown reason, they didn't include the high-performing Xeons in this test, so you can't draw any conclusions about comparative performance.

BTW, this disclaimer in their article is also very telling:

"Another factor to keep in mind is that Thunderbolt is fairly common in post-production workflows, and if you plan on using it, you should strongly consider using an Intel-based platform. This is because at the moment, there are no AMD platforms that have certified Thunderbolt support from Intel. Thunderbolt can be very finicky on PC, and there are only a handful of platforms (even among those that are fully certified) that we have found to be reliable across a wide range of devices. The AMD boards that are available with Thunderbolt may end up working just fine with your devices, but in general, we recommend sticking with a platform that is fully certified if Thunderbolt is important to you."

Platform/processor choices are based on many things, raw performance at certain tasks being just one of them.
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Not ordered mine yet, waiting until the 5700X is release as I’m mainly a stills photographer using Capture One but sooting increasingly more 4K and editing in FCPX so not sure I’ll see the benefit of Vega II yet. Want to see more tests before I buy hence my interest in this discussion. 😀

Fingers crossed for the delivery going to plan.

I suspect the 5700X will be an excellent choice for those who are primarily using the Mac Pro for still photography editing. Plenty of horsepower there.

 

[Quu]

So now we deflect..."Oh it's not the latest AMD chip" but where's the new benchmarks? The Puget Systems article is just four months old. If Intel jumped ahead at one point and at the moment the new TR3 jumps ahead at another then the whole argument of Apple using old outdated tech is built on a very flimsy basis of relative time windows of releases.

The Threadripper chips are up against Intels HEDT platform which consists of 10 to 18 core chips on LGA 2066. The XEON range from Intel competes with EPYC from AMD which goes up-to 64 cores. XEON-W is an off-shoot of the XEON server range to try and stave off Threadripper, but Threadripper is itself gaining 64 cores next year (on the same socket I may add).

Intel by contrast has nothing above 28 Cores that is socket compatible. The Mac Pro is basically as good as it's going to get CPU wise until the motherboard is changed. Intel is planning a 36 Core Icelake Chip for late 2020, needs a new socket though and will not even come close to matching a 64 core Threadripper.

As for release windows. Threadripper came out a month ago, and when I say came out, I mean motherboards and CPU's available on store shelves. Apple had ample time to design a system based on this platform as OEM's were given designs a year ago to get their products ready for launch. Apple has no excuses here.

Constantly bringing them up in a Mac Pro forum is a futile exercise, and frankly it just gets annoying after a while.

I personally hadn't brought up Threadripper again for a while but then the outdated benchmarks were linked to again and people were liking it. I can't not respond to fake news

BTW, this disclaimer in their article is also very telling:

[...] Issues with Thunderbolt on non-Intel hardware [...]

Platform/processor choices are based on many things, raw performance at certain tasks being just one of them.

This is valid criticism. Thunderbolt on Windows is still not very good, with Ryzen 3 and Threadripper 3 I would say the support is now on par with Intel chips but that's still not saying much. Also you only get a single Thunderbolt 3 port, two at most. With the Mac Pro you can already get like 14 depending on your configuration which is quite incredible to be honest.

 

[bob_stan]

This is not a benchmark, but I was pleased to see that Compressor processed one of my small FCPX projects in 14 minutes on my 2019 MacPro vs. 42 minutes on my 2013 Mac Pro, with barely raised temperatures. The 2013 always got very hot.

2019 - 12 core, single Vega II, 96 GB Ram
2013 - 6 core, dual D700, 64GB Ram

 

[jinnyman]

This is not a benchmark, but I was pleased to see that Compressor processed one of my small FCPX projects in 14 minutes on my 2019 MacPro vs. 42 minutes on my 2013 Mac Pro, with barely raised temperatures. The 2013 always got very hot.

2019 - 12 core, single Vega II, 96 GB Ram
2013 - 6 core, dual D700, 64GB Ram

Welcome to the modern world. The performance level offered by your setup was well available for more than few years while Apple was stuck with their failed 6,1 from 2013 until now.
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So now we deflect..."Oh it's not the latest AMD chip" but where's the new benchmarks? The Puget Systems article is just four months old. If Intel jumped ahead at one point and at the moment the new TR3 jumps ahead at another then the whole argument of Apple using old outdated tech is built on a very flimsy basis of relative time windows of releases.

My point is this: The ridiculous harping on the AMD chips is not only completely irrelevant, since Apple doesn't offer them (and BTW, the major workstation vendors like HP and Dell don't, either), but also the results aren't nearly as clear-cut on the "superiority" of those chips anyway.

Constantly bringing them up in a Mac Pro forum is a futile exercise, and frankly it just gets annoying after a while.

The review for new TR3 is available everywhere. If you are really so interested in the performance level of the chip, look in to one of the reviews below:

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X review

These are crazy times in the desktop processor landscape. CPUs with 24 to even 32 processor cores are slowly getting the norm. AMD just released their 3rd generation of Threadripper processors, in thi...

www.guru3d.com

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-threadripper-3970x-review

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1504...3960x-and-3970x-review-24-and-32-cores-on-7nm

I understand if you are defending the merit of MP 7,1 as only option available from Apple with Mac OS, then I'd agree. But since we are talking benchmarks, the raw performance of CPU chip is not really comparable.

Of course, MP offers more than just chip, they offer lot of advantages including, but not limited to, increased memory channel, more pcie lanes (albeit 3.0), and last but not least Mac OS. But CPU wise, it's not comparable.

I didn't bring again the old link to puget comparison showing TR2. Just couldn't stand people are liking the TR2 link thinking intel is beating TR. No it's not.
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[Adult80HD]

Welcome to the modern world. The performance level offered by your setup was well available for more than few years while Apple was stuck with their failed 6,1 from 2013 until now.
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The review for new TR3 is available everywhere. If you are really so interested in the performance level of the chip, look in to one of the reviews below:

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X review

These are crazy times in the desktop processor landscape. CPUs with 24 to even 32 processor cores are slowly getting the norm. AMD just released their 3rd generation of Threadripper processors, in thi...

www.guru3d.com

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-threadripper-3970x-review

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1504...3960x-and-3970x-review-24-and-32-cores-on-7nm

I understand if you are defending the merit of MP 7,1 as only option available from Apple with Mac OS, then I'd agree. But since we are talking benchmarks, the raw performance of CPU chip is not really comparable.

Of course, MP offers more than just chip, they offer lot of advantages including, but not limited to, increased memory channel, more pcie lanes (albeit 3.0), and last but not least Mac OS. But CPU wise, it's not comparable.

I didn't bring again the old link to puget comparison showing TR2. Just couldn't stand people are liking the TR2 link thinking intel is beating TR. No it's not.
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OK, so once again though, the data does not support the ridiculous praise for the TR3: In the Anandtech review, there's only one Xeon and it's the older W-31xx series. It doesn't really get "trounced" either--it's right up in the performance space you would expect and in some tests outperforms the AMD offerings. Is it more expensive than the AMD? Definitely. That's always been the case though. The performance is so close though that all of the other trade-offs that start to come in play are not insignificant. For many people those considerations are vastly more important than the cost delta and the minor performance differences. BTW, that includes much more than the Mac crowd buying the Mac Pro--note the high-end workstations from Dell and HP are all based on the Intel processors as well.

The endless flogging of the AMD processors on these Mac Pro threads is really tiresome. It's irrelevant. No one cares except the people bringing it up, and from what I can see, none of you are buying Mac Pros anyway. What's the point? You're not winning any converts or making new friends.

 

[WShawn]

I just ran benchmark tests on my machine: 16-core, Vega II solo, 192GB ram, 2TB HD

Is this inline with expected results?

CPU:
Single Core: 1137
Multicore Score: 15846

Compute
Open CL: 84060

Compute
Metal: 102611

Cinebench:
6807

Unique Heaven Benchmark 4.0
FPS: 113
Score: 2847
Min FPS: 18.4
Max FPS: 195.8
Full Screen 34440x1440, set to medium, Tessellation: disabled

Thank you for posting these benchmarks on the 16-core model, as this is the processor I was leaning towards to replace my 2012 Mac Pro (2 x 2.66 Ghz 6-Core Intel Xeon). I'm leaning towards the same GPU but less installed RAM and smaller system drive, around $11K.

I'm mainly interested in the Cinebench score as Cinema 4D is my main tool for our small motion graphics/3D animation business.

Is this the Cinebench R20 score? My 2012 Mac Pro gets a score of 2641 on that, so it looks like I could be getting a 2.5x C4D render speed boost on a new system. I'd love to get the 24-core processor, but the $4000 jump to get that is a bit too much to justify.

Yes, some PC running AMD Threadrippers would be cheaper and faster in terms of raw processing power, but there's more to my work life than that. In short, I really really dislike working in Windows. The interface is gross. It's poorly organized. It won't let me sort all files and folders by date the way I can on my Mac.

We're currently in possession of a 2 x 12 core Xeon Windows workstation with a Cinebench 20 score of 8809 that a client gave to us for a project in 2016 (and never asked for its return), and I use it only sporadically. In terms of raw CPU power it's 3.3x as fast as my 2012 Mac Pro, but I'd rather do the bulk of my animation and compositing on my slower Mac Pro than have to deal with Windows 10. When it comes time for my final animation renders I send those to Pixel Plow.

The Mac in general has NEVER been the best platform for 3D animation, but that hasn't stopped my wife and me from running a fairly successful small animation business that celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2019. We're not rich, but we're comfortable, and we can justify a new $11K Mac Pro after 7-8 years of no workstation upgrades.

 

[ssgbryan]

The endless flogging of the AMD processors on these Mac Pro threads is really tiresome. It's irrelevant. No one cares except the people bringing it up, and from what I can see, none of you are buying Mac Pros anyway. What's the point? You're not winning any converts or making new friends.

There are 2 types of Mac Pro users. The pragmatists and the true believers.

Pragmatists care about performance. That is why AMD processors keep coming up. We didn't come here because of P.T. Barnum and his reality distortion field. We went Mac because it was the best performance option. Those of us that have been circling the airport, waiting on a new Mac Pro have decisions to make. As a pragmatist, that means we need to collect data, so we can make an informed decision.

I am sure that it is irrelevant to the true believers and you don't care. That being said, those of us that are pragmatic are looking at all of our options. Do I stay or do I go (with a tip of the hat to Joe Strummer), do we make do with what we have, is there a 7,1 that actually fits our workflow, or do we move onto greener pastures (with more performance).

Decisions, decisions.