iMac Pro Really Will Be The Fastest Mac

[Dave245]

For those that need it the iMac Pro looks to be the fastest Mac Apple have ever created. The alleged benchmarks are crazy fast.

"The 8-core iMac Pro averages at 23,536 in multi-core tests, making it the highest performance of any iMac ever, nearly 22% faster than the top-of-the-line 5K iMac." - http://bgr.com/2017/10/17/imac-pro-2017-benchmarks-vs-mac-pro-scores/

https://9to5mac.com/2017/10/23/apple-suppliers-imac-pro/

Also i wonder if we will see Touch ID on the keyboard? the iMac Pro will have support for the secure enclave

http://appleinsider.com/articles/17...enclave-intel-purley-chips-coming-to-imac-pro

https://www.macrumors.com/2017/10/13/magic-keyboard-numeric-keypad-shipping-slips/

What do you guys make of all this? are you impressed by the iMac Pro specs? are you getting one?

 

[Mr_Brightside_@]

Crazy, I heard the iPhone X will be the fastest iPhone too!

 

[redheeler]

Apple could be and should be releasing the fastest Mac ever made every single year, as it was back when Apple really cared about keeping the Mac Pro hardware current (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010). The fact we are treating it as a unique occurrence now shows just how bad the neglect has been...

Hopefully the iMac Pro is the beginning of a return to caring about the professional-oriented Mac desktops, and to me it looks like it will be a decent offering (other than not being easy-to-upgrade for customers that care about hardware expansion or longevity).

 

[ItsNotaTumor]

I'll get it if a fairy grants me 5k

 

[spoonie1972]

The specs are great, but I worry about the longterm (ok, nearterm - 3 to 4 years) thermals turning everything inside that tiny case into hot junk. Lots of 2010/11 and even a few 2014's here at work with issues.

 

[NT1440]

The specs are great, but I worry about the longterm (ok, nearterm - 3 to 4 years) thermals turning everything inside that tiny case into hot junk. Lots of 2010/11 and even a few 2014's here at work with issues.

...Which is why the completely redesigned thermal handling will be neat to observe, and also makes the comparison to previous iMac's completely meaningless.

 

[spoonie1972]

Here's to hope :thumbsup:

 

[DesterWallaboo]

The iMac Pro may be fast at some tasks. But I guarantee it isn't fast as the regular iMac at others. 3D apps and apps that use extensive multithreading will absolutely benefit. Sadly, these do not include key apps like Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere. These apps benefit almost exclusively from clock speed. The 4.2Ghz i7 iMac will drastically outperform the 3.5Ghz E7 Xeon. We noticed that our Mac Pros were being slaughtered by our iMacs a couple years ago. So we did some tests with BareFeats and it bore out the reality that clock speeds are vastly superior to Xeon multi-threading for nearly all tasks. If you are doing strictly 3D-related work, then I'd say to absolutely buy the iMac Pro. However, if you are working in a mixed media app environment using After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and maybe a 3D app.... then I strongly recommend a regular iMac for the task.... as it will outperform the iMac Pro by probably a good 30-50%

 

[jjjoseph]

iMac Pro will be the fastest computer ever made, end of discussion.. OK.. End of Discussion, even if takes 4 years for it to be released, it will still be the fastest computer ever made and the fastest computer for the next 10 years.... Radeon Pro Vega 56 and 64 are faster than a GTX 1080Ti, 1080, 1070 and 1060 combined.. Nothing more to discuss. Nothing. I would pay $64,000 for this computer and it would be worth every penny. Am I right? /S
Ok that was a joke.

Anyway, if I went out and bought a ThreadRipper today and a GTX 1080Ti it will be faster and less throttled than an iMac Pro. I think the inherent problem with a mobile computer like the iMac Pro is that your are limited by its size and its inability to displace heat.

A Pro Build needs a larger footprint to be able to get heat away from the CPU and GPU and the only way an iMac Pro will be able to do this will be to throttle it way way down.

It is a great idea.. having a professional level Macintosh again, but the iMac Pro can't be it. Your going to waste some high end components with its inability to be running those components 100% all the time. Why are they wasting their time on this? Build a pro tower, that is what the market wants.

Unless the laws of Physics are changed or Apple has figured out a way to change them, this computer will be a HOT HOT item. Literally.

 

[Trebuin]

iMac Pro will be the fastest computer ever made, end of discussion.. OK.. End of Discussion, even if takes 4 years for it to be released, it will still be the fastest computer ever made and the fastest computer for the next 10 years.... Radeon Pro Vega 56 and 64 are faster than a GTX 1080Ti, 1080, 1070 and 1060 combined.. Nothing more to discuss. Nothing. I would pay $64,000 for this computer and it would be worth every penny. Am I right? /S
Ok that was a joke.

Anyway, if I went out and bought a ThreadRipper today and a GTX 1080Ti it will be faster and less throttled than an iMac Pro. I think the inherent problem with a mobile computer like the iMac Pro is that your are limited by its size and its inability to displace heat.

A Pro Build needs a larger footprint to be able to get heat away from the CPU and GPU and the only way an iMac Pro will be able to do this will be to throttle it way way down.

It is a great idea.. having a professional level Macintosh again, but the iMac Pro can't be it. Your going to waste some high end components with its inability to be running those components 100% all the time. Why are they wasting their time on this? Build a pro tower, that is what the market wants.

Unless the laws of Physics are changed or Apple has figured out a way to change them, this computer will be a HOT HOT item. Literally.

It all depends on the chip design. TDP may be 140w, but it doesn't tell us what temperature it was designed to run at. The idea of a die shrink is to reduce the voltage (an consequently, heat) to run at the same speed. After that, Intel or AMD will increase the clock or components in the CPU bringing up the volts back to a target. Intel may make a "downclocked" version of a chip to help keep the temps down.

If I were Apple, I'd test the case with something that is designed only to put off heat, & figure out what the heatsink and fan can handle. For example, if I adjust the heating device so the heatsink reports an 80C temp (my preference, apple uses 100C) and I find the heating device is emitting 160C, then I'd put in a request for a chip that does not get any hotter than 160 without protection. Those are mythical numbers, BTW.

 

[DesterWallaboo]

It's very unlikely the iMac Pro will be faster than the iMac for anything outside of 3D apps.

 

[fokmik]

Imac pro will be faster at everythin, from games to final cut pro

 

[DesterWallaboo]

Imac pro will be faster at everythin, from games to final cut pro

I highly doubt it.
[doublepost=1508800618][/doublepost]Games and FCP are not highly-multithreaded apps. Which means that clock speed will be their friend. And since the fastest E7 Xeon is 3.5Ghz.... the 4.2Ghz iMac will spank it soundly. Games may have a better benefit due the higher end graphics card. But FCP won't really see much benefit overall.

 

[Apple Fritter]

Seeing how they took great care to finally remove that nasty self-serviceable RAM door the price of the device will probably double in case you want 128 GB RAM. Thanks Apple, but no, thanks. That's just too much of a slap-in-the-face move accompanied by a nice giggle. Even for me as a devout Apple sheep, this is where the buck stops for me. Hard.

 

[alien3dx]

fastest is useless .. usability is the main point.. with need to open upgrade ram 21 inch, no hdmi, bad magic mouse,small keyboard, no upgradable graphic card for aesthetically design.

 

[iPadified]

I have replied to another thread about these Geekbench scores. These number do not make any sense to me. 8-core MT about 23000 (current nMP 8-core is 22000) and 10-core about 35000. This is inconsistent. Expect about 10% higher (or lower) MT performance between 8-core and 10 core. It wold be depressing if the new 8-core in iMac Pro is "only" about as fast as the old 8-core in nMP.

I saw somewhere else that the iMac Pro ST 8 core had about 3500 score while to 10-core was about 5500. No logic in that either. Usually lower core counts have higher ST performance.

I am looking forward to see some appropriate (and believable tests) soon.

 

[Dave245]

To the average consumer these specs are crazy, lets also not forget that this will be an iMac, there will be a Mac Pro in either 2018 or 2019, but this is more of a professional iMac which i think will appeal, the all in 1 form factor of the iMac is great and it's what a lot of people like, putting higher specs inside it is a great way of appealing to professional users who want that.

 

[HDFan]

It's very unlikely the iMac Pro will be faster than the iMac for anything outside of 3D apps.

There are a number of application categories, not just 3D, that benefit from multiple processors. Video editing is a prime example. The ones I am familiar with (HandBrake, Premiere Pro) will run at 1000% to 1900% of cpu on my 12 core (24 virtual) mac. As we move to 4K and 8K video the more cpus the better.

 

[RuffDraft]

There are a number of application categories, not just 3D, that benefit from multiple processors. Video editing is a prime example. The ones I am familiar with (HandBrake, Premiere Pro) will run at 1000% to 1900% of cpu on my 12 core (24 virtual) mac. As we move to 4K and 8K video the more cpus the better.

I'm also shooting and then editing multi-cam 4K projects using FCPX. I have a G RAID Shuttle XL Thunderbolt 2 which will be running into the iMac Pro 10-Core 16GB VRAM if I can afford this. I've been saving since the announcement and look likely to have £6K to throw at it... I can probably go higher if I have to.

From my research online, it seems as though the CPU is quite beneficial for all things without effects, whereas the minute you start doing a lot of intense video effects, the GPU will help out enormously. It's a shame that there's no white paper for FCPX which helps us to decipher what works best / what is used the most.

I tend to keep my projects simple - with colour correction and saturation over heavy grades, but I will be shooting some 10bit 4K 50p eventually, so I want a system that can keep up with that move in a year or two, whilst keeping my current edits swift.

I'm interested as you're in the same line of work:

What would you upgrade in order of performance boons?

I'm thinking:

#1: Go 10-core
#2: Go 16GB VRAM
#3: Go 64GB RAM

Would you say to stick with 8GB VRAM and 32GB RAM and get the most cores as I possibly can instead? I think FCPX runs optimally on maxed out MacBook Pros, and they're only 16GB RAM, so I'm not so sure if the move to 64GB RAM will make much of a difference if I'm only using iTunes alongside FCPX and limited tabs in Safari. 16GB VRAM seems more for effect-heavy work, which I'm not currently aiming to do.

Do you think FCPX relies as heavily on the CPU as Premiere does?

 

[shaunp]

I reckon TDP will limit the performance and it's priced way over what is acceptable to many for an all-in-one. If you need that level of performance you'd be best off looking at a proper workstation given the starting price.

 

[joema2]

I'm also shooting and then editing multi-cam 4K projects using FCPX....it seems as though the CPU is quite beneficial for all things without effects, whereas the minute you start doing a lot of intense video effects, the GPU will help out enormously. It's a shame that there's no white paper for FCPX which helps us to decipher what works best / what is used the most.

I tend to keep my projects simple - with colour correction and saturation over heavy grades, but I will be shooting some 10bit 4K 50p eventually, so I want a system that can keep up with that move in a year or two, whilst keeping my current edits swift....

The CPU vs GPU labor split varies widely based on the workload. In FCPX some effects use CPU, some use GPU and some use a mix or can be configured. E.g, Neat Video can be configured to use all CPU, all GPU or any mix in between. Some effects which claim to use the GPU do not, as can be seen from the CPU graph or iStat Menus when rendering them.

As a general statement video editing in FCPX is more CPU-limited than GPU, however you need plenty of horsepower on both sides as developers figure out how better leverage the GPU.

Unless you have a top-spec 2017 iMac 27, you can get a significant speed increase for several 4k H264 editing tasks just by getting one of those, which is considerably cheaper than even the entry-level iMac Pro.

The early GeekBench numbers indicate the 10-core iMac Pro may be about 1.8x faster at multi-core CPU operations (compared to the 64-bit GeekBench 4.1 numbers on my 2017 iMac 27). However the leaked 8-core iMac Pro multi-core numbers are only about 18% faster: http://bgr.com/2017/10/17/imac-pro-2017-benchmarks-vs-mac-pro-scores/ I don't see 18% as a very compelling upgrade if it's a lot more expensive.

Those numbers also raise the question of why so much difference in multi-core performance between (alleged) 8 and 10-core iMac Pro. They may not be representative.

On the GPU side there is even less data but if the Vega 64 GPU was about 2x faster than the Radeon Pro 580, then both CPU and GPU (for 10-core) might each be nearly 2x faster than the top 2017 iMac 27. Whether the software can use this is another issue but in video editing there are lots of highly multi-core code paths, at least with FCPX. For certain workloads a nearly 2x CPU & GPU improvement (if real) would be worth a lot.

The big unknown about the iMac Pro is whether it will have Quick Sync. No Xeon CPU with over four cores has that, and it's not listed on the Intel spec page for the presumed Xeon-W variants rumored for the iMac Pro.

 

[RuffDraft]

The CPU vs GPU labor split varies widely based on the workload. In FCPX some effects use CPU, some use GPU and some use a mix or can be configured. E.g, Neat Video can be configured to use all CPU, all GPU or any mix in between. Some effects which claim to use the GPU do not, as can be seen from the CPU graph or iStat Menus when rendering them.

As a general statement video editing in FCPX is more CPU-limited than GPU, however you need plenty of horsepower on both sides as developers figure out how better leverage the GPU.

Unless you have a top-spec 2017 iMac 27, you can get a significant speed increase for several 4k H264 editing tasks just by getting one of those, which is considerably cheaper than even the entry-level iMac Pro.

The early GeekBench numbers indicate the 10-core iMac Pro may be about 1.8x faster at multi-core CPU operations (compared to the 64-bit GeekBench 4.1 numbers on my 2017 iMac 27). However the leaked 8-core iMac Pro multi-core numbers are only about 18% faster: http://bgr.com/2017/10/17/imac-pro-2017-benchmarks-vs-mac-pro-scores/ I don't see 18% as a very compelling upgrade if it's a lot more expensive.

Those numbers also raise the question of why so much difference in multi-core performance between (alleged) 8 and 10-core iMac Pro. They may not be representative.

On the GPU side there is even less data but if the Vega 64 GPU was about 2x faster than the Radeon Pro 580, then both CPU and GPU (for 10-core) might each be nearly 2x faster than the top 2017 iMac 27. Whether the software can use this is another issue but in video editing there are lots of highly multi-core code paths, at least with FCPX. For certain workloads a nearly 2x CPU & GPU improvement (if real) would be worth a lot.

The big unknown about the iMac Pro is whether it will have Quick Sync. No Xeon CPU with over four cores has that, and it's not listed on the Intel spec page for the presumed Xeon-W variants rumored for the iMac Pro.

Joema2 - really helpful post. It sounds as though I should go with CPU first, GPU second, though the difference is minimal. I also thought the 10-core sounded like a necessary upgrade based off of last week's leaked spec tests. I also know that Max Yuryev always states that the iMac can blow away the Mac Pro for most tasks, and so I'd prefer to get the iMac Pro at a config where that is not the case. If a 10-core + 16GB Vega is what I need, then that's what I'll be getting.

I know that the current iMac can do a decent job, but the GPU as you've mentioned is old and underwhelming in comparison to what the iMac Pro will offer at the base price. The updates to the iMac Pro - new cooling system, slightly faster (DDR4 2666MHz) and much larger RAM, new GPU using lower power consumption through 2.5d, which sounds like an interesting breakthrough that NVidia hadn't reached at the time of AMD's breakthrough and perfect for an iMac with much more power, great CPU update in the 10-core, 1TB SSD as standard, plus the smaller bonuses such as UHS-II SD card slot, four Thunderbolt 3 ports, louder speakers etc. just make the iMac Pro an all-round great purchase for a video editor who's going to hit the Mac with 3-4 4K camera throughputs and ten audio channels.

How much do you foresee the 10-core CPU and 16GB VEGA chips costing altogether? Are you going to up the RAM as well or not?

I'm thinking the difference on the video card will be minor - few hundred going off Mac Pro updates, but that the 10-core may be an extra £1K. I think for 6.5K, I'll go for it. I just don't think I'll be able to stretch to 64GB RAM, but then I'm not so sure that I'll need that anyways... it seems like the least necessary upgrade.

Thanks for conversing with me - really helpful! I know the 10-core + 16GB Vega may 'only' be 2x faster in comparison to a maxed out iMac 27", but I'm currently struggling away on a 17" MacBook Pro, modified to have 1TB SSD and 16GB RAM, so I think that this update is going to be MAJOR for me... I'm really excited about it. It's great that Apple has been increasing their orders for the GPUs this week as well, as now it looks like December is going to be the release date for sure.

 

[joema2]

...How much do you foresee the 10-core CPU and 16GB VEGA chips costing altogether? Are you going to up the RAM as well or not?...I'm currently struggling away on a 17" MacBook Pro, modified to have 1TB SSD and 16GB RAM, so I think that this update is going to be MAJOR for me....

Based on GeekBench 4, the top-spec 2017 iMac 27 is about 2x faster on CPU and 20x faster on GPU than your 17" MBP. It would be a huge improvement, and the 8GB/512GB SSD model is only $2,700 brand new, maybe $2300-2400 if it was available on the Apple refurbished site. Of course you'd more RAM but a 32GB OWC RAM kit is only $368.

The problem is the entry level iMac Pro is $5k and it might not be much faster than the top iMac 27. Time will tell but early numbers indicate that's a possibility. It looks like the 10-core with Vega 64 would be considerably faster, maybe 1.7x maybe 2x depending on workload and whether CPU or GPU. But it will be considerably more expensive -- how much, nobody knows. If it doesn't have Quick Sync or some other solution to hardware video encoding, that will be yet another complication.

As a documentary editor I may get the 10-core model, but if and only if the FCPX benchmarks -- esp. for H264 and H265 - show it can really deliver a major performance improvement worth the cost.

However if the real-world application benchmarks (not synthetic benchmarks) show the 10-core Vega 64 iMac Pro is only 1.4x faster on CPU/GPU, does not have Quick Sync so it's actually slower on H264 encode/decode, yet is $7k, $8k or more, then I won't be getting it. It would be cheaper to get another iMac 27 and manually split the workload, such as dedicating a machine to transcoding.

 

[jjjoseph]

To the average consumer these specs are crazy, lets also not forget that this will be an iMac, there will be a Mac Pro in either 2018 or 2019, but this is more of a professional iMac which i think will appeal, the all in 1 form factor of the iMac is great and it's what a lot of people like, putting higher specs inside it is a great way of appealing to professional users who want that.

We want higher specs, but not an all in one enclosed computer. It is like putting a Ferrari v12 engine in a Mini Cooper, it doesn't make any sense and is misplaced performance.

The market for this computer is an even smaller sub-market of the Pro Market, and the Pro market is already very very small.

 

[Dave245]

We want higher specs, but not an all in one enclosed computer. It is like putting a Ferrari v12 engine in a Mini Cooper, it doesn't make any sense and is misplaced performance.

The market for this computer is an even smaller sub-market of the Pro Market, and the Pro market is already very very small.

There must be a market for it tho as Apple wouldn’t of made the iMac Pro. They are also working on a Mac Pro update which will either be next year or in 2019, so I guess you will be able to choose. Personally I love the all in one form factor but this machine isn’t for me since I only edit videos and write.