Seems like it would be a great selling point for an AS MP too. A few of the e.g. 32 ARM cores could be crunching encodes efficiently in the background.
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MP 7,1 Mac Pro 2019 installed AMD RX 6900 XT with Vega II Duo exists
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The M1 does have HEVC hardware acceleration. I've tested that on my wife's M1 Macbook
As you can see. The CPU was doing almost nothing when I transcode this 10bit HEVC source video to another 8bit HEVC video. And it did 31 FPS @3840x2160.
It is very clear that the M1 can do both HEVC hardware decoding and HEVC hardware encoding.
Haven't A-series chips had h265 encoding for a few generations, to record 4K video?
Should do - the issue is the missing drivers in macOS, not Windows.
Thanks for your reply!
I am asking because RTX 2000 Series was working under windows too.. But last week I installed an RTX 3090 and it did not show any sign, nor boot chime until I swapped back RX 580, so I was wondering if RX 6000 Series would work
Yes, indeed..it has plenty of power (750W)!
it was mentioned on another thread that other people could also not get it to boot, but no one mentioned a MP 5,1 and any success or fail
They could. If Intel CPUs supported such a protocol. But they don't. So they can't. Xeon's don't support clustering with anything besides Xeon's, assuming the Xeon being used is multi socket compatible.
There is no way an M1 could be patched through the PCIe bus into a Mac Pro. Not in a way that that goes beyond what T2 already can do. When someone is describing an ARM co-processor that can do acceleration tasks... Every Mac Pro ships with that. That's T2.
What won't ever happen is an M1 PCIe board that lets you run ARM apps or does general purpose work. There is no way for the M1 to efficiently sync memory with a Xeon. Yes, if a Xeon support Infinity Fabric it could sync with something like an M1. But it doesn't. So it won't.
In order for this to work we'd all have to throw away our Intel Mac Pros and buy new machines on a new architecture. And at that point you might as well just wait for an Apple Silicon Mac Pro.
And again, newer Radeons like the RX 6900/6800 can do things like HVEC, and have a lot more horsepower than M1.
I would have swear that vega2duo were interconnected via infinity fabric.... in a macpro, so if they could do it over MPX module on amd silicon, I guess they could do it over their own sillicon... It might need an external connector to work....
And any how they still could do it over just plain pcie gen3 x16 like cluster computers linked over 100gb FC .
I’m not referring to multipro clustering, I am refering as clustering ala XGrid.
a m1 is only 14w and the die is very small... basically they could fit 10 M1 on a fullsize pcie card if they want...
a 6900, will never ever do anything else than what it is intended to do, and will never ever have the render quality of cpu rendering...
render the same scene in bender with cpu/gpu and see how it looks...
don’t forget the 2018 mac mini cluster over 10gbe ... apple know how to do clustering, and macmini farm make a lot of sense.
what i am referring to is only a pcie version of that...
once again apple would probably never do that , but i would totally pay 3000€ to have a dual M1 pcie card that shows just like network macs and a kind of « xgrid » app to handle everything... a couple more thunderbolt port and maybe a 10gbe rj45, or a external cfexpress slot to connect small video capture card....
anyhow lets not hijack this post with our crap as anyhow apple will probably never do that....
As long as there is enough VRAM for your scene, using a GPU will have no impact on render quality. It's just crunching the same numbers but faster.
More info: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/cycles/gpu_rendering.html
I'll be pretty happy with a 6900 XT MPX module for my Mac Pro and a high-end Apple Silicon MBP.
If it turns out OP's suggestion the 6900 XT comes close to the Vega II Duo, then it'll round my system nicely (and hopefully for a decent cost).
I'll keep reading all the new announcements for desktops for entertainment purposes, but I won't get stressed by the release of new products.
If it turns out OP's suggestion the 6900 XT comes close to the Vega II Duo, then it'll round my system nicely (and hopefully for a decent cost).
I'll keep reading all the new announcements for desktops for entertainment purposes, but I won't get stressed by the release of new products.
The Vegas in a Vega 2 Duo are connected to each other with Infinity Fabric. But the board and the CPU aren't compatible with Infinity Fabric, and the GPUs are just a standard PCIe link.
This means the Mac Pro doesn't have things you'd need to have two CPUs talk effectively to each other like memory synchronization. You're reduced to the Mac Pro having to treat everything like an accelerator card or GPU that it's copying memory back and forth to.
Which takes us back to... a GPU probably makes more sense because you won't get any of the memory optimizations of M1 anyway.
The 6900 XT just makes a lot more sense in most ways you look at it. The Mac Pro was not designed for HSA things like throwing on ARM CPUs for general purpose work. That's been something AMD has been working on, but Intel hasn't.
Apple could eventually build an HSA Mac Pro with someone like AMD that maybe could do both ARM and x86 using a combination of CPUs. But the 2019 Mac Pro will never be that Mac.
^^^^
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Lou
Need your input! What benchmarks and tests would you like to see on Mac Pro with 6900XT?
I would like your input, I am testing a Mac Pro with a few new GPU configurations, and I would like for you to tell me what you would like me to test. I’ve already done a lot of testing in final cut pro, as well as da Vinci resolve, but I can do more specific ones and whatever resolution or...
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Lou