MP 7,1 Mac Pro 8,1 updated Afterburner card?

[Grumply]

Has anyone heard any rumours of an updated Afterburner card for the 8,1? I'm presuming we'll see something in that vein (to trounce the video encoding/decoding edge that the M1 Max has at the moment).

I'm thinking it would be a nice option to keep the 7,1 as competitive as possible.

 

[randy85]

I wish there was more stuff Apple could do with the Afterburner card. For the cost of an Afterburner, you can buy a whole M1 Pro Macbook Pro instead. I mean, it does what it was made to do, but it's just a bit of a stretch spending £2k one one now seeing as similar capability is now built into M1 Pro/Max.

If it could accelerate more codecs (other than Prores) that would be nice. It just doesn't feel likely they'll release a new version due to how niche of a product it is.

 

[deconstruct60]

Has anyone heard any rumours of an updated Afterburner card for the 8,1? I'm presuming we'll see something in that vein (to trounce the video encoding/decoding edge that the M1 Max has at the moment).

Pretty decent chance that Afterburner was more so a R&D prototype mechanism for what is now in the M1 Pro/Max. Apple isn't running a "contest" between MBP and Mac Pros. The software library calls to invoke the embedded ProRes decoder in Afterburner and new hardwired implementation is probably the same for decode.

If so , then part of the Afterburner buy-in price was to participate in the 'beta' program. There is no long term horizon there when the finished hardwired solution starts shipping.

Apple didn't do full benchmarks in the "as many 8K ProRes RAW" streams possible. Apple mainly focused on 'plain' ProRes 442 . So pretty good chance that there isn't a decoding edge for the new implementation (at least on multicam matrix presentation on a single screen). ( and still may not even if get multiple chip modules. Depends upon the interchip bisection bandwidth. ) . I suspect the hardwired ones can do a 8k ProRes RAW but not quite as many concurrent ones. So there would still be a functionality gap at the very high end.


[ Apple's hardwired encode probably leans a bit on the NPU cores to do part of the work. The two sets of fixed function logic are closely coupled on the die. and the second encode unit also has another NPU cluster. That doesn't bode well for a encode FPGA solution (would need more gates than have now ) . Or some specific ASIC. ]

I'm thinking it would be a nice option to keep the 7,1 as competitive as possible.

Probably not. If there is a specific niche that a two or four die ( Jade2C , Jade4c) M1 Max Duo/Quattour would be quite good at is the user base that have high value match to the Afterburner deployments. If the duo still has two, but the quattour has four ProRes en/decoders then the latter is close to one top of where the Afterburner is. If Apple is calling that new system "Mac Pro" then doubtful they'll be trying to create a competitor to that. It will essentially come with an "Afterburner" built into the basic system price and also be a better regular ProRes to H.264/265 transcoder.


Furthermore, to get some substantive edge over the hardwired four en/decode solution ( e.g., 6 ProRes RAW 4K decodes ) the bandwidth to the Afterburner card would need to change. Something like PCI-e v4 x16. If Apple shipped another Intel Mac Pro ( W-3300 series) then maybe that system would get something that had some "uplift". But in that case, probably wouldn't see much uplift with a W-3200 model (2019).

 

[rondocap]

It's incredible how the M1 Max beats the 28 core, afterburner + quad W6800x Mac Pro in Pro Res. Really is!

The AS Mac Pro is going to be tremendous, as much as I really like the current Intel Mac Pro for its performance and usability, it's going to be outclassed entirely soon imo. That's not only for pro res, but also for R3D raw, which the current Mac Pro beats the M1 Max - but the M1 Max is respectable too.

The GPU is where the real battle will be, imo. The Pro Res battle with encoders/decoders is already won by the M1 Max

 

[deconstruct60]

It's incredible how the M1 Max beats the 28 core, afterburner + quad W6800x Mac Pro in Pro Res. Really is!

Not really. Most of that stuff is superfluous. ProRes isn't GPU optimized so.... there is many thousands that is contributing not much at all ( quad W660X ). Is x86_64 ProRes all that multithreaded optimized? 4-12 cores really gong to show linear improvement on a single file decode? 28 cores to ProRes decode a simple video file wasn't necessary.

ProRes was never set up to be a ginormous CPU hog. It is suppose to coexist with other workloads. Soaks up lots of bandwidth, but the compute aspect is manageable. The M series decoders are a major win on Perf/Watt.

The AS Mac Pro is going to be tremendous, as much as I really like the current Intel Mac Pro for its performance and usability, it's going to be outclassed entirely soon imo. That's not only for pro res, but also for R3D raw, which the current Mac Pro beats the M1 Max - but the M1 Max is respectable too.

Decent change that Apple's multichip module GPU(s) scale better as a compute cluster than at a high single video stream frame-rate GPU. So yeah, in this specific niche of video processing workstation it will probably pay off. Presuming Red , Blackmagic, and others get their RAW decoders/encoders optimized it probably will work well.

Not sure though they are going to make most folks who had zero interest in buying an Afterburner card happy though. ( AMD's multiple die GPGPU, Mi250 , shows up as two GPUs at the software level. Apple may have a better interchip comm system, but seamlessly unifying all GPU cores without any NUMA hiccups will be challenging. )

The GPU is where the real battle will be, imo. The Pro Res battle with encoders/decoders is already won by the M1 Max

Not going to be much of a battle is Apple doesn't sign 3rd party GPU drivers going forward. They are signing zero of those on the macOS on M-series and could stop signing on Intel too if the relationship with AMD fizzles.

Final Cut Pro wise probably not going to be much of a battle. Multiple platform video editing depends on the update streams over time. Short term leaning to Apple, but longer term 2-3 year horizon ( multiple cards aetups of AMD and Nvidia's late 2022 - late 2023 offerings not as clear cut. )