Mac Pro Rising

[beaker7]

So far every benchmark that actually is Rendering in Open CL shows that AMD is better at it than Nvidia offerings...

Even if that were true its kind of irrelevant at this point. OpenCL was a promising standard but has been largely ignored or abandoned in the rendering community thanks in no small part to Apple's completely inept support for it.

 

[rGiskard]

Bigger stability, lower power consumption alongside lower temperatures and higher reliability is no real benefit?

Guys, do your technical analysis is based always on personal preferences, or strictly technical analysis?

There is a very good reason why Radeon Pro Duo board water cooled is averaging 293W of power consumption under load while maintaining 890 MHz core clock, on BOTH Fiji XT chips. So for each GPU the average power consumption is 146.5W and single GPU gives on average 7.3 TFLOPs of compute power. Compare it to even Nano that is air cooled(184W at average 850 MHz).

Bigger stability? We're not discussing overclocked processors.

Lower power consumption? Likely not significant on a standard Xeon cpu installation.

Lower temperatures? Zero benefit to the end user. Nobody cares if their Xeons run at 70˚C instead of 85˚C. It is a waste of energy to cool a CPU lower than it's thermal design envelope requires.

Your example is of a video card that is designed to be water cooled. It's a facile comparison since a standard Xeon is designed to be air cooled and we were discussing a theoretical tower Mac Pro until you butted in with your emotional response.

There is some similarity to the Tube in that the video card features two high TDP GPUs in close proximity and there is insufficient room for an appropriately sized air cooler. One could make the case that this is true for the Tube, but of course there is nothing to gain since such a cooling system still requires a radiator and fan. AMD realizes an advantage in their card because they basically use liquid to shift the cooler from the confined space of a PCIe slot to another part of a tower case.

 

[koyoot]

Even if that were true its kind of irrelevant at this point. OpenCL was a promising standard but has been largely ignored or abandoned in the rendering community thanks in no small part to Apple's completely inept support for it.

It is relevant. Mantle on which Metal is based was built for combining OpenCL and OpenGL, and for Parallel Computing. Guess who developed Mantle? AMD.

Apple ruled out Nvidia for number of reasons from their platform. One was the lawsuit Nvidia tried to push over Apple for infringing in their minds Nvidia's patents. Secondly is that there is no documentation that would help Apple develop drivers for Nvidia hardware, for Metal. Nvidia likes to control their drivers, and does not allow anyone to interfere with them.

Bigger stability? We're not discussing overclocked processors.

Lower power consumption? Likely not significant on a standard Xeon cpu installation.

Lower temperatures? Again, zero benefit to the end user. Nobody cares if their Xeons run at 70˚C instead of 85˚C.

Your example is of a video card that is designed to be water cooled. It's a facile comparison since a standard Xeon is designed to be air cooled and we were discussing a theoretical tower Mac Pro until you butted in with your emotional response.

There is some similarity to the Tube in that the video card features two high TDP GPUs in close proximity and there is insufficient room for an appropriately sized air cooler. One could make the case that this is true for the Tube, but of course there is nothing to gain since such a cooling system still requires a radiator and fan. AMD realizes an advantage in their card because they basically use liquid to shift the cooler from the confined space of a PCIe slot to another part of a tower case.

I suppose you have absolutely 0 experience with Water(Liquid cooling). Otherwise you would know what you are talking about. The processor is not a main thing to cool. Apple in Mac Pro pushes GPU acceleration, and for them would be Liquid Cooling most.

Fury X under 100% load stays under 65 degrees celsius. Yes, I would care about that. The same goes for lower power Fiji chips that are in Nano(75 degrees air cooled, thank to power limit, and lower voltage than Fury X), and Fiji XT chips in Pro Duo(under 60 degrees celsius in certain tasks, and both GPUs are loaded in 90-95%).

Stability: Lower voltage - lower leakage. Lower leakage - lower power consumption. Lower power consumption - lower temperatures. Lower temperatures - higher stability. Higher stability - higher reliability.

Sorry but there is more benefit to Liquid Cooling than you want to see.

 

[beaker7]

It is relevant. Mantle on which Metal is based was built for combining OpenCL and OpenGL, and for Parallel Computing. Guess who developed Mantle? AMD.

It might be relevant, someday. Another standard with promise. Hopefully it won't fare as poorly as OpenCL did in the rendering community. Because right now arguing that AMD+OpenCL's is a better combo for rendering is like arguing that betamax is better than VHS. Even if it is better on paper, it doesn't matter since no movies you actually want to watch use that format.

 

[rGiskard]

HP likes them...

View attachment 640128

http://www8.hp.com/emea_africa/en/products/oas/product-detail.html?oid=6746050#!tab=features

Here's a photo of the other side:

Looks like trouble...lots of fail points. I wouldn't want it anywhere near a $4000 logic board and CPU.

And if Apple did it, well they would insist on reinventing the liquid cooler and that makes me nervous.

 

[koyoot]

It might be relevant, someday. Another standard with promise. Hopefully it won't fare as poorly as OpenCL did in the rendering community. Because right now arguing that AMD+OpenCL's is a better combo for rendering is like arguing that betamax is better than VHS. Even if it is better on paper, it doesn't matter since no movies you actually want to watch use that format.

Well Apple platform is in development right now. Every single computer has been stalled, because Apple is presumably readying something new, and fresh that will fit Metal and future for Apple. Mac Pro was just the beginning.

 

[Jack Burton]

It is relevant. Mantle on which Metal is based was built for combining OpenCL and OpenGL, and for Parallel Computing. Guess who developed Mantle? AMD.

Apple ruled out Nvidia for number of reasons from their platform. One was the lawsuit Nvidia tried to push over Apple for infringing in their minds Nvidia's patents. Secondly is that there is no documentation that would help Apple develop drivers for Nvidia hardware, for Metal. Nvidia likes to control their drivers, and does not allow anyone to interfere with them.

If this is true, I probably have no reason to hold out hope for Apple hardware. Developers like Otoy are dumping Open CL completely, and they tried to write their own solution. They basically told Apple users to buy PCs.

 

[koyoot]

If this is true, I probably have no reason to hold out hope for Apple hardware. Developers like Otoy are dumping Open CL completely, and they tried to write their own solution. They basically told Apple users to buy PCs.

It is funny that you mentioned Otoy. http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/09/o...-the-best-graphics-software-across-platforms/

Thank to... Reversed engineering of HIP CUDA-OpenCL compiler from AMD.

 

[rGiskard]

It is relevant. Mantle on which Metal is based was built for combining OpenCL and OpenGL, and for Parallel Computing. Guess who developed Mantle? AMD.

Apple ruled out Nvidia for number of reasons from their platform. One was the lawsuit Nvidia tried to push over Apple for infringing in their minds Nvidia's patents. Secondly is that there is no documentation that would help Apple develop drivers for Nvidia hardware, for Metal. Nvidia likes to control their drivers, and does not allow anyone to interfere with them.

I suppose you have absolutely 0 experience with Water(Liquid cooling). Otherwise you would know what you are talking about. The processor is not a main thing to cool. Apple in Mac Pro pushes GPU acceleration, and for them would be Liquid Cooling most.

Fury X under 100% load stays under 65 degrees celsius. Yes, I would care about that. The same goes for lower power Fiji chips that are in Nano(75 degrees air cooled, thank to power limit, and lower voltage than Fury X), and Fiji XT chips in Pro Duo(under 60 degrees celsius in certain tasks, and both GPUs are loaded in 90-95%).

Stability: Lower voltage - lower leakage. Lower leakage - lower power consumption. Lower power consumption - lower temperatures. Lower temperatures - higher stability. Higher stability - higher reliability.

Sorry but there is more benefit to Liquid Cooling than you want to see.

Gosh are you obnoxious, going around lecturing others on tech you don't seem to understand.

Apple in Mac Pro pushes GPU acceleration, and for them would be Liquid Cooling most.

Apple don't push the GPUs, they are in fact underclocked.

You propose liquid cooling as a solution to an inadequate air cooling design, when we were discussing liquid cooling in the context of a mythical Broadwell-EP Mac Pro tower.

Lower voltage - lower leakage. Lower leakage - lower power consumption. Lower power consumption - lower temperatures. Lower temperatures - higher stability. Higher stability - higher reliability.

You're just listing the benefits of liquid cooling that enable radical overclocking. They are utterly, absolutely, completely irrelevant a discussion about a workstation that uses stock parts clocked at stock frequencies.

The ONLY benefit in such a system is a reduction in noise. Now I'll admit I probably dismissed that advantage when I shouldn't have, but you're other advantages are pure nonsense. I'll say it yet again, none of the processors in a Mac Pro have stability or reliability problems when properly air cooled. Where do you even get these notions?

 

[Jack Burton]

It is funny that you mentioned Otoy. http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/09/o...-the-best-graphics-software-across-platforms/

Thank to... Reversed engineering of HIP CUDA-OpenCL compiler from AMD.

That's old news, unfortunately. Apparently they recently gave up on an Open CL implementation for OS X and laid the blame on Apple's Open CL work. It might still be coming for Windows though.

It kind of dashed hopes for some of the users on the C4d forums who have the nMP. I think their only real option right now is Thea render, which looks impressive but doesn't have the install base of its competitors.

Octane and Vray are the big boys on the block in GPU rendering.

 

[rGiskard]

Fury X under 100% load stays under 65 degrees celsius. Yes, I would care about that. The same goes for lower power Fiji chips that are in Nano(75 degrees air cooled, thank to power limit, and lower voltage than Fury X), and Fiji XT chips in Pro Duo(under 60 degrees celsius in certain tasks, and both GPUs are loaded in 90-95%).

Do you understand why liquid cooling is neccessary for a top performing PCIe video card? Or are you just throwing tech factoids around?

 

[koyoot]

Apple don't push the GPUs, they are in fact underclocked.

First of all, do you see the difference between pushing the GPUs, and pushing the GPU acceleration for software? With that in mind, knowing that they will be loaded 100% all the time, you would still not put them under efficient liquid cooling solution?

Again, you are basing your point of view on personal preferences not technical analysis, and that distorts the outlook for the situation.

Do you understand why liquid cooling is neccessary for a top performing PCIe video card? Or are you just throwing tech factoids around?

AMD could have lowered the voltage, and power consumption of Fury X by 40 Watts, and leave it on air(it would draw between 225 and 240W of power then), while maintaining the same core clocks. They wanted something with better build quality.

Fiji XT is also in Fury Nano. And that does not require Liquid Cooling.

That's old news, unfortunately. Apparently they recently gave up on an Open CL implementation for OS X and laid the blame on Apple's Open CL work.

Thanks for the information. I suppose that is because the OpenCL implementation is still 1.2 in OSX.

 

[Jack Burton]

Thanks for the information. I suppose that is because the OpenCL implementation is still 1.2 in OSX.

Is Metal a language that could drive GPU renderers like Open CL could? I have no clue what it is beyond the initial Unity3d demo I saw (which looked great).

This is why I was hoping Apple would announce something at siggraph. It would get the attention of all the right people. I don't think it will happen, though. Siggraph is this month. The article you posted was from March, and Otoy came out and laid the blame on Apple in April.

I'd love for surprise announcements from major GPU renderers getting ported to the mac in a few weeks.

 

[koyoot]

Is Metal a language that could drive GPU renderers like Open CL could? I have no clue what it is beyond the initial Unity3d demo I saw (which looked great).

This is why I was hoping Apple would announce something at siggraph. It would get the attention of all the right people. I don't think it will happen, though. Siggraph is this month. The article you posted was from March, and Otoy came out and laid the blame on Apple in April.

I'd love for surprise announcements from major GPU renderers getting ported to the mac in a few weeks.

Metal is an API like CUDA, DirectX, Mantle.

Yes it can drive GPU renderers, but it is still for development.

 

[ITguy2016]

So far every benchmark that actually is Rendering in Open CL shows that AMD is better at it than Nvidia offerings...

Here's the thing. On some workloads AMD GPUs outperform Nvidia. On others Nvidia outperforms AMD. Systems which use industry standard GPUs (i.e. essentially those with PCIe slots) one can choose the GPU which best suits their application. Unfortunately they cannot do so with the nMP.

 

[rGiskard]

First of all, do you see the difference between pushing the GPUs, and pushing the GPU acceleration for software?

Do you? If so, then why didn't you say so before?

With that in mind, knowing that they will be loaded 100% all the time, you would still not put them under efficient liquid cooling solution?

Don't tell me you actually think a processor requires liquid cooling if it is under continuous load. Yet again, your interpretation of the technology is dubious.

You know what I would prefer in a Mac Pro? I would prefer ANY cooling system that maintains component temps withing thermal design limits. But among those cooling system designs with sufficient performance, I prefer the one with the least complexity.

For example, my cMP once had an air spill in the processor compartment. Cleanup was a breeze and the processor board was less dusty afterward!

Again, you are basing your point of view on personal preferences not technical analysis, and that distorts the outlook for the situation.

I think you're engaging in psychological projection, and it's annoying that you cannot discuss anything without resorting to emotional personal attacks.

AMD could have lowered the voltage, and power consumption of Fury X by 40 Watts, and leave it on air(it would draw between 225 and 240W of power then), while maintaining the same core clocks. They wanted something with better build quality.

Again, do you not understand why liquid cooling is more advantageous in PCIe video cards? You get bogged down in technical details and miss the big picture. And you use a limited production "hot rodded" video card as an example of what Apple should do in a machine designed for professional work. Apples and oranges.

 

[ITguy2016]

Here's a photo of the other side:

Looks like trouble...lots of fail points. I wouldn't want it anywhere near a $4000 logic board and CPU.

And if Apple did it, well they would insist on reinventing the liquid cooler and that makes me nervous.

I believe the liquid cooling was limited to certain Z-series systems and was optional for a sub set of them depending on configuration.

 

[koyoot]

Do you? If so, then why didn't you say so before?

How hard can it be to understand simple words: GPU acceleration, that was in the quoted part, and you understood that I am saying it as about pushing the GPUs.

Don't tell me you actually think a processor requires liquid cooling if it is under continuous load. Yet again, your interpretation of the technology is dubious.

You know what I would prefer in a Mac Pro? I would prefer ANY cooling system that maintains component temps withing thermal design limits. But among those cooling system designs with sufficient performance, I prefer the one with the least complexity.

For example, my cMP once had an air spill in the processor compartment. Cleanup was a breeze and the processor board was less dusty afterward!



I think you're engaging in psychological projection, and it's annoying that you cannot discuss anything without resorting to emotional personal attacks.



Again, do you not understand why liquid cooling is more advantageous in PCIe video cards? You get bogged down in technical details and miss the big picture. And you use a limited production "hot rodded" video card as an example of what Apple should do in a machine designed for professional work. Apples and oranges.

You know I talk so much about Fiji chips? Because I have experience with them. I worked for last 6 months with Liquid Cooled computers.

I do see benefits of it. Apple has trash can design that can be specifically designed for Liquid cooling and efficiently cooling ALL of the parts inside Mac Pro trash can: CPU, and Dual GPUs.

That is my point. Yesterday I built 2 computers for my family. And you know what all of them had? Liquid Cooling. What was thermal design power for the CPU? 65W, and 140W. What were the GPUs used there? MSI GTX 1070 Sea Hawk. In both computers. And both are water cooled.

Here's the thing. On some workloads AMD GPUs outperform Nvidia. On others Nvidia outperforms AMD. Systems which use industry standard GPUs (i.e. essentially those with PCIe slots) one can choose the GPU which best suits their application. Unfortunately they cannot do so with the nMP.

What do you use on Apple when ALL workloads will use Metal on Apple platform?

Have you ever thought about that?

 

[pat500000]

We can agree it's sold in lower numbers, at least. But you don't have any data, either, other than the parts Apple uses to build it are cheaper now than they were at launch.



I already freely admitted I can't prove it. And I rightly claim you can't prove me wrong, either. So we're stuck with our thumbs up our butts waiting to see if Apple comes out with something new.

Heck, if they came out with an "iMac Pro" like this thing, I'd be over the moon excited. They already make a fantastic 5k display. I'd be happy to get me one of those with a GTX 1080/70 in the back and a 6-core i7.

that wouldn't be too bad.

 

[rGiskard]

How hard can it be to understand simple words: GPU acceleration, that was in the quoted part, and you understood that I am saying it as about pushing the GPUs.



You know I talk so much about Fiji chips? Because I have experience with them. I worked for last 6 months with Liquid Cooled computers.

I do see benefits of it. Apple has trash can design that can be specifically designed for Liquid cooling and efficiently cooling ALL of the parts inside Mac Pro trash can: CPU, and Dual GPUs.

That is my point. Yesterday I built 2 computers for my family. And you know what all of them had? Liquid Cooling. What was thermal design power for the CPU? 65W, and 140W. What were the GPUs used there? MSI GTX 1070 Sea Hawk. In both computers. And both are water cooled.

What do you use on Apple when ALL workloads will use Metal on Apple platform?

Have you ever thought about that?

Again, we were not discussing liquid cooling in regard to the Tube. And I really doubt it's possible to cram even more components inside that thing, but maybe it could be done as an engineering excercise.

That's great that you work with liquid cooling (I've also built many systems with it), but I think you've formed an emotional attachment to it and now see it as a solution to every problem. And you still don't seem to understand why liquid cooling is particularly advantageous to PCIe cards. It's like you just shapeshift your argument instead of actually discussing anything.

 

[beaker7]

What do you use on Apple when ALL workloads will use Metal on Apple platform?

Windows? It's not likely that many cross-platform software developers will waste time porting to yet another soon-to-be-abandoned API pushed by Apple.

OSX is in this akward place where it has enough market share for developers to think about supporting it, but not enough that they have to, and not enough to influence industry-wide trends. Especially when the environment (apple) is so hostile to 3rd party development.

 

[koyoot]

Again, we were not discussing liquid cooling in regard to the Tube. And I really doubt it's possible to cram even more components inside that thing, but maybe it could be done as an engineering excercise.

That's great that you work with liquid cooling (I've also built many systems with it), but I think you've formed an emotional attachment to it and now see it as a solution to every problem. And you still don't seem to understand why liquid cooling is particularly advantageous to PCIe cards. It's like you just shapeshift your argument instead of actually discussing anything.

...

Well, You are not discussing liquid cooling in regard to the tube. I did. From the beginning.

I work with Liquid Cooling because I do see the value in it. And personally, considering all the benefits it gives, I will not go back to air cooling on any of my PC's. If there will be Liquid Cooling in the Can - I will welcome it with open hands, because that is one of the ways Apple can very much improve the MP7.1.

 

[techwhiz]

I'll be plain honest here.
I have a 2008/09 Mac Pro and I have not upgraded because I can't get my cards in anything unless I buy an expensive expansion chassis. I will also need to buy a case so I can have a JBOD for the drives I have.
The end result is more money and a bunch of cables and external boxes.
I can make due with two PCIe slots.
I can make due with 2 drive bays.
I can't make do with none of the above. So I will sit on my old Mac Pro until it dies.. (Crossing my fingers, toes, arms and eyes.)

 

[koyoot]

Windows? It's not likely that many cross-platform software developers will waste time porting to yet another soon-to-be-abandoned API pushed by Apple.

OSX is in this akward place where it has enough market share for developers to think about supporting it, but not enough that they have to, and not enough to influence industry-wide trends. Especially when the environment (apple) is so hostile to 3rd party development.

Then why even consider buying Macs in the first place?

I don't understand this. Apple is investing quite a lot of R&D in Metal and new computers that will fit that software, also invests in software that will fit Metal. Metal is here to stay, because it is not only on macOS, but also iOS. Why you want to buy a Mac to work under Windows while using software that is incompatible with whole platform?

 

[AidenShaw]

Then why even consider buying Macs in the first place?

I don't understand this. Apple is investing quite a lot of R&D in Metal and new computers that will fit that software, also invests in software that will fit Metal. Metal is here to stay, because it is not only on macOS, but also iOS. Why you want to buy a Mac to work under Windows while using software that is incompatible with whole platform?

Just like Apple invested a lot of R&D in:

• Just like Apple invested a lot of R&D in Pink - what became of that?
• Just like Apple invested a lot of R&D in Copland - what became of that?
• Just like Apple invested a lot of R&D in Rhapsody - what became of that?
• Just like Apple invested a lot of R&D in Yellow Box - what became of that?
• Just like Apple invested a lot of R&D in Blue Box - what became of that?
• Just like Apple invested a lot of R&D in Newton - what became of that?
• Just like Apple invested a lot of R&D in Pippin - what became of that?
• Just like Apple invested a lot of R&D in PowerPC - what became of that?
• Just like Apple invested a lot of R&D in OpenCL - now what's becoming of that?
• Just like Apple didn't invest a lot of R&D in OpenGL - now what's becoming of that?
• What about the fling with Objective C - a proprietary programming language for a proprietary OS?
• What about Swift - a proprietary programming language to replace a proprietary programming language for a proprietary OS?
• What about Cocoa and Carbon?
• What about Carbon 64 - an evolution of Carbon that was promised and even beta tested - then dropped even as major partners were in beta?

With that history, would you invest in rewriting your software (yet again) to suit the latest "API of the week" from Apple?

On the other hand, new colors for Apple watch bands are a hot development area.

The last true innovation from Cupertino happened shortly after Next bought Apple.

[doublepost=1468449905][/doublepost]

Then why even consider buying Macs in the first place?

I don't understand this.

Apologies for taking this out of context - but it's precious!