Mac Pro WWDC ?

[TurbyKirby]

What is the cost of the afterburner card? That's what might make this workstation worth it.

 

[Flint Ironstag]

That price comparison with the HP Z8 was disingenuous. I just specced out a Z8 with 32GB, 8 core Xeon (1.7GHz), 256GB Z turbo drive, and Radeon 3100 - without any discount it's $4300. I bet a Dell Precision is even less.

As I'm doing fine on CPU power and just need more GPU punch, I'll probably contract with someone to maintain a handful of Hackintosh Z840s for now, unless I can get ESXi working.

Wonder how this will affect the used market on 6,1?

 

[TurbyKirby]

You can't compare these systems with the windows/linux version, because the software is proprietary, especially if you work with ProRes, as I do.

 

[Zwhaler]

That price comparison with the HP Z8 was disingenuous. I just specced out a Z8 with 32GB, 8 core Xeon (1.7GHz), 256GB Z turbo drive, and Radeon 3100 - without any discount it's $4300. I bet a Dell Precision is even less.

As I'm doing fine on CPU power and just need more GPU punch, I'll probably contract with someone to maintain a handful of Hackintosh Z840s for now, unless I can get ESXi working.

Wonder how this will affect the used market on 6,1?

Used market for a 6,1 has been extremely reasonable. I expect that to continue.

 

[daveedjackson]

You can't compare these systems with the windows/linux version, because the software is proprietary, especially if you work with ProRes, as I do.

Most of the graphics I build are delivered in ProRes. I think I'll wait to see what the benchmarks are, because for 3D CUDA will likely run rings around this offering.

 

[JayKay514]

I expect them to make a hybrid machine - like a classic Mac Pro that's powerful and has internal expansion, but smaller in volume, and forward-looking in terms of how people use their machines. It won't simply be a Mac-branded version of a current PC Xeon workstation.

Well, I think I got this mostly right.

• Dual SSDs (looks like M2 cards), I suppose you can add more M.2s via a PCIe slot.
• Xeon processor, 8 core minimum
• Hybrid PCI 3.0 + "New PCIe" architecture for extreme bandwidth to the graphics card modules - not exactly what I expected, but I thought they'd do something interesting to push performance ahead.
• Slightly smaller design that recalled the classic Mac Pro
• More or less the I/O I expected.

Things that surprised me:

• Those milled vents - very much like the roundels in the new Doctor's TARDIS
• A massive EIGHT (count 'em) expansion slots
• 1.5 TB of RAM on the high-end machines!
• That new Pro Display XDR.
• Rackmount option!

Things I got wrong:

• A wide array of graphics cards. That's a very small number of options.

Questions we'll find out the answers to eventually:

• I'm not a fan of having to use these Apple proprietary graphics cards. I'd like to see if you can order it without those modules and just use a card with a compatible driver (for instance, Radeon Pro WX series)? For lower-end cards that don't generate a lot of heat would you even require that thermal shell?
• That Logic / Final Cut combined demo was impressive. How much does Logic lean on compute units from one of those high-end graphics cards? I was always told that you can't really run audio DSP on a GPU because the nature of the math is totally different. Has this changed? Or could you get that 1000-track, 1000-virtual-instrument performance with a high-end CPU, big SSDs + lots of RAM with a mediocre graphics card?

 

[mikehalloran]

I'm really impressed. Always something to complain about on these forums... If they charged $5,999 for the monitor and included the stand, people would complain that they don't want the stand because they VESA mount theirs.
I admit the 256GB SSD is a joke. Other than that, this was the high-end workstation pretty much everyone was asking for. If you don't want or need this level of performance, the iMac Pro and iMac fill in the lower performance tiers pretty nicely. It's expensive, but really delivers where it counts. For everyone else, there are PCs. I didn't see any of you budget millions of dollars for R&D, so you're paying for that when (if) you buy one.

Yep.

This machine was developed for a specific industry to run those new versions of Logic and FCP, not the other way around.

I'm amazed that it's so inexpensive.

 

[Zwhaler]

• That Logic / Final Cut combined demo was impressive. How much does Logic lean on compute units from one of those high-end graphics cards? I was always told that you can't really run audio DSP on a GPU because the nature of the math is totally different. Has this changed? Or could you get that 1000-track, 1000-virtual-instrument performance with a high-end CPU, big SSDs + lots of RAM with a mediocre graphics card?

I'm not an expert on this subject, but I would expect the latter to be mostly true.

 

[fokmik]

A wide array of graphics cards. That's a very small number of options

They said with time, will add more,expect navi next year