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Mac Pro -- you can't make a cheaper one
- Thread starter keysofanxiety
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A Mac mini that's basically a headless version of the 27" iMac (with all the same configuration options), but for, say, $900 less, would probably be more Apple's speed. Not that I'm predicting we'll see that either. But my company would immediately buy two or three such machines for offline video editing to go with the Mac Pro we just ordered for our 'hero' color grading theater.
Right on, a headless iMac with a few internal PCIe slots and drive bays. Basically the old Mac pro sans ODD bays and perhaps as many as six 2.5" SATA III bays.
More likely with Apple, but still not gonna happen, a headless iMac with two internal SATA bays, but no PCIe slots and a mobile GPU
I can understand that video pros could benefit from using external storage that can be plugged into their laptops or Mac Pros. But some of us don't need such an expensive setup.
I can actually see how the nMP could work if it were cheaper. An inexpensive CPU unit that you plug into your storage tower makes sense. What does not make sense is a CPU unit that costs MORE than competing CPU units having internal storage options. It's also a failure on Apple's part to force dual FirePro GPUs on all buyers. A single fast Nvidia GPU is a better fit for many photographers and graphic artists who would prefer to buy a MP and use their own monitor with it.
Anyways I've never liked AIO desktop computers like the iMac since one part will grow obsolete or fail before the others, forcing the user to upgrade the entire computer in one expensive shot. As long as used Mac towers were available this was never a problem, but now Apple has truly buggered their desktop options.
I'm not convinced they do and I'm sure their marketeers and finance guys have been through all this
If apple released a suitably priced mac with a desktop cpu and pci-e slot tomorrow (along with their standard features tb/pci-e storage/etc), would many people be buying an imac or a nmp? We all know apple can put stuff together in a nice box, I know I'd certainly prefer to sacrifice a few cubic cm of their ridiculous form factors for a 'proper pc'.
I'm not convinced they do and I'm sure their marketeers and finance guys have been through all this
If apple released a suitably priced mac with a desktop cpu and pci-e slot tomorrow (along with their standard features tb/pci-e storage/etc), would many people be buying an imac or a nmp? We all know apple can put stuff together in a nice box, I know I'd certainly prefer to sacrifice a few cubic cm of their ridiculous form factors for a 'proper pc'.
I've thought about the hole in their line up ever since they stopped offering a lower cost Mac Pro like the BTO 2Ghz system in 2006.
All the quad core systems have hyperthreading, can be upgraded to 16 or 32Gb of RAM and offer CPU performance in artifical benchmarks in the 11,000 to 14,000 range.
1 or more i7 Mac Minis can be better than a Mac Pro for certain tasks and the iMac has it's uses for graphics work.
I'm disappointed the Mac Pro is so expensive but I'm also catered for with the Mac Mini and when they get the Haswell chips the recent Retina Macbook Pros use, it'll offer even closer CPU performance to the E5-1620 in the quad Mac Pro.
If they were only offering i5s in the Mac Mini, Quad i7s in the higher end 27" iMac and that left only the Mac Pro as an option for some people, they really would have a hole in their range but I think for a lot of tasks, their range caters for most uses at all price points.
Yeah, I don't really think they do have a hole in their line up.
An xmac would have to be priced sensibly to avoid being an instant laughing stock to both the computer literate and the "this one doesn't have a built in screen" purchasers. If they did away with the power and thermal restrictions they impose on themselves, it would be hard to position a 'standard pc with osx' in the budget lineup - how would they explain a 6core 4ghz i7 and 2x amd 290x on those pretty performance charts?
An xmac would have to be priced sensibly to avoid being an instant laughing stock to both the computer literate and the "this one doesn't have a built in screen" purchasers. If they did away with the power and thermal restrictions they impose on themselves, it would be hard to position a 'standard pc with osx' in the budget lineup - how would they explain a 6core 4ghz i7 and 2x amd 290x on those pretty performance charts?
Totally agree. Once the Mac Mini can outperform the Mac Pro in my sig, I'll probably switch to the Mini. Still, I'll miss my beast.
I am a huge detractor of the nMP and even I agree the nMP is a deal, but ONLY if
1) The Dx00 have the same advantages as other workstation cards over consumer cards, and have those advantages in OS X
2) You actually need those advantages.
For many SPECIFIC tasks, the W9000 (which the D700 is supposedly an underclocked version of) is pretty much the king. OpenCL for instance. IMO this is a result of highly optimized applications and drivers. For people who work in those fields, the $3500 pricetag is actually worth it! (look at the benchmarks if you don't believe me)
I would like to point out at this time that we actually do not know if the D700 has the same driver advantages at those professional applications as the W9000. Basically, we don't know if this is a workstation card yet. If it behaves like a 7970, this machine is a joke. If it behaves like a W9000 (even an underclocked one), I could see thousands of windows users flocking to the nMP to save thousands of dollars on an OpenCL power-house. I kind of think it'll be somewhere between a 7970 and a W9000 at those tasks, leaning towards the 7970 side.
HOWEVER: If you do not perform those tasks, you will have ZERO added value from the W9000 over say a 7970. If you need to perform CUDA tasks, the W9000 is completely worthless (except that you can sell it for $3000 and buy an NVidia
)That, as they say, is how they getcha. If you see the D700 as nothing more than an underclocked 7970 (ie if you aren't going to use it for OpenCL... perhaps some light gaming plus some CPU-intensive tasks), then the D700 and therefore the nMP is a total ripoff. You can get the same non-OpenCL and much of the computational performance from dual 7970 in a Mac Pro 5,1.
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I just spent a few minutes googling artificial and real world opencl benchmarks for the w9000 and 7970 and haven't been able to find a single chart that shows the w9000 in front.
Nice.
If, and this is a big "if", OpenCL supplants CUDA, then Apple will finally have differentiated the MP from other Xeon workstations. They could rightly reclaim the "visionary" mantle.
It's probably too much to ask, but I'd like to see a consumer Mac Pro with a quad-core i7 and a single 7970. Put a few 2.5" SATA III bays in it and I'd be one happy Mac user
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Damn, how many inverted charts did you have to wade through to find that?
ps. (on linux at least) with a little bit of driver patching, specviewperf results can be altered drastically for desktop cards. It's a prime example of ridiculous artificial limitation and an even better example of how silly the situation is if you're 'just a guy' looking for massively parallel compute performance. Pretty sure I read a big thread on this on phoronix (definitely a site regulared by oss amd devs anyway) yonks ago.
Could not agree more. The whole "workstation card" is BS apart from the ECC thing. However, I was scouring the message boards trying to find hacks for GeForces and Radeons to make them into Quadros and FirePros in Windows. It seems they've gotten exceptionally good at keeping people from soft-modding.
Nvidia artificially limits. AMD does not. (except hawii but that's because of tdp reasons).
Maybe both of you have "online forum" PTSD, but I was just agreeing with you. The link just reinforces the topic of the thread.
Radeon HDs with the same GPU processor that Apple uses for the nMP have been portraying themselves, at least in LuxRender, as D300s and D700s since last summer. See, e.g., pic below. I suspect that under 10.9.2, if not with earlier versions, the same may be the case with those Radeon HDs under OSX Mavericks whether in a nMP or oMP.
BTW - No one has presented any specific assertion by Apple that the GPUs in the nMP use ECC memory. People seem to just read that into the equation because Apple says, "Not only does it feature a state-of-the-art AMD FirePro workstation-class GPU — ... ." That the nMP features the same GPU (graphic processing units are largest chips on the cards, not whole video cards, despite the fact that we may loosely refer to the whole card as a GPU) on the FirePro says nothing about whether the VRAM is or isn't ECC. This is especially so since those same GPUs are also used on the Radeon HD cards. Moreover, I suspect that if it is ECC memory that Apple is using that would be a big enough deal for Apple to specifically state that. Apple's silence on that score doesn't support an assumption that the VRAM is ECC. It supports the contrary assumption.
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It could be the case that like the W7000, the D300 does not have ECC whereas the other two models do--just a guess. I would not be surprised if none had ECC.
As far as what these cards actually are, I'm not sure the way the OS X driver identifies them is a good indicator--the real value and strengths of these cards are how they perform in Windows running Windows applications. I seriously doubt FCP (OS X) is going to run that much different on Dual 7970 than on dual D700, and I don't think that was ever an issue.
If the D700 doesn't identify as some kind of FirePro in Windows and have the correlating speed advantages, the nMP becomes a total joke. This thread about "can't make one cheaper" becomes a total bunch of crap--just throw Two 7970 (~$650) in a Xeon-powered PC and you have the same thing.