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No more nvidia chips in Apple's computer line

flat five said:
tbh, you haven't made a very clear point.. you may think you've made a strong point since you're the one experiencing the emotions but i don't think the words are drawing a clear picture to others.

they 'screwed' you over? ok.. to me, that sounds as if you spent money on apple products in order to do some tasks then apple cut off the ability to do the task.. they took your money and didn't deliver on the arrangement (or whatever).
when i read you saying 'apple screwed me over', that ^ is what the words sound like.. is that what happened to you?

i also don't get what you mean by alienating prosumers.
because apple's lineup right now is probably better for the prosumer crowd than it has ever been.

but then again, this could be a misunderstanding of the word 'prosumer'.. to me, these days-- a prosumer is basically anybody buying/using a laptop or desktop computer.. and the non-prosumer does what they need to do on a phone or tablet.

anyway.. just saying that i don't think you've made any clear point.. not saying you don't have a point.. just that your words aren't illustrating one.
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I think he's talking about being able to swap out graphics cards. While it's true that the new Mac Pro has a really good graphics card, what if it's not good enough a few years from now? Or what if you're using a program which uses CUDA? Being able to swap out graphics cards is a big deal. Also, in the days of the classic Mac Pro, video professionals weren't the only people who bought Mac Pros; gamers also bought them. But now gamers can't make much use of the new Mac Pro because the graphics card it comes with is for design, and it can't be replaced because it uses a proprietary connector and a regular graphics card wouldn't fit.

Another big annoyance is that the new Mac Pro doesn't have any room for hard drives. The old Mac Pro had four hard drive bays. Suppose each bay had a 4 terabyte hard drive; that's 16 terabytes of internal storage. That's a big deal for professional video editors.
 
jblagden said:
I think he's talking about being able to swap out graphics cards. While it's true that the new Mac Pro has a really good graphics card, what if it's not good enough a few years from now? Or what if you're using a program which uses CUDA? Being able to swap out graphics cards is a big deal. Also, in the days of the classic Mac Pro, video professionals weren't the only people who bought Mac Pros; gamers also bought them. But now gamers can't make much use of the new Mac Pro because the graphics card it comes with is for design, and it can't be replaced because it uses a proprietary connector and a regular graphics card wouldn't fit.

Another big annoyance is that the new Mac Pro doesn't have any room for hard drives. The old Mac Pro had four hard drive bays. Suppose each bay had a 4 terabyte hard drive; that's 16 terabytes of internal storage. That's a big deal for professional video editors.
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I don't know, what Mac applications utilize CUDA?

Gamers buying MacPros are a fringe case at best, I doubt they were even 1% of the market.

Yes, no more internal storage expansion is inconvenient, but more so for individuals, as larger AV facilities would have moved to XSAN or a contemporary equivalent already.

For my personal use, the cMP is a better fit, but I don't know if internal HDD bays and PCIe slots would be sufficient reason to switch to Windows when my current machine transitions to the Eternal Cloud. I have got a bunch of external stuff connected already, one more Thunderbolt cable to the external HDD bay wouldn't make that much of a difference.

The biggest objection remains price, and a nagging suspicion that Thunderbolt may not make it to the end of the decade.
 
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Let me make this quite clear first of all. THIS IS NOT HAVING A GO AT MacVidCards, and hopefully he won't take it that way. Nor am I singling him out here regarding this ( or any other individual ) but the group as a whole that seem to have to share there feelings constantly about the nMP.

MacVidCards offers a valuable service offering EFI Flashed Cards for people that want to extend the life of there cMP. He and others he works with put a lot of time and effort into making the EFI for the Graphics Cards. Just want make sure that is clear first of all.

However his service is not useful to ME. I live in the UK and it is simply not worthwhile purchasing a Flashed GPU card from the States. (Returns for faults/reflashing required makes impractical and therefore not for me) He has been looking for an Europen partner without success, ( I fully agree with him where doesn't want to work with create.pro people based on what seen happen previously ) however where he mentions shipping the ROMs in lots of 10, then doesn't indicate that we are looking at huge volume of sales expected here in Europe for the product, ( yet to hear people go on you would think that the Mac Pro user base in Europe would be crying out to be able to update there cMP's ). Does this mean that his product/service is crap, should I flood the forum with every thread about flashed cards, cMP with how crap/poor his service is, and I have been screwed over with the advertising of his product/service only to find that it isn't of any good for me.

I own a Mac Pro 2010, that upgraded myself, therefore my opinion/experience is just as valid as any others that own a cMP, so surely would be entitled to do so.

The nMP doesn't meet the needs/expectation of some people that have cMP's and were looking for an upgrade. Does this make the nMP crap. NO, it simply means that the nMP is unsuitable for YOUR needs and Apple is going in a different direction to the one that YOU would like. ( I would also like to point out here that I am not going to be buying an nMP, not because it is crap but simply doesn't meet MY needs, I may in fact move to Windows and general PC for what use the cMP for, if a product no longer meets my needs then I MOVE ON and get a product that does )

The point has been well made that you ( as in group ) aren't happy with how Apple is going with the nMP. The nMP is not suited for everyone. However now it is just tiring and detracts from the good contributions that are made by that same group of people.
 
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mcnallym said:
Let me make this quite clear first of all. THIS IS NOT HAVING A GO AT MacVidCards, and hopefully he won't take it that way. Nor am I singling him out here regarding this ( or any other individual ) but the group as a whole that seem to have to share there feelings constantly about the nMP.

MacVidCards offers a valuable service offering EFI Flashed Cards for people that want to extend the life of there cMP. He and others he works with put a lot of time and effort into making the EFI for the Graphics Cards. Just want make sure that is clear first of all.

However his service is not useful to ME. I live in the UK and it is simply not worthwhile purchasing a Flashed GPU card from the States. (Returns for faults/reflashing required makes impractical and therefore not for me) He has been looking for an Europen partner without success, ( I fully agree with him where doesn't want to work with create.pro people based on what seen happen previously ) however where he mentions shipping the ROMs in lots of 10, then doesn't indicate that we are looking at huge volume of sales expected here in Europe for the product, ( yet to hear people go on you would think that the Mac Pro user base in Europe would be crying out to be able to update there cMP's ). Does this mean that his product/service is crap, should I flood the forum with every thread about flashed cards, cMP with how crap/poor his service is, and I have been screwed over with the advertising of his product/service only to find that it isn't of any good for me.

I own a Mac Pro 2010, that upgraded myself, therefore my opinion/experience is just as valid as any others that own a cMP, so surely would be entitled to do so.

The nMP doesn't meet the needs/expectation of some people that have cMP's and were looking for an upgrade. Does this make the nMP crap. NO, it simply means that the nMP is unsuitable for YOUR needs and Apple is going in a different direction to the one that YOU would like. ( I would also like to point out here that I am not going to be buying an nMP, not because it is crap but simply doesn't meet MY needs, I may in fact move to Windows and general PC for what use the cMP for, if a product no longer meets my needs then I MOVE ON and get a product that does )

The point has been well made that you ( as in group ) aren't happy with how Apple is going with the nMP. The nMP is not suited for everyone. However now it is just tiring and detracts from the good contributions that are made by that same group of people.
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I've been kicking around the idea of volunteering for that European distributor thing for about 6 months as I know it can be done part time. I think the issue though will be will the card have to be warrantied like a manufacturer here. I think there is a market here in Europe but I just don't know the rules well enough to make it happen. I'm mostly German literate but like most non-native speakers of any language legalese is tough.
 
Exactly, the modifications would void the manufacturer's warranty but you'd still have to give warranty to your customers. You'd also have to take back the cards for free within 14days if a customer doesn't like it. No big deal for crappy old HD5770's the 'experts' are selling here (=Germany) on ebay, but definitely no fun when talking about a TitanX. ;)
 
Ursadorable said:
I want to buy a new Mac Pro, but not until it comes with an nVidia GPU.. so I'll keep sitting on my cash.
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Looks like you can go with anything else except nMP because it doesn't appear Apple will work with NVIDA. PC might be the way.
 
goMac said:
Apple does not care about CUDA. If you're waiting for Apple to make a change to make CUDA easier, best just move on to Windows.
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What can Apple do about it? I always thought CUDA is a closed source property of Nvidia.
 
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I've used the M390X in an iMac and it's a pretty crappy GPU. It looks good on paper but performance is supbar in CC2015 applications like Photoshop.
 
JoSch said:
What can Apple do about it? I always thought CUDA is a closed source property of Nvidia.
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A closed source property like Apple OSX?

And what Apple can do is simply give its customers the option of systems with Nvidia GPUs, and let Nvidia supply the drivers and libraries to unlock CUDA performance. Like Nvidia is already doing for the Apples shipped with Nvidia GPUs or upgradeable.

Then what's with Apple backing away from OpenCL in favor of yet another Apple API - Metal? Even before many apps were ported to OpenCL? I guess the vendors didn't slap Apple hard enough after the Carbon64 debacle.
 
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AidenShaw said:
A closed source property like Apple OSX?
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Like Darwin?

And what Apple can do is simply give its customers the option of systems with Nvidia GPUs, and let Nvidia supply the drivers and libraries to unlock CUDA performance. Like Nvidia is already doing for the Apples shipped with Nvidia GPUs or upgradeable.

Then what's with Apple backing away from OpenCL in favor of yet another Apple API - Metal? Even before many apps were ported to OpenCL? I guess the vendors didn't slap Apple hard enough after the Carbon64 debacle.
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It would be nice if third party apps would give us support using either Nvidia or AMD. That would give users more choice then forcing them to choose Nvidia. Metal is simply a better API considering developers are still dragging their feet with openCL.
 
AidenShaw said:
...
Then what's with Apple backing away from OpenCL in favor of yet another Apple API - Metal? Even before many apps were ported to OpenCL? ...
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Metal isn't that far off of an extremely tightly coupled OpenCL 1.2 and LLVM. The prefix of the system calls are a bit different, but if were using Grand Central Dispatch and OS X Foundation libraries to queue up your OpenCL 1.0/1.1/1.2 computational kernels may not have tons of work to do make the transition. XCode won't automagically do all the work for you but have not really missed the major concepts with OpenCL work.


OpenCL may end up like OpenGL on windows. It is an "add on" the GPU vendors can provide but the OS vendor isn't signed up to provide it by default. [ Long term, same thing for OpenGL and perhaps Vulkan (GLnext) in the graphic space. ]. I don't think Windows approach has helped OpenGL (or OpenCL ). However, it has large enough user base to make the GPU jump through hoops to get to them. iOS + OS X is a pretty large group now. ( larger than Windows through a large segment of its lifetime. )

P.S.
I guess the vendors didn't slap Apple hard enough after the Carbon64 debacle.
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Carbon was always intended as a transitionary stopgap to get folks over to Cocoa eventually. NextStep "won". Carbon was there to transition the OS 9 folks to the Cocoa world. After the Intel transition was complete Carbon was on weak footing. Only the folks in deep denial couldn't see that. Apple had spent many years at that point explicitly saying that folks needed to make plans to transition to Cocoa and that Cocoa was more the heart of where OS X was going.

What was eventually became to be called iOS only poured a large amount of gasoline on that already burning fire.

I don't think Apple started out on the OpenCL path as it being only transitionary. The problem with OpenCL is though is the number of other major players through roadblocks at it. Apple can (especially at the relatively limited Open investment R&D levels they are at. ) drive the whole market adoption. Apple fought Flash but Google and others wanted HTML5 + javascript also.
 
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pat500000 said:
Looks like you can go with anything else except nMP because it doesn't appear Apple will work with NVIDA. PC might be the way.
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I own a pretty high end PC already (i7-4770k, 32GB RAM, GTX780Ti).. I don't want to go the hackintosh route, namely so I don't have to muddle around with drivers that may or may not work. And I want to get away from Microsoft. But I can't see owning a Mini due to lack of a dedicated GPU and slow dual core processors, nor do I want an iMac that if the monitor dies, the entire machine is pretty much a write off.
 
Ursadorable said:
I own a pretty high end PC already (i7-4770k, 32GB RAM, GTX780Ti).. I don't want to go the hackintosh route, namely so I don't have to muddle around with drivers that may or may not work. And I want to get away from Microsoft. But I can't see owning a Mini due to lack of a dedicated GPU and slow dual core processors, nor do I want an iMac that if the monitor dies, the entire machine is pretty much a write off.
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In that case PC would be your choice at this time.
 
Ursadorable said:
I own a pretty high end PC already (i7-4770k, 32GB RAM, GTX780Ti).. I don't want to go the hackintosh route, namely so I don't have to muddle around with drivers that may or may not work. And I want to get away from Microsoft. But I can't see owning a Mini due to lack of a dedicated GPU and slow dual core processors, nor do I want an iMac that if the monitor dies, the entire machine is pretty much a write off.
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Never thought I'd miss the Mac Clone days. I wonder what a UMAX S900 would look like today? hmmm

C'mon Apple, we need a really cool new expandable Mac Pro. Pretty please!
 
Ursadorable said:
I own a pretty high end PC already (i7-4770k, 32GB RAM, GTX780Ti).. I don't want to go the hackintosh route, namely so I don't have to muddle around with drivers that may or may not work. And I want to get away from Microsoft. But I can't see owning a Mini due to lack of a dedicated GPU and slow dual core processors, nor do I want an iMac that if the monitor dies, the entire machine is pretty much a write off.
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You could use a Thunderbolt eGPU. You might want to take a look at this thread: http://forum.techinferno.com/mobiqu...tion=topic&page=1&perpage=10&fid=135&tid=7205
 
linuxcooldude said:
Like Darwin?



It would be nice if third party apps would give us support using either Nvidia or AMD. That would give users more choice then forcing them to choose Nvidia. Metal is simply a better API considering developers are still dragging their feet with openCL.
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There is more to an OS than just the kernel...
 
Latest Nvidia drivers for Windows contain preliminary support for Vulcan, Pascal and Volta features. So now they are almost three generations ahead of the Mac drivers which do not yet support Maxwell specific features that would make them much faster than Kepler.

Also, nice new Radeon drivers are giving them a boost on the Windows side.

http://wccftech.com/amd-r9-fury-x-performance-ahead-nvidia-980-ti-latest-drivers/
 
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