Single Processor only for the new Pro?

[beaker7]

Cheers for the update Juanm. When did you ask them this ? I suppose it wasn't a definite no though ! I still hold some hope otherwise i may find it impossible to justify a single processor machine for my work. I also suspect this was a non answer as next limit never give clues and are extremely secretive. It seems if maxwell render want to continue supporting the osx version then they will have to consider open cl at least. Because none of the other macs have the grunt for unbiased rendering. The user base also has a preference for a native osx environment. I'm glad to see i'm not alone with my hopes and thanks for the feedback. I'll keep my fingers crossed also !

I don't know if I'd say Maxwell users are overwhelmingly Mac at all. Probably the same % as any other CG field, if not less, considering a lot of Maxwell users are doing arch-viz which tends to be 3ds Max and thus PC. In any case they support Win, Mac, and Linux so there are always options.

In my talks with their dev teams they haven't been opposed to GPU rendering for any particular religious reason other than up until recently, big comprimises would have to be made that they weren't willing to do, like severe scene size limits primarily. Now with larger memory GPU's coming out and especially in a couple years with the new memory architectures coming from nVidia, you might see movement.

 

[12dylan34]

Out of curiosity, what do people do with 24 processor cores? I remember a documentary about South Park where they said the entire show is animated and rendered on regular iMacs. 4K video editing can put a lot of stress on a computer but it looks like the new Pro was designed specifically for that.

South Park is very simple animation that's quick to render. On my brand new decked out iMac, many projects that I work on take 10 minutes or more per frame. In short, realistic 3D rendering. Most of that is done on PCs or Linux, but most commercials that use that kind if stuff are done on Macs. More cores=better always in 3D. You pretty much can't have too much.

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So you spent how much to replace the GPU to get how many FPS faster out of your render? If you have all that money to blow for marginal performance increase, just buy a new Mac Pro every other year. That's what I'd probably do.

It's usually more "minutes or hours per frame" and not "fps" in 3D. Very few renders use the GPU as well. One of the few things where CPU is everything.

 

[chedda]

cheers

Thanks for the feedback Beaker. I should have said that i prefer a mac osx environment. I think your right archviz (my) field is still dominated by windows and 3ds max. So it looks like either way it's going to be some time before movement. Sometimes i run out of ram in big scenes and i have 24GB so it seems a long way off.Unless system memory is shared with the cards somehow but i'm not technically minded enough to understand. Open cl seems preferable over CUDA because of cross platform and hardware support. Will we have to wait for them to battle it out ? Perhaps even the xeon phi can be supported under osx in an external chassis over thunderbolt in the future. I agree with you Dylan you pretty much can't have too much !

 

[calaverasgrande]

You're not alone there. If they're not going to build the fastest-possible boxes, they should give some support to those who will. But I suspect Apple doesn't want to be involved in making tweaks to accommodate everyone else's hardware and such.

Still, though, a solution could be reached.

In the early days of DAWs and NLE systems a lot of software vendors would specify only Intel chips on an Intel board with Kingston/Samsung etc ram.
If Apple did a limited licensing thing they could offer such restraints to insure they have minimal housekeeping to do in the OS, if any. Of course this will never happen.
It would be the equivalent of Apple admitting they goofed and they couldn't use their favorite ad phrase.
"The most powerful Mac (bookPro/Pro/Mini) ever"
Since workstation integrators would be selling that now.
What I really wish they would do is make somethign like BeOS. Branch the Mac OS so that there is one version with all the ice cream and candy gee whiz nonsense for the consumers and another barebones, all crunching no nonsense.
This would benefit the consumers because they wouldnt be carrying the extra virtual weight of the MAMP stack and other developer friendly frameworks.
Workstation users (and IT staff trying to justify budgets) would benefit from the lack of Cartoon Life, Garageband, iTunes and all the other "fun" stuff.
They could optimize teh consumer OS for smoothness of media experience, battery life and social media. The content creator/engineer version would be optimized for parallel processing, content management and standards compliance.
Of course this draws a line through the middle of Apple's "everyone is a creative individual" marketing shtick.

As far as "$10 adapter", if you spent more than $10 on a firewire cable to connect your $3000 interface you probably got ripped off.
I balk at the thunderbolt to firewire adapters because it involves several bridge chips, and 1394 is super finicky!
I need to just buy one and test it with my work laptop.

 

[twietee]

Sorry, this will most probably sound very ridiculous, but serious question: with the PPC times gone and Bootcamp used in lots of Macs nowadays: why isn't it possible to emulate(?) OSX under Windows?

 

[Topper]

Sorry, this will most probably sound very ridiculous, but serious question: with the PPC times gone and Bootcamp used in lots of Macs nowadays: why isn't it possible to emulate(?) OSX under Windows?

Somebody can correct me if I'm wrong since I've never done this but...
Nope, there is nothing like Bootcamp for PCs.
But there are people who have PCs with OS X on one drive and Windows on another drive.
It doesn't appear to me like the process is easy but it can be done.
Tonymacx86 is a good place for answers.
And we've got good hackintosh people on this forum also.

 

[juanm]

Cheers for the update Juanm. When did you ask them this ? I suppose it wasn't a definite no though ! I still hold some hope otherwise i may find it impossible to justify a single processor machine for my work. I also suspect this was a non answer as next limit never give clues and are extremely secretive. It seems if maxwell render want to continue supporting the osx version then they will have to consider open cl at least. Because none of the other macs have the grunt for unbiased rendering. The user base also has a preference for a native osx environment. I'm glad to see i'm not alone with my hopes and thanks for the feedback. I'll keep my fingers crossed also !

Sorry, I didn't see your answer before. I asked him the question almost exactly one year ago. To be precise, I asked him about CUDA specifically. As you say, they are tight-lipped about future developments, so as far as I'm concerned, it's as if I didn't get an answer. Are you the "Queso/Location: sota el aigua"?

 

[chedda]

Are you the "Queso/Location: sota el aigua"?

I swam in the sea earlier, sometimes i free dive.

 

[cmanderson]

Sorry, this will most probably sound very ridiculous, but serious question: with the PPC times gone and Bootcamp used in lots of Macs nowadays: why isn't it possible to emulate(?) OSX under Windows?

It's not "impossible", but the issue is one of licensing for the most part. It also wouldn't be emulation, but rather virtualization. Emulation is MUCH slower than hardware accelerated native instruction set virtualization.

 

[winterspan]

I guess you haven't priced 8GB DIMMs recently? I've now heard more than a few people making this claim but it just simply is NOT the case.

$300 to $350 for 4x8GB (32GB) of RAM is not expensive. Anyone making this claim is kinda out to lunch IMHO! It's actually cheaper (or about the same is some cases) than an 8x4GB configuration at present. Four years ago you might have been right but not any longer - not for a very long while.

Also I think you're mistaken about channels. MP5,1 had triple-channel access not 8-channel. The new MP6,1 actually has quad-channel access and thus faster, not slower.

You are right about the RAM prices coming down so much, I thought the 8/16GB sticks were more than they actually are at retail now.

However, you are missing the point about the memory bandwidth. When you talk about the old mac pro being "triple channel", it means that the memory controller on each CPU has three channels. Thus, with two CPUS, you have two independent memory controllers with three channels each operating (NUMA) with their own bank of RAM. a 12-core dual-cpu machine will have greater memory bandwidth than a 12-core single processor machine.