So what are the benchmarks of the cpus in the mac pro vs the imacs i5 and i7 haswell?

[Zellio]

Because the d300's are apparantly apple branded firepro w7000's, with only 2 gb vram each instead of 4 gb. The imac's 780m is 4 gb vram by itself and is comparable to a 660 ti or a 7870 in the first place...

 

[robgendreau]

I saw tomshardware do a comparison of the rumored 12 core vs other stuff:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ivy-bridge-ep-xeon-e5-2697-v2-benchmarks,3585-5.html

Not sure if that's the exact CPU but a start. Of course there's other stuff besides the CPU that means in the real world it'll be honking fast, esp the PCI based storage. But you can add that into other computers as well. Apple's pretty good at the whole package and PC-minded component-by-component comparo's rarely tell the full story.

The nice thing about the article is that you can see that these days it's more important than ever that you look at what's fast in the context of what software tools you use, not at the hardware in isolation. For some, eg, the speed of the CPU won't be nearly as important as the PCI storage. And some are already complaining that the speedy graphics is overkill for their needs, which might be mostly just fast CPU processing. YMMV.

 

[spaz8]

Because the d300's are apparantly apple branded firepro w7000's, with only 2 gb vram each instead of 4 gb. The imac's 780m is 4 gb vram by itself and is comparable to a 660 ti or a 7870 in the first place...

No the D300.. is probably more like a w5000.. which is just 2gb vram

D500 = w7000 - normally 4 gb vram

D700 = w9000 - 6 gb vrma - untouched.

 

[Jeremy M.]

From what I have read thus far and seen from people's feelings, it looks like the baseline Mac Pro may only be slightly better than the high end iMac 27".

Quad core Xeon against Haswell i7.

It seems the benefits come rapidly after the base configuration, once you start paying triple the price of the iMac.

Nothing can be proven fact until the benchmarks and user reviews are out, however.