Do you mind if I ask what you’re doing? I have a hard time imagining what sort of work requires 128 or 256 GB of RAM where CPU and GPU are not important. It takes a lot of horsepower to crunch that much data.
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When do you think the M1 (pro level) iMacs will be released? And do you want one?
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Do you mind if I ask what you’re doing? I have a hard time imagining what sort of work requires 128 or 256 GB of RAM where CPU and GPU are not important. It takes a lot of horsepower to crunch that much data.
Good question and I am leap-frogging here and I know you aren't asking me your question, so pardon me, but it that were me answering I'd say that through the use of photo editing of RAW captures and then saving to very large images with either JPG and especially at TIFF I don't want to experience lags getting this through my workflow.
There are times too when I am experiencing a jitter while a memory-hog game is being played that just plain irritates me.
However I look forward to JouniS's reason
Someone who needs a larger screen? Or someone who never works outside the office and doesn’t want to pay for a battery he’ll never use? Or someone who prefers a separate full-size keyboard and mouse to the laptop’s keyboard and touchpad? Raw performance is not the only consideration when selecting a computer. For most people, it’s not even the primary consideration. Very few people need or buy the fastest computer on the market.
Agree. I like a large screen and do all of my work in the office on a desk which also affords me a larger surface area for a Wacom or an iPad. I do own a laptop but only for travel or backup.
My former comment was establishing my criteria as it comes to the differences between the MBP and the iMac 27" as is consistent with the configurations including the RAM and the price points other than what I have already ststed
If the desktop's SoC performance is equal to a laptop SKU then I'd like a price reduction for the desktop.
I develop bioinformatics software that runs on servers that have hundreds of gigabytes of memory. With 128 GB, I can usually run full-scale tests locally, which improves my productivity over having to start a cloud instance for the tests. 256 GB would almost always be enough. Most of the tests are quick enough that the running time is determined by startup delays and the time required to read the data from disk rather than by CPU performance.
That 128 GB only cost me ~$600 when I got the iMac. Another way to avoid the startup delays for the tests would be having an on-demand cloud instance running whenever I work, but that would cost $3k to $5k per year. (A reserved instance that is available 24/7 would be $10k to $15k per year.)
Well you're entitled to your opinion, and yes of course, no computer is a one horse pony. All assets in it contribute to the performance. But there is little I can do about the GPU once I've picked the model's processor and graphics card. That leaves me with the Ram availability
As far as I know and experienced is dat certainly Lightroom benefits most from processing power (has to render every change on the fly). Photoshop a little more on memory, but none of both gained much if anything by upgrading memory from 16 to 32 gig on my iMac 2011 (contrary SSD upgrade: wow!)
Still way behind M1 mini ?
I'm wondering the practical issues though.
SSDs in Macbook Pros in 2015 were about 2500 or so, by 2019 they were around 2700 (with read write being different speeds). The PCI-4 allowed a theoretical 5,000 mbs.
With m1, the air I think and the 13" Pro had published transfer rate of I think 3.6 (3600). As you said, the published figure for the 14/16"s MPro/M macs are 7.6.
My query though is, where is the bottleneck? Does a typical app process the whole file in one hit? I don't think so ... it processes things sequentially. My query is that if the sequential read required to operate is less than the SSD can page, then perhaps the SSD is not the bottleneck.
I don't understand what happens ... but evidently the M1 MacPros showed fast virtual performance.
As to SSD performance, this article was curious to me:
Quote:
"There now seems no doubt that, by any standards or comparisons, Apple’s first Apple Silicon Macs, its M1 models, are wickedly quick. Their one crucial performance area which isn’t as clear is their internal storage: I’ve seen a range of benchmark results which either set them on a par with T2-equipped Macs like my iMac Pro, or just seem puzzling.
One clear conclusion for the moment is that relative performance of M1 Macs depends on which benchmark you use. Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, available from the App Store, is now a Universal App, but returns read and write benchmarks of between 2.7 and 3.5 GB/s, which are very similar to those of a T2 model.
I’m very grateful to Jay, who alerted me to different figures being reported by ATTO Disk Benchmark (available on request from ATTO). Before showing those from an M1 model, this is a typical set of results from my iMac Pro:
How fast is the SSD inside an M1 Mac? Eclectic Light Co
Once read and write sizes exceed about 4 MiB, transfer speeds settle at around 2.8 GB/s for reads, and 3.4 GB/s for writes.
Results for my M1 Mac mini, with a 500 GB internal SSD, are very different. While writes stabilise at just under 4 GB/s, even at 64 MiB, reads are continuing to increase in speed, at just under 10 GB/s. Note that Blackmagic is normally run with ‘stress’ set at 5 GB. Those results are for a single stream; increase the number of streams to 4, and the results are even more curious.
Write speed has fallen fairly uniformly to around 2.5 GB/s, while read speeds have reached nearly 20 GB/s by a size of 24 MiB."
End Quote
This site (Macrumours) front page is currently reporting that a new iMac will be called a "Pro", will have black surrounds, will use either of the just introduced two "Pro' processors, will have ethernet on their power supplies, may have face recognition, will have Pro motion screens same tech as the new Pro notebook, 27" is likely but not certain, will start at around $2,000 and will ship in the first half of 2022. https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/30/imac-pro-2022-rumors/
You and me both! I’m also waiting for Apple to make a monitor that isn’t 5 grand. I really hope they release it sometime soon. Fingers crossed!
I think my outlook on Apple releasing the iMac is more pessimistic. There are supply chain disruptions happening world wide, also geopolitics with China‘s economic issues and rolling power outages. There’s also shortages of truck drivers across the U.S.
Early 2021 MacBook Pro releases were expected around spring, then summer, and now it’s been pushed back to the Fall. So the MacBook Pro releases were delayed for 3 quarters. The Apple Watches had last minute design changes due to supply chain issues as well - they managed to release but not according to the rumored design specs.
If we’re thinking it might come out Spring of 2022, then I think a more likely release is Summer 2022 and then Fall of 2022 for the rest of the product line. There are still silicon shortages for their iPhones.
Bit of a leap regarding the Apple Watch. The rumoured redesigns were a bit **** really and there’s nothing to sugar apple we’re going down that route. Sure there were lots of rumours but they surfaced so late in the day that the watches must have been in full production by the time the chatter started
Depends on whether it's a prosumer device like the MBP or a proper iMac Pro. Workstation CPUs tend to have a lot more external bandwidth than consumer models, so we might see something like 8x Thunderbolt and 10 Gb Ethernet. Maybe HDMI, but it's less useful in a desktop than in a laptop. And maybe some low-bandwidth ports like SD.
If the rumors of dual & quad M1 Max SiPs hold true, that would double & quadruple the number of Thunderbolt controllers...?
My guess for iMac Pro will be April and Mac Pro November. Apple seems to be rolling out from the least to more capable machine for AS.