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About the new Mac Pro-X
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[Michael Hadley] “oth on FCPX, and I can’t wait to get a new mac pro. From my perspective, for my work, my clients, my budgets, it looks terrific.”
I agree. I don’t get all the hand wringing over this. Until someone actually tests this thing with FCP X or Premiere Pro or whatever, we really don’t know squat. If it makes editing faster and more efficient in FCP X I’ll get it.
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$6k will be toward the high end version. Being honest, I’ve always been in the midrange with price/performance, hence my Hexacore 3.33 2010. Don’t do a lot of mograph. If I did, yes I would buy it at $6k. No hesitation. A lot of Cheese Graters were sold at higher prices, and this thing will scream with no hassles, unlike Hackintosh or even Windows.
Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1,Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1.3, Premiere Pro 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Avid MC, Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz 24Gb RAM GTX-285 120GB SSD, Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 8Gb SSD, G5 Quadcore PCIe -
Windows can scream with little hassle as well.
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[Lance Bachelder] “ECC RAM, PCIe storage, Dual uber GPU’s, 12 core Xeon – these are very pricey items,”
Then what do you make of all the griping that these towers are underpowered. Personally, I think Apple hit it as far as price/performance assuming these are relatively the same as existing Mac Pros. I don’t see them being priced higher than existing Macs. As much as us video people like to think of ourselves as the center of the universe, these towers are also undoubtedly targeted toward high end graphic design and layout also. If they were $10-15K as many on the board seem to want them to be, they’d sell almost none of them.
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[Brett Sherman] “Then what do you make of all the griping that these towers are underpowered. Personally, I think Apple hit it as far as price/performance assuming these are relatively the same as existing Mac Pros. I don’t see them being priced higher than existing Macs. As much as us video people like to think of ourselves as the center of the universe, these towers are also undoubtedly targeted toward high end graphic design and layout also. If they were $10-15K as many on the board seem to want them to be, they’d sell almost none of them.”
I guess I’m one of those griping that the systems will be underpowered, but that’s only due to my very specific requirements. It’s all horses for courses, and there are some applications where the old Mac Pro could compete against its peers but the new one won’t.
The Mac Pro is going to be a fantastic system for a really broad variety of creative tasks. It will fly with FCPX/M5. It will fly with Resolve, especially for an out-of-the-box system. It will fly with Photoshop and its OpenCL acceleration on things like Liquify and Warp. It will fly with GPU-based applications dealing with large datasets, like the MARI demo shows.
However, CPU-intensive applications like Ae, C4D and NUKE will all have better performance options available on PC systems. There will be a huge performance gulf between the Mac Pro tube with a single 12-core CPU and a PC workstation with dual 12-core CPUs for 3D rendering. The Mac will be literally half as fast. This hasn’t happened before, at least since the Intel transition.
I didn’t want ALL Mac Pros to ship with a dual-CPU configuration. I wanted a second CPU BTO option, not a second CPU standard. You are right that not everyone needs, wants, or cares to pay for that kind of CPU power. I recognize that I’m in the small minority.
I’m happy to see a serious computer coming from Apple again, and I’m really impressed with their decision to push dual GPUs into the market, but I’m sad to see Apple choosing not to compete on CPU power so they could have a smaller and cooler-looking computer.
The new Mac Pro looks like a really nice system overall, but I think there are some niches where it’s far from ideal.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Michael Gissing] “I have been interested in hearing the feedback from the audio community… the perception that Apple doesn’t care about audio pros seems to be strong with this MacPro announcement.”
Sidebar: I ran across some interesting research going on with physically-modeled sound synthesis, done in realtime on GPUs:
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2484010
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Are we sure we’re sure about the config options? All this hand wringing over dual CPUs could be for nothing.
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[Marcus Moore] “Are we sure we’re sure about the config options? All this hand wringing over dual CPUs could be for nothing.”
I don’t have Cartesian certainty about what the options will be on this unreleased system, but there are a few pieces of evidence pointing to single-socket, and none pointing to dual-socket.
The Mac Pro minisite refers specifically to “processor” and the picture shows room only for a single CPU.
Starting with Nehalem, Xeons have the memory controller on the CPU, and new Xeons use a quad-channel memory interface. There are only four memory slots shown, suggesting a single quad-channel interface and thus a single CPU.
The site also refers to “up to 12 cores of processing power.” The next generation E5 Xeons will offer 12 cores on a single CPU. If they were using current Xeons and had a dual-CPU configuration, I’d expect them to say “up to 16 cores.” If they were using next-gen Xeons with a dual-processor configuration, I’d expect “up to 24 cores.”
I wouldn’t say it’s really hand-wringing, either — just a recognition of the strengths and weaknesses of this particular system. I’m already using Macs and PCs, so I can just keep on using PCs where I really need that kind of CPU power. Not every application benefits from a zillion sizzle cores, and the Mac Pro will be a fine system for those. I just don’t expect to buy a Mac Pro and use it for all my work, as a good portion of what I do could go twice as fast on a dual-processor system.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
That’s good some good reasoning, Walter.
Optimized performance is obviously the point. I spent a ton of money on a G5 Quad when they were released, but I’m not sure I ever got the real benefit out of using using the software I did.
I believe I’ve read from you that Motion and FCPX particularly will benefit from this- where GPUs power is more important than CPU cores.
I haven’t looked into this in a while, but its no longer as simple as GPUs are real-time performance and CPUs are for rendering, is it? My impression is that line has started to blur, even if its only in one direction with rendering being aided by GPUs now.
Where is the benefit to 24 cores now? 3D applications I’m guessing?
Benchmarks tests for this thing are going to be interesting.
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[Marcus Moore] “I believe I’ve read from you that Motion and FCPX particularly will benefit from this- where GPUs power is more important than CPU cores. “
Yes. I think there are a number of applications which will benefit from the system design of the new Mac Pro, FCPX/M5 among them.
[Marcus Moore] “I haven’t looked into this in a while, but its no longer as simple as GPUs are real-time performance and CPUs are for rendering, is it? My impression is that line has started to blur, even if its only in one direction with rendering being aided by GPUs now.”
Absolutely. For a long time, rendering on a GPU meant rendering with OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) and one of the biggest benefits was the fact that it could render in real-time.
Now, rendering on a GPU goes well beyond graphics — CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) and OpenCL (Open Computing Language) both allow GPUs with their massively parallel architectures to crunch numbers instead of just draw images.
That means that you are not restricted to what’s possible with OpenGL: you can implement other kinds of renderers and use the GPU to run the calculations.
The blurring is bi-directional, too. It’s absolutely possible to use OpenGL for non-realtime rendering. Things like computing motion blur (basically rendering subframes and compositing them together), anti-aliasing (smoothing harsh edges of renders), and supersampling (a specific method of anti-aliasing where the images is rendered at higher resolution than output) can all slow a detailed OpenGL render to below real-time.
[Marcus Moore] “Where is the benefit to 24 cores now? 3D applications I’m guessing?”
Any CPU-heavy parallel task. 3D rendering is particularly notable, as there are few GPU-accelerated production renderers on the market and most renderers are still entirely CPU-based. Compositing is another: both Ae and NUKE benefit from loads of cores. Compression is a third: few encoders or decoders leverage GPUs.
These may be good candidates for GPU acceleration, but we’re not there yet.
RAM-heavy uses (again, compositing is a good example) or operations on very large data sets tend to benefit from CPU rather than GPU, because very few GPUs have significant quantities of their own RAM.
[Marcus Moore] “Benchmarks tests for this thing are going to be interesting.”
Yes indeed — but in the end, I think it will come down to what software you want to use.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events
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