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ATI GPU the right choice?
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Erik, here is the top-of-the-line AMD FirePro S10000 link:
https://www.amd.com/us/products/workstation/graphics/firepro-remote-graphics/S10000/Pages/S10000.aspxRick Lang
iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB
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[Daniel Frome] “Crap…I wasn’t aware the prices were THIS high. I had guessed that a 12 core 64GB RAM config was going to cost about $6000 … that’s looking more like $9000 now.”
NVIDIA has somewhere near three-quarters of the workstation graphics market. AMD may have been willing (or may have been coerced) to lower prices a bit.
But yes, a high-spec Mac Pro will cost a lot of money.
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 -
Roger, however, the specs Apple’s given points at 2xW9000’s.
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[Erik Lindahl] “Roger, however, the specs Apple’s given points at 2xW9000’s.”
Groovy.
A single W9000 lists at $3600.
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 -
In studying all the different cards and benchmarks it appears to me that AMD gives you similar performance to Quadro for about half the price. For instance a FirePro W7000 which is around %700 online is similar to a Quadro K5000 which is around $1800 online. Even a W8000 is only around $1300 and that can compete with a K6000 Quadro.
Walter mentioned the Titan – it’s a powerful card but sadly nVidia cripples output on all GeForce cards to 8 bit only. The AMD W7000, for instance, is less expensive than a Titan and can drive 4 10 bit 4K monitors via Display Port 1.2. I’m planning on testing the the W7000 in my PC as ASAP since Adobe CC is optimized for OpenCL and on paper performs better with AMD cards than Quadro.
The truth is for me, if Adobe CC performs well using the AMD W7000 on my PC and has affordable 10bit output to all my displays I would really have no use at all for a Mac in my workflow as I already have a powerful Win 7 workstation. Of course we won’t know ’til next week when Adobe finally released the new suite.
Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Downtown Long Beach, California
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1680680/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1 -
firepro is different from common radeon cards mostly by drivers and ECC memory. so gpu chips for new mac pro could be pretty cheap, wonder what ram they use for their custom gpus in mac pro.
Radeon 7970 uses the same core and it is very interesting how it shows up in OsX 10.9 https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1594669
7970 is pretty cheap, $400 for whole card. imagine they just get the chips, in large quantity…
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[Walter Soyka] “A single W9000 lists at $3600.”
AMD: So Mr. Schiller, how many would you be ordering?
Schiller: How about a million units to start… and we can pay cash if that helps.
AMD: Un. let me sharpen my pencil a bit for that pricing tier…
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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[Walter Soyka] “What’s interesting to me is that the S10000 costs $3500.
A Mac Pro with dual GPUs is not going to be cheap.”
Keep in mind, workstation GPUs are basically just gaming GPUs with more memory (and in this case ECC memory), qualified drivers, and firmware tweaks. Lots of ECC VRAM does add some cost, but not nearly as much as the markup GPU vendors charge. So, AMD can price this stuff much cheaper if they want to. Given that they don’t have to worry about undermining aftermarket GPU upgrades here (since those aren’t really going to exist on Mac platform anyway at this point), and given the promotional value of having their FirePro brand prominently featured on a new, ultra slick flagship Mac, AMD may well have cut Apple a pretty crazy deal.
Especially since this will encourage software vendors to support OpenCL, which, since much of this software is cross-platform, might help AMD sell more high-priced workstation GPUs to their Windows-based customers.
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Bill, please see my post above. I am sure that not only is Apple not paying retail, I am sure that Apple can get preferential pricing. I’d suspect that AMD would have done just about anything to get this deal for the damage it can do to CUDA on the desktop alone.
My point in all this is that a new Mac Pro configuration with a 12-core CPU and dual 6GB GPUs sports some very pricey components. People should set their expectations for pricing accordingly. I’d be shocked if these things were available in a $4,000 configuration.
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 -
[Chris Kenny] “So, AMD can price this stuff much cheaper if they want to. Given that they don’t have to worry about undermining aftermarket GPU upgrades here (since those aren’t really going to exist on Mac platform anyway at this point), and given the promotional value of having their FirePro brand prominently featured on a new, ultra slick flagship Mac, AMD may well have cut Apple a pretty crazy deal.”
Chris, I see from you and Bill that I’ve been very unclear here.
I am not suggesting that Apple is paying retail, or that the cost of this Mac Pro must start at $7k for the GPUs alone.
I just mean to point out that all this awesomeness comes with a price tag.
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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