imac i7 v mac pro (plus CS5 and pro 12-core Q’s)

[David Lewis]

Hi Everybody

My first post on the “COW” site… here goes…

Like several of the other posters, I am waiting with growing impatience for the official announcement of the new, presumably Xeon hexacore or dual-hexacore Mac-Pro machines. I haven’t found any online rumours that would shed very much useful light on any “solid” specs, and nobody seems to have any idea of the price/availability, or the impact of the new machines possibly “pushing down” pricing on the Quad MacPros? It would be SO nice if Apple would let a *little* bit of solid information out–a trickle of blood-in-the-water to keep all of us in a feeding frenzy… 🙂

So, assuming that the price is too high, or immediate availability too low–is it possible to crank up the performance of CS5 (or other lower versions) on a dual-Quadcore MacPro by putting in a small SSD-Raid *internally*? Would such a setup work in tandem with the GPU to assist in overall throughput?

Obviously more RAM is ALWAYS a good idea, but what about SSD’s?? Thanks for any advice!

[Elin Grome]

Hi all,

Sorry to drag you all through this again 🙂 I know this subject (upgrades, Imac v Mac Pro, 4v8v12 cores) has been done to death, but well, you know how it is, a combination of not wanting to part with a stack of cash lightly and childish excitement at getting a new machine 🙂

Anyway I reckon im in a similar position to Tyson;

“Having 64-bit capability would be great, especially being able to render longer RAM previews on higher resolution projects.

The type of work I do, however, is typically short-length (10-30 second) HD resolution graphics… so what’s really important to me is faster renders, not so much longer RAM previews. I realize those go hand-in-hand, but will I ever add more than 16GB of RAM (which is the iMac’s memory max) to my machine, even if I did buy a Mac Pro? Probably not. “

This pretty much defines the kind of work i do; more graphics/motion graphic, very little editing.

Can Dave/Tyson or anyone else expand on this?

Thanks in advance,

Elin

It’s all the those pesky details :p

[Walter Soyka]

With After Effects, speed and number of cores go hand in hand — and the more cores you have, the more RAM you need. After Effects rendering performance scales with money spent on hardware.

The iMac has only 4 cores, versus 6, 8, or 12 in the Mac Pro. The iMac is limited to 16 GB of RAM, versus 64 GB in the Mac Pro. The iMac is not expandable, but the Mac Pro is.

Can you get by with the iMac? Sure, unless you want to connect to a high-speed RAID, preview your work on a broadcast monitor, or take advantage of long RAM previews.

Will a well-equipped Mac Pro be substantially faster than a well-equipped iMac? Yes.

Is the extra performance worth the cost increase? That one’s up to you. Personally, I hate to wait (and so do my clients!), so I chose the Mac Pro.

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

[Elin Grome]

Thanks guys I guess that really is all there is to be said on this issue – its up to me to decide whether this extra grunt us gonna pay for itself; Im more of a all-round creative (yes, I know how pretentious that sounds :)) than a full time motion graphics guy, so I can always find some other toys to spend that 3000 dollars on, so i guess ill be bothering folks on the DSLR, filmmaking forums 🙂

One final, final questions for you Dave;

I saw that the 8 core seems to outperform the 12 core in many tasks – but you mentioned you wont be able to use hyperthreading on an 8 core? is that only available on the hexacore chips? Why didnt u choose one of those?

It’s all the those pesky details :p

[Elin Grome]

ahah – well a belated thanks for those responses/

FYI In the end I went for the Imac on steroids – at this stage it suits my needs since my “bottleneck” at the moment is the work; I dont have enough of it!

my partner and i are just starting up and I figure can always upgrade at a later stage and use the imac as render node etc etc

but thanks again, as much as u surely answer these same type of questions 50x a month the individual answers are still important to us as individual decision makers.

It’s all the those pesky details :p

[Clayton Macdonald]

there seem to be a few misconceptions re the imac on here with regards to Adobe CS5, so here goes.

NVIDIA are not the only video cards which support CUDA/ Mercury engine rendering in CS5. The ATI HD series supports it as well, although apparently you need at least 800MB of video card RAM so that leaves the 27″ imac with the ATI Radeon HD 5750 (1GB) as a valid option if you want to take advantage of GPU-aided rendering via CUDA/Mercury.

also, imacs are 64 bit. anything that ships with snow leopard is 64-bit. You do, however, need to boot it in 64-bit mode by holding down the 6 and 4 on startup.

Also, modern deliverables have blurred the lines of what is considered ‘broadcast’. If you’re delivering in NTSC, then you definitely need to preview your work on an NTSC monitor via a proper video card ie KONA3, and for that you’ll need a mac pro. If you deliver for the web, or anything other than NTSC ( including Blu-Ray) then you probably don’t need to proof your work on NTSC monitors. Also, if you need to ingest /output via SDI then you’ll need a KONA card as well.

So, to re-cap, yes there will be MASSIVE benefits to running Adobe CS5 on a hyper-threaded imac i7 with 1Gb of video RAM and 16GB of RAM. As a 64 bit machine, your imac will be able to make full use of adobe’s new 64-bit code, as well as CUDA/Mercury engine if your card exceeds 800MB of video RAM. It will be a fast and somewhat future -proof machine if you consider they are still shipping Macs of various flavours with 256MB video cards.

I picked this machine to cut my Canon 5DMkii footage on because the limitations re external drives don’t really affect me. Premiere Pro edits H264 natively at around 40mb/s, so FW 800 is plenty fast for me.

This ain’t your daddy’s imac, people, especially now that we are reaching the physical limitations of what a silicon chip can do.

Clayton MacDonald
Video Editor
778-960-0569

[Walter Soyka]

Respectfully, there’s a bit of misinformation in this post, so here are a couple important clarifications.

The phrase “Mercury Playback Engine” does not refer exclusively to GPU processing. It’s a broad term that includes a lot of big architectural improvements to Premiere Pro, including multi-threading, being a 64-bit application, and some co-processing with CUDA. (See Todd Kopriva’s post at https://forums.adobe.com/message/3377595 for more.)

CUDA is an NVIDIA technology. There are no ATI cards that support CUDA, and there are no ATI that accelerate processing in Premiere Pro. As above, the term “Mercury Playback Engine” is still meaningful on machines with ATI cards, but the CUDA processing is restricted to a handful of supported NVIDIA cards. (The list of supported cards is here: https://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/performance/.)

You do not need to specifically boot the Mac into the 64-bit kernel to use a 64-bit application. The kernel space and application space are completely separate, and you can still run 64-bit applications (with full access to 64-bit memory addressing) with the 32-bit kernel. (See https://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2010/03/64-bit-kernels-and-after-effec.html for more.)

Adobe has really excellent color management, but the iMac’s display is 8-bit only and cannot be calibrated in hardware like many higher-end wide gamut displays (like a Dreamcolor or Eizo), so I think that critical color evaluation still belongs on a properly-calibrated external monitor.

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

[Clayton Macdonald]

Thanks for the clarification Walter! Please correct me if I’m wrong ( again?) but here is some info I have dug up… mixed in with speculation. I’m trying to figure out how things will play out in the CUDA/OPENCL race, which i believe was at the core of my earlier misunderstanding. Here goes:

CUDA may just be OPENCL with a different wrapper (?). NVIDIA is a member of the Khronos group ( led by Apple of course) which was responsible for developing OPENCL in the first place. The chipsets are the same, the GPU’s are all the same – does Adobe/NVIDIA really want to alienate the second larget company on the planet (Apple)? Me thinks not. It’s just another format war and NVIDIA is trying to get their licks in first ( usually a mark of weakness).

In other words, it may not be long before CUDA is trumped by its open-sourced competitor OPENCL. CUDA is just as important to the pro video industry as other proprietary stuff like Avid video codecs ( which is, not very important?). We can see plenty of other examples where open-sourced codes have simply overwhelmed their proprietary and inherently weaker counterparts ( Linux vs. Windows ).

So, to amend my earlier post, you may only need a certain amount of video card RAM to take advantage of GPU acceleration ( CUDA/OPENCL ), especially as OPENCL moves forward. Apparently the threshold is around 800MB.

cheers!

Clayton MacDonald
Online Editor
Greedy Productions Ltd.
(https://www.elecplay.com, https://www.reviewsontherun.com)

Clayton MacDonald
Video Editor
778-960-0569

[Walter Soyka]

[Clayton MacDonald] “I’m trying to figure out how things will play out in the CUDA/OPENCL race”

So is everyone else! 🙂

The good news is that graphics cards are cheap, so you can pick NVIDIA for CUDA today, and if OpenCL wins, you can switch later if ATI delivers a better and cheaper option.

[Clayton MacDonald] “CUDA may just be OPENCL with a different wrapper (?). NVIDIA is a member of the Khronos group ( led by Apple of course) which was responsible for developing OPENCL in the first place.”

CUDA and OpenCL do similar things (and NVIDIA implements OpenCL on their CUDA architecture), but they are not the same. CUDA code does not run on ATI cards.

[Clayton MacDonald] “NVIDIA is trying to get their licks in first ( usually a mark of weakness).”

I think that NVIDIA’s goal in launching CUDA was simple: they had a great massively parallel architecture that they wanted to open up to new markets beyond pure graphics. CUDA (and OpenCL) is a fundamentally a competitive shot at Intel for general-purpose calculation. This sort of competition is confusing for customers in the short run, but will benefit everyone who wants cheaper and faster computing in the long run.

[Clayton MacDonald] “It’s just another format war”

I think you’re absolutely right, and I’ll take it a step further: this will be the biggest format war that no one has ever heard of in the coming years. I agree that OpenCL will have a huge amount of potential in the future, but I’d add that CUDA has a huge amount of momentum right now, both in our industry and others.

[Clayton MacDonald] “CUDA is just as important to the pro video industry as other proprietary stuff like Avid video codecs ( which is, not very important?).”

I’m not sure I follow here.

It depends on your market segment, but Avid is still very relevant to the industry. They have certainly lost momentum, but I wouldn’t count them out yet.

CUDA is still new, so it’s difficult to gauge its importance to the industry, but Adobe has jumped on it with Premiere Pro, BMD/DaVinci has jumped on it with Resolve, and Sorenson has jumped on it with GPU-accelerated video compression Squeeze 7.

[Clayton MacDonald] “We can see plenty of other examples where open-sourced codes have simply overwhelmed their proprietary and inherently weaker counterparts ( Linux vs. Windows ).”

Very true, but this seems to apply more to commodity markets and less to specialized markets like ours. I don’t realistically see Kdenlive denting the marketshare of any of the three A’s (Adobe, Apple, and Avid) any time soon. Also, a lot of critical video technology is heavily patent-encumbered.

Apple’s ProRes is a great example of how a closed, proprietary, sold-for-profit standard can totally dominate a market segment.

[Clayton MacDonald] “So, to amend my earlier post, you may only need a certain amount of video card RAM to take advantage of GPU acceleration ( CUDA/OPENCL ), especially as OPENCL moves forward. Apparently the threshold is around 800MB.”

Agreed. Today, Adobe has only developed GPU acceleration using CUDA on qualified NVIDIA cards, but who knows what tomorrow will bring?

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