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Mac Pro – arstechnica Review
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And you are absolutely sure a RedRocket X card is going to saturate the bus?
The original red rocket supposedly requires 8x, yet realtime debayer is achieved at TBs paltry 4x 10Gb/s.
We should wait to see what’s possible.
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By the way, from the Red Rocket X tech specs:
“SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS Mac OS X 10.7 or later
Windows 7 or later
Linux (Red Hat)
2048 MB RAM Minimum
Thunderbolt Compliant”At least one person is going to try and shove this in a Thunderbolt chassis.
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I believe Dave Girard’s review said the Apple FirePro included 10-bit colour but since OS X doesn’t support 10-bit colour yet, you can utilize the 10-bit colour if you boot up under Windows.
I think that was a very detailed review from a perspective (visual effects artists) of which I have very limited understanding. Once in a while I thought he was even contradicting himself but I guess that’s inevitable in such a lengthy review. I really appreciated the effort made in that review but it seemed flawed at times and selective of things that didn’t show off the Mac Pro in its best light.
I hesitate to give examples because I don’t want to get into a fight about my opinion versus anyone else’s opinion, but one example would be the number of times he used Cinebench 11.5 tests when he probably knows Cinebench 15 results would show better performance. He also repeatedly played down the FirePro label (workstation class GPU) and referred to it as the gamers 7970 I think. Why would he do that after educating us in the distinction between Intel desktop machines that may be faster than the Xeon, but point out the much more rigorous testing the workstation Xeons must pass? Just because some of the physical specs are similar to the gamers GPU, doesn’t mean that Apple GPUs were not subjected to similar rigorous testing befitting a workstation GPU.
It is a superb review overall and paired with the AnandTech review that emphasizes other aspects, these reviews give a rather good picture of the new Mac Pro. Considering how superficial many of the reviews have been, I hope Apple reads the Girard review carefully and thoughtfully. I don’t see the new Mac Pro and the software running on it as immutable. It seems to me it may take months or even a few years as software and hardware evolve for the combination to be a winner for more disciplines. Right now is just that, the present. Who knows what will happen tomorrow. If you are primarily a user of Final Cut X and DaVinci Resolve, at least today you should have a good night’s sleep! And bless you all.
Rick Lang
iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB
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The FirePro designation has always been a discussion. Typically FirePros are behind the top gaming gpu from the same vendor, in the way Xeon’s are last years model but revisioned and hardened for Servers. When I was supporting Autocad for Windows, this workstation designation was always an issue on the PC side.
But when you have a deadline and its 2 in the morning, it’s a little more assuring to know that the GPU your using has been certified as a workstation card, with whatever tests it needed to pass to get that designation. For the most part, I’ve always understood that one differentiating aspect is that the firmware nor the drivers are allowed to take “shortcuts” or “cheats” to improve performance, IEEE specs and rules on math precision, etc.
So this argument that the GPU is no different than a gaming GPU is really pedestrian. Really surprised by the Arstechnica review. I think they are just trying to be controversial and attention mongering. The MacPro is quite a development and the current pinnacle of innovation in the workstation world. Its a great target for critics who want to be read.
Reading it, on the one had they seem to imply the GPUs are not a big deal after all, with some marketing spin. Then when switching to the CPU, they claim it’s the weakest link and the Mac Pro is really about the performance of the GPU. The reality is that this is a workstation, and as a workstation, you’re getting some of the best combinations of CPU and GPU even compared to systems that are more expensive.
And as far as programming to leverage both GPU’s and the CPUs simultaneously, OS X’s Cocoa frameworks already have that covered. If the developers has been leveraging apples math and other frameworks, a lot of this performance comes for free. With Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL, not only is the GPU an OpenCL target but so are all the virtual CPU cores. Many modern Cocoa Apps get the boost for free. But, if the developer takes a few extra streps, than the boost is quite significant, take a look at Pixelmator…
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What I have to agree with in the arstechnica review is the lack of dual CPU options. This would open two lacking feature:
A) more peak multithreaded performance.
B) cheaper multithreaded performance.
C) cheaper upgrade options and more peak RAM.As they note a dual 6-core system would be cheaper than a single 12-core system and have supperior single and multithreaded performance. Dual 8-, 10- or 12-core systems would push performance way off the current machines charts. This really is a design flaw from Apples point of view. Seeing technically how well the single CPU design works even at full load with both GPU’s Apple surely could have solved this with out to much headache.
It would be interesting with a system that has four boards rather than three where the end-user has more options.
– choice of 1 or 2 CPU’s
– choice of 1 or 2 GPU’s
– choice of using unused slots for internal disk expansion (seeing general PCIe cards would be virtually impossible).This would open up the current hardware to a wider audience for sure.
I also find the GPU performance issue very alarming. Apple and / AMD really have to step up there game here. Clearly apps like FCPX utilize the machines potential but third party devs need this available to them as well. If the case is as bad as A mentions – up to 40% less perfromance in OSX on top of at best 50% of “top CPU choices” – Apples workstation has a bit of a problem.
The MacPro 2013 is a pretty interesting development. I’d love to see this grow into other product la given Apple tends to draw very clean lines between product categories. For example the high-end 4- and 6-core chips in the consumer market with consumer grade GPU(s) would make TERRIFIC lower end work or gaming systems. The Thunderbolt design would however be a problem here.
All that said, the MacPro 2013 holds a place for many. People just need to understand what the system is and what it is not. Apple also needs to “get with the workstation program” and sort out some soft and hardware features.
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[Jack Zahran] “Really surprised by the Arstechnica review. I think they are just trying to be controversial and attention mongering. The MacPro is quite a development and the current pinnacle of innovation in the workstation world. Its a great target for critics who want to be read.”
What in your opinion makes this the “current pinnacle of innovation in the workstation world?”
I find it rather telling that Apple studiously avoids the word “workstation” and calls the Mac Pro a “pro computer” instead.
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 -
[Gustavo Bermudas] “It’s not theoretical stats, it’s math”
My back-of-the-napkin math says that a 6144×3160 image with 3 channels (RGB) at 16 bits per channel is about 888 Mb or 112 MB.
With a transfer speed of 20 Gbps, you could move 23 of these frames per second.
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 -
Over at the Lift Gamma Gain forum they did test the new MacPro against a 2010 modell with various GPU’s. Sadly the nVidia GTX 780 wasn’t able to perform the Red Cine X export due to some OpenCL error. The new MacPro however performed very well, especially the D700 machine.
6K debayer to ProRes 4444 / 23.98 fps:
2013 12c 2xD700: 29 seconds
2010 12c 2x280X: 39 seconds
2013 6c 2xD500: 52 secondsIt would of course be interesting to see how an iMac would fair in the above. It does however have a much slower GPU than the machines in the test. It’s clear Red Cine X today only uses ONE of the two GPU’s however as the old 2010 12c machine got the same result with one 280X card.
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Of course they’re going to say that, they’re not going to discard the whole Mac user base, and while you can run that card in TB, you’re never going to get the same performance you can get running on a fast PCI bus.
I’d recommend give this a listen where they talk about the limitation and bottlenecks that may occur running a Red Rocket X in a NMP
The Coloristos ColorCast – Episode 15 “New Mac Pro”
Stream here: https://coloristos.podomatic.com/entry/2014-01-20T11_55_53-08_00
or on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-coloristos-colorcast/id549040100?mt=2They also have this tests done targeting DaVinci Resolve and comparison with 2010 vs New Mac Pro
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[Walter Soyka] “My back-of-the-napkin math says that a 6144×3160 image with 3 channels (RGB) at 16 bits per channel is about 888 Mb or 112 MB.
With a transfer speed of 20 Gbps, you could move 23 of these frames per second.”
That’s only uplink right? I don’t think TB2 maintains 20 Gbps up and down simultaneously, if it doesn’t then is 11.5 fps
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