Maxed out MacPro Pricing

[Marcus Moore]

We’re sick… SICK people!

[Rick Lang]

Marcus, with the optimization of the Pro Apps for the new Mac Pro, the existing behaviour of the apps that Andy described earlier may be changing. Aperture isn’t changing much I don’t think but we know FCP X has undergone significant performance enhancements to take advantage of the new dual GPUs, Other Pro Apps will likely see performance changes but perhaps not at the launch date.

SSD and PCIe Flash
There’s an old rule of thumb for system disks to ensure you have at least 10% free space. For one thing, your virtual disk needs free disk space to write new memory pages. But in reality you can practically fill a hard disk used for any other purpose without ill effects. All ‘traditional’ SSDs do require enough free space to do their data management housekeeping. SSDs that are sold as 480 GB devices for example already have about 6% of their free space set aside so you never see it. SSDs that are sold as 512 GB devices for example likely don’t have any free space kept in reserve so you want to be very cautious about filling them up and certainly you shouldn’t fill such a device if it is your boot disk. Now the PCIe flash drives probably follow the same principles: if it’s your system drive, don’t fill it up.

RAM
More is better within reason. In an ideal world, you wouldn’t be writing any memory pages out to your system drive and all the programs you need to use concurrently will run fine in real memory. Some minor exceptions won’t be a concern but if your virtual memory is much larger than that, you are suffering performance hits. In the old days when the virtual memory was on a spinning hard disk, it was a very big hit potentially. But in the new Mac Pro as well as the MacBook Air for example, the PCIe system flash drive is much faster and virtual memory likely isn’t as great an impact. Still obviously better to have the real memory you anticipate you will need. FCP X and DaVinci Resolve seem to run well in 16 GB RAM, but I don’t know the impact of 4K video on the overall requirements and hence feel 32 GB is better. By the way, the memory is four-channel access so Apple is frankly wrong to even offer that low-end 12 GB configuration. Configurations that use all four memory slots with identical sticks will run at the rated speed. That 12 GB will be slow. Intel must have a white paper on it for the new memory, but I don’t think it is worth the effort to find it. I’m sure everyone will be smarter than Apple’s marketing department and buy either 16 GB, 32 GB or 64 GB memory configurations.

GPU
We are going to have to readjust our thinking regarding Apple’s use of GPUs now that they are supporting dual Firepros in the new Mac Pro and tuning their apps for that. Having dual GPUs sounds very good and hopefully the implementations in the software will take full advantage of both at some point if they are available. Time will tell. I know Blackmagic Design has commented that DaVinci Resolve “screams” on the new Mac Pro. That’s been discussed in another thread and “screams” is a relative word comparing the Mac Pro to previous Macs and the verdict is out about how it will stack up against high-end PCs that can run multiple Titans.

CPU
again, we need to wait to see how the new versions of the Pro Apps behave. And even if some apps like FCP X make extensive use of the dual GPUs, there will be other apps that continue to use the CPUs. Over time I expect that will change.

External Storage
Don’t forget that all the potential of the new Mac Pro can be humbled by expeternal storage that doesn’t keep up! Enter Thunderbolt 2 to squeeze more performance from external storage devices. I had thought something like the 6-bay Promise Pegasus2 R6 would suffice for 4K video but someone recently vaguely warned about 6-bay RAIDs. I don’t know what the concern was but will think about an 8-bay RAID. If anyone can explain why 6-bay RAIDs should be avoided, I’d appreciate hearing from you. I think the goal posts have moved to sustaining at least 1 GB/s of incompressible data (video) over Thunderbolt to the Mac Pro. Again, love to hear other opinions.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Andre Van berlo]

With all the info here and in this article: https://www.marco.org/2013/11/26/new-mac-pro-cpus and info found in the app store I started calculating, it’s guessing(which is fun!) but this is what came out:

Maxed out:
base price 3000
12 core 2500+
D700 1750+
64 GB 1200+
1TB SSD 750+ (going from 500-TB adds 500 in apple store)
Total 9200

should be 9500 So one or more items are a bit under priced

EDIT: according to prices on https://alex4d.com/notes/item/maxed-out-2013-mac-pro-price ($9160 for maxed out setup) 9200 is only $60 overpriced so the only unsure thing here is the balance between the D700 price and the 12 core cpu.

8 core Marcus Moore config
base price 3000
8 core 1500+
D700 1750+
64 GB 1200+
500GB SSD 250+
Total 7700

should be 7500 So one or more items are a bit over priced.

EDIT: according to prices on https://alex4d.com/notes/item/maxed-out-2013-mac-pro-price ($7270 for maxed out setup) 7700 is overpriced by $400 so that might mean the price for the 8 core cpu is less than the +1500 i listed.

For my own ideal setup these are the speculated prices:
8 core personal config
base price 4000+
8 core 1000+ price increase is related to the 6 core config
D500 0+
32 GB 600+
500GB SSD 250+
Total 5850+

I might though opt for the D700’s but that makes for a price increase of $1000.

Estimated costs of GPU’s
D300= +0
D500= +750
D700= +1750

[Marcus Moore]

I’ve pointed out to Alex that his calculations for $9,200 are off. He’s doing it as a direct currency conversion, whereas the spread between US and Canadian prices on the Apple products isn’t nearly that wide. But he’s taking the conservative tact. I’m betting the CN$9,700 config will be closer to US$9,500.

The other place your off is the SSDs. A 512GB upgrade on the iMac is $500, and 1TB is $1,000. That will be exactly the same for the MacPro according to my info.

[Walter Soyka]

[Rick Lang] “Looking forward to aggressive pricing from Apple to make a statement that they intend to be competitive and to make a dent in the market.”

Competitive with whom, and a dent in what market?

I’d argue that Apple has been price competitive with the Mac Pro line since its debut in 2006, and I’d also argue that Apple is trying to define a new market (the “pro computer”).

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

[Marcus Moore]

I was hoping you’d get in on this topic, Walter.

If we take for granted that 10.1 works the same way as 10.0.X-

What’s your option on how CPU and RAM are used in FCPX day to day?

[Walter Soyka]

[Marcus Moore] “What’s your option on how CPU and RAM are used in FCPX day to day?”

As you know, while I am not an FCPXophobe, I’m not a heavy FCPX user, either. Please take this with a few grains of salt… but here goes.

My educated guess is that CPU and RAM matter more than people are assuming in this thread, and while the GPU is important for rendering, its overall importance is being somewhat overstated. I’m not sure to what degree we should expect this to change in 10.1.

It generally seems that the smoothest-running FCPX systems today are high-spec iMacs with fast i7 CPUs, healthy amounts of RAM, and laptop graphics cards, not prior-generation Mac Pros with fire-breathing GPUs. Once all those components have finally been brought to the same generation and performance level in the Mac Pro, I’d guess that a balanced system would be the best choice for most editors.

I think that the GPU is obviously enormously important for real-time effects and rendering/exporting effects. I’d guess (but I am not sure) that nearly everything else is CPU/RAM-driven. That includes the entire UI, all the database stuff, background tasks, encode/decode for just about everything (H.264 excepted), and most of the skimmer’s functionality.

I am very intrigued by the BruceX benchmark [link] that Alex Gollner has published, but I think its emphasis on generative effects puts more emphasis on the GPU than common editorial will.

In short, I think that looking at rendering performance is important and useful, but I don’t think it tells the whole story.

Care to keep an eye on a couple of CPU/GPU monitors while you work?

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

[Marcus Moore]

Thanks Walter.

Phil Schiller’s big pitch with the MacPro seemed to be OpenCL, where GPU cores can be tasked to perform numerical tasks historically left to the CPU. I’ve also heard it referred to as “Apple’s Mercury playback engine”.

If FCPX leans on OpenCL even more, then the standard dual-GPU configuration of the new MacPro really starts to make sense.

[Rick Lang]

[Walter Soyka] “[Rick Lang] “Looking forward to aggressive pricing from Apple to make a statement that they intend to be competitive and to make a dent in the market.”

Competitive with whom, and a dent in what market?”

I had in mind competitive with the higher-end PCs and the market that those PCs attract. By competitive I don’t imply that they have to be cheaper but be in the ballpark.

I do feel that Apple is not going to dominate on specs with the higher-end PC machines, but it remains to be seen how close they’ll get in real use due to their tight integration of hardware (and tuning of selected Pro Apps software) and what value their new Mac Pro price-performance will be perceived to have.

Once we start getting feedback from actual use in January, I think the threads here on the COW will be very enlightening. I distrust Apple’s ad copy on the new Mac Pro, but I do trust you and others here to present balanced and insightful (and entertaining) reports to the community.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Walter Soyka]

[Marcus Moore] “Phil Schiller’s big pitch with the MacPro seemed to be OpenCL, where GPU cores can be tasked to perform numerical tasks historically left to the CPU. I’ve also heard it referred to as “Apple’s Mercury playback engine”. If FCPX leans on OpenCL even more, then the standard dual-GPU configuration of the new MacPro really starts to make sense.”

Think about the marketing: the big pitch HAS to be OpenCL. Absent OpenCL, the single-CPU, AMD-graphics Mac Pro is really unremarkable from a computation standpoint.

That said, I’m not trying to downplay the importance of the GPU, and I do expect Apple to continue to leverage OpenCL extensively. I’d personally go for at least the D500s and preferably the D700s — but I also think the importance of the CPU and RAM has been downplayed elsewhere in this thread.

Until some real-world tests for this unreleased software on unreleased hardware show me otherwise — which could absolutely happen! — I’d expect most users here would benefit from balanced systems. If your system is starved for RAM or is bottlenecking on the CPU, the fastest GPU in the world won’t help.

If budget is a factor, a better balance between GPU and CPU might be beneficial. In other words, maybe an 8-core CPU with D500s will provide better real-world performance than a 6-core CPU with dual D700s. I’d think this uncertainty is painful for quite a few of us here, because it’s entirely possible we won’t have real-world data to know for sure one way or the other until sometime in January. As Craig pointed out, delaying the purchase until you know for sure where the best bang for your buck comes may cost you 2013 tax benefits, but sadly any order placed today is still speculative on performance.

It’s interesting that you bring up the Mercury Playback Engine. MPE is a marketing entity; from a tech perspective, it’s actually a collection of several different technologies of which hardware acceleration via GPGPU is only one. Notably, MPE accelerates a lot of image processing tasks via the GPU (running on either OpenCL or CUDA), but none of the actual compression or decompression of video footage.

The treatment of GPGPU around here reminds me of Thunderbolt: it’s new and exciting, it’s part of an important trend, and it’s prone to hype.

GPGPU is a great technology for improving render performance, but it’s not magic and I don’t think we should assume that more GPGPU will always provide the most additional bang for the incremental buck.

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