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Nice thread on the future of the Mac Pro on the Videoguy’s forum
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[Jeremy Garchow] “I know we all like to think that the Mac was the highest performance machine on the planet, but it simply wasn’t and never has been.
“Totally agree with you, but remember back to the early G5s when, just by pushing the power button, you could totally ride it across the living room and through the closed door into the tree in the yard? Now that was fast! There was no way you could ride a Wintel box like that.
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[Brett Sherman] “I didn’t realize they didn’t sell PCs. I never intended to besmirch anybody. I think I was clear in saying there is nothing wrong with selling things.”
Glad to hear it. I agree with you that there is nothing wrong with trying to sell things. Where we disagree, however, seems to be on the legitimacy of offering supposedly neutral advice or opinion that is formed not by the facts at hand, but is arranged solely for financial gain. That may be OK with you, but the sense I’ve gotten from Videoguys over the years is that strive to rise far above that.
[Brett Sherman] “I don’t think I have any more wishful thinking than those who dislike Apple. I have to say there’s quite a bit of wishful thinking on the other side also.
“I’m not sure at all what you mean by this. I personally own 7 Macs, a string of phones, 3 Apple TVs, numerous iPods, 2 iPads, and the networking guts to connect them together. I enjoy using them all. But, I also believe that Apple has taken a far more consumer-oriented path in the last few years, and that they no longer have the incentive to support the needs of the high-tech artistic community. I also believe they don’t have much desire to do so anymore. So which “side” am I on? Do I dislike Apple because I believe they no longer have my core needs in their sights? Wishful thinking on my part would be for Apple to build a fully competitive MacPro. I just doubt that they are going to.
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Walter & Jeremy: you both raise several good points. I am still liking the idea. If Apple were really clever they might build some cluster services into OS X, since that is probably the one thing other computer manufacturers can’t clone. Just as parallelism is supported now with Grand Central Dispatch, XPC Services and OpenCL/OpenGL interfaces, an MPI capability built in would let a Phi-equipped MP act as a little personal renderfarm. FCPX could be extended to utilize this capability. More importantly for Apple, it opens up the opportunity to sell MP’s into a bigger market: turnkey High Performance Computing at the desktop level. Sort of a re-imagining of the XGrid and XServe models on a personal scale and usable by any software developer who wants to supercharge their application.
Today’s macs utilize integrated and discrete gpus and can determine the level of OpenCL or OpenGL support provided. To be revolutionary, Apple would need to make the Phi not just a 2k powerful graphics coprocessor, but expose these broader x86 capabilities through something like an embedded clustering capability.
On the one hand, this is getting pretty fantasmagoric. But on the other hand, it seems pretty clear that the shrinking of HPC clusters in space, power and cost is going to continue. Apple could have their MP future sights on a market much bigger than NLE’s pushing more pixels around faster.
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[Chris Harlan] “There was no way you could ride a Wintel box like that.”
No, it would just do it in 3D due to the seemingly endless supply of RAM/PCIe/GPU.
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LOL
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[Jeremy Garchow] “1) It’s not bolt on, but with x86 it’s pretty ‘easy’. The software all of us use today will have to be modified very little, unlike other GPU models, and it’s PCIe so with fast Thunderbolt (another intel product) this could be a reality. Maybe… it would allow almost anyone to tap in to it with already available instruction sets and wouldn’t have to rely on a separate GPU architecture or host support for that architecture. If you don’t have it, things just run a bit slower, or thing don’t run as fast. “
Jeremy, I don’t think the bit about x86 in the Phi marketing is directed at us. I think it’s directed at the massive computational users that already have x86-specific code running on clusters.
The hard part about writing for some kind of massively parallel co-processing like a GPU or a Phi isn’t the instruction set of the hardware — it’s designing your application to exploit parallel processing in the first place. Your application has to be cool with its execution being split up into literally hundreds of pieces that can run concurrently, all separated from the main system by the expansion bus.
You couldn’t just (say) recompile an old app like FCP7 with the Phi switch turned on and get a co-processor accelerated app. You’d have to actively design and develop the application for parallelism (like FCPX has been with OpenCL, or Pr has been, first with CUDA, now with CUDA/OpenCL).
Speaking of which, if Phi runs OpenCL, FCPX and Pr should be able to make use of it as such almost out of the gate. Maybe.
There are two larger points I’m trying to make here.
First, I think that Phi, like Thunderbolt before it, is being hyped far beyond reality. Both are very cool technologies, but neither are magic. I don’t not trying to be a wet blanket, I don’t dislike Apple, and I’m not trying to diminish the influence Thunderbolt has had on raising the capabilities of otherwise consumer-class portables, but it seems to me that a lot of the discussions about these technologies veers away from their real-world, practical applications and into fantasyland very quickly.
Phi is fast, but NVIDIA’s Tesla K20X is up to 30% faster. Intel will very certainly offer a nice toolchain to support Phi development, but NVIDIA’s CUDA toolchain has a huge lead in both maturity and community. The big news about Phi is that the massively parallel co-processing race has expanded from two horses (NVIDIA and AMD/ATI) to three (adding Intel).
Second, I’m questioning the suggestion here that whatever the future Mac Pro will be, it will be some technological marvel the likes of which are unlikely to be matched, like when Craig says “The only reason I can see for such a long period between 2010 and “later in 2013″ is they’re once again pushing technology” or when Rick says “Perhaps that would be optical, not copper, at far greater speeds and/or bandwidth which could disrupt the hardware playing field. If you were announcing to the world that you will be bringiing “something really great” to the dinner table, then you have set expectations that it will be something really delicious after all. What we’ve speculated about would be tasty appetizers but we may be surprised by a new satisfying entreé we hadn’t realized how much we craved until it is served on our platter.”
As long as Apple is dependent on Intel, I don’t see them gaining some huge disruptive hardware advantage over the rest of the industry. If Apple does move toward some proprietary system, they will have to get other third-party developers on-board, too, or FCPX on a 2013 Mac Pro will basically be a turnkey 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 -
[Brett Sherman] “I don’t think I have any more wishful thinking than those who dislike Apple. I have to say there’s quite a bit of wishful thinking on the other side also.”
Brett, I’m not sure where you’d put me. You might consider me on “the other side” and I have certainly been vocal and critical of Apple, but I really don’t dislike them.
I wrote other comments here on a PC. I’m writing this on a Mac now. I’m looking forward to retiring my current MBP and buying a new retina-display MBP this year. I use PCs, and I use Macs. No big deal.The right tool for the job. I hope that there will be a cool new Mac Pro in 2013. I bought into Smoke this year, so I’m in the market for an updated Mac workstation. I’d love to run one alongside my HPs.
I’m curious what wishful thinking you see on the other side. I talk about theory here because that’s the way the conversations sometimes go, but I work in the real world and practicality matters a lot to me. If I’m being impractical about something, I would love to re-consider.
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 -
[Walter Soyka]: If Apple does move toward some proprietary system, they will have to get other third-party developers on-board, too, or FCPX on a 2013 Mac Pro will basically be a turnkey system.
And I don’t think Apple really has a problem with this strategy. Looking at the overall Apple ecosystem from OS to hardware, to managed applications via iTunes/App store, mobile, and content consumption/sharing, this might actually be their strategy. I often wonder what the tipping point is for a monopoly… 😉
Michael
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[Jeremy Garchow] “I would argue that it barely was two years ago. In this regard, not much has changed. I know we all like to think that the Mac was the highest performance machine on the planet, but it simply wasn’t and never has been.”
We have this argument every time. You keep telling me that Macs have never been high-performance machines.
But as best I can recall, the 2006, 2008, 2009, and 2010 Mac Pros all used the fastest Intel processors available at the time. In 2009, the Mac Pro actually introduced Intel’s new Nehalem microarchitecture.
These were all screaming machines when they were introduced, and Apple had been marketing screaming performance on their pro systems since before the Intel transition (whether they had to make up crazy Photoshop benchmarks to prove it or not!).
Apple did do high-performance hardware. Yes, there were caveats, but any system has caveats. The areas where Macs were limited (RAM capacity, PCIe slots) relative to other workstations were immaterial for the sort of work we’re discussing here. It wasn’t until GPU co-processing started catching on for some specific software that Apple’s poor GPU drivers, limited GPU choices, and lack of slots to put them in started to matter. I think that practically speaking, the concern about slots/GPU on Mac had been forward-looking until maybe last year.
Think back just a few years. How much better could you do than a 8-core Intel workstation with 32 GB of RAM, running UNIX, with an NVIDIA Quadro FX4800, AJA Kona, and fibre channel or RAID card installed?
[Jeremy Garchow] “”High-end” and “demanding” and “finishing” are broad terms.”
Guilty as charged. Like Justice Potter, I’m finding these terms hard to define, but don’t we know them when we see them?
There are lots of places we could take the discussion from here if anyone is inclined.
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 -
[Walter Soyka] If Apple does move toward some proprietary system, they will have to get other third-party developers on-board, too, or FCPX on a 2013 Mac Pro will basically be a turnkey system.
[Michael Phillips] “And I don’t think Apple really has a problem with this strategy. Looking at the overall Apple ecosystem from OS to hardware, to managed applications via iTunes/App store, mobile, and content consumption/sharing, this might actually be their strategy.”
I’d bet a tasty beverage that Apple has FCPX running on an A6X in a lab somewhere.
[Michael Phillips] “I often wonder what the tipping point is for a monopoly… ;)”
Well, apparently it’s somewhere after Bruce Willis’s iTunes collection… 🙂
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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