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Oliver Peter’s Thoughts On The New Mac Pro
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I suspect the people who most want the ability to reframe will simply be zooming in on 4k on a 4k timeline.
And then render down to 1080 for the master.
Like what we did with the jump from 480 to 1080.
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A ‘Waver? It’s too bad CORE didn’t work out, but Rob Powers seems to have at least righted the ship.
[Marcus Moore] “To be fair, Mac have always been an “also ran” in 3D animation. They’re not abandoning anything here that they had a serious investment in.”
Macs have been prevalent in broadcast graphics and 3D motion graphics via C4D. The Mac Pro has been pretty competitive here since its first release in 2006 until recently. The next Mac Pro will be outclassed by machines that have two of the same processor it has: slower by half. The performance gap had never been this big.
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] “They are in different segments and there is plenty of room for growth.”
I agree that they are different segments but the segments sizes are changing. With each new generation of CPU and GPU design, the “bottom end” of the “workstation” market moves to the more commoditized system. The number of shops that need higher end workstations either declines or grows so slowly that they become a smaller proportion of the market.
The business model of the companies making workstations for that market has to change in some fashion. How they change will determine whether the shrinking niche can still sustain or increase revenue. Of course that may mean an increase in workstation prices to sustain or increase revenue but as prices thresholds are crossed yet another tier will shift down to more commoditized systems.
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Yikes! Not me-
With a majority of the corporate and commercial work I do, the ability to zoom and reframe is not only useful simply from a compositional point of view, but practically when I have to integrate titles, lower3rds, bugs, etc… being able to play around with negative space is a godsend.
This was the case when we started shooting 1080 but were still posting 480, and it the case with 4K/1080 now.
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[Walter Soyka] “Macs have been prevalent in broadcast graphics and 3D motion graphics via C4D.”
Sorry, I was making a distinction between 3D character animation and more traditional motion graphics (which can absolutely involve 3D elements). I was meerly suggesting I’ve never seen the animation side of an animation studio built on Macs. The design department, yes, but not the animators themselves. At least that’s been my impression.
T[Walter Soyka] “he Mac Pro has been pretty competitive here since its first release in 2006 until recently. The next Mac Pro will be outclassed by machines that have two of the same processor it has: slower by half. The performance gap had never been this big”
I’m not sure how you’re getting to that conclusion, can you explain? Why would this MacPro run the same hardware at half the speed. Are you talking GPUs? Isn’t that a conclusion we can’t come to until we see some benchmarks on specific application tasks?
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[Marcus Moore] “Why would this MacPro run the same hardware at half the speed. “
The new MacPro is single CPU x12 cores.
A new PC will have a similar processor x2 which is 24 cores (dual 12 core CPU).
Walter Soyka, is still coming to terms with the historical speed and connectivity (or lack there of) of Macintosh computers, and Apple’s stake in the speed race.
This is also a subtle dig that goes way back to the early X or Not: The Debate days. Way way back, like two years ago.
Ancient history.
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Not to lawyer-y about it, but a dual processor machine isn’t the same or similar to a single processor one. That second CPU isn’t free – you’re going to pay for it, and not an insignificant amount from what I’ve read.
Can you get a more powerful configuration than this MacPro with a PC, you probably will, but let’s compare Apple’s to Apple’s here (no pun intended).
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[Marcus Moore] “Can you get a more powerful configuration than this MacPro with a PC, you probably will, but let’s compare Apple’s to Apple’s here (no pun intended).”
That’s what Walter is saying in that you can’t. The gap between flagship PC and Mac machines is widening even further.
Sure, you could compare a similarly specs PC to a new MacPro, but that’s artificially dismissing PC performance just for the sake of comparison.
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Sorry- the way I read it Walter seemed to be inferring a performance deficit from Machines running the same hardware config.
Do I wish that Apple would allow for dual 12core CPUs- sure, why not. For those that could benefit from that CPU power and want to use a Mac? It must really suck.
As an editor, am I likely to feel the pinch performance-wise with this machine? Probably not, I’m apparently under the ceiling for what niches Apple is wiling to cater to.
On the GPU side I really do hope that Apple leaves room for external GPU expansion- again, from my 2011 iMac to the new MacPro is probably going to feel like lightspeed.
But again, the word has been so good from the few people that have actually used this thing (Resolve, Foundry) that performance discussions seem a bit pedantic.
But is a MacPro going to be the fastest machine you can buy- no.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Walter Soyka, is still coming to terms with the historical speed and connectivity (or lack there of) of Macintosh computers, and Apple’s stake in the speed race. This is also a subtle dig that goes way back to the early X or Not: The Debate days. Way way back, like two years ago. Ancient history.”
Jeremy’s correct. For years, I labored under the delusion that Apple Mac Pros were performance-oriented. I was bamboozled by the fact that Apple kept offering the absolute top-of-the-line Intel Xeons in dual-processor configurations (just like the big PC workstation manufacturers) at the launch of each new Mac Pro through 2010.
I got suspicious in 2012 when Apple skipped a major generation of Xeons for the first time, but the scales really fell from my eyes on June 11 of this year when I formally conceded [link] to Jeremy that high-end Macs just aren’t built for speed.
All kidding aside, Jeremy has explained my POV really well here. From my perspective, the high-end on the Mac platform just got lower.
I’ll only add that CPU aside, I do think the next Mac Pro is a great machine. It’s a lot of power in a little bit of space. I’m excited to see powerful GPUs available. I was grumpy about Thunderbolt, but I think TB2 will probably be fast enough. I bet that it will even be price-competitive (as all other previous Mac Pros have been).
It’s just not the machine that I had been hoping for, and I’m not sure yet if it will make sense for me. Given the work I do, it would have been a lot more useful to me with a second CPU, but I do understand why everyone else here is so excited about it.
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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