OWC’s Larry O’Connor on the New MacPro – MacObserver

[Dan Stewart]

Interesting.. also I just saw the geekbench scores (maybe I missed it)

https://www.macrumors.com/2013/06/19/apples-new-mac-pro-begins-showing-up-in-benchmarks/

It looks like a 2012 MP running Mavericks will be only marginally slower than the Tube and has the ‘extras’ we’re supposed to dream of for the future..
..and will be at least a thousand dollars cheaper, even with a Titan & a kepler..
Anyone selling??

[Craig Seeman]

[Dan Stewart] “It looks like a 2012 MP running Mavericks will be only marginally slower than the Tube “

That’s a very early test (June 19) so I’m not sure how accurate it is or whether all the tests Note the John Poole comments.

Keep in mind software written to take advantage of two GPUs might perform substantially better (but proper comparison might be with 2010(2012) with two AMD 7950 maybe.

Programs like FCPX may take advantage of processor technology in Ivy Bridge that wasn’t available in the Westmere processors as well.

[Jason Van patten]

[Craig Seeman] ” Programs like FCPX may take advantage of processor technology in Ivy Bridge that wasn’t available in the Westmere processors as well.”

It already is: AVX. FCPX takes advantage of Intel’s AVX extensions, which is why it seems so much snappier on newer Macbook Pros and iMacs when compared to Westmere-equipped Mac Pros. AVX will be available in the Ivy Bridge Xeons that come in the new Mac Pro.

[Craig Seeman]

[Jason Van Patten] “It already is: AVX. FCPX takes advantage of Intel’s AVX extensions”

Apple does note that on their page. This is why Geekbench tests may not be real world practical. When the OS is nearing RC stage and tests are used with software that take advantage of the technology, they’ll be meaningful.

[Nicholas Zimmerman]

Not to mention the biggest factor, GeekBench is a CPU intensive test. The new Mac Pro (in it’s first iteration at least) is a single socket 12 core processor, versus dual socket 6 cores. Apple’s move to a single socket system essentially halved their processing capabilities, but the chips have progressed to the point that they were able to swallow that loss. It’s widely believed that the CPU is becoming less important, and the GPU more. I think when weighing the pros & cons, Apple made a very future ready decision.

The biggest perk of the new Mac Pro to me is that they went with AMD instead of Nvidia. This means that developers will have to pay attention to OpenCL, and not just Cuda capable cards. The change is already noticeable, as Resolve 10 and Adobe CC both support OpenCL now.

————————–
Avid MC, PPro CS6, FCP7 – wasting away on my SSD.
I just can’t quit X.
————————–

[Ronny Courtens]

I agree with the assessment that Apple made a good future-proof decision by making the CPU less important while drawing more computing power from the GPUs. That’s where we are heading anyway.

As to the choice for AMD: if Apple pushes developers to pay more attention to OpenCL instead of just CUDA that’s good for competition. By writing their own software to address the cores of their GPUs NVidia have successfully put themselves in a comfortable position where people need to use their cards if they use software that only relies on CUDA acceleration. And we all know what happens when corporate businesses get in a comfortable position ((-:

Although they have some pretty darn fast cards AMD at this time has a low market share compared to NVidia. When we see that Adobe, Blackmagic and other larger companies now have officially announced they would also add full support for OpenCL (which is getting better all the time) we will have a better competition which is always good for us, the end users. And I would not be surprised if by enforcing this competition Apple got a really good deal for these powerful AMD GPUs they will put in the MacPro. Again this could be a good thing for us.

[David Mcgavran]

[Ronny Courtens] “When we see that Adobe, Blackmagic and other larger companies now have officially announced they would also add full support for OpenCL (which is getting better all the time) we will have a better competition which is always good for us, the end users. And I would not be surprised if by enforcing this competition Apple got a really good deal for these powerful AMD GPUs they will put in the MacPro. Again this could be a good thing for us.”

Just to be clear 🙂 Adobe is embracing OpenCL. In CS 6 both Premiere Pro and Photoshop added OpenCL support. In Premiere Pro CC we have cross platform support for OpenCL including the entire Mercury GPU engine on Mac and Windows with OpenCL and Cuda. We have presented on our OpenCL support at Siggraph, WWDC and AMD conferences.

Cheers

Dave

———————————————————————————————————
David McGavran, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Senior Engineering Manager Adobe Premiere Pro
———————————————————————————————————

[Dan Stewart]

But the fact remains that even at launch the performance gains for anything but fcpx (and that has yet to be seen) can’t possibly justify the price jump over a 2012 with a 2014 gpu & mavericks?
That’s even before you have to replace / thunderbodge your existing storages screens & peripherals.
And chuck in 4 drive bays & slots..
Not trying to be a downer but the more I think about the tube the more I realise I’ll never use one – a second hand cheesegrater will make sense at launch, let alone a year or two in when those firepros are antiques and we’re onto the next chipset- it’ll be at least that long before the GPU is king. This seems like the disposable desktop – fcpx manifest as hardware. And I don’t use fcpx because I can’t – I need some of the things they removed from the software – and now I guess the hardware too. I’d love to love it – hell maybe it’s $2k and we’re all smiling.

[Craig Seeman]

[Dan Stewart] “performance gains for anything but fcpx (and that has yet to be seen)”

While we don’t know about other software but Apple has announced FCPX update specific to new MacPro.
Grant Petty called it the computer we’ve been waiting for (or similar) in regards to Resolve 10.

Given WWDC presentation made very specific reference to creative arts software and MacPro, I seriously think Apple’s own “Pro” software will take advantage of it.

[Dan Stewart] “That’s even before you have to replace / thunderbodge your existing storages screens & peripherals.
And chuck in 4 drive bays & slots..”

On the other hand if you’re already using Thunderbolt with MBP or iMac then you save not having to buy any PCIe cards. Plug and Play and move them back and forth between computers.

Consider Foundary porting Mari to the Mac as well (demoed on Tube at WWDC). My hunch is professional GPU assisted software will move to take advantage of it quickly.

[Jason Van patten]

[Dan Stewart] “Not trying to be a downer but the more I think about the tube the more I realise I’ll never use one – a second hand cheesegrater will make sense at launch, let alone a year or two in when those firepros are antiques”

If you’re editing in FCPX, it may make sense to consider another alternative, and that’s a Hack. The specific reason why I’m suggesting it is the availability of Intel’s AVX, as I’d mentioned previously. You’ll never have access to those on the ‘old’ Mac Pros. But any Intel chip Sandy Bridge and newer will have the extensions available.

FCPX can and does use those.

As I wrote on another FCPX forum: I did a homemade benchmark the other day with FCPX on 2 different Macs. One is a heavily modified Mac Pro 5,1 with 2 6-core x5690 (3.46GHz) Westmere chips, a flashed GTX570, 48G of RAM, and a bunch of media RAID’d together. The second: a stock 2012 Macbook Pro Retina with a 2.6GHz chip and 16G of RAM. The test: export my 20-minute AVCHD video out to 720p h.264 MP4. If t=20 minutes, the Mac Pro took 2t to complete the tasks. The laptop? It did it in time t. Literally half the time of the Mac Pro. And I’d accidentally disabled the nVidia GPU in the laptop during the test, as well.

From a pure CPU-brute perspective, the Mac Pro will crush the laptop. But clearly something was at play here that made the export in FCPX literally twice as fast as the big monster. I’m betting it was AVX.

Now, whether you do a Xeon version akin to the Mac Pros, or stick with the desktop chips is entirely up to you and your budget. Picking the right motherboard and other parts isn’t difficult any longer; most of that homework has already been done by other folks. The biggest factor at that point is: which video card? Thankfully, with a Hack you’re no longer locked into needing an EFI-capable one and can use any PC-based card for which drivers exist.