New Mac Pro 2019

[planetearth]

So...what happens to this $10,000 to $50,000 (fully maxed out, according to some reports) computer when Apple starts shipping its own processors? How will you be able to sell it to recoup any of your money? Yes, there will be some overlap in OS and software compatibility for a few months (with plenty of accompanying headaches), but the resale value of these new Mac Pros will drop like a rock when the new chips "fall where they may" (so to speak).

"Apple is said to be aiming to transition to its own Arm-based chips starting in 2020, though the transition period could take some time." (https://www.macrumors.com/guide/arm-macs/, one of many reports of this upcoming upheaval)

I'm not anti-Apple or anti-Mac. In fact, I'd love to have one of these new machines. But I think this is a very interesting development, and I don't see many people who talk about how "great" the new Mac Pro will be also talk about which door they'll use it to prop open when they have to buy an all-new, RISC-based Mac Pro in 2021 or 2022. (And that's only one to two years away now, for those of you keeping score at home.)

Steve

[Jace-BeOS]

I have yet to see any credible evidence that ARM CPUs can equal the sheer power of Intel or Intel-architecture CPUs. If Apple moves to ARM in 2020, it’s like saying “that $12,000 Mac Pro you just bought... ha ha, we were kidding. We’re not actually going to keep making machines for what you folks do.”

It would be way more than a few months of upheaval too. Each time an architectural change is made, developers lag behind even longer. It’s a prime time for software to die when developers say “nah... wont touch that product again. Doesn’t work anymore? Too bad.”

[teilo]

So...what happens to this $10,000 to $50,000 (fully maxed out, according to some reports) computer when Apple starts shipping its own processors?

Assuming you need that much power: By the time Apple manages to create an Arm CPU that can match the performance of a modern high-core-count Xeon, and the relevant players in the industry have compiled their applications to run efficiently on the same, you will have long gotten your money's worth out of the current Mac Pro.

[planetearth]

So...what happens to this $10,000 to $50,000 (fully maxed out, according to some reports) computer when Apple starts shipping its own processors?

Assuming you need that much power: By the time Apple manages to create an Arm CPU that can match the performance of a modern high-core-count Xeon, and the relevant players in the industry have compiled their applications to run efficiently on the same, you will have long gotten your money's worth out of the current Mac Pro.

Then you'd better hurry to get your money's worth out of it. Many people who watch and report on Apple tech say they expect them to start shipping the Arm-based processors next year or the year after. And since Apple doesn't do anything half-way, these won't be "starter" systems. These will be designed to replace--and improve upon--what they're already offering. Apple has never suggested you "take a step back" when buying their latest systems.

Steve

[teilo]

Then you'd better hurry to get your money's worth out of it. Many people who watch and report on Apple tech say they expect them to start shipping the Arm-based processors next year or the year after. And since Apple doesn't do anything half-way, these won't be "starter" systems. These will be designed to replace--and improve upon--what they're already offering. Apple has never suggested you "take a step back" when buying their latest systems.

All the tech prognosticators are just as likely to be wrong as right. None of them know. They are just guessing, as are you. Further, you vastly under-estimate the current performance gap between Arm and Xeon. It's at least an order of magnitude more than you think. Apple is nowhere near close to creating an Arm equivalent, and if I were a betting man, I'd put money on it.

[pekbro]

They only need a lot more of the ARM chips to beat or match the intel chips, they do not need to be faster. That’s the beauty of multi-processing.

[mgw38]

The main issue with these ARM discussions here on KVR is that the most KVR users are not really part of the target audience that will benefit from the move to ARM based architectures. The reason this switch is almost unavoidable is that ARM based system promise massive performance benefits in highly parallelize-able processes such as you find in convolutional neural networks (Deep Learning) for example. And those will dominate a large portion of computing in the very near future.

Music production by contrast pretty much relies on a sequential processing chain. That is why I think that people in music production will continue to prefer the current CPU architecture long after most other computing areas have moved over to ARM. But the idea that ARM is inferior as a matter of principle is nonsense. It is just difficult to imagine how the advantages of ARM will benefit music production. At the same time, the advantages of ARM in AI systems are glaringly obvious.

[imrae]

Still, 2/3 of the price is absurd 3 TB RAM. I'd love someone to explain what kind of workload could realistically use that much (except constantly leaking software running for a year ).

I know for the molecular dynamics stuff some of our people do massive ram means you can use direct methods (and hence get a huge speed boost). Also in bioinformatics a lot of the tools are seriously ram hungry.

basically we’re now doing stuff on desktops that 10 years ago we’d have been running on our IBM BlueGene, and 5 years ago we’d have been running on a compute server

Yup, I could happily do some expensive physics calculations on such a machine. But... for research software it makes more sense to run Linux on the high-spec workstation and have a separate Mac to be a terminal/editing/productivity environment. These are the kind of use-cases the advanced CPU and memory design have in mind, but I don't see them as a target market for Apple. I can only assume video/graphics is the main target?

[mgw38]

I can only assume video/graphics is the main target?

An uncompressed 4k video requires a bit more than 5 TB per hour. The more you can keep in memory the better.

[planetearth]

Then you'd better hurry to get your money's worth out of it. Many people who watch and report on Apple tech say they expect them to start shipping the Arm-based processors next year or the year after. And since Apple doesn't do anything half-way, these won't be "starter" systems. These will be designed to replace--and improve upon--what they're already offering. Apple has never suggested you "take a step back" when buying their latest systems.

All the tech prognosticators are just as likely to be wrong as right. None of them know. They are just guessing, as are you. Further, you vastly under-estimate the current performance gap between Arm and Xeon. It's at least an order of magnitude more than you think. Apple is nowhere near close to creating an Arm equivalent, and if I were a betting man, I'd put money on it.

They may indeed be wrong. But unlike you, it's their job to know--or at least have a finger on the pulse of--what's going on with Apple's tech developments, and to report those developments. Those who are consistently wrong are denounced repeatedly (and publicly) and are out of a job soon enough. The end result is that we're not subjected to their error-filled reports for long. The reports (and reporters) who survive must know something. And since they bother to see which patents Apple files, which projects Apple has in development, and since they bother to ask Apple employees (or try to find "leaks"), they probably know more than you. Or me, of course--but I didn't pretend to know; I merely reported what others have been saying.

Of course, you have no idea what I "think" about Apple's developments, or how Intel's chips compare to what Apple might offer. As I've said before--and in an attempt to keep you from suggesting more things on my behalf--I am not an Apple (or Intel) fanboy, and I have no horse in this race. I am interested merely in the advancements in processors and what they can offer those of us who use them. I don't particularly care who does what with the design or how they get to the results they want.

Steve

[Hooj]

The scary thing is there's morons out there happy to pay and encourage this lunacy!
Apple now truly sat in the garden of Eden haha

People who freak about macpro prices have obviously never purchased high end dell precision or hp z8 series workstations - it’s quite easy to spec either of them such they cost 2-4 times the cost of a maxed out macpro

No, it is not! I have 6 builds here and none of them cost more than 2k.

IMO, 2K is NOT enough to build a quality music rig capable of running comfortably for the next 6-8 yrs. Heck, my laptop was almost 2K..... I mean, seriously? If you ask around, you'll find that many mac pro owners typically spent between $4,000 & $10,000 on their last rig.

When I purchased my MB Pro in 2015, I could not find many Windows rigs (with similar hardware) in the same price range... One, Maybe two machines and they were both modified gaming rigs, so they were quite bulky.

[Amelia70]

I could not have picked a better time to say goodbye Apple, hello Windows, save a veritable ^^^^load of money, sell my ashtray 10 core mac pro, build a killer 16 core professionally overclocked windows computer (yes, I have someone getting me a top bin and will overclock set and forget for me), and make the mac pro performance look hilarious in comparison, especially when it is more than twice the cost of what I am paying.

There is a topic going at another forum which shows the single core performance of the new mac pro is not great when using cpu intensive plugins. From what I can tell, these computers were designed with video studios in mind. I have never used any of the plugins mentioned in that topic (I come from a hardware background), but my entire plan IS to start investing more heavily into the plugin world to have projects that I can just load and not worry about recalling settings on all my analog processors .

I want the best performance bang for my buck that I can get. My associate is using a windows quad core computer, I think it's a 6600, from a decade ago, and it still works perfectly. She doesn't need power for what she does, only enough to play back recorded audio tracks that then get sent out to hardware for processing, as well as midi sequencing of hardware synthesisers.
The point is, why do people say macs are more reliable? I had to claim AppleCare twice on my ashtray, and then eventually I had the 10 core CPU installed by a 3rd party, which was never an option from Apple. Guess what? Since THEN, it has worked perfectly! My tech has told me if top quality components are purchased, especially cooling, power supply and motherboard, that there is no reason my coming computer wouldn't last a decade.

I also decided to buy two hard wearing SSD's rather than the cheaper low terabytes written ones, except for the drives that will only be commonly doing sample reading and not writing. Price versus the Mac Pro? Well, the 16 core mac pro with 96 gigabytes of ram and a two terabyte drive is 16,079 Australian dollars. I will be paying 8000 but with 128 gigabytes of ram instead, the 9960X processor, and 4 terabytes of SSD rather than 2 in the mac pro quote. OH, AND a much better graphics card than the 580X included in the $16079 mac pro!
What a saving, with my "loss" only being that I will not have a server grade CPU. Who cares? We are making music, not protecting national security.

[planetearth]

I could not have picked a better time to say goodbye Apple, hello Windows, save a veritable ^^^^load of money, sell my ashtray 10 core mac pro, build a killer 16 core professionally overclocked windows computer (yes, I have someone getting me a top bin and will overclock set and forget for me), and make the mac pro performance look hilarious in comparison, especially when it is more than twice the cost of what I am paying.

There is a topic going at another forum which shows the single core performance of the new mac pro is not great when using cpu intensive plugins. From what I can tell, these computers were designed with video studios in mind. I have never used any of the plugins mentioned in that topic (I come from a hardware background), but my entire plan IS to start investing more heavily into the plugin world to have projects that I can just load and not worry about recalling settings on all my analog processors .

I want the best performance bang for my buck that I can get. My associate is using a windows quad core computer, I think it's a 6600, from a decade ago, and it still works perfectly. She doesn't need power for what she does, only enough to play back recorded audio tracks that then get sent out to hardware for processing, as well as midi sequencing of hardware synthesisers.
The point is, why do people say macs are more reliable? I had to claim AppleCare twice on my ashtray, and then eventually I had the 10 core CPU installed by a 3rd party, which was never an option from Apple. Guess what? Since THEN, it has worked perfectly! My tech has told me if top quality components are purchased, especially cooling, power supply and motherboard, that there is no reason my coming computer wouldn't last a decade.

I also decided to buy two hard wearing SSD's rather than the cheaper low terabytes written ones, except for the drives that will only be commonly doing sample reading and not writing. Price versus the Mac Pro? Well, the 16 core mac pro with 96 gigabytes of ram and a two terabyte drive is 16,079 Australian dollars. I will be paying 8000 but with 128 gigabytes of ram instead, the 9960X processor, and 4 terabytes of SSD rather than 2 in the mac pro quote. OH, AND a much better graphics card than the 580X included in the $16079 mac pro!
What a saving, with my "loss" only being that I will not have a server grade CPU. Who cares? We are making music, not protecting national security.

(Where's the "drops mic and walks away" emoji when you need it? )

Steve

[pekbro]

I believe the Zeon CPU thing is pretty much bull anyway. They are the same processors as the regular,
just the cream of the crop after binning. Even the lower rank models are the same, just disabled or
limited in some way. They don't actually have separate manufacturing runs for different chips, that
would cost way too much. Mostly it's just marketing to add or remove value in the eyes of the consumer.

[DJ Warmonger]

Heck, my laptop was almost 2K..... I mean, seriously

Laptops are much less efficient than PCs with same price.
Sorry for stating the obvious...

If you ask around, you'll find that many mac pro owners typically spent between $4,000 & $10,000 on their last rig.

My current PC is worth about 2000$.
Just a quick reminder: the point of this thread is whether Mac Pro is overpriced

In the meantime, Calvin Harris showed his studio featuring new Mac Pro:
https://www.musicradar.com/news/calvin- ... ew-mac-pro
He earned 48 million $ in 2018:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalle ... n-in-2018/
...that is, before he bough this new Mac Pro. It doesn't seem he needs that particular rig to make millions as a DJ