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| > Here's an interesting article on the value proposition of the new Mac Pro. Turns out it's tough to build a comparable machine for the price. - Unfortunately, that's a lazy and poorly researched article. The new Mac Pro is an intriguing mystery of parts. I'm currently researching parts for a new build to help finish my film and was curious about the Mac Pro parts (FirePro GPUs, PCI SSD etc.). The huge dollar issue with the MacPro is GPU and getting good information about exactly what they has not been easy. But I found this published a couple of days ago: http://wccftech.com/generation-amd-professional-gpu-arrives-firepro-d700-leads-pack-35-teraflops-compute/ They claim this is confirmed but I would still not say this is 100%. But it does further open up the mystery of the GPU parts. They appear to be cut down, TDP reduced parts to work in the new case. The focus on dual parts also appears part of the heat/power management issue to balance thermal throttling that invariably would be part of such a design. Apple appears to have made some deal possibly including custom manufacturing that may allow them to get parts that don't spec out for higher TDP use (like Intel does with hex vs. quad core parts) and using them here to give the Mac Pro a GPU price advantage you can't match on off-the-shelf parts - of course OpenCL performance will need to be part of question as CUDA is not an option. So they are not exactly like any parts you can buy. Additionally, they likely will have a unique set of drivers, so until someone can actually carefully benchmark their OpenCL performance, it's near impossible to price comparison a Mac Pro right now. And it appears for any configuration an "apple to apple" :) price/build comparison is not possible even with just the GPU. The PCI SSD is also a benchmark test waiting to be done to see if it fact does deliver the performance difference claimed - but given the impossibility of putting in a variety of parts for testing in a the new Mac Pro, this also will likely be somewhat inaccurate. But I'm not sure PCI SSD vs current SSD options, including a RAID 1 SSD ,offers that much boost. And the limitations of the storage design in the new Mac Pro introduce a number of other issues related to expandability, flexibility etc. Plus the article does not actually build anything nor benchmark either the DIY system or the Mac Pro - so all the valuations are essentially meaningless. It's just an internet shopping cart article. The one published Geekbench benchmark that was out there is not exactly blazing - and the only thing that should matter is actual application performance. Until that is tested - an article like this does not tell you anything other than Apple used a lot of custom, proprietary parts that you can't buy off the shelf. Throwing money at the effort to mimic the Mac Pro parts list to "prove" the MacPro is a "value" seems like a waste of time - if you did this with an iPhone, you would get a similar result. The real question is what Mac Pro's real world performance in various configs are and what parts are required to match it. My DIY builds are set to give real world performance that matches or exceed Xenon based setups at half the price. That's perfectly doable on the CPU side. The Mac Pro may have GPU advantage based on essentially cutting down workstation cards that we've always expected were overpriced - but that information has not been tested and 100% proved yet. stephen van vuuren 336.202.4777 http://www.insaturnsrings.com/ http://www.sv2dcp.com/ http://www.sv2studios.com/ A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later. -Stanley Kubrick -----Original Message----- From: After Effects Mail List [mailto:AE-List@media-motion.tv] On Behalf Of Dave Bittner Sent: Thursday, December 26, 2013 9:46 AM To: After Effects Mail List Subject: Re: [AE] (OT) New Mac Pro - Who's getting it? Here's an interesting article on the value proposition of the new Mac Pro. Turns out it's tough to build a comparable machine for the price. - <http://www.electronista.com/articles/13/12/24/does.better.in.some.areas.but.cant.compete.on.cost.or.specs/> On Dec 23, 2013, at 1:20PM, Dave Bittner <dave@pixelworkshop.com> wrote: > I've switched our main edit suite system to a 27" i7 iMac after realizing that it renders about three times faster than the 2008 Mac Pro it's replacing. I've got a 30" monitor hooked up to it, and a fast external RAID via a cheap Thunderbolt to SATA adapter. We're running AE, FCPX and Maya on it, primarily, and for what we do it's plenty fast. (We are rarely under tight delivery deadlines where rendering speed would make or break us. In fact, the biggest bottleneck these days seems to be h.264 encoding for delivery.) > > As for the new Mac Pro, if you need the speed it doesn't seem the price should make all that much difference. Even if you replace it after two years, a couple of grand difference in price shouldn't break the bank for an active shop with a decent number of projects coming through. It's amazing to me that after all these years people are still shocked - Shocked! - that there's a premium for Mac OS workstations. For our small shop it's worth it, since we know the Mac OS and know how to troubleshoot it. > > Interesting times, with all of these incredibly fast machines for choose from. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go play Marathon on my Quadra 700... > +---End of message---+ To unsubscribe send any message to <ae-list-off@media-motion.tv> |
