14 ms·
iMac Pro 18-core Follow Up Review
- NKosmatos 9y agoWould love to see a “real world” benchmark involving Lightroom, Photoshop, Camera raw and Premier. I don’t think the target customer of the iMac pros would run CFD on them ;-)
- azag0 9y agoCame to say the same. I’ve always assumed the target audience of these machines is just video editing? What are the requirements on running, say, TensorFlow? Isn’t it just the GPU there?
- jrs95 9y agoYou can't run tensorflow on it because it has an AMD GPU.
- arcanus 9y agoTensorflow has been supported on AMD GPUs since at least November. https://www.anandtech.com/show/12032/amd-announces-wider-epyc-availability-and-rocm-17-with-tensorflow-support https://www.anandtech.com/show/12032/amd-announces-wider-epy...
- PeterisP 9y agoNo, AMD has claimed that tensorflow works for them since 2016 IIRC, but it's not exactly correct. The main tensorflow branch does not support AMD GPUs at all. There's a bunch of experimental code by AMD that possibly works in certain conditions, but is neither properly supported nor widely used. For example, there's hiptensorflow which seems to be a TF port stuck on 1.0.1 (TF is now up to 1.5, with many major releases and key changes), not being actively developed (the last commit seems to be at the end of 2017) and core parts of it (ROCm) don't work in OS X (tensorflow as such runs just fine on OSX, just CPU-only, which is a major performance limitation compared to any machine with a good nvidia gpu), and thus are not that relevant for discussing Apple systems. There are also some OpenCL port efforts, none of which are stable, up to date, and actually usable to get the expected performance improvements. All these projects are interesting, promising, difficult, and their developers deserve all the best, but calling them "Tensorflow has been supported" is an extreme exaggeration, PR vaporware. Proper support is not there yet. I believe that there are likely ways to jury-rig some code together and run it on AMD hardware, but that's not comparable to the maturity level of these tools on nvidia (essentially, run the install, and it works). AMD still has to do their homework and fulfil their promises. They've spent far too long saying that the software support is coming soon, and now their claims have to be taken with a grain of salt. They can hope that the community will take over effective development a year or two after they do that and people in the ML scene start widely using their hardware, but not earlier. Currently, even if you have a nice AMD GPU, it's cheaper to just buy another high-end GPU from nvidia rather than spend a week of engineer-time to possibly maybe get their shoddy software to do what you need.
- danieldk 9y agoSorry, this is not just a box that you tick off. The CUDA code paths in Tensorflow have been optimized and stabilized for years. Why would anyone drop 5000-10000 Euro on a Tesla-class GPU and get a subpar experience when you can just buy NVIDIA? AMD has a lot more work to do in this area before people will seriously consider them in GPU computing.
- matt4077 9y agoI worked in bioinformatics at a Max Planck Institute during my studies, and made good use of a Mac Pro. Some of the tools we used were interactive, such as 3D-modelling. Many other tasks, such as DNA sequence searches (BLAST), just happened to involve datasets that were too large for most notebooks, but manageable with the 32GB or RAM the Mac Pro had. We did use a compute cluster, but using it drastically reduced the turnaround time during development in my experience.
- Recurecur 9y agoActually I think a good number of high-end Mac users are scientists and engineers. These benchmarks are good data for them.
- sgillen 9y agoI haven’t seen very much of this in my experience. Most Mac using scientists and engineers I know use a MacBook for email/webrowsig etc. but when they need some serious computation they use an external cluster (which they talk to with their Mac). That being said I do know one such scientist with the same workflow but who remoted into a Mac Pro, not sure what they are doing now.
- acdha 9y agoMost of the scientists I know do both: interactive work to prove the idea or for moderate sized data sets, and the cluster for when they have stable code and a huge amount of data. Since the capacity of a laptop has steadily increased, the relative ratios have shifted over the years.
- PeterisP 9y agoFor me, the main use of such hardware is to allow running multiple non-lightweight VMs locally. It would be convenient if I could run machine learning tasks locally, but that's limited to very small models (since it doesn't have an nvidia GPU and AMD hasn't yet done their homework to ensure that common software packages work), so those tasks need a remote server anyway.
- danieldk 9y agoI am from a university department with mostly high-end Mac users. But no, we do actual computation on Linux machines. Why? It's the only (reasonable) way to cram capable NVIDIA GPUs, large amounts of memory, large amounts of storage and 32/64 cores in a machine.
- petercooper 9y agoI think we'll see a ton of them pretty soon as content creator types like Marques Brownlee/iJustine/Casey Neistat get their hands on them :)
- ams6110 9y agoAre those software packages written to take advantage of that many cores? Since they all date back 10 years or more, I would guess not.
- gumby 9y agoAnd you would guess wrong. LINPACK is a lot older than 10years too :-)...more like 35
- ams6110 9y agoSure but LINPACK has always been for scientific and supercomputing applications. Photoshop is a prosumer PC software application.
- acdha 9y agoPhotoshop is heavily used by pros (i.e. people for whom time = money) and in scientific or medical imaging. It’s had SMP for a long time (I thought going back to the 90s) and has often been one of the first mainstream adopters of new things like SIMD because it’s a measurable boost for many operations.
- wmf 9y agoOften "old" software like Linpack will be rewritten under the same name. Presumably Intel's implementation is tuned for their latest processors.
- dboreham 9y ago10 years ago was 2008 : pretty much every machine had multiple cores then, except perhaps low end laptops. 20 years ago in 1998 SMP (before we decided the word "core" sounded nice) was quite common, certainly in machines used by developers and graphics designers. 30 years ago in 1988 SMP in microcomputers was uncommon, but it was very common in minicomputers and mainframes. Whether software has been written for SMP scaling is quite another thing. Plenty of software written today isn't.
- saagarjha 9y ago> Though I haven't mentioned it, if you look back through the various benchmark results, you'll see that the 18-core iMac Pro shows no disadvantage for single-core performance, despite running at a lower clock speed (2.3GHz/4.3GHz) than the 10-core iMac Pro (3.0GHz/4.5GHz). Often times, the price of scaling a CPU architecture to more cores is a loss of single-core performance, but no such penalty seems to exist here. The 18-core iMac Pro brings 8 more cores to the table on the high end with no loss of performance on the low end. I remember this being an issue on the older Mac Pros; it's interesting that this isn't an issue anymore. What's the reason behind it? Better thermals? Turbo Boost?
- rsynnott 9y agoTurbo boost, yeah. Modern Intel chips generally have a much higher clock cap if only a core or two is active. I think to an extent this should be true of the 2013 Mac Pro, too, but less so for the cheesegrater, which used much older chips.
- boomskats 9y agoBut it is an interesting point - why does the bigger chip perform better with a lower turbo clock speed? Does it dissipate heat better & so is capable of sustaining boost for longer?
- wtallis 9y agoIt isn't too surprising that a 24.8MB L3 cache vs 13.8MB L3 cache can make up for a 4.4% clock speed deficit.
- digi_owl 9y agoYeah the Hz race is long dead. These days it is all about avoiding cache misses. Perhaps why Intel got egg on their face with Meltdown, as that seems to have all to do with avoiding said misses.
- 013a 9y ago
- UncleEntity 9y ago> CFD tends to be a good real-world benchmark...If this was a car test drive, running CFD would be like showing up at the dealership with three tons of gravel on a trailer and hitching it up. Ummm...perhaps the author has a different definition of "real-world" than I do?
- Already__Taken 9y agoSounds kind of real-world for the kind of people shopping for 18+ core systems.
- wtallis 9y agoIt's an 18-core workstation. You don't buy it for photo editing and web browsing.
- Terretta 9y agoUnless you’re a photo pro shooting sports or fashion with 50MP RAW images at 10 FPS then picking and correcting on a deadline. Then yes you do. Top three consumers of CPU and IOPS on my Mac Pro or MacBook Pro: video editing and transcoding, photo triage and conversion, and Kubernetes clusters (minikube+xhyve) doing whatever.
- cutler 9y ago£4900 for the 8-core iMac Pro. It seems Apple worship has plumbed new depths of lunacy.
- BoorishBears 9y agoIf you make 6+ figures a year off your computer, do you really care if your PC cost 5,000$ instead of 2,000$? Especially if you can write off a large part of that cost?
- cutler 9y agoWhat does the figure you make from using your computer have to do with its retail value? By that measure Mark Zuckerberg's dorm-room Dell was worth billions.
- BoorishBears 9y agoI’m not sure if you’re being intentionally obtuse or if you honestly can’t see the difference between what you’re describing and what I am.
- acdha 9y agoMany people do work which is time sensitive: processing more per hour or turning around results faster is quite literally money in the bank. Think of a photographer: if you charge a fixed fee any boost in productivity allows you to take on more clients. If you’re a freelancer at a public event, getting your final photos out quickly might be what decides whether someone buys from you or a competitor. For a small business that kind of margin is often the difference between making it or failing.
- scarface74 9y agoin the grand scheme of things $5000 is not that much money if computer work is your livelihood. Especially considering that if you are a developer, that may be the only equipment or software you have to buy. Even at a low rate of $100 an hour, I could make that on the side with 50 hours of work.
- blt 9y agoSounds great, but I still have trouble with the idea of a $10,000 machine that is permanently married to one monitor and unexpandable. If I'm spending that much on a computer I want PCI slots. Especially now that it's common to keep a desktop for 5+ years.
- adamnemecek 9y agoYou are going to put a dent into apples market cap with that attitude. Is that really what you want?
- ryanwaggoner 9y agoDoubtful. They’ve been going in this direction for a long time, and their results seem to indicate that there’s a huge market of people who just don’t care much about modularity, expandability, etc.
- jaak 9y ago> My 10-core test unit prices out at $9,599, and a comparable 18-core unit would be $11,199, a 17% increase in cost. All I can say here is "Wow!!!" That's an amazing price for a computer that is completely user hostile to upgrade or repair.
- jcadam 9y agoI know. This sort of thing is the reason I'm not a mac user anymore. Remember the old PowerMac towers? Expensive, yes, but those things were made to be opened up and upgraded.
- bhj 9y agoPerhaps Apple has market research indicating that most companies don't upgrade or repair these kinds of machines.
- cowsandmilk 9y agoYep, many companies don't upgrade these machines and actually dump them at the end of the warranty. Hacker news actually turned me onto going to ebay to buy used workstations as a pretty good source for inexpensive computers that have Xeons. HP or Dell give you a 3 year warranty, you don't upgrade or change parts because that fucks with warranties, then you dump them onto a reseller. Or, frequently, you actually rented it from HP or Dell for those 3 years, and they are the ones dumping computers onto resellers.
- cmrdporcupine 9y agoYes, it's insane. It's a lifestyle accessory. But put in the context of _workstation_ prices -- which I guess is what it's sort of in the category of -- check out what a Sun 2 (68010) workstation cost in 1986: "A color 2/160 with 8Mb of memory, two 71 Mb SCSI disks and 60 Mb 1/4" SCSI tape cost $48,800 (1986 US price list)." That's $109,766.16 in today's dollars. Or more modest and perhaps more comparable, an HP 9000 Model 705 PA-RISC workstation (32mhz, HP-UX) in 1991 was priced around $5000. That's $9000ish in today's dollars. People bought stuff like that back then. Low volume, prestige item, specialized market, and I guess Apple must figure they will still do that now. Workstation class machines have always been overpriced.
- ghostcluster 9y agoIt's incredibly expensive with a mediocre AMD GPU. No Nvidia option, meaining no CUDA. No TensorFlow. A really weird machine that seems overly strong in some areas and absolutely weak in fundamentally critical places.
- plg 9y agoA lot of the negative comments wrt cost are versions of this: what a ripoff, you can get better components for way less money in some other PC and/or if you build your own. That's nice but it's not Apple's market. Apple's market is not other PCs, and it's not build your own. This criticism of Apple has been around ever since Apple has been around (1970s). While the criticism has basically stayed the same since then, Apple has not stayed the same, they have grown. Their products have improved. Their market share has grown and it continues to grow. Some people pay more money for a Benz, and other people say Hey that's a ripoff, I can buy a Toyota that gets me to work and back, just like your expensive Benz, for half the price! What a ripoff! Apple is not in the business of making inexpensive PCs (and accepting all of the tradeoffs therein). The trends show that more and more people are willing to spend their money on Apple products. They are clearly doing something right. If you are enraged by their success, perhaps you are not their target market. And that is ok.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ghostcluster 9y agoSome of the harshest criticisms of Apple have been coming from diehard fans in Apple's market niche, such as Marco Arment. See: the Touch Bar, the keyboards: https://marco.org/2017/11/24/fixing-the-macbook-pro https://marco.org/2017/11/24/fixing-the-macbook-pro > They are clearly doing something right. Mac sales are down 5%.
- CleanSlate_III 9y agoI agree, they're in a bit of a drought with respect to what their core consumers wants. I'm still using my 2010 15" MPB (i5 duo core). When I was browsing for a computer at the time it was a product I could see myself using for a decade. I hope that turns out to be true--it works great for what I need to do. Their recent updates have made me shrug and think, "meh, I can wait." If I'm going to shell out $2k+ for a new computer it better be damn near perfect.
- glhaynes 9y ago
- et2o 9y agoIs anyone running production computational fluid dynamics simulations on a desktop anyway? Seems like something that would get farmed out on an HPC cluster with a couple hundred cores minimum.