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Mac Pro Puts the Pedal to Metal in Apple's Race with Nvidia
- exabrial 7y agoWithout the ability to spin Osx instances up on the cloud, I don't see Metal making a dent in CUDA.
- Scaevolus 7y agoAgreed. I expect Metal to be used by game engines that target iOS, but there's way too much hardware tax involved for it to supplant CUDA or OpenCL for GPU programming workloads.
- RyJones 7y agoMacStadium exists.
- jchw 7y agoMacStadium is really great, but it’s relatively expensive for a given spec and not as simple/agile as some other bare metal platforms. Nothing against MacStadium, though, they seem to do all they can to drag Mac kicking and screaming into the data center.
- RyJones 7y agoI was a MacStadium customer for years, and I really liked the products, but they are very expensive.
- CoolGuySteve 7y agoThe cloud is staggeringly more expensive than building your own workstation. Like a couple of weeks of on-demand GPU instances on AWS Virginia costs about as much as a machine with 2 RTX 2080 cards in it that will stay performant for at least a couple years. But coming back to the Mac Pro, unless you need Apple-specific software, the same is true compared to Ryzen/ThreadRipper + NVidia cards. The Mac costs 2-3x as much while delivering less performance. At least the cloud can scale horizontally, the Mac Pro is just slow and inefficient.
- GenerocUsername 7y agoWhy is that? Shouldn't competition drive cloud prices closer to ownership prices?
- gbear605 7y agoThere’s a high cost of entry (onboarding lots of customers, building data centers, writing the management software, etc.), so there isn’t much competition. The market just isn’t efficient in this case.
- magashna 7y agoI think it does for stuff like storage, but transactional and heavy data processing are still cheaper to do on-prem from what I've seen.
- sseveran 7y agoIts because NVIDIA requires Teslas in the cloud, which while more powerful than 2080 ti's, cost roughly 6-8x as much.
- Analemma_ 7y agoHow does that work? If I buy a 2080 Ti and then decide to use it in an internet-hosted box that I rent out to other people, the first-sale doctrine should tell Nvidia to piss off if they have a problem with it.
- ptomato 7y agoBecause nvidia's driver licensing terms require you not to be using the consumer stuff in a datacenter.
- lliamander 7y agoWhat if you're running Linux with the nouveau driver?
- kevin_b_er 7y agoMetal is racing against Vulkin as well, because Apple needed to have their own standard they owned. Except Metal has zero support outside of Apple products. Besides, what Metal represents is Apple's attempt to have yet another vector for their infamous walled garden and vendor lock-in strategies. Further, the article and the website are intentionally and blatently biased. Quotes like this showcase their extreme bias: > One can be righteously indignant that Apple isn't subsidizing everyone else with support for their platforms, whether CUDA, Vulkan, or even Android. But such emotions won't have any bearing on the final outcome of who wins and who loses in the market for developing and commercializing the graphics technology of the future. The absolute derisiveness of open standards coupled with their insults against those that would showcases quite well the position of the article, its authors, and the website itself.
- dillonmckay 7y agoThat was the same paragraph I stopped on and thought, “How biased is this?” All mentions of the machine learning efforts seemed vague, as well. That was the main reason for me for reading the article.
- reaperducer 7y agoFurther, the article and the website are intentionally and blatently biased Seems like an unnecessary criticism. It's an Apple fan blog, not journalism. Nobody is going to Apple Insider for balanced information about tech trends.
- BryantD 7y agoAppleInsider is really excessively biased, even for an Apple-focused site. I'm an Apple user from way back and I rarely find their opinion pieces useful.
- symfoniq 7y agoI agree. At first glance, they serve the same niche, but in reality there is a huge difference in credibility between AppleInsider and MacRumors. (I don't have a relationship with either site.)
- microcolonel 7y agoPeople who trust Apple are made to look like fools, every time. Consider using a compatibility layer rather than using Metal directly: chances are, your shaders will perform just as well, and you won't be tied to their cycles of betrayal and rug-pulling.
- elipsey 7y agoAs an aside, what's this about "Microsoft and Intel worked to steal Apple's code representing proprietary video acceleration techniques" back in the day? It's before my time, and the citation is a press release. Any one remember that?
- macintux 7y agohttps://www.cultofmac.com/466987/today-in-apple-history-intel-and-microsoft-sued-for-stealing-apple-code/ https://www.cultofmac.com/466987/today-in-apple-history-inte...
- webwielder2 7y agohttps://www.theregister.co.uk/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_150m/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_appl...
- galad87 7y agoIf I remember correctly a company working with Apple had access to QuickTime source code, and this company just reused QuickTime when Intel and Microsoft approached it to create a video player.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- GeekyBear 7y agoCode written under contract for a port of QuickTime to Windows later showed up in Microsoft's Video for Windows product. >The lawsuit, filed on December 6, 1994, alleged that the San Francisco Canyon used some of the code developed under contract to Apple, in their additions to Video for Windows. Apple expanded the lawsuit to include Intel and Microsoft on February 10, 1995, alleging that Microsoft and Intel knowingly used the software company to aid them in stealing several thousand lines of Apple's QuickTime code in their effort to improve the performance of Video for Windows. On March 3, 1995, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order that prohibited Microsoft from distributing its current version of Video for Windows.[1] Microsoft subsequently released version 1.1e of Video for Windows, that removed all of the code contributed by San Francisco Canyon, stating in the release notes "does not include the low-level driver code that was licensed from Intel Corporation." Later testimony in the Microsoft anti-trust trial revealed that, at the time, Apple was threatening Microsoft with a multi-billion dollar lawsuit over the allegedly stolen code, and in return Bill Gates was threatening with the cancellation of Office for the Mac.[2] https://itlaw.wikia.org/wiki/Apple_v._San_Francisco_Canyon https://itlaw.wikia.org/wiki/Apple_v._San_Francisco_Canyon Microsoft and Apple eventually settled and cross licensed their patent portfolios.
- spamizbad 7y agoSeems strange they don't mention Vulkan. While OpenGL will continue to be developed, Vulkan is lower-level and plays into the architecture of modern GPUs. Edit: I am wrong here and apparently can't find properly. I'm not entirely confident that Metal will see widespread adoption become outside of iOS devices. And while that's a big market, it's on the opposite spectrum of the more powerful, and niche, Mac Pro.
- PaulHoule 7y agoThe page doesn't seem to work in Firefox.
- ska 7y agoIt does here.
- jchw 7y agoIn all honesty, with Metal limited to just Apple and Vulkan representing roughly “everyone else,” will this even be a fair fight? This could be a horrendous prediction, but I see Metal as the modern-day Betamax. There’s nothing wrong with it, but is this how you win a competition of APIs? I have enormous doubts.
- lostmsu 7y agoDoes Vulkan work on Xbox and PS?
- Grazester 7y agoTheir GPU's support it, of course they are closed systems so I have no idea how you would get it on there easily.
- jchw 7y agoExcellent question, but let’s be clear: it’s more of a question of whether or not Xbox or PlayStation ship Vulkan implementations. As far as I know, PlayStation is traditionally proprietary APIs, and you would need a third party implementation, if one exists. As for Xbox, I assume Xbox is still a modified Direct3D API for graphics. I assume you didn’t mention Switch because it, somewhat famously, does actually ship with Vulkan support natively. Which is cool. Of course, even though video game consoles continue to converge into looking like computers, developers still don’t and can’t treat them as such. Sure, Switch runs Vulkan but that doesn’t mean you can compile a Vulkan game and ship it to the eShop. Same for a DirectX game on Xbox. Consoles are, by nature, very proprietary, and much more frugal than general purpose computing platforms. Does adoption of Vulkan for game consoles matter? Maybe, but I’d guess probably not. It might help the consoles attract developers, but at the end of the day every console is going to get its own port with a decent amount of retooling to better suit the platform, especially in the case of Switch which is not a terribly high end piece of hardware in this day and age.
- pjmlp 7y agoSwitch also has their own proprietary API, NVN. Vulkan is a kind of addendum.
- gdubs 7y agoI’ve been exploring Metal a lot in the past year, and I really enjoy working with it. This article has a lot of interesting historical bits, but conflates a lot. Maybe Jobs hoped to take on the high-end graphics market, but my understanding is that the NeXT cube was fairly underpowered. It was its application development environment which made it a cult classic. (And arguably what led the the success of MacOS and iOS.) The Mac Pro is definitely reminiscent of a time where SGI had some of the sexiest machines available. There’s always been the “Apple Tax”, but there’s also always been people willing to pay it because they love the Apple ecosystem, the aesthetics of the platform.
- wazoox 7y agoGiven the hefty price of the new Mac Pro, the lack of dense, rackable hardware setups, I don't see how it could make any significant dent in the 3D market.
- pram 7y agoThey said the new Mac Pro will come in a rack mounted variant at the WWDC presentation. Rebirth of the Xserve ;P
- bitwize 7y agoSo many 3D folks are fond of Mac that I'm surprised there isn't an aftermarket company dedicated to fitting Mac Pro guts into a rackable chassis. Of course, even then you'd be left with the problem of what to do with all those hollowed out cheese graters...
- skvj 7y agoVulkan (MoltenVK) does seem to be a valid option for those heavily invested or interested in porting existing OpenGL projects (I plan on evaluating it): https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK
- gavanwoolery 7y agoCompetition is generally good, but competing standards are bad, especially when they have no real advantages over each other. Imagine if every platform had its own incompatible version of C (ok, yes there are incompatibilities but they are not there by intention). If you want to win me over as a developer, do it the right way. Provider superior tooling and win a customer base with superior implementation.
- burlesona 7y agoI'm not sure it's that simple when you're talking about needing to evolve hardware design and software toolkit together. NVidia has been ahead of everyone else largely because they skip all the coordination overhead and design CUDA to just work on their hardware, and put their energy into making that hardware + software combination better and better without regard for what everyone else is doing. If Apple wants to compete it's hard to see how they could without adopting a similar approach. What I think is more realistic is that things like Vulcan will have Metal and CUDA adapters, etc., and that developers who don't need bleeding edge performance as much as they need broad compatibility will be able to use that. In other words it's the same tradeoff as we've seen in software for decades -- you can write a fully-optimised native application per operating system, or you can use a cross-platform toolkit (increasingly the web) which can do a nice job but lacks some of the power and polish that a native application can deliver.
- siod 7y agoIt's fairly standard for rendering/games engines to support native graphics apis, they're built to be cross platform. Not to mention machine learning is a totally different market, using OS X on workstations would be counterproductive as there isn't any feasible server solutions to run production data on. Also the Tegra chips aren't irrelevant, they're powering the switch and extremely popular for drone/robotics application processors. This entire article is biased beyond belief.
- pram 7y agoThe Mac Pro will come in a rackable server chassis version. That's a detail from the announcement a lot of people missed. Presumably Apple intends for the new hardware to be deployable Xserve style, not just workstations. https://i.imgur.com/D1HaH9l.png https://i.imgur.com/D1HaH9l.png
- chipotle_coyote 7y agoIt's refreshing to see that Daniel Eran Dilger's talent for writing thousands of words of speculation based on, say, two sentences in release notes is still going strong. And, yes, that's a little mean of me, but I'm not kidding. In July 2010 he wrote three pages with illustrations about how Xcode 4 "could portend new HTML5 development tools" that delivered "solutions for parallel development tasks"; in April of that year, he wrote what might as well have been a short novel about how the iPad would "kill" DVDs, Microsoft Office, DVRs, and "idle moments." He at least used to fill his long, long articles with links that look like citations, but are actually just links to... earlier speculative articles he's written. Actual references tend to be very, very thin. He's also still remarkably committed to the notion that everything Apple does is mad genius four-dimensional chess, to the point where other bloggers in the Apple space including John Gruber (and, back when I could be described as "a blogger in the Apple space," me, I suppose) called him out for it. The notion that Metal is a SECRET GRAND STRATEGY to replace CUDA is fascinating, it's just... not supported by any material evidence, despite the length of the article suggesting otherwise. In other words, it's pretty classic Dan Dilger.
- scarface74 7y agoHe was writing his entries at “Roughly Drafted” for years and he was a well known but not well respected blogger I think back as early as the 200x’s.
- Rannath 7y agoThink he knows Mega Man?
- Havoc 7y ago>talent for writing thousands of words of speculation based on, say, two sentences in release notes is still going strong. In fairness I'd love to have a piece of that
- auggierose 7y agoIt makes sense though. I have been thinking the same for a while now. What they need for that strategy to work though is to provide cloud computing offers for Metal, and I don't see that anywhere on a meaningful scale. A cheap Metal cloud computing offering from Apple would truly be something. Would probably make them better at writing cloud software, too ...
- xvilka 7y agoAnything that impedes NVIDIA is good news for open source.
- julienfr112 7y agoEverything that was impeding Microsoft was good news for open source. Until Chrome.
- bloody-crow 7y agoI mean the whole article talks about how Apple wants to grab CUDA's market share with their own proprietary tech that is owned by Apple and only exists in Apple's walled garden. Not sure how much of a win for open source that is.
- soup10 7y agoI'm happy for Apple to embrace gaming, but yet another proprietary non-cross platform API is not what we need. I will not be supporting metal.
- angry_octet 7y agoWhat an incredibly Cool-Aid guzzling piece. Manages to get historical time line right but has totally out of kilter understanding of the reasons why. And thinking Apple can supplant CUDA with their own proprietary tech is completely delusional. The lack of an nVidia GPU is a significant drawback to using it as a workstation, and Apple is foolish to have gone the AMD only route.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dev_dull 7y agoFor those that think Apple can't pull this off, remember that they dominate the developer laptop market. They just need to incrementally slip it in via software and hardware. For example I recently found myself doing some video encoding via ffmpeg. The default install from brew supports videotoolbox (T2 chip accelerated) out of the box, and boy howdy is it fast. It smokes my multicore intel server optimized with vaapi. Soon users will do a `pip install pytorch` on their dev laptop and get the metal-optimized version of it without even thinking twice. Apple already has their foot in the door.
- lliamander 7y agoI don't know about dominate. From the most recent Stack Overflow survey, 25% of developers used Mac, 25% used Linux/BSD, and 50% used windows.
- dev_dull 7y agoMaybe I should say it dominates for silicon valley tech companies and startups, which is manifestly obvious to anyone who works here.
- lliamander 7y agoFair enough. I'm "valley-adjacent" and so I see plenty of that.
- tensor 7y agoThat would be amazing, but I'll believe it when I see it. So far Apple hasn't seemed to care at all about open tools like pytorch or tensorflow. An independent developer might be able to modify a video encoding library to support metal easily enough, but getting pytorch or tensorflow to work seems to require serious support, support that has yet to show itself.
- jpambrun 7y agoYou can play around with ML on your laptop, but serious work is typically done in the cloud. I use powerful Nvidia GPUs from my MacBook every day.
- temac 7y agoEither I completely missed some important things about PC history, or the author does not know at all what he is talking about: e.g.: > By 1991 ATI was selling dedicated GPU cards that worked independently from the CPU. By enhancing the gameplay of titles like 1993's "Doom" Hm I'm sorry, what???
- SigmundA 7y agoThe ATI Mach8 was a 8514/A graphics accelerator with no VGA core so it needed a separate base video card. AFAIK Doom never had a 8514/A mode, but there where a very few games that did: https://www.classicdosgames.com/game/Mah_Jongg_-8514-.html https://www.classicdosgames.com/game/Mah_Jongg_-8514-.html Back then accelerators where about GUI/windows acceleration and then the 3dfx came out...
- temac 7y agoAcceleration in that era was about 2d drawing, most of the time for desktop env. Completely uninteresting for 3d games like Doom. Probably uninteresting for even 2d games unless the acceleration in question support direct sprite rendering (like video game consoles)
- shmerl 7y ago> One can be righteously indignant that Apple isn't subsidizing everyone else with support for their platforms, whether CUDA, Vulkan, or even Android. But such emotions won't have any bearing on the final outcome of who wins and who loses in the market for developing and commercializing the graphics technology of the future Time for Apple to unstick from their nasty lock-in attitude, and to support Vulkan. Such sickening lock-in approach in development tools is so much '90s. Apple got frozen in time with having this attitude. Metal isn't even a competitor to Vulkan, due to Metal being Apple only. So it's not a question of what will win. It's a question, whether Apple will remain in the dark age of lock-in or will unstick from it and will become a good citizen that collaborates instead of taxing developers.