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"Company developing Mac Pro desktop with 40 cores, new Mac mini" It will be interesting to see how close the rumors are to fact when real hardware announcement

by mikece 5y ago

"Company developing Mac Pro desktop with 40 cores, new Mac mini" It will be interesting to see how close the rumors are to fact when real hardware announcements happen. Given how fast the M1 in the MacBook Air is performing for tasks like video editing I wonder if they will really need to push to such extremes as putting 40 cores in a Mac Pro -- unless they plan to edit four 8K streams at once?

geerlingguy 5y ago
There are plenty of editors who would love to be able to edit 4 8K (or 12K!) streams in real time :) I still deal with 1080p and get annoyed at my hardware's limitations. If I could justify a Mac Pro and Apple's accelerator card, I'd get them in a heartbeat. For certain applications, no matter how good the hardware you have is, there's always a desire for more, faster hardware.
- mikece 5y ago
  "There are plenty of editors who would love to be able to edit 4 8K (or 12K!) streams in real time :)" Is that really a common scenario? I can see editors at the big studios using monsters like this (because the studios can afford it) but are we talking about a market of hundreds or thousands? Is this something a free-lance video person would use?
  - theklr 5y ago
    Not yet, but that future is nigh. And if you’re discussing workhorse computers, I’d at least want that capability for when the time comes.
  - mjburgess 5y ago
    I think this is an overstatement anyway. It's more likely that these cores will accelerate increasingly complex effects applied to one 4k/8k stream. M1 is fast at editing, but not particularly fast when you factor in processing.
  - jamesfmilne 5y ago
    No, 8K is not really reality at the moment, but editing UltraHD is reality, and being able to easily edit or composite 2/3 streams of UltraHD with some complex effects in realtime is desirable. It's a bit mind-bending for those of us who remember the SGI Octane and Onyx days to think that 100x as much computation is available at 100x less power-consumption. (That's 10,000 times more efficient, for those following along at home.) Between that and the almost infinite instantaneous computation power available in the cloud at the press of a few buttons (and sufficient capacity on one's credit card), we ain't in Kansas any more.
tyleo 5y ago
I almost feel like pushing these extremes is a “because we can” sorta thing.
- qzw 5y ago
  4K+ video production workflows will happily eat that many cores anytime. Or you could run up to 5 Electron apps simultaneously!
gregoriol 5y ago
That's what a Mac Pro is for: it has always been "too much" for us, but useful for some. To give some perspective: the current version can go up to 28 Xeon W cores, 1.5TB or RAM, Radeon Pro Vega II Duo with 2 x 32 GB, ...
- finiteseries 5y ago
  ~$53,000 USD for the tower for those wondering (~$54,000 USD with wheels)
  - willis936 5y ago
    Insane. That's nearly the price of a DGX station.
pjmlp 5y ago
40 cores isn't extreme. "Titan S375 - Dual AMD EPYC Rome 7002 Series - Scientific Research Server PC up to 128 cores" https://www.titancomputers.com/Titan-S375-Dual-AMD-EPYC-Rome-7002-Series-p/s375.htm https://www.titancomputers.com/Titan-S375-Dual-AMD-EPYC-Rome...
- mikece 5y ago
  The key part there being "scientific research server." The Amazon Graviton2 ARM chips have something like 64 cores but that makes sense for machines that are powering AWS. Unless the point of these Mac pros is to be at supercomputer speeds or to pack massive specs like VM packs a Bughatti Veyron (because we can) I don't see much of a point beyond the highest of high end video editing and scientific research.
  - salamandersauce 5y ago
    I mean Mac Pros can easily be configured to $50,000+ machines from their base price of $6,000. They aren't aimed at the average joe. The majority of these things are being sold for business purposes in the first place with maybe a handful of sales to ultra rich enthusiasts. The 40 core model is probably the replacement of the 28 core Xeon which is a $7,000 option.
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    Well that literally was their marketing 1999, no? https://data.mactechnews.de/493404.jpg https://data.mactechnews.de/493404.jpg https://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/dam/assets/150514094302-apple-com-power-mac-g4-10-4-99-1024x640.png https://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/dam/assets/150514094302-appl... https://imgv2-2-f.scribdassets.com/img/document/94353573/original/34f21724b5/1618063599?v=1 https://imgv2-2-f.scribdassets.com/img/document/94353573/ori... https://b2c-images.idg.zone/3292182_800x400_r.jpg https://b2c-images.idg.zone/3292182_800x400_r.jpg
- lasagnaphil 5y ago
  If you're going the scientific computing / HPC server route, then the sky's the limit for core count, you can buy dozens of these and connect them up with Infiniband to run your MPI job or whatever. The point is, the people buying Mac Pros are usually content creators (photography, video editing, music composition, animation etc...) rather than researchers for numerical computation, and for them Mac Pros are probably going to be sufficient enough (unless you are doing 3D animation and need render farms). Most number-crunching scientific code is written only for Linux, you'll never buy a Mac anyway.
bredren 5y ago
Apple has a one-off modular product in the Mac Pro called Afterburner that offers 6 streams of 8k play back. My theory is Apple will release the new Mac Pro with an updated Apple Silicon Afterburner card focused on pro video. They will debut a new AI / ML compute "accelerator" focused on the data science space also under the Afterburner moniker. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26956886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26956886

by mikece 5y ago

geerlingguy 5y ago

There are plenty of editors who would love to be able to edit 4 8K (or 12K!) streams in real time :) I still deal with 1080p and get annoyed at my hardware's limitations. If I could justify a Mac Pro and Apple's accelerator card, I'd get them in a heartbeat. For certain applications, no matter how good the hardware you have is, there's always a desire for more, faster hardware.

mikece 5y ago
"There are plenty of editors who would love to be able to edit 4 8K (or 12K!) streams in real time :)" Is that really a common scenario? I can see editors at the big studios using monsters like this (because the studios can afford it) but are we talking about a market of hundreds or thousands? Is this something a free-lance video person would use?
- theklr 5y ago
  Not yet, but that future is nigh. And if you’re discussing workhorse computers, I’d at least want that capability for when the time comes.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  I think this is an overstatement anyway. It's more likely that these cores will accelerate increasingly complex effects applied to one 4k/8k stream. M1 is fast at editing, but not particularly fast when you factor in processing.
- jamesfmilne 5y ago
  No, 8K is not really reality at the moment, but editing UltraHD is reality, and being able to easily edit or composite 2/3 streams of UltraHD with some complex effects in realtime is desirable. It's a bit mind-bending for those of us who remember the SGI Octane and Onyx days to think that 100x as much computation is available at 100x less power-consumption. (That's 10,000 times more efficient, for those following along at home.) Between that and the almost infinite instantaneous computation power available in the cloud at the press of a few buttons (and sufficient capacity on one's credit card), we ain't in Kansas any more.

tyleo 5y ago

I almost feel like pushing these extremes is a “because we can” sorta thing.

qzw 5y ago
4K+ video production workflows will happily eat that many cores anytime. Or you could run up to 5 Electron apps simultaneously!

gregoriol 5y ago

That's what a Mac Pro is for: it has always been "too much" for us, but useful for some. To give some perspective: the current version can go up to 28 Xeon W cores, 1.5TB or RAM, Radeon Pro Vega II Duo with 2 x 32 GB, ...

finiteseries 5y ago
~$53,000 USD for the tower for those wondering (~$54,000 USD with wheels)
- willis936 5y ago
  Insane. That's nearly the price of a DGX station.

pjmlp 5y ago

40 cores isn't extreme. "Titan S375 - Dual AMD EPYC Rome 7002 Series - Scientific Research Server PC up to 128 cores" https://www.titancomputers.com/Titan-S375-Dual-AMD-EPYC-Rome-7002-Series-p/s375.htm https://www.titancomputers.com/Titan-S375-Dual-AMD-EPYC-Rome...

mikece 5y ago
The key part there being "scientific research server." The Amazon Graviton2 ARM chips have something like 64 cores but that makes sense for machines that are powering AWS. Unless the point of these Mac pros is to be at supercomputer speeds or to pack massive specs like VM packs a Bughatti Veyron (because we can) I don't see much of a point beyond the highest of high end video editing and scientific research.
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  I mean Mac Pros can easily be configured to $50,000+ machines from their base price of $6,000. They aren't aimed at the average joe. The majority of these things are being sold for business purposes in the first place with maybe a handful of sales to ultra rich enthusiasts. The 40 core model is probably the replacement of the 28 core Xeon which is a $7,000 option.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  Well that literally was their marketing 1999, no? https://data.mactechnews.de/493404.jpg https://data.mactechnews.de/493404.jpg https://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/dam/assets/150514094302-apple-com-power-mac-g4-10-4-99-1024x640.png https://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/dam/assets/150514094302-appl... https://imgv2-2-f.scribdassets.com/img/document/94353573/original/34f21724b5/1618063599?v=1 https://imgv2-2-f.scribdassets.com/img/document/94353573/ori... https://b2c-images.idg.zone/3292182_800x400_r.jpg https://b2c-images.idg.zone/3292182_800x400_r.jpg
lasagnaphil 5y ago
If you're going the scientific computing / HPC server route, then the sky's the limit for core count, you can buy dozens of these and connect them up with Infiniband to run your MPI job or whatever. The point is, the people buying Mac Pros are usually content creators (photography, video editing, music composition, animation etc...) rather than researchers for numerical computation, and for them Mac Pros are probably going to be sufficient enough (unless you are doing 3D animation and need render farms). Most number-crunching scientific code is written only for Linux, you'll never buy a Mac anyway.

bredren 5y ago

Apple has a one-off modular product in the Mac Pro called Afterburner that offers 6 streams of 8k play back. My theory is Apple will release the new Mac Pro with an updated Apple Silicon Afterburner card focused on pro video. They will debut a new AI / ML compute "accelerator" focused on the data science space also under the Afterburner moniker. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26956886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26956886