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Apple's New Mac Pro Begins Showing Up in Benchmarks
- dchichkov 13y ago>> "and includes the latest four-channel ECC DDR3 memory running at 1866 MHz to deliver up to 60GBps of memory bandwidth.* " - It should be "running at 933⅓ MHz". A DDR3-1866 module is 933⅓ MHz, 1866⅔ MT/s, ~15GB/s. They have quad channel DDR3-1866. (If you disagree - check the DDR3 spec. Article at apple.com is simply wrong in stating running at 1866 MHz I know it is a minor point, but when you are listing specs, you have to be precise.) - Update: sorry, saying "running at 1866 MHz" is Ok. I stand corrected.
- wtallis 13y agoAbsolutely nobody uses that scheme for referring to memory speeds. Everybody uses the effective clock speed, and there's really nothing technically wrong about labeling that with MHz, since Hz isn't restricted to referring to only sinusoidal clock signals. If you're going to be pedantic, then you ought to make clear when you're referring to the memory clock speed or the I/O clock speed or the transfer rate. For anyone who is interested only in using a memory module and not implementing the memory bus, 1866 is the only number that matters.
- pslam 13y agoHz refers to the number of cycles per second. Everybody uses this as the effective transfer clock, but hey, everybody is wrong. It's correct to use MT/sec instead, but you're right that it's being pedantic and it's unlikely to confuse anyone who really did care. On the other hand, it does stink of specmanship to quote the doubled frequency. I would have hoped a Pro spec machine would rise above that kind of thing.
- sliverstorm 13y agoThe doubled frequency is just the way the market works. It is actually kind of nice when you are trying to compare sticks that are double sided vs. sticks that are single sided and actually run at the listed frequency.
- mehrdada 13y agoHz is just 1/sec. If you want to be technically correct, don't add any implicit meaning to it. Frequency is the rate of something happening per unit of time. That "something" can be "number of data transfers" or "number of clock cycles" or "number of times a ball hits the floor". The frequency of all of those can be measured in Hz. You should be clear about what quantity you're measuring, but the unit is Hertz nevertheless. (And MT/sec is really "some unit-less quantity/sec", so it can be accurately called MHz.)
- zdw 13y agoYou can also add the dual naming scheme that gives us gems like "PC3-14400" where the latter number is the MBps of bandwidth or something similarly confusing to 95% of people, myself included.
- sliverstorm 13y ago"PC3-14400" wouldn't be half so bad if there wasn't also "PC3-14440", "PC3-14444", "PC3-14000", and maybe "PC3-14402" depending on which manufacturer you are buying from. To make things even more dandy, they aren't interchangeable.
- tbrock 13y agoI'm just excited the older models will be getting less expensive soon so I can afford one.
- dmishe 13y agoPretty sure that macbook pros are cheaper and faster that that already.
- tracker1 13y agoDon't be too sure of that.. plenty of pros want upgradable systems... Most of the mac pro users I know tend to keep them 4-5 years or more, with an upgrade cycle every 12-24 months (faster cpu, more ram, ssd, etc) in the same box. The new form factor really limits that, and would probably be better served with a consumer grade CPU etc.. this is much closer to a mid-range desktop a lot of people have been asking for, except it's going to cost an arm and a leg.
- colmvp 13y agoYeah, as much as I love the aesthetics, I'm predicting poor sales unless the price is comparable to other desktops. It's precisely the reason I avoided the Cube back in 2000/2001 and opted for the Tower.
- Shivetya 13y agoComparable to whose desktops? The server edition of the Mac Mini is a thousand dollars and its absolutely nothing special in hardware. I haven't seen this much disappointment amongst people who actually use the hardware when it comes to an Apple product ever. Well, we have the cheer leaders for the new hardware but its pretty obvious they don't use the current hardware. You get these types in any conversation. No internal expansion, no built in CD/DVD drives, limited memory, no apparent means of upgrading the video, and if one of the components breaks its off to the store. Yet if predictions are right this will be even more expensive than current solutions. Worse, Thunderbolt enclosures are not cheap, if can even find them. Unless those price predictions are way off base I and a few others I know have even started serious talk of going hackintosh. Apple had every opportunity to produce a slimmer tower that still gave options for expansion. Instead its a replay of the "Cube" days. Its not even good looking, the Cube at least could pass as a conversation piece
- frozenport 13y agoThe speedup is lacking. 12 cores is only 2x faster than 4 cores from 2010. I wonder how the GPU factors into these benchmarks.
- Steko 13y agoGeekbench does not measure GPU performance at all AFAIK.
- elithrar 13y ago> Geekbench does not measure GPU performance at all AFAIK. Nor does it measure I/O. I'm interested to see how that PCIe SSD performs.
- frozenport 13y agoPCIe SSDs are a terrible disappointment.I was able to achive the same performance as 'http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227724' http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227... with 3 Samsung RAID0 drives.
- veidr 13y agoUhm... your link 404s, but I very much doubt that you were able to achieve 1.25GBps (thats GBps) reads with 3 Samsung spinning platter disks, right? Because that's what Apple says the 2013 Mac Pro SSD is capable of.
- brisance 13y agoI fixed the link for you: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=20-227-724&Tpk=20-227-724 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=20-227-724&T... But I don't understand. That card alone is $3,500. Here are two links which come to a different conclusion from you. http://www.barefeats.com/mba13a.html http://www.barefeats.com/mba13a.html http://www.macrumors.com/2013/06/11/macbook-airs-pcie-based-flash-storage-approaches-800-mbs-read-and-write/ http://www.macrumors.com/2013/06/11/macbook-airs-pcie-based-...
- jviddy 13y agoAs someone who's never owned a mac pro can someone give an indication of how often "power" users are upgrading their CPU. When I was a windows desktop user (up until about 8 years ago) I found that everytime i wanted upgrade the internals the CPU socket had changed along with the Mobo chipset necessitating a upgrade of not just CPU, but Mobo and memory. I can understand swapping out gfx cards fairly regularly but are there that main users who completely gut their mac pro on a regular basis?
- sliverstorm 13y agoNot a Mac guy, but I believe the Mac Pro normally uses a Xeon chip, which I believe have used fairly stable sockets over the years. For example, socket 604 was used by the Xeon for 5 years, and LGA771 has been supported from 2006 to present.
- lostlogin 13y agoI could be wrong as I've been out of the powerful-beige-box world for quite a few years. However when I was in it, the upgrade and replace thing was always with consumer grade CPUs and was like this for everyone I knew. The xenon isn't really targeting the same market. Rock solid stability and sustained performance wasn't something the gaming crowd I was in was after. Massive over-clocks, super hot chips (that died hot deaths) and a GPU clocked to the threshold of showing artefacts. The frame rate must stay high at all costs. This is nothing like what the Xeon targets. Just a thought, and again, I may be wrong.
- jfb 13y agoXeons never shipped in sufficient volume to make up for the huge discount that the system assemblers like Apple, Dell, HP &c were getting; I remember looking at upgrading a ~2009 era MP CPU, and you couldn't get the fastest CPUs for significantly less money than just upgrading the entire box.
- buro9 13y agoI am a workstation user. I've used both Mac Pro and HP Z800 workstations, and currently use a HP Z800 that is probably 3 or 4 years old, but also have used a Mac Pro as recently as 2 years ago. I've never upgraded a CPU in a workstation. The CPUs I buy are chosen for performance at a sane (relative) price. I'm currently running a couple of Xeon X5560 CPUs, I think they cost £1,600 each at the time. I also buy as much RAM as is reasonable for the box, I started this Z800 on 24GB ECC RAM which was dirt cheap (relatively - as many slots on the motherboard meant I could get lots of the smaller sizes which were cheap). When the price later dropped on the larger modules I upped it to 192GB RAM. As for graphics card... now that is something I upgrade every 2 years or so. I started on a Quadro FX1800 and am now on a Quadro 6000. Aren't the names of these things wonderful? You know you get more when the number is HUGE! I think this is basically the norm: Upgrade RAM, upgrade GPU... leave CPU until you replace the whole box. PS: And whilst I'm here, the Mac Pro is a good design... but for the wrong product. I think this is a new design that is the right design with airflow, cooling and silence in mind and would suit desktop users well... but desktop requirements are not workstation requirements and not being able to replace GPUs is a non-starter. I'll skip this design of Mac Pro entirely, or at least until a very wide range of upgradeable GPUs are available. The RAM is also going to be costly, given the few slots available and the higher price for denser modules. I love the design, but this is the wrong class of computer for the constraints that come from the execution of that design.
- sjtgraham 13y agoRegistered Apple developers should watch WWDC 2013 session 109 to get a taste of what the new Mac Pro is capable of.
- alanthonyc 13y agoWhat's the title? (The index[1] is currently hard to search by session number.) [1]:https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/videos/ https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/videos/
- xuki 13y agoIt's a lunch talk: Painting the future
- alanthonyc 13y agoAh, cool. Thank you. I actually saw that at the event. Excellent demo.