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Well, to be fair, it's more a comment on Intel's progress than Apple's. I'm sure you can throw together an ugly generic PC with the same parts for less. Anyway,

Well, to be fair, it's more a comment on Intel's progress than Apple's. I'm sure you can throw together an ugly generic PC with the same parts for less. Anyway, workstations are supposed to look big and intimidating :)

mikeash 13y ago
Can you? The CPU alone is unbelievably expensive. Two high-end GPUs are not cheap either. I would be interested in seeing the cost of a truly equivalent generic PC build. ("Truly" equivalent meaning no non-Xeon CPUs and other "almost as good" parts, something that's all too commonly done with Mac Pro comparisons.)
- ddoolin 13y ago
  Either you can or you can't, and I've never seen Apple sell hardware without significant markup. If I had a complete part list I'd be interested in seeing the difference as well.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    I've seen plenty of cases where someone said they could build an equivalent PC for less, and then ended up not being able to, because they were thinking of cheaper and worse components than Apple used. I don't know which way it goes with the Mac Pro. But it's certainly not obvious to me that there's any sort of substantial markup on Apple's part here. The CPU alone is going to cost something like 1/3 to 1/2 of the total purchase price. I don't even know what the GPUs cost (can't find any mention of the model Apple lists outside of Mac Pro discussion) but I bet they're not cheap either. Apple stuff is expensive generally because it's high-end, not because there's a huge markup. When people say that e.g. the Mac Pro is too expensive, they generally mean that it has more than they need (e.g. they don't want a Xeon CPU), not that it's overpriced for what it actually has. That's why I preempted the use of non-equivalent parts, because it's really common to start out this sort of comparison with something like, "Well, I don't actually need a Xeon, so I tossed in an i7 instead, and I don't need a workstation GPU so I used a gaming GPU instead, and..." and they end up with something much cheaper but not at all the same.
    - jere 13y ago
      This xeon is $343 at retail for 3.5GHz quad core. http://www.neweggbusiness.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9B-19-116-904 http://www.neweggbusiness.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9B-1... I know it's not linear, but you really expect Apple to be paying $1000 to $1500 for a 3.7GHz quad core? I'm sure I'm one of those people you're thinking of. I built a PC last year for $1k and it appeared either identical or better than the maxed out iMac which was ~$3k.
      - mikeash 13y ago
        I don't expect Apple to, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were putting in a CPU that we would pay that much for. The CPU you cite is an E3 versus an E5 (not that I have any clue what that means), runs slower, and has less L3 cache. I don't know how much those add but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a lot. Just once, it would be nice if someone making a Mac versus PC price comparison could compare against a part that was better than the one in the Mac....
        jere 13y ago
        >Just once, it would be nice if someone making a Mac versus PC price comparison could compare against a part that was better than the one in the Mac.... I'm very sorry. I couldn't find a faster xeon for sale and I thought it would suffice to demonstrate how a 200MHz increase most likely isn't worth $1000. I imagine you think it logically impossible that Apple could be marking up the cpu, since I can't currently buy the cpu myself (and thus the cost for me is infinite)... When I'm the most valuable company in the world and not just some guy searching newegg, I'll get back to you.
        mikeash 13y ago
        As I mentioned, clock speed is only one difference. The cache is not the same, and from a bit of research, it looks like the E5 has double the memory bandwidth over the E3, so it's not at all a trivial difference. > I imagine you think it logically impossible that Apple could be marking up the cpu What would make you think that? I just want to see an actual comparison, not comparisons with parts people think are "close enough". Maybe that's impossible right now, in which case I want people to stop trying instead of coming up with "close enough". The question is, how much does it cost to build a PC "with the same parts"?
- backprojection 13y ago
  Well I guess we won't know until they release part numbers on the CPU, and that part number is available form Newegg/Amazon. It's not clear to me if they're going Haswell or Ivy-Bridge. The I-B E5 Xeons on Newegg now are all 6+ cores and very expensive (into the thousands of $s). The closest I can find are Haswell quad core (the new Mac Pro is 4-core) and are much cheaper: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116908 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116... > I would be interested in seeing the cost of a truly equivalent generic PC build. ("Truly" equivalent meaning no non-Xeon CPUs and other "almost as good" parts, something that's all too commonly done with Mac Pro comparisons. I agree with that. We'll have to see.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    The CPU and GPUs are going to contribute hugely to the price and it seems impossible to figure out exactly what they cost yet, so I guess all we can do for now is speculate. Will be interesting to see exactly how it all compares once the info becomes available, for sure.
    - Shivetya 13y ago
      4 Core: E5-1620 v2 Price $294.00 Best guestimates I have seen on GPUs are high 200s to low 300s each for the base model items.
      - TylerE 13y ago
        The GDDR5 FirePros start at more like $450, and that's with less VRAM
      - lhl 13y ago
        The closest equivalent on the GPUs for the D300 (same SP count, slight clock bump, less RAM) is the W7000, which goes for about $650/ea right now. Part for part, the new Mac Pro is very well priced, but like others have mentioned you could make different decisions if you put together your own system (personally I'd rather have a single R9 290X for example, but I game more than I CAD/CAM). Of course, the new Mac Pro is your only choice if OS X is something you need (discounting PITA to update hackintoshes).
- KaiserPro 13y ago
  A z620 with 32gigs of ram, quadro k4000 and two 6 core procs running at 2.66gigs is roughly the same price (within 10%, bear in mind that they are yet to bump to the v2 procs that the apple use.) Granted it lacks an SSD, but thats an extra £250, depending on what you want to achieve. Unless you are doing something that really hits the GPU, then this mac is pretty much useless to you. Video editing is mostly IO bound. Only a few effects are use the GPU, let alone can make things faster.
  - Leynos 13y ago
    Bear in mind that the SSD in the Mac Pro is PCI-E. It seems like all the M.2 form factor PCI-E SSDs are going to OEMs right now. Would be interesting to know what they will be selling for at retail.
  - lhl 13y ago
    FYI, the cheapest PCIe SSD card I could find, a 240GB OCZ RevoDrive 3 will cost you ~$600 (while IOPs weren't specified, a +1GB/s RW was mentioned in the keynote). As you mentioned, much of the cost is in the (extra) GPU (roughly FirePro W7000 class), but being said, I think you underestimate how important OpenCL is these days for video editing. FCPX is heavily dependent on the GPU and presumably Logic will be moving in that direction as well.
    - KaiserPro 13y ago
      I work for a large VFX company, trust me, video editing doesn't use the GPU that much.
      - lhl 13y ago
        Depends on the software package you use. FCPX uses OpenCL for real-time playback w/o rendering, including realtime FX, transcoding and accelerating plugin rendering. Premiere Pro's Mercury Engine does similar things with CUDA accelerating many effects, scaling, deinterlacing, blending, and color-space conversions. If you're going to do proxy-less RT 4K like they mentioned in the keynote, you will need the GPU. BTW, I spec'd out a Z620 w/ an E5-1620v2/12GB RAM and topped $3K even w/o video cards. 2 W7000's puts you over $5K: http://h71016.www7.hp.com/dstore/MiddleFrame.asp?page=config&ProductLineId=433&FamilyId=3539&BaseId=38384&oi=E9CED&BEID=19701&SBLID= http://h71016.www7.hp.com/dstore/MiddleFrame.asp?page=config...
- jotm 13y ago
  Right now I think you can't, unless you can get your hands on a cheap dual socket motherboard for the new Xeons. Even then, the PCIE SSD will get you over the limit. I really like the new Mac Pro, even if it's not upgradeable...
- rch 13y ago
  For me, the emphasis on the GPU is the precisely problem. There are other ways to allocate resources and still keep the price down. For background, I generally take the time to plug my laptop into a monitor when I'm commuting to an office, but since I like to take my work with me the laptop is my primary device. Working with multiple monitors is nice, but I always gravitate back to my portable workflow. My use of the old Mac Pro was usually through the terminal, or via web apps, and centered on storage, long running processes, or providing services to others. It was very handy to have the machine physically in my office, for a variety of big-enterprise-nonsense reasons, so quiet operation was appreciated. So, now it looks like if I wanted a comparable setup I'd be stuck with a Mac Mini, and I guess 3 more Mac Minis with external storage. That sounds fun to me personally, but it really shouldn't be necessary. I also wouldn't look forward to presenting a request for a vanity mini-cluster for myself, and having to compare that on a cost/performance basis to a basic 2U server, even if that wouldn't sit in my office. If the new Mac Pro were more compute-focused, or provided some flexibility in that regard, then I'd have zero complaints. As it is, I can only imagine being asked to take a break from actual work to to help someone who has one of these machines with an e-mail problem. Edit: I should mention that I really appreciate the the approach to cooling, and engineering overall. I've had some very loud (60 dB), very hot workstations that I'm thankful to be rid of.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    I have a colleague who has a machine with 4 NVIDIA Tesla cards, and he is looking at getting one with 8 cards. Many video/audio editing tasks benefit from the GPUs, not to mention HPC (but OpenCL sucks, so its NVIDIA/CUDA only here). If you aren't into those workloads, maybe you don't want a MacPro.
    - rch 13y ago
      That's a good point, and I could get extra mileage out of GPUs for some tasks. HMMER and Amber both benefit from that type of acceleration, for instance. But unfortunately I still would expect to be CPU-bound nearly all the time. Having 64GB of memory would have been great, but I'd need another 20 cores to fully utilize it.
    - 13y ago
- cheald 13y ago
  Most of the FLOPS number comes from the GPU. A single Radeon 7990 (~$800) pulls 8.2 (single-precision) TFLOPS by its lonesome. You can throw a pair of those and a beefy CPU into a computer for under $2k and claim 17 teraflops.
- KVFinn 13y ago
  >Well, to be fair, it's more a comment on Intel's progress than Apple's. >Can you? The CPU alone is unbelievably expensive. Two high-end GPUs are not cheap either. In the context of this thread topic of, "wow 7 teraflops used to cost millions and now you can put it on your desktop with a mac pro" yes, you can get those same numbers with even less money. A computer with two 7970s is 7 teraflops and those particular cards retail for 300. A quad 780 GPU configuration would cost 4 or 5 k and get you even more impressive stats, at 16+ teraflops it crushes those cray numbers.
- Tuna-Fish 13y ago
  E5-1620 v2 (10M cache, 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 3.70 GHz (130W), 22nm) - $294 Hardly unbelievably expensive. In fact, the CPU is disappointing -- a top of the line non-Xeon desktop CPU would actually be better, not just in speed, but features. However, I blame this on Intel, not Apple, as the larger socket CPUs now lag the desktop line by more than a year, mostly because there is little to no competition for them and so Intel concentrates on other product lines. Your choice is now newest cpu or option for more than 4 cores. The GPUs are also not that interesting. They are top of the line from AMD now, but they are just about to release new ones that should delegate those to middle of the line before the Pro comes out. I hope the cpu choice doesn't mean that Mac Pro is stuck on Ivy Bridge as CPU for it's entire run, and that you can upgrade the GPU to Hawaii for the better models on launch.
- keypusher 13y ago
  I'm not sure. I just through some configuration options for a standalone tower server, and you can definitely get a comparable Xeon in there for the same or less. What's not clear to me is those video cards. There is no reference on the Dell site (or anywhere else I could find) as to what an AMD D300 FirePro is, or how much it costs. Dell lists FirePro V7800 and W7000 for ~$1500, but I don't see the D300 listed on any site so it much be an exclusive thing?
  - kayoone 13y ago
    try to put PCI-Express based Flash Storage (1.2Gbit/s) in there and you will see that the MacPro is actually a good deal for people that need that kind of stuff.
nXqd 13y ago
nah, it depends :D Sometimes, it needs to inspire the creators as well. And some build it and some just want a beautiful one to get job done. And to be successful for Apple or not, it's based on their research about the market.
MaysonL 13y ago
Lenovo Thinkstation, with the same Xeon quad-core, a bit less RAM (8 GB vs 12), and a 1TB hybrid disk instead of the 256 GB PCIe SSD, runs 2447 (plus 20 shipping!) on Amazon, and is almost 3X as heavy (30 lb vs 11).

mikeash 13y ago

Can you? The CPU alone is unbelievably expensive. Two high-end GPUs are not cheap either. I would be interested in seeing the cost of a truly equivalent generic PC build. ("Truly" equivalent meaning no non-Xeon CPUs and other "almost as good" parts, something that's all too commonly done with Mac Pro comparisons.)

ddoolin 13y ago
Either you can or you can't, and I've never seen Apple sell hardware without significant markup. If I had a complete part list I'd be interested in seeing the difference as well.
- mikeash 13y ago
  I've seen plenty of cases where someone said they could build an equivalent PC for less, and then ended up not being able to, because they were thinking of cheaper and worse components than Apple used. I don't know which way it goes with the Mac Pro. But it's certainly not obvious to me that there's any sort of substantial markup on Apple's part here. The CPU alone is going to cost something like 1/3 to 1/2 of the total purchase price. I don't even know what the GPUs cost (can't find any mention of the model Apple lists outside of Mac Pro discussion) but I bet they're not cheap either. Apple stuff is expensive generally because it's high-end, not because there's a huge markup. When people say that e.g. the Mac Pro is too expensive, they generally mean that it has more than they need (e.g. they don't want a Xeon CPU), not that it's overpriced for what it actually has. That's why I preempted the use of non-equivalent parts, because it's really common to start out this sort of comparison with something like, "Well, I don't actually need a Xeon, so I tossed in an i7 instead, and I don't need a workstation GPU so I used a gaming GPU instead, and..." and they end up with something much cheaper but not at all the same.
  - jere 13y ago
    This xeon is $343 at retail for 3.5GHz quad core. http://www.neweggbusiness.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9B-19-116-904 http://www.neweggbusiness.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9B-1... I know it's not linear, but you really expect Apple to be paying $1000 to $1500 for a 3.7GHz quad core? I'm sure I'm one of those people you're thinking of. I built a PC last year for $1k and it appeared either identical or better than the maxed out iMac which was ~$3k.
    - mikeash 13y ago
      I don't expect Apple to, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were putting in a CPU that we would pay that much for. The CPU you cite is an E3 versus an E5 (not that I have any clue what that means), runs slower, and has less L3 cache. I don't know how much those add but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a lot. Just once, it would be nice if someone making a Mac versus PC price comparison could compare against a part that was better than the one in the Mac....
      - jere 13y ago
        >Just once, it would be nice if someone making a Mac versus PC price comparison could compare against a part that was better than the one in the Mac.... I'm very sorry. I couldn't find a faster xeon for sale and I thought it would suffice to demonstrate how a 200MHz increase most likely isn't worth $1000. I imagine you think it logically impossible that Apple could be marking up the cpu, since I can't currently buy the cpu myself (and thus the cost for me is infinite)... When I'm the most valuable company in the world and not just some guy searching newegg, I'll get back to you.
        mikeash 13y ago
        As I mentioned, clock speed is only one difference. The cache is not the same, and from a bit of research, it looks like the E5 has double the memory bandwidth over the E3, so it's not at all a trivial difference. > I imagine you think it logically impossible that Apple could be marking up the cpu What would make you think that? I just want to see an actual comparison, not comparisons with parts people think are "close enough". Maybe that's impossible right now, in which case I want people to stop trying instead of coming up with "close enough". The question is, how much does it cost to build a PC "with the same parts"?
backprojection 13y ago
Well I guess we won't know until they release part numbers on the CPU, and that part number is available form Newegg/Amazon. It's not clear to me if they're going Haswell or Ivy-Bridge. The I-B E5 Xeons on Newegg now are all 6+ cores and very expensive (into the thousands of $s). The closest I can find are Haswell quad core (the new Mac Pro is 4-core) and are much cheaper: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116908 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116... > I would be interested in seeing the cost of a truly equivalent generic PC build. ("Truly" equivalent meaning no non-Xeon CPUs and other "almost as good" parts, something that's all too commonly done with Mac Pro comparisons. I agree with that. We'll have to see.
- mikeash 13y ago
  The CPU and GPUs are going to contribute hugely to the price and it seems impossible to figure out exactly what they cost yet, so I guess all we can do for now is speculate. Will be interesting to see exactly how it all compares once the info becomes available, for sure.
  - Shivetya 13y ago
    4 Core: E5-1620 v2 Price $294.00 Best guestimates I have seen on GPUs are high 200s to low 300s each for the base model items.
    - TylerE 13y ago
      The GDDR5 FirePros start at more like $450, and that's with less VRAM
    - lhl 13y ago
      The closest equivalent on the GPUs for the D300 (same SP count, slight clock bump, less RAM) is the W7000, which goes for about $650/ea right now. Part for part, the new Mac Pro is very well priced, but like others have mentioned you could make different decisions if you put together your own system (personally I'd rather have a single R9 290X for example, but I game more than I CAD/CAM). Of course, the new Mac Pro is your only choice if OS X is something you need (discounting PITA to update hackintoshes).
KaiserPro 13y ago
A z620 with 32gigs of ram, quadro k4000 and two 6 core procs running at 2.66gigs is roughly the same price (within 10%, bear in mind that they are yet to bump to the v2 procs that the apple use.) Granted it lacks an SSD, but thats an extra £250, depending on what you want to achieve. Unless you are doing something that really hits the GPU, then this mac is pretty much useless to you. Video editing is mostly IO bound. Only a few effects are use the GPU, let alone can make things faster.
- Leynos 13y ago
  Bear in mind that the SSD in the Mac Pro is PCI-E. It seems like all the M.2 form factor PCI-E SSDs are going to OEMs right now. Would be interesting to know what they will be selling for at retail.
- lhl 13y ago
  FYI, the cheapest PCIe SSD card I could find, a 240GB OCZ RevoDrive 3 will cost you ~$600 (while IOPs weren't specified, a +1GB/s RW was mentioned in the keynote). As you mentioned, much of the cost is in the (extra) GPU (roughly FirePro W7000 class), but being said, I think you underestimate how important OpenCL is these days for video editing. FCPX is heavily dependent on the GPU and presumably Logic will be moving in that direction as well.
  - KaiserPro 13y ago
    I work for a large VFX company, trust me, video editing doesn't use the GPU that much.
    - lhl 13y ago
      Depends on the software package you use. FCPX uses OpenCL for real-time playback w/o rendering, including realtime FX, transcoding and accelerating plugin rendering. Premiere Pro's Mercury Engine does similar things with CUDA accelerating many effects, scaling, deinterlacing, blending, and color-space conversions. If you're going to do proxy-less RT 4K like they mentioned in the keynote, you will need the GPU. BTW, I spec'd out a Z620 w/ an E5-1620v2/12GB RAM and topped $3K even w/o video cards. 2 W7000's puts you over $5K: http://h71016.www7.hp.com/dstore/MiddleFrame.asp?page=config&ProductLineId=433&FamilyId=3539&BaseId=38384&oi=E9CED&BEID=19701&SBLID= http://h71016.www7.hp.com/dstore/MiddleFrame.asp?page=config...
jotm 13y ago
Right now I think you can't, unless you can get your hands on a cheap dual socket motherboard for the new Xeons. Even then, the PCIE SSD will get you over the limit. I really like the new Mac Pro, even if it's not upgradeable...
rch 13y ago
For me, the emphasis on the GPU is the precisely problem. There are other ways to allocate resources and still keep the price down. For background, I generally take the time to plug my laptop into a monitor when I'm commuting to an office, but since I like to take my work with me the laptop is my primary device. Working with multiple monitors is nice, but I always gravitate back to my portable workflow. My use of the old Mac Pro was usually through the terminal, or via web apps, and centered on storage, long running processes, or providing services to others. It was very handy to have the machine physically in my office, for a variety of big-enterprise-nonsense reasons, so quiet operation was appreciated. So, now it looks like if I wanted a comparable setup I'd be stuck with a Mac Mini, and I guess 3 more Mac Minis with external storage. That sounds fun to me personally, but it really shouldn't be necessary. I also wouldn't look forward to presenting a request for a vanity mini-cluster for myself, and having to compare that on a cost/performance basis to a basic 2U server, even if that wouldn't sit in my office. If the new Mac Pro were more compute-focused, or provided some flexibility in that regard, then I'd have zero complaints. As it is, I can only imagine being asked to take a break from actual work to to help someone who has one of these machines with an e-mail problem. Edit: I should mention that I really appreciate the the approach to cooling, and engineering overall. I've had some very loud (60 dB), very hot workstations that I'm thankful to be rid of.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  I have a colleague who has a machine with 4 NVIDIA Tesla cards, and he is looking at getting one with 8 cards. Many video/audio editing tasks benefit from the GPUs, not to mention HPC (but OpenCL sucks, so its NVIDIA/CUDA only here). If you aren't into those workloads, maybe you don't want a MacPro.
  - rch 13y ago
    That's a good point, and I could get extra mileage out of GPUs for some tasks. HMMER and Amber both benefit from that type of acceleration, for instance. But unfortunately I still would expect to be CPU-bound nearly all the time. Having 64GB of memory would have been great, but I'd need another 20 cores to fully utilize it.
  - 13y ago
cheald 13y ago
Most of the FLOPS number comes from the GPU. A single Radeon 7990 (~$800) pulls 8.2 (single-precision) TFLOPS by its lonesome. You can throw a pair of those and a beefy CPU into a computer for under $2k and claim 17 teraflops.
KVFinn 13y ago
>Well, to be fair, it's more a comment on Intel's progress than Apple's. >Can you? The CPU alone is unbelievably expensive. Two high-end GPUs are not cheap either. In the context of this thread topic of, "wow 7 teraflops used to cost millions and now you can put it on your desktop with a mac pro" yes, you can get those same numbers with even less money. A computer with two 7970s is 7 teraflops and those particular cards retail for 300. A quad 780 GPU configuration would cost 4 or 5 k and get you even more impressive stats, at 16+ teraflops it crushes those cray numbers.
Tuna-Fish 13y ago
E5-1620 v2 (10M cache, 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 3.70 GHz (130W), 22nm) - $294 Hardly unbelievably expensive. In fact, the CPU is disappointing -- a top of the line non-Xeon desktop CPU would actually be better, not just in speed, but features. However, I blame this on Intel, not Apple, as the larger socket CPUs now lag the desktop line by more than a year, mostly because there is little to no competition for them and so Intel concentrates on other product lines. Your choice is now newest cpu or option for more than 4 cores. The GPUs are also not that interesting. They are top of the line from AMD now, but they are just about to release new ones that should delegate those to middle of the line before the Pro comes out. I hope the cpu choice doesn't mean that Mac Pro is stuck on Ivy Bridge as CPU for it's entire run, and that you can upgrade the GPU to Hawaii for the better models on launch.
keypusher 13y ago
I'm not sure. I just through some configuration options for a standalone tower server, and you can definitely get a comparable Xeon in there for the same or less. What's not clear to me is those video cards. There is no reference on the Dell site (or anywhere else I could find) as to what an AMD D300 FirePro is, or how much it costs. Dell lists FirePro V7800 and W7000 for ~$1500, but I don't see the D300 listed on any site so it much be an exclusive thing?
- kayoone 13y ago
  try to put PCI-Express based Flash Storage (1.2Gbit/s) in there and you will see that the MacPro is actually a good deal for people that need that kind of stuff.

nXqd 13y ago

nah, it depends :D Sometimes, it needs to inspire the creators as well. And some build it and some just want a beautiful one to get job done. And to be successful for Apple or not, it's based on their research about the market.

MaysonL 13y ago

Lenovo Thinkstation, with the same Xeon quad-core, a bit less RAM (8 GB vs 12), and a 1TB hybrid disk instead of the 256 GB PCIe SSD, runs 2447 (plus 20 shipping!) on Amazon, and is almost 3X as heavy (30 lb vs 11).