New Mac Pro

[GeekGod]

I have a couple thunderbolt promise pegasus arrays and I gotta say they are wicked fast. Thunderbolt is great technology - not sure why some folks are calling it bunk.

[mdcdesign]

@R01

I’m actually with Polygon on this one.

Anyone using audio DSP cards looks to be left out in the cold. Which is pretty much anyone using large Pro Tools I/O’s or other pro level audio converters. It really is quite a bummer because I was looking forward to seeing a more powerful Mac Pro that would add to the processing power of utilizing DPS cards.

I’m not excluding the options of adding something like the Silverstone PCI-E expansion chassis to this product. We’ll just have to wait and see how that ends up working out. If anything I’m just a little disappointing that this Mac Pro has lost this built-in functionality.

In terms of audio, all I really care about is latency + processing. I’m sure thunderbolt is a great transfer method, it just lacks the power you get from DSP cards. I’m only saying this because I’ve mixed movie scores that have 100+ tracks, and then processing + latency becomes pretty crucial. Chiming in because I consider that pro level work if anything.

In all honesty I was just expecting to see the same old Mac Pro design with beefier CPU, Memory and HD options.

MUSIC STORE (formerly DV247) - Order musical instruments | United Kingdom

Boom.

Thunderbolt is external PCI-E, it’s basically NO different to having an internal PCI-E card.

Just for comparison a 1x PCI-E 3.0 card has a theoretical throughput of 980MB/s; Thunderbolt is 10Gbit/s, aka 1.25GB/s.

The RME HDSPe AIO, a £400+ DAW card is only a 1x PCI-E 1.1, which means 250MB/s of bandwidth (and 2.5GT/s vs Thunderbolt’s 8GT/s).

To say that Thunderbolt isn’t capable of doing everything PCI-E can is just bollocks. And it doesn’t even remotely compare to USB.

With that said, don’t be a moron and buy a Mac Pro; buy a PC case, a Xeon bundle, and some RAM. Job done for a fifth of the price.

[makar1]

You’ll be forking out a ton for dual workstation graphics cards too.

[mdcdesign]

@makar1

You’ll be forking out a ton for dual workstation graphics cards too.

That’s not the base configuration, that’s just an additional configuration option. Specifically, that configuration is dual W9000s which are £3k a pop. It’s almost certain that the base model will ship with the £500 V7900.

And you can be damn sure that the upgrade to the W9000s will be far, far more than their OEM cost.

[deevey]

@mdcdesign

That’s not the base configuration, that’s just an additional configuration option. Specifically, that configuration is dual W9000s which are £3k a pop. It’s almost certain that the base model will ship with the £500 V7900.

And you can be damn sure that the upgrade to the W9000s will be far, far more than their OEM cost.

Oh look yet more unsubstantiated speculation …

[makar1]

@mdcdesign

It’s almost certain that the base model will ship with the £500 V7900.

The V7900 gets up to 1.8 TFLOPS per card. The new Mac Pro’s Fire Pros are rated at 7 TFLOPS.

Edit: Where are you getting all this information about a cut down base model?

[mdcdesign]

The fact that at the keynote, they specifically stated that you could “configure the Mac Pro with up to 4096 stream processors”, which is 2x W9000s.

[QUOTE]I re-watched the stream just to make sure I didn’t get it wrong.

Phil said, UP TO. Did not say that was the base configuration graphics, but the top.

There will be much lower, maybe even a single card.

The biggest issue I see is that we’re back to waiting for apple to give us the upgrade graphic packages in order to get a new card, I was getting used to popping any PC card in. [/QUOTE]

FirePro in New Mac Pro is FirePro W9000

Are you ever going to stop fucking arguing, makar?

[makar1]

No

[mdcdesign]

@makar1

No

Fair enough. Be aware, however, that your behaviour is literally now bordering on just plain trolling.

[makar1]

How would you describe your initial posts to the thread then?

[iambiggles]

@mdcdesign

Fair enough. Be aware, however, that your behaviour is literally now bordering on just plain trolling.

Oh the irony…

[mdcdesign]

My comments about it looking like a bin? It’s called humour. And my last few posts have been informational regarding Thunderbolt and the specifications of the unit. You know, actually contributing to the discussion. All YOU do is just contradict every post I make on here, usually dragging Reloop into it somewhere like over on the Z1 thread.

It’s getting old, and it’s not helping anyone else on this forum. Either pack it in, or go troll on Reddit.

[makar1]

When you repeatedly make baseless unsubstantiated claims on a variety of threads there’s little left to do besides contradict with facts.

You might want to look up the definition of “trolling” if you think arguing and contradicting qualifies while your so-called humour does not.

[mdcdesign]

@makar1

When you repeatedly make baseless unsubstantiated claims on a variety of threads there’s little left to do besides contradict with facts.

You might want to look up the definition of “trolling” if you think arguing and contradicting qualifies while your so-called humour does not.

If you REALLY think that’s what you’re doing, then I’m just going to ignore you from now on and wait for the inevitable end result.

[Polygon]

@makar1

The Fire Pros are there for compute performance more than anything. If you don’t need such high performance, then you obviously wouldn’t buy the machine.

Being able to “afford” something like this doesn’t really apply in the same way as a typical computer as they are not consumer-oriented.

The firepros aren’t any more gpgpu computing oriented than any other consumer card on the market if the system itself doesn’t support it.
And last time i checked osx doesn’t support any kind of gpgpu acceleration if not on the visual aspect of things.

Ever saw protools or cubase accelerated with gpus? No? Really?

[Polygon]

@R01

In terms of audio, all I really care about is latency + processing. I’m sure thunderbolt is a great transfer method, it just lacks the power you get from DSP cards. I’m only saying this because I’ve mixed movie scores that have 100+ tracks, and then processing + latency becomes pretty crucial. Chiming in because I consider that pro level work if anything.

This.

[Polygon]

@GeekGod

I have a couple thunderbolt promise pegasus arrays and I gotta say they are wicked fast. Thunderbolt is great technology - not sure why some folks are calling it bunk.

You’re talking about sheer storage, not overall expandability.

[makar1]

@Polygon

The firepros aren’t any more gpgpu computing oriented than any other consumer card on the market if the system itself doesn’t support it.
And last time i checked osx doesn’t support any kind of gpgpu acceleration if not on the visual aspect of things.

Ever saw protools or cubase accelerated with gpus? No? Really?

They are not for “acceleration” and they are certainly not for use in any sort of audio applications. You would use them for applications specifically designed to make use of their parallel processing power.

[Polygon]

@mdcdesign

MUSIC STORE (formerly DV247) - Order musical instruments | United Kingdom

Boom.

Thunderbolt is external PCI-E, it’s basically NO different to having an internal PCI-E card.

Just for comparison a 1x PCI-E 3.0 card has a theoretical throughput of 980MB/s; Thunderbolt is 10Gbit/s, aka 1.25GB/s.

The RME HDSPe AIO, a £400+ DAW card is only a 1x PCI-E 1.1, which means 250MB/s of bandwidth (and 2.5GT/s vs Thunderbolt’s 8GT/s).

To say that Thunderbolt isn’t capable of doing everything PCI-E can is just bollocks. And it doesn’t even remotely compare to USB.

With that said, don’t be a moron and buy a Mac Pro; buy a PC case, a Xeon bundle, and some RAM. Job done for a fifth of the price.

You quoted max throughput.

Now consider this: TB has 20 pins on the connector.
PCIe has 82 pins.

I do not know at what frequency the lanes on TB operate, but the packets must surely be transcoded to carry pcie info over TB. This in turn adds latency because of the converters.
I can have a 24Gbps internet connection with 700ms ping and it’ll be painful to use, while on a normal 10mbps/5ms ping connection everything would work normally.

If i didn’t download torrents of course

[Polygon]

@makar1

The V7900 gets up to 1.8 TFLOPS per card. The new Mac Pro’s Fire Pros are rated at 7 TFLOPS.

Edit: Where are you getting all this information about a cut down base model?

7tflops for the whole machine,not one card