Apple's iMac Pro to use Intel Server grade 'Purley' with an ARM co-processor

[mr moose]

 

1 hour ago, anthonyjc2010 said:

snip

Is it a failed concept, or did they just overestimate the compute power required by most of their customers?

 

I've often wondered just how much market share Apple has in workstations for photo/video work.    Given how small their current total market share is and we know that macs are equally/if not more favored in industries like coding and software with by and large their biggest professional market being audio (that doesn't need a 10bit panel BTW).  We also know big CGI firms like animal logic prefer HP workstations (or at least did).   Does it just leave them with a small consumer base which may diminish if they drop the nice peripherals (like 10 bit panels) or the server grade hardware?

[RedRound2]

12 hours ago, Sniperfox47 said:

It's not a standard. It's a certification. The Sony broadcast monitors I've mentioned a number of times now vastly exceed the requirements for UHD Premium OLED certification. That's why they're one of the few screens used as master monitors for HDR content.

But how many people us it? There may be amazing colour accurate monitors out there, but only very few people actually invest in those really high end monitors. For people who don't the iMac Pro 5K is a great display

Quote

Compared to other consumer monitors? Sure. Compared to high end industrial and professional monitors? Not even close. Apple didn't announce how much of P3 their new display covers. Hence my skeptecism. For high end editing it doesn't matter if you cover part of DCI-P3 if you only cover 60% of it. Until we see actual numbers on colour gamut, you're not going to convince me it's useful in any way for editing.

Their 2015 5K iMac supported DCI P3. Sure they probably didn't announce it but no one is stopping anyone from checking it. Besides I'm pretty sure it's close to a 100 percent as the iPad Pro 9.7" has truly a great display

Quote

Can Pixar run their rendering engines on an iPad? Can I run solidworks on an iPad? Can people doing video mastering and encoding run premier pro or other in-house solutions on an iPad. That's my point. This is supposed to be a professional system, not a prosumer system.

I specifically mentioned iPads can be used currently for professionals  drawing and photo editing and yet you chose to ignore that. Apple's chips have had amazing leaps and bounds in performance and graphics power in past 5 years and the 'Crappy ARM' can now run full featured photo editing apps like a breeze coupled with a very high end display

Quote

ECC has nothing to do with performance. It's to do with memory errors. ECC ram typically performs slightly slower than non-ECC ram. If you're spending 3 days rendering a scene in a professional setting, you're going to want ECC memory period.

Never said it did. It was two separate remarks that you chose to combine. All I said was iOS devices didn't need ECC at least currently. And again IM NOT condoning using an iPad Pro for anything more than photo editing and sketching in a professional scenario but yet you ignore my remark. iMovie in iPad is pretty bad compared to Mac version, but I think they'll be able to close the gap within the next five years 

[Sniperfox47]

11 minutes ago, RedRound2 said:

But how many people us it? There may be amazing colour accurate monitors out there, but only very few people actually invest in those really high end monitors. For people who don't the iMac Pro 5K is a great display

That's kinda my point though. My point is, for the people who need an 8-18 core Xeon, ECC memory, and all that other professional grade hardware, having a fixed monitor isn't a great option. Some of the pro users (eg. Video Colour Technicians) will need a Mastering monitor. Some users such as high end digital artists -and no, i do not mean people doing drawings and 2d art on their tablet- will use a cintiq. Some users will be fine with the iMac Pro's display. But marketing a product towards a professional crowd with a one fit all solution is not a solution for a professional audience.

 

17 minutes ago, RedRound2 said:

Their 2015 5K iMac supported DCI P3. Sure they probably didn't announce it but no one is stopping anyone from checking it. Besides I'm pretty sure it's close to a 100 percent as the iPad Pro 9.7" has truly a great display

The iPad Pro 9.7 had a pretty meh display compared to professional design displays. The issue is that unless it covers all of DCI-P3, nearly all of Adobe RGB, and a huge amount of Rec2020 it's not going to be a solution for huge parts of the professional community. And since it's an LCD panel it simply can't do that.

 

And if they had put an OLED mastering display in it? It would maybe last a year tops, and the price would skyrocket insanely. If they put pen support into it, the form factor wouldn't be condusive and it wouldn't work through most of the OS OOB.

 

This is my whole point. The professional community isn't one you target with a one size fits all solution.

 

22 minutes ago, RedRound2 said:

I specifically mentioned iPads can be used currently for professionals  drawing and photo editing and yet you chose to ignore that. Apple's chips have had amazing leaps and bounds in performance and graphics power in past 5 years and the 'Crappy ARM' can now run full featured photo editing apps like a breeze coupled with a very high end display

If your idea of professional workloads are photo editing and drawing then you don't understand professional workloads.

 

Can the iPad handle digital signage collage development in Photoshop of projects with over 300 layers where the ram usage of the project is in the order of 50-60GB?

 

This is my point. You're looking at prosumer tasks, tasks that could be handled just fine by a MacBook or even a Chromebook and going "well these are professional tasks and the iPad can handle it!". Fact is this is a point in time when a potato could handle those tasks. That's not what the iMac Pro is targeted for. It's targeted towards high end professionals, not "I can get it done on my potato if I have to" professionals.

 

27 minutes ago, RedRound2 said:

Never said it did. It was two separate remarks that you chose to combine. All I said was iOS devices didn't need ECC at least currently. And again IM NOT condoning using an iPad Pro for anything more than photo editing and sketching in a professional scenario but yet you ignore my remark. iMovie in iPad is pretty bad compared to Mac version, but I think they'll be able to close the gap within the next five years 

Again. That's kind of my point. The tasks the iMac Pro is oriented towards are tasks that would require ECC in any realistic work case. iMovie is *not* high end creative software. If you can do what you do on an iPad you're not the target audience for this product so stop comparing it to consumer and prosumer devices...

[RedRound2]

On 6/24/2017 at 3:45 AM, mr moose said:

 

Is it a failed concept, or did they just overestimate the compute power required by most of their customers?

 

I've often wondered just how much market share Apple has in workstations for photo/video work.    Given how small their current total market share is and we know that macs are equally/if not more favored in industries like coding and software with by and large their biggest professional market being audio (that doesn't need a 10bit panel BTW).  We also know big CGI firms like animal logic prefer HP workstations (or at least did).   Does it just leave them with a small consumer base which may diminish if they drop the nice peripherals (like 10 bit panels) or the server grade hardware?

So when Apple releases a balls to the walls product, you guys start complaining that they went overboard? Pretty much every tech enthusiast were complaining/mocking Apple for not having a HEDT. And no you can't use the AiO excuse because Apple had confirmed earlier this year that they would be releasing a pro grade iMac and a proper Mac Pro next year. 

 

A lot of photo and video editors use Macs. There are a lot of industries that use Macs or rather prefer Macs. It's actually Apple's fault for losing market share because the newer computers couldn't be upgraded in a regular manner. If Apple nails this and next years Mac Pro and makes sure they have a regular predictable update path, I'm positive that Apple can regain entire Movie industry and with their push in VR Content Creation, they could leapfrog Microsoft in that particular space

9 hours ago, anthonyjc2010 said:

There's one problem, it's a Mac. That means it comes with all of the problems associated with the users of them. I have, on multiple occasions, hung around the Apple Store. I listen to the conversations between the customers and the sales people, and the customers are idiots. They know nothing about what they are getting, except that it's an Apple product. Probably one of the most egregious things I've witnessed in those stores is this "Woman points to the 15" MacBook Pro and asks what the difference is between that and the MacBook Pro without TouchBar. The man responds by telling her that it's bigger, that's it. He only left out that it had far superior single threaded performance, over double the multi-threaded performance, a dedicated GPU that kicked the Iris 640 right in the balls, and so much more." My main problem with going back to using Macs (for my laptop) is the whole attitude around them. It's horrible. And from an ex-Apple Diehard Fanboy (who is now semi-PCMR and literally using a Surface... pays for OneDrive and a Groove Music Subscription... and Office 365 Subscription... and has a Nexus 6P) I know what the vast majority of their users are like first hand, and I don't want to be associated with that again.

This is the most ridiculous excuse I've ever heard. Do you actually think the regular 80% of the masses are tech heads? It's stupid you generalised Apple based on this one women or five, but don't tell my that every single Windows PC buyer knows what they're buying. I can't even fathom how you came to such a ridiculous generalisation.

 

Do you think the lady in the story, knows what multithreaded performance means. Do you think she needs a dGPU? If she needed she would've specifically asked for it. And heck there's even specifications written on it, so chances she might've already known, but didn't really care because it's all gibberish to her.

 

Point being, Windows users aren't any more smart than what you claimed Apple has with its Mac users. Most people just buy a laptop form a company they have good experience with and fits their price bracket. Relatively few people go out looking for a specific specification or have a requirement for a specific specification.

 

Also it's  kind of stupid that you base your purchase around a status symbol rather than what you need.

[mr moose]

1 minute ago, RedRound2 said:

So when Apple releases a balls to the walls product, you guys start complaint. That they went overboard? Pretty much every tech enthusiast were complaining/mocking Apple for not having a HEDT. And no you can't use the AiO excuse because Apple had confirmed earlier this year that they would be releasing a pro grade iMac and a proper Mac Pro next year. 

 

A lot of photo and video editors use Macs. There are a lot of industries that use Macs or rather prefer Macs. It's actually Apple's fault for losing market share because the newer computers couldn't be upgraded in a regular manner. If Apple nails this and next years Mac Pro and makes sure they have a regular predictable update path, I'm positive that Apple can regain entire Movie industry and with their push in VR Content Creation, they could leapfrog Microsoft in that particular space

This is the most ridiculous excuse I've ever heard. Do you actually think the regular 80% of the masses are tech heads? It's stupid you generalised Apple based on this one women or five, but don't tell my that every single Windows PC buyer knows what they're buying. I can't even fathom how you came to such a ridiculous generalisation.

 

Do you think the lady in the story, knows what multithreaded performance means. Do you think she needs a dGPU? If she needed she would've specifically asked for it. And heck there's even specifications written on it, so chances she might've already known, but didn't really care because it's all gibberish to her.

 

Point being, Windows users aren't any more smart than what you claimed Apple has with its Mac users. Most people just buy a laptop form a company they have good experience with and fits their price bracket. Relatively few people go out looking for a specific specification or have a requirement for a specific specification.

 

Also it's  kind of stupid that you base your purchase around a status symbol rather than what you need.

Who's complaining or even mocking?  This is a discussion which entails reviewing the facts, whether you like them or not.

[RedRound2]

On 6/24/2017 at 2:07 PM, Sniperfox47 said:

That's kinda my point though. My point is, for the people who need an 8-18 core Xeon, ECC memory, and all that other professional grade hardware, having a fixed monitor isn't a great option. Some of the pro users (eg. Video Colour Technicians) will need a Mastering monitor. Some users such as high end digital artists -and no, i do not mean people doing drawings and 2d art on their tablet- will use a cintiq. Some users will be fine with the iMac Pro's display. But marketing a product towards a professional crowd with a one fit all solution is not a solution for a professional audience.

With TB3 you can attach extra monitors, you're not fixed with what Apple gives you. 90% professional users wouldn't need an extremely high end monitor and if they needed, chances are they already own one and it can easily be hooked up to iMac Pro. If you're so hellbent on not wanting the built in 5K monitor, then wait for next years Mac Pro.

 

And Apple isn't forcing anyone to buy iMac Pro. It's impossible to make a one size fits all, but they can attempt one size fits most. If it's not for you, don't buy ut. Not Apples fault if you do when you knew it wasn't for you

Quote

The iPad Pro 9.7 had a pretty meh display compared to professional design displays. The issue is that unless it covers all of DCI-P3, nearly all of Adobe RGB, and a huge amount of Rec2020 it's not going to be a solution for huge parts of the professional community. And since it's an LCD panel it simply can't do that.

I would like to know that huge part of the professional crowd because from what I searched and found, all they really need is a 10-bit panel with some good coverage of Adobe RGB. Sure there are a very niche crowd who want the absolute best, but you can't generalize it there

Quote

And if they had put an OLED mastering display in it? It would maybe last a year tops, and the price would skyrocket insanely. If they put pen support into it, the form factor wouldn't be condusive and it wouldn't work through most of the OS OOB.

Umm ok, your point being? Next year's iPad is rumored to have an OLED display and I really don't think they're going to drop the pen support on iPad Pro models

Quote

If your idea of professional workloads are photo editing and drawing then you don't understand professional workloads.

Under professional, I said iPad was only suitable for photo editing and art. My goodness, how many times do I have to repeat myself on the same thing. You mentioned in OP that surface studio had an advantage of pen support. I disagreed because drawing in a huge vertical digital display has never been a thing hence why Cintiq's are in tablet form factor. iPads can be used as a replacement in that regard due to powerful apps, best stylus in the market and a pretty good display with portability and rest of tablet advantages going for it

Quote

Can the iPad handle digital signage collage development in Photoshop of projects with over 300 layers where the ram usage of the project is in the order of 50-60GB?

I said most, not all. And iPads in that regard can be used to sketch and it can be further edited in iMac Pro with continuity 

Quote

This is my point. You're looking at prosumer tasks, tasks that could be handled just fine by a MacBook or even a Chromebook and going "well these are professional tasks and the iPad can handle it!". Fact is this is a point in time when a potato could handle those tasks. That's not what the iMac Pro is targeted for. It's targeted towards high end professionals, not "I can get it done on my potato if I have to" professionals.

iPad can be used to sketch and it can be further edited in the iMac Pro. Is this concept really hard to understand?

Quote

Again. That's kind of my point. The tasks the iMac Pro is oriented towards are tasks that would require ECC in any realistic work case. iMovie is *not* high end creative software. If you can do what you do on an iPad you're not the target audience for this product so stop comparing it to consumer and prosumer devices...

iMovie is not high-end software and I know that I specified it on purpose implying that even a moderate video editor ain't really good on iPads today let alone high end like FCPX. You follow the context rather than taking everything at face value

[RedRound2]

12 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Who's complaining or even mocking?  This is a discussion which entails reviewing the facts, whether you like them or not.

You just said Apple went overboard. And pretty much everyone else was complaining that they don't have an HEDT. I wasn't talking about you complaining rather the general tech community 

[mr moose]

3 minutes ago, RedRound2 said:

You just said Apple went overboard.

No I didn't.

 

EDIT: and even if I did, that is neither complaining nor mocking. 

[leadeater]

16 minutes ago, RedRound2 said:

So when Apple releases a balls to the walls product, you guys start complaint. That they went overboard? Pretty much every tech enthusiast were complaining/mocking Apple for not having a HEDT. And no you can't use the AiO excuse because Apple had confirmed earlier this year that they would be releasing a pro grade iMac and a proper Mac Pro next year. 

 

A lot of photo and video editors use Macs. There are a lot of industries that use Macs or rather prefer Macs. It's actually Apple's fault for losing market share because the newer computers couldn't be upgraded in a regular manner. If Apple nails this and next years Mac Pro and makes sure they have a regular predictable update path, I'm positive that Apple can regain entire Movie industry and with their push in VR Content Creation, they could leapfrog Microsoft in that particular space

A device that happens to use HEDT parts does not therefore make it a HEDT device or fit in to the generally accepted description of that type of device. People are criticizing the platform not the parts and a lot of the points a valid.

 

Apple will never regain the very high end HEDT market until they bring back the classic Mac Pro full tower, that is what these people want and use. Large movie studios, scientific researchers, structural designers and engineers, Formula 1/racing teams and the list could go on for quite some time more all use very high end dual socket customizable  workstations. Some require fibre channel HBA's, some need Infiniband, some need 10/40 Gb NICs but all together these requirements cannot be served by the current Apple/Mac ecosystem so will never regain this market until a fundamental change in stratagy by Apple.

[RedRound2]

12 minutes ago, leadeater said:

A device that happens to use HEDT parts does not therefore make it a HEDT device or fit in to the generally accepted description of that type of device. People are criticizing the platform not the parts and a lot of the points a valid.

 

Apple will never regain the very high end HEDT market until they bring back the classic Mac Pro full tower, that is what these people want and use. Large movie studios, scientific researchers, structural designers and engineers, Formula 1/racing teams and the list could go on for quite some time more all use very high end dual socket customizable  workstations. Some require fibre channel HBA's, some need Infiniband, some need 10/40 Gb NICs but all together these requirements cannot be served by the current Apple/Mac ecosystem so will never regain this market until a fundamental change in stratagy by Apple.

They have it coming. They themselves confirmed that. 

They explicitly said they will be releasing a new modular Mac Pro next year and I'm pretty sure they said it so they wouldnt recieve backlash on a product Apple may have dremt of.

 

It's maybe a proof of concept and there definitely is a market for these however niche they might be, but they will be releasing a Mac Pro next year

[leadeater]

On 6/24/2017 at 10:21 AM, mr moose said:

 

From my understanding ECC is slower, but because the cpu doesn't have to run a process again to fic the ram error the overall job is quicker.   Please correct me if this isn't right.   

ECC is about 2% slower. The other thing with ECC memory is they stick to the JDEC standards so are slower frequency than typical desktop memory that we would use in our gaming desktops.

 

Quote

Finally, ECC RAM is slightly slower than non-ECC RAM. Many memory manufacturers say that ECC RAM will be roughly 2% slower than standard RAM due to the additional time it takes for the system to check for any memory errors. To verify this, we examined multiple benchmarks that we run on each system we produce. By using comparable CPUs (For example: Intel Core i7 4771 3.5GHz Quad Core 8MB versus Intel Xeon E3-1275 V3 3.5GHZ Quad Core 8MB) we found that this 2% estimate to be roughly correct. Our own benchmarks showed a performance hit ranging from .72 to 2.2% which, given normal testing deviations, is right in line with the 2% estimate.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Advantages-of-ECC-Memory-520/

 

Also

https://www.servethehome.com/unbuffered-registered-ecc-memory-difference-ecc-udimms-rdimms/

[mr moose]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

ECC is about 2% slower. The other thing with ECC memory is they stick to the JDEC standards so are slower frequency than typical desktop memory that we would use in our gaming desktops.

 

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Advantages-of-ECC-Memory-520/

 

Also

https://www.servethehome.com/unbuffered-registered-ecc-memory-difference-ecc-udimms-rdimms/

 

But what about the time of the over all job being quicker with ecc?  I was told one error on a large job without ecc took longer to remedy than running slower ecc.

[leadeater]

3 minutes ago, RedRound2 said:

They have it coming. They themselves confirmed that. 

They explicitly said they will be releasing a new modular Mac Pro next year and I'm pretty sure they said it so they wouldnt recieve backlash on a product Apple may have dremt of.

 

It's maybe a proof of concept and there definitely is a market for these however niche they might be, but they will be releasing a Mac Pro next year

I'll believe it when I see it. With the complete dissolvement of the Xserve product line, Mac Pro trash can "just use TB dongles", the crippling of Mac OS management and Open Directory you'll have to forgive my skepticism that Apple is bringing a new Mac Pro hardware platform that is anything like the old tower or can carry the moniker of customizable. Modular can mean anything, including TB dongles or external devices.

[leadeater]

Just now, mr moose said:

 

But what about the time of the over all job being quicker with ecc?  I was told one error on a large job without ecc took longer to remedy than running slower ecc.

Depends where the memory error happens but for the most part applications and the OS do not expect memory errors so the list of possible outcomes are: Memory error in unused memory area so nothing, non catastrophic data corruption, total application crash or OS crash.

 

Memory errors aren't like your typical program errors that you can catch in error handling, they are illegal memory address modifications so makes things freak the hell out.

 

From the standpoint of having to rerun the job since it crashed yes ECC is faster, I don't know of any other reliable and measurable way to compare non-ECC vs ECC in this regard.

[mr moose]

Just now, leadeater said:

Depends where the memory error happens but for the most part applications and the OS do not expect memory errors so the list of possible outcomes are: Memory error in unused memory area so nothing, non catastrophic data corruption, total application crash or OS crash.

 

Memory errors aren't like your typical program errors that you can catch in error handling, they are illegal memory address modifications so makes things freak the hell out.

 

From the standpoint of having to rerun the job since it crashed yes ECC is faster, I don't know of any other reliable and measurable way to compare non-ECC vs ECC in this regard.

 

So basically yes it can be true, but mostly was someone just making shit up because they didn't fully understand it.

[NunoLava1998]

Indian Tech Support Scammer: "Your Microsoft computer is slow and has been hacked"

Mac Pro user: "I have server-grade specs and a Mac you fucking dumbfu-"

[leadeater]

6 minutes ago, mr moose said:

 

So basically yes it can be true, but mostly was someone just making shit up because they didn't fully understand it.

Depends how much you trust the source of information. They could know of a use case or real word example that they are basing that information off of that I'm not aware of or can't think of right now.

 

For me I can't think of a scenario where 2% less memory performance is a deal breaker, and in a situation where that would be the case I'm willing to bet they require Registered memory due to the system RAM capacity they need so ECC is given anyway.

[mr moose]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Depends how much you trust the source of information. They could know of a use case or real word example that they are basing that information off of that I'm not aware of could or can't think of right now.

 

For me I can't think of a scenario where 2% less memory performance is a deal breaker, and in a situation where that would be the case I'm willing to be they require Registered memory due to the system RAM capacity they need so ECC is given anyway.

Not really,  If it was something real then I would have expected many more responses confirming as much, etc  but given you are the only one who has responded with anything substantial,  it is very likely he was just trying to sound important.  

[Jito463]

42 minutes ago, NunoLava1998 said:

Indian Tech Support Scammer: "Your Microsoft computer is slow and has been hacked"

Mac Pro user: "I have server-grade specs and a Mac you f****** dumbfu-"

LOL, we actually had a local computer repair place that buys their parts from us, run into exactly that situation.

 

They run nothing but Linux at their shop, and got one of these scammers calling them:

 

Scam: Your Windows computer is infected with viruses

Them: We don't have any Windows computers, we run Linux.

Scam: Do you have a computer?

Them: Yes.

Scam: Then you have Windows, and it is infected.

[Valentyn]

58 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

LOL, we actually had a local computer repair place that buys their parts from us, run into exactly that situation.

 

They run nothing but Linux at their shop, and got one of these scammers calling them:

 

Scam: Your Windows computer is infected with viruses

Them: We don't have any Windows computers, we run Linux.

Scam: Do you have a computer?

Them: Yes.

Scam: Then you have Windows, and it is infected.

Here's how to handle it.