New 27-Inch iMac Has Up to 80% Faster Graphics at Compute Tasks Compared to Prev | Hacker News Reader

New 27-Inch iMac Has Up to 80% Faster Graphics at Compute Tasks Compared to Prev

macrumors.com

33 pointsjanober4 comments

Although this is good news for pro Mac users it's still not that meaningful in an age were CUDA still dominates for almost anything you'd want to use this power for in an iMac (You're not going to want to mine ETH or compute ML inside an iMac chassis so I'm thinking more visual work).

Speaking as someone from the creative professional side I waited and waited for OpenCL to take off I thought a year after the trashcan pro with it's dedicated compute GPU (only one of the two GPUs was for display the other was 100% OpenCL) then nothing, I waited two years then nothing, etc. Then eventually I caved and moved to PC just for the Nvidia like most of people in my industry [1] [2] [3]

3D and motion graphics people are leading the way with this but look into the tech Adobe is prototyping and the future of photo manipulation via ML, within the next 5 to 10 years multiple GPUs as purely compute units will be essential for many creative professionals.

[1] http://rawandrendered.com/Octane-Render-Hepta-GPU-Build

[2] http://www.yambo.me/blog/2016/4/4/watercooled-4x-980ti-octan...

[3] http://www.mattfrodsham.com/octane/2015/4/10/4xgpu-pc

First I can't follow the 80% math, on the OpenCL benchmark that they got the 80% number. At best the iMac 2015 has 74% performance of the 2017 iMac at the top end of both.

Additionally, when you are still in the same ball park as with the high end of the Mac Pro, from 2013, seems also wrong. A lot has happened in the GPU space in the last 4 years, so this seems odd. Maybe it isn't fair to compare to the Mac Pro, as it isn't clear if that GPU was SLI'd or not, but it's their graph.

Of course there is no comparison to other non-apple systems.

I'm flagging this story as it's pure fluff, in my eyes.

Perhaps, but there's no denying the GPU updates in this refresh are substantial relative to the old ones, in no small part due to how outdated the GPUs in the previous generation were. Heck just being able to purchase a 21.5 inch model with a discrete GPU is a giant leap forward!

It's more like "Fastest new 27-inch iMac is 80% faster than the slowest model of the previous generation"...

It's still 30% faster than the previous top-of-the-line though.

In other news, newest Ferrari totally smokes last year Volkswagen Up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com