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Comment by Cyder | Hacker News Reader

It's just first on the consumer market with 32 cores. Wait until AMD and Intel's comparable chips hit the mass market. 32 cores isn't unbelievable l like it use to be.

  Putting multiple graphics cards in a machine has been common for a long time in gaming rigs. Crypto-miners run +12 graphics cards in an attempt to be profitable.

 There's nothing unique mentioned in the article except the proprietary video stream processing, and I guarantee you, there's other high end machines that do the same thing if not more.

I really wonder what the author's specialty is, since he thinks these specs are actually unique to Apple.

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It’s the integration and testing and support that Apple offers.

In fact, the more demanding your requirements, the more likely you need all of these fairly exotic components to work seamlessly together.

If you’re working on the next Star Wars movie, there are billions of dollars at stake; you can’t rely on some Linux box a guy you know put together, no matter how good the specs supposedly are.

Even if you could get comparable components, you’re not going to have the driver support you need. If you have downtime, you can’t wait for some guy on an email list who’s day job is not supporting this mission critical driver, to get back to you.

And you’re not going to get the performance of Apple’s APIs like Metal2, etc. which blow OpenGL, etc. away.

You get get that from Dell. They and HP have been selling this stuff forever.

Yes, Dell and HP sell perfectly fine workstations.

No, there's nothing like the current Mac Pro.

A quick look doesn't show a Dell Precision desktop workstation that goes beyond 48GB RAM, for example, while the Mac Pro goes to 1.5 TB.

I also didn't see anything like the MPX Module:

The MPX Module starts with an industry-standard PCI Express connector. Then, for the first time in a graphics card, more PCIe lanes integrate Thunderbolt and additional power provided to increase capability. With up to 500 watts, the MPX Module has power capacity equivalent to that of the entire previous-generation Mac Pro.

Didn't see a way to have up to 8K streams going at the same time or the ability to attach up to 12 4K displays on the Dell site.

It goes on and on. You can approximate a lot of what Apple is offering, but you can't duplicate what they're offering at a lower price.

There's so much Apple-designed silicon in this box, it's literally impossible for Dell, HP or anyone else to compete with off-the-shelf, commodity components.

For the target market Apple is going for, the cost of even a tricked-out Mac Pro is a rounding error.

look again at e.g. the Dell 7920:

Up to 3 TB RAM, 4 GPUs with 4 DP ports each if you want, dual processor if you want (so 56 cores), ...

Costs more or less the same as the Mac though, or more if you go higher-spec. MPX might be interesting, although I notice the Apple marketing comparing it to previous Macs and not competing PC-workstation cards, and of course application-dependent.

MPX might be interesting, although I notice the Apple marketing comparing it to previous Macs and not competing PC-workstation cards, and of course application-dependent.

They were saying this one card has more processing power than the last generation Mac Pro.

Up to 3 TB RAM, 4 GPUs with 4 DP ports each if you want, dual processor if you want (so 56 cores)

Sure, the hardware is comparable if you don't take Apple's custom silicon into account, which by definition doesn't exist anywhere else.

None of the highest-end graphics cards--AMD Radeon Pro Vega II (64 compute units, 4096 stream units, 14.1 teraflops single precision or 28.3 teraflops double-precision) or the same card in the Duo configuration with two Vega II GPUs each with the 64 compute units, 4096 stream units, etc. are available from Dell.

Windows 10 is a big improvement over previous versions and the rollout of macOS Catalina was rough, but as things settle down, I believe Apple has the edge when it comes to ease of use and robustness.

And there's software like Final Cut Pro, which is an industry-standard in the movie business that only runs on macOS and is updated to take advantage of the new Mac Pro.

Testing? like that time their internal tests showed iphones 6/6+ had substandard integrity bending 3-7 times more easily and they still released defective product while loudly denying any deficiency? https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3a3gg/iphone-6-touch-dis...

What good is testing when you release defective product anyway?

This should've used AMD 64 cores blah blah blah, is getting kind of old.

For the work loads that these will be GPU driven not CPU. Plus more CPU cores doesn't mean more performance, as software has to be optimized to handle so many cores and more cores means lower clock per core.

That being said, I do like AMD over Intel.

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