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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

$7k starting price. High but compared to? Just glancing at the new HP Z6 G5, which may be a fair comparison, with a 16-core CPU, 8x16GB of memory (the lowest configuration that populates all 8 channels of that CPU), minimal storage, and a parts bin GPU that nobody wants, $6k. To get 8 thunderbolt ports like the mac pro you'd have to fill each and every one of its add-in card slots with a HP dual TB4 card.

Edit: The HP 340L1AA TBT4 card is only compatible with one expansion slot in that machine, so what I suggested is not even possible. Perhaps the Mac Pro is the only workstation you can get with 8 Thunderbolt4 ports.

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If you actually want 8 Thunderbolt 4 ports that probably puts you towards that price range anyways because nobody has really seen the demand to make a quad Thunderbolt 4 card yet (as far as I know) so you're eating up a lot of slots which were probably designed to have way more than PCIe 3.0 x8 plugged into them. Same with the memory bandwidth, if you actually need 800 GB/s of RAM bandwidth then there isn't really a traditional option to compete.

If you compare with what most people actually need out of a workstation instead of what this can do as a workstation you run into a lot of opposites though, and just as easily. 192 GB as a maximum cap is honestly pretty low for a workstation these days, as is a max CPU configuration of 2x10+2.

Overall I don't think it's horrendously priced as some of the previous Mac workstation components could get, but at the same time, unless you have a very specific use case or specifically need macOS, it's not exactly compelling. It is "good enough" to finally round out the lineup though.

> Overall I don't think it's horrendously priced as some of the previous Mac workstation components could get, but at the same time, unless you have a very specific use case or specifically need macOS, it's not exactly compelling. It is "good enough" to finally round out the lineup though.

It's such a specific use case that I'm not entirely sure what the use case even is. Capturing off an SDI camera? Great! Why do we need so many pcie cards and so little memory? These things aren't even setup to hold that much storage. It appears to not work with PCIE GPUs, so that's out. You probably don't need additional thunderbolt ports since it already has those. Maybe additional USB, but probably not that many cards worth? Most audio equipment is external?

I get it. Apple is saying "This machine is for a very specific type of video editor" lol.

I am probably the minimal target market for the mac pro m2 ultra. I am an artist and I do a lot of 3D rendering. I think it's a great price and I would love to own one, but I wouldn't even consider it unless it had support for Nvidia GPUs. Good GPU-based 3D rendering engines need CUDA. Even with the ones that don't, GPU rendering on a 4090 is 4x-5x times more performant than on an M2 Max, and building my own PC allows me to have multiple of them. Also Octane, the rendering engine in their demo, is trash. Specifically, it's fine for fancy titles and cartoons but terrible for realistic renderings.

Also, I still have a chip on my shoulder about Apple failing to update Mac Pros for about a decade and then rubbing salt in the wound with their pathetic trash can. It would take A LOT to get me back after that BS. Moving to Windows was a horrible experience and they gave me no choice.

Lastly, VFX software is heartily embracing Linux these days and I'm loving it, but I did have to invest in a KVM switch system and 10Gbe network so I can comfortably run Photoshop and Substance on a separate Windows machine.

Seriously - they do not even talk about GPU in the PCIe slot - then again they do not expressly rule it out either.

I think it's ruled out by the fact that Nvidia would need to release macOS drivers, and there is no realistic chance of them doing so without Apple's support.

at this point, for mac pros which have expansion slots, why would not apple do that. both for nvidia and amd cards?

Why did they discontinue support for eGPUs? They have some legacy beef with Nvidia and now they are increasingly competitors.

No idea if the operating system will support nvidia graphics cards on arm.

However, even if it does, the mac pro only has one 8 pin power connector and two 6 pin connectors.

The 4090 needs a 16 pin input, and I've only ever seen adapters that convert 2x8pin to 16. Maybe you could get one card running, but any more than that and you will need some kind of hacky external power supply setup.

> I am probably the minimal target market for the mac pro m2 ultra. I am an artist and I do a lot of 3D rendering. I think it's a great price and I would love to own one, but I wouldn't even consider it unless it had support for Nvidia GPUs.

Please don't get me wrong, but when I said that Apple seemed to have narrowed their target audience to the point where I was confused who the target audience even was - I was taking stuff like your use case into account when I said that!

For my own personal use cases? Ehh. I don't need a $7000 Mac Pro. A $2000 Mac studio would suffice, but it doesn't do the one thing I wish any of these machines did - and that's accept a bunch of m.2 NVME SSD cards!

Honestly I always thought a "more pro" laptop would be one where you could open a door on the bottom and have a couple of m.2 slots.

Anyway, the last Mac Pro that I really would've fit in the target audience for was the original. Those were great. I have a trash can because I always loved that design and got an incredible deal on one. I'll probably pick up one of the last intel ones if/when I find a killer deal on one.

I ended up just switching to building my own PC desktops and using the Mac Pro for things that I prefer using a Mac for.

> It's such a specific use case that I'm not entirely sure what the use case even is.

Live TV production, I think. Mostly in the rackmount form-factor. A plethora of "IO breakout boards" is what turns a regular computer into a "video production system" head-unit.

Though also, at least three of the PCI-e cards shown on the slide were for fibre-optic networking. So, presumably, this would be the Mac to get if you're trying to Beowulf the M2-Ultras together for some kind of NUMA-friendly ML model training. Or just for a render farm. Insofar as Apple dogfoods things, I would guess this is what they use them for themselves.

I liked how one of the cards on the screen was a sound card, as if a PCIe slot wasn't 1000x overkill for that amount of I/O. We had USB ports that could handle that when Bill Clinton was still president of the United States.

There was also what I believe to be an SDR card (the one with all the antenna-inputs) — which is pretty interesting in its implications, but perhaps not the brightest one in this context. Aren't RF antennas also lightning rods? :)

There was also something there that had DB9 and DB25 connectors, but both female. (I would think this was a weird SuperIO card, but the computer side of a serial port is usually male.) There was also a lot of stuff on that card. Anyone know what that one was?

That's the sound card. It's a Lynx E44. It has two giant breakout cables.

Plus for audio tasks that USB isn't good enough for, there is Thunderbolt (Avid will do 256 channels via TB3) and Ethernet (256+ channels via AVB possible).

I thought that too, but the existence of highly affordable SDI-to-Thunderbolt adapters means the Mac Studio should still suffice unless you need a very large number of inputs... and I don't know how many multi-SDI PCIe cards there are.

AJA makes a couple of Thunderbolt 3 external SDI capture/output devices with 4x bidirectional SDI I/Os. If you want more than that you need multiple devices or a PCIe card. AJA and Blackmagic both make 8x SDI cards, as do a couple other vendors.

I don't even see the use case for SDI capture. You can buy SDI-to-Thunderbolt converters starting at $150.

SDI->Thunderbolt “converters” are capture cards, they just use TB as the physical connector. Also, not all capture cards have the same feature set. Some of these cards have SDI capture and/or output, sometimes simultaneously and some with up to 8 SDI IO connectors. Some cards also do HDMI capture and/or output of the same or different feeds as the SDI signal(s).

The landscape of capture cards (not just SDI) is pretty diverse. It all depends on the kind of workflow you’re dealing with. Live productions in particular will often demand many connections, to be able to capture multiple camera angles, as well as to output to confidence monitors and/or backup recording devices, frame syncs, switchers, SDI routers and more.

Thunderbolt falls short at 4k resolutions. It is OK for 4k24 through 4k30, but for 4k60 or higher (HDR, high frame rates and not to mention 8k) you would probably want an internal PCIe card. 40gbit thunderbolt sounds like it should be fast enough, but it turns out that for PCIe traffic it tops out at 32gbit, which just isn't quite enough.

FWIW Ampere Altra dev kit is $4k for 128 cores and supports 768GB of RAM. Bring your own memory, storage, PSU, GPU

https://www.ipi.wiki/products/com-hpc-ampere-altra?variant=4...

Curious if you can feed all those Ampere CPUs or if it is memory bandwidth constrained.

Disclaimer: this is not a "zomg apple grate; others must suck" comment. Apple claims that their integrated design balances things out to get the best performance. It will be interesting once there are some real benchmarks to see how well that claim continues to stack up.

The M transition has been amazing, but not every iteration can be a winner.

It has 8 x DDR4 3200, so about 204GB/s of memory bandwidth, 1/4th of the M2 Ultra.

Unless somethings dramatically changed with the M2, Apples chips can't leverage their full memory bandwidth in CPU-only workloads so comparing their numbers to those of a discrete CPU isn't especially meaningful. When Anandtech tested the "400GB/sec" M1 Max the most throughput they could coax out of it via the CPU was 224GB/sec.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

The huge bandwidth numbers on the M-series are mainly for the benefit of the GPU, less so the CPU.

Which means that M1 (previous gen) REAL numbers beat maximal theoretical numbers of ampere.

Sure, but that's a real number, not peak. The top ryzen (7950x) or top intel (i9-13k) manage only 83GB/sec peak, and something in around 60GB/sec real. Generally the arm memory model is looser than the x86-64, which allows a greater fraction of peak bandwidth. So apple chips that fit in thin laptops have 4x the memory bandwidth of the 150 watt and up high end desktops from Intel and AMD.

Sure the AMD Epyc (12 channel) or Intel Xeon (8 channel) compete, but at even higher power ratings and large physical sizes.

Not to mention that 224GB/sec leaves a fair bit of bandwidth for compression, matrix multiply, ML acceleration, GPU, video encode/decode, and related.

With the M2 transition, I feel we're back in the days of the PowerMac G5.

It was a beast on its own, but the main issue for comparison was that you couldn't just do the same things. If you're working on video editing or Photoshop perhaps, but if you're developping games for instance you'll want an x86 computer, and however good the M2 specs are on benchmarks, you can't compare it on real world usage anymore.

For ML it seems there are efforts to be ARM compatible, then VR is a weird bit where current ecosystem is x86 only, but the introduction of the Apple headset could probably help ?

For scientific research, I was under the impression that Nvida/AMD GPUs were a given, and Metal had very little support.

What would the other serious uses of a high power machine that could help make comparison with other actual workstations ?

High compared to the Mac Studio, I'd say. $3,000 extra for the exact same specs and an extra 6 PCI slots. I guess if you need them, that's the cost of entry, but $500/slot seems like a tough sell.

Agreed, and the small max memory is disappointing. However, maybe the thermals of the Pro give it a significant performance edge over the Studio?

No, because the Mac Studio doesn't throttle to begin with. (Hilariously, LTT water-cooled one and it made no difference.)

M1 Ultra Mac Studio almost never ran the fans above 1300rpm, I doubt the M2 version is thermally constrained either.

The HP is usually at least 30% off and has ECC memory - so depending on your use case it may still make sense.

I think the lust for ML performance has made people a lot more likely to arbitrage these costs by building their own machines so the usual like for like comparison doesn't necessarily hold the same way it does for Apple Silicon laptops.

How many simultaneous 4K input video steams can that HP handle (input and encoding)?

I haven't the slightest idea. I assume people with such requirements know how to specify and buy machines. That said, these guys who specifically target the video production market sell machines with the latest Xeons and e.g. an RTX 4080 (which I suspect is the more relevant part). https://www.pugetsystems.com/workstations/xeon/w790-e/

You could probably configure it for more with those alveo ma35d cards, bifurcation, and risers if you really cared and you're after volume of AV1 instead of higher quality prores. It'd also be much more expensive at that point and look like a Frankenstein machine. Need a proper rack mount server.

But this is an extremely niche use case anyways

this comparison is with a major caveat of the platform you're buying. using workstation-grade hardware to contrast is not quite fair imo, unless you really want 100s GB of RAM for cpu alone.

you can easily go with faster cores and like 128 GB ram with the latest ryzen platform and buy consumer-tier gpu and save on much more. however, it might make more sense if you just want to buy in bulk and not worry about all that. then might as well throw in the 1k monitor stand in your shopping cart.

Genuinely curious: folks with desktops or workstations with 1TB or more of RAM, what do you use it for?

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