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MattRogish

Mac Pro: 7 teraflops for a few thousand.

Cray X1 in 2004 5.9 teraflops[1] for only ~$40M USD[extrapolating from 2].

Mind boggling what to expect 10 years from now.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray [2]http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/11/15/cray_flogs_x1_superc...

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>Mac Pro: 7 teraflops for a few thousand.

>Cray X1 in 2004 5.9 teraflops[1] for only ~$40M USD

Each D700 GPU is 3.5 terraflops. These are the same hardware as the 7970 which currently retails for 300 dollars. So it's even more impressive -- 7 teraflops could be nearly an order of magnitude less than that!

With any luck the CX1[0] will eventually be seen as merely ahead of its time, and not just a dead end. It was a marvelous concept for a machine. The main difference is that instead of stopping with cores-per-socket and flops per core, you also consider network and IO performance, between nodes in the workstation running quietly under your desk...

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_CX1

And the Mac Pro even looks like a shrunken Cray (minus the included seating).

Original IBM PC: $2400 ($6000 in today's dollars) for 0.00477GHz, 0.000016GB RAM, no storage (cassette interface).

For years, it was a rule-of-thumb that your dream machine was always $5000.

Fully trick-out a Mac Pro, and that rule might still be true.

I would expect it to top out at significantly more than $5k

It doesn't matters, this is a halo product, it's main purpose is to showcase the company's engineering chops not being a sales success story like the iphone or ipad were.

Problem is previous such products like the G4 cube coexisted with the traditional and less pricey powermac, while this thing killed the old mac pro, leaving a lot of pros and their expensive expansions and accessories out in the cold.

> it's main purpose is to showcase the company's engineering chops

I agree with this, but I'd add that it's to show off their silky smooth blend of engineering and design. We all can go to NewEgg or a million other online retailers and build something which approximates the specs of this machine. Shit, almost two years ago I built a 32 core machine with 32GiB of RAM (could've added more RAM, didn't need it as problem was parallelizable and CPU-bound).

As for the sales successes, I really want one of these, and I'm sure I'm not alone. I'm betting most individuals who buy these will be the types who also spend money on art. What I mean is, I could scrape enough loose change together to get one, but I have no use for it. My desire for one is purely emotional. It's beautiful. Just a hunch, but I think Apple's margin on this product fits more closely with the fine art consumer market than the mass consumer market.

That's the problem, the people who want this "as art" aren't nearly as many as those who bought the previous mac pro for work, so again you have the same problem the G4 cube had.

> Mac Pro: 7 teraflops for a few thousand.

I bet it will still beach ball...

64TB of memory? Yes please.

I wonder if it's any good at mining bitcoins... How long do I have to mine for this to pay for itself? ;)

A long time given that it's nowhere near as efficient as a dedicated bitcoin-mining ASIC.

Hold on tight! It's going to be an awesome ride.

does the apple marketing department troll hacker news?

Well, to be fair, it's more a comment on Intel's progress than Apple's. I'm sure you can throw together an ugly generic PC with the same parts for less. Anyway, workstations are supposed to look big and intimidating :)

Can you? The CPU alone is unbelievably expensive. Two high-end GPUs are not cheap either. I would be interested in seeing the cost of a truly equivalent generic PC build. ("Truly" equivalent meaning no non-Xeon CPUs and other "almost as good" parts, something that's all too commonly done with Mac Pro comparisons.)

>Well, to be fair, it's more a comment on Intel's progress than Apple's.

>Can you? The CPU alone is unbelievably expensive. Two high-end GPUs are not cheap either.

In the context of this thread topic of, "wow 7 teraflops used to cost millions and now you can put it on your desktop with a mac pro" yes, you can get those same numbers with even less money. A computer with two 7970s is 7 teraflops and those particular cards retail for 300.

A quad 780 GPU configuration would cost 4 or 5 k and get you even more impressive stats, at 16+ teraflops it crushes those cray numbers.

For me, the emphasis on the GPU is the precisely problem. There are other ways to allocate resources and still keep the price down.

For background, I generally take the time to plug my laptop into a monitor when I'm commuting to an office, but since I like to take my work with me the laptop is my primary device. Working with multiple monitors is nice, but I always gravitate back to my portable workflow.

My use of the old Mac Pro was usually through the terminal, or via web apps, and centered on storage, long running processes, or providing services to others. It was very handy to have the machine physically in my office, for a variety of big-enterprise-nonsense reasons, so quiet operation was appreciated.

So, now it looks like if I wanted a comparable setup I'd be stuck with a Mac Mini, and I guess 3 more Mac Minis with external storage. That sounds fun to me personally, but it really shouldn't be necessary. I also wouldn't look forward to presenting a request for a vanity mini-cluster for myself, and having to compare that on a cost/performance basis to a basic 2U server, even if that wouldn't sit in my office.

If the new Mac Pro were more compute-focused, or provided some flexibility in that regard, then I'd have zero complaints. As it is, I can only imagine being asked to take a break from actual work to to help someone who has one of these machines with an e-mail problem.

Edit: I should mention that I really appreciate the the approach to cooling, and engineering overall. I've had some very loud (60 dB), very hot workstations that I'm thankful to be rid of.

I have a colleague who has a machine with 4 NVIDIA Tesla cards, and he is looking at getting one with 8 cards.

Many video/audio editing tasks benefit from the GPUs, not to mention HPC (but OpenCL sucks, so its NVIDIA/CUDA only here). If you aren't into those workloads, maybe you don't want a MacPro.

That's a good point, and I could get extra mileage out of GPUs for some tasks. HMMER and Amber both benefit from that type of acceleration, for instance. But unfortunately I still would expect to be CPU-bound nearly all the time. Having 64GB of memory would have been great, but I'd need another 20 cores to fully utilize it.

How much does a 4 Tesla rig cost?

Brand new each cost ~$3,499 [1]. The rest of the computer could be $2,000. So possibly $15,000.

I remember them being around ~$10,000 when they first came out. So I'm guessing you could be more economical.

[1]: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814132...

E5-1620 v2 (10M cache, 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 3.70 GHz (130W), 22nm) - $294

Hardly unbelievably expensive. In fact, the CPU is disappointing -- a top of the line non-Xeon desktop CPU would actually be better, not just in speed, but features. However, I blame this on Intel, not Apple, as the larger socket CPUs now lag the desktop line by more than a year, mostly because there is little to no competition for them and so Intel concentrates on other product lines. Your choice is now newest cpu or option for more than 4 cores.

The GPUs are also not that interesting. They are top of the line from AMD now, but they are just about to release new ones that should delegate those to middle of the line before the Pro comes out. I hope the cpu choice doesn't mean that Mac Pro is stuck on Ivy Bridge as CPU for it's entire run, and that you can upgrade the GPU to Hawaii for the better models on launch.

A z620 with 32gigs of ram, quadro k4000 and two 6 core procs running at 2.66gigs is roughly the same price (within 10%, bear in mind that they are yet to bump to the v2 procs that the apple use.)

Granted it lacks an SSD, but thats an extra £250, depending on what you want to achieve.

Unless you are doing something that really hits the GPU, then this mac is pretty much useless to you. Video editing is mostly IO bound. Only a few effects are use the GPU, let alone can make things faster.

Bear in mind that the SSD in the Mac Pro is PCI-E. It seems like all the M.2 form factor PCI-E SSDs are going to OEMs right now. Would be interesting to know what they will be selling for at retail.

FYI, the cheapest PCIe SSD card I could find, a 240GB OCZ RevoDrive 3 will cost you ~$600 (while IOPs weren't specified, a +1GB/s RW was mentioned in the keynote).

As you mentioned, much of the cost is in the (extra) GPU (roughly FirePro W7000 class), but being said, I think you underestimate how important OpenCL is these days for video editing. FCPX is heavily dependent on the GPU and presumably Logic will be moving in that direction as well.

I work for a large VFX company, trust me, video editing doesn't use the GPU that much.

Depends on the software package you use. FCPX uses OpenCL for real-time playback w/o rendering, including realtime FX, transcoding and accelerating plugin rendering.

Premiere Pro's Mercury Engine does similar things with CUDA accelerating many effects, scaling, deinterlacing, blending, and color-space conversions.

If you're going to do proxy-less RT 4K like they mentioned in the keynote, you will need the GPU.

BTW, I spec'd out a Z620 w/ an E5-1620v2/12GB RAM and topped $3K even w/o video cards. 2 W7000's puts you over $5K: http://h71016.www7.hp.com/dstore/MiddleFrame.asp?page=config...

Well I guess we won't know until they release part numbers on the CPU, and that part number is available form Newegg/Amazon. It's not clear to me if they're going Haswell or Ivy-Bridge. The I-B E5 Xeons on Newegg now are all 6+ cores and very expensive (into the thousands of $s). The closest I can find are Haswell quad core (the new Mac Pro is 4-core) and are much cheaper: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116...

> I would be interested in seeing the cost of a truly equivalent generic PC build. ("Truly" equivalent meaning no non-Xeon CPUs and other "almost as good" parts, something that's all too commonly done with Mac Pro comparisons.

I agree with that. We'll have to see.

The Mac Pro is Ivy Bridge-EP. Haswell-EP won't be released for a year.

The CPU and GPUs are going to contribute hugely to the price and it seems impossible to figure out exactly what they cost yet, so I guess all we can do for now is speculate.

Will be interesting to see exactly how it all compares once the info becomes available, for sure.

4 Core: E5-1620 v2 Price $294.00

Best guestimates I have seen on GPUs are high 200s to low 300s each for the base model items.

The closest equivalent on the GPUs for the D300 (same SP count, slight clock bump, less RAM) is the W7000, which goes for about $650/ea right now.

Part for part, the new Mac Pro is very well priced, but like others have mentioned you could make different decisions if you put together your own system (personally I'd rather have a single R9 290X for example, but I game more than I CAD/CAM).

Of course, the new Mac Pro is your only choice if OS X is something you need (discounting PITA to update hackintoshes).

+ 256GB PCI-Express based Flash storage, which is more expensive than regular SSDs

The GDDR5 FirePros start at more like $450, and that's with less VRAM

Most of the FLOPS number comes from the GPU. A single Radeon 7990 (~$800) pulls 8.2 (single-precision) TFLOPS by its lonesome. You can throw a pair of those and a beefy CPU into a computer for under $2k and claim 17 teraflops.

Either you can or you can't, and I've never seen Apple sell hardware without significant markup. If I had a complete part list I'd be interested in seeing the difference as well.

I've seen plenty of cases where someone said they could build an equivalent PC for less, and then ended up not being able to, because they were thinking of cheaper and worse components than Apple used.

I don't know which way it goes with the Mac Pro. But it's certainly not obvious to me that there's any sort of substantial markup on Apple's part here. The CPU alone is going to cost something like 1/3 to 1/2 of the total purchase price. I don't even know what the GPUs cost (can't find any mention of the model Apple lists outside of Mac Pro discussion) but I bet they're not cheap either.

Apple stuff is expensive generally because it's high-end, not because there's a huge markup. When people say that e.g. the Mac Pro is too expensive, they generally mean that it has more than they need (e.g. they don't want a Xeon CPU), not that it's overpriced for what it actually has. That's why I preempted the use of non-equivalent parts, because it's really common to start out this sort of comparison with something like, "Well, I don't actually need a Xeon, so I tossed in an i7 instead, and I don't need a workstation GPU so I used a gaming GPU instead, and..." and they end up with something much cheaper but not at all the same.

You have to stop thinking that a large OEM such as apple will be as subject to the artificial market segmentation pricing Intel & AMD makes. Intel sells i7 CPUs much cheaper than the equivalent xeon cpus for example. The big advantage of the equivalent xeon is being able to dual socket it and some other cheap-for-intel features being switched on. You can't dual socket CPU this mac pro anyway and GPUs tend to max out at ~$500 each for equivalent consumer GPUs.

So in summary, you can make an equivalent performance PC for $1500-$2000 dollars.

Core i7s and Xeon E3s are actually very close in price. The E3 1275v3 is $353.99 and the i7 4771 (the same sans ECC) is $319.99, and the i7 4770K (no ECC but overclockable) is $339.99. The E3 1245v3 (100MHz slower) is only $289.99, and the i7 4770 (same base speed as the 1245v3 but one extra turbo bin) is $309.99. The E3 1225v3 (300MHz slower than the top i7s and E3s) is $224.99, only slightly more expensive than the i5 4570 ($199.99) which is clocked the same but lacks HyperThreading and ECC.

Your problem is in assuming that the Xeon E5s that are going into high-end workstations and servers are in any way comparable to the E3s and the consumer parts. They're not. The E5s have twice the memory bandwidth, more than twice as many PCIe lanes, and a minimum of 20% more cache (and cache sizes scale up with core count). The E5s admittedly don't have the integrated GPU, but nobody in that market misses it.

Do you know how much those GPU's cost? This isn't a $1500 home gaming machine, it's a standalone server. And spending $3-$5k on a Dell server with dual video cards is completely reasonable. Some of the Tesla cards run for $3k+, by themselves!

You misunderstand. I'm not thinking that Apple is subject to anything. I'm not talking about their costs at all. I'm merely talking about our costs if we were to try to build an equivalent PC ourselves.

Apple probably gets a steep discount on all of its components, but that's completely irrelevant for this comparison.

I don't doubt that you can build a much cheaper PC if you go through the whole parts list and substitute cheaper, worse consumer parts for all the workstation parts in the Mac Pro. The question is, can you really build the same thing for the same price? I bet you can't, or at least it's close. Maybe you can, I could be wrong.

The question isn't how much a generic PC that's "good enough" costs. The question is how much it costs "with the same parts".

How are 'workstation' GPUs better than good 'gamer' GPUs? Isn't that differentiation basically a big marketing con in the first place?

You're shifting the goalposts a little by starting with "building an equivalent PC" then concluding "but it doesn't use the same parts"

You get ECC RAM, but mostly you're paying for drivers. They are usually slower for gaming, but provide better accuracy and usually crush consumer cards in pro performance.

Interestingly enough, EFI flashing a RadeonHD 7970 gets it recognized as a FirePro D700 in 10.9: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1594669

It may be a marketing con, but if you buy your $30,000 engineering package and expect it to run on your gamer GPU, you may need to do some video card firmware hacking to make that happen. And then, of course, you won't be able to get any customer support from the software vendor for any visual glitches which may appear. Sucks, but that's how it is -- workstation GPUs _are_ better, generally not in terms of FPS in Crysis, but in terms of out-of-the-box compatibility with off-the-shelf high end software packages.

If you are in the rare software segment with $30k software, then the extra $1000 or $2000 to indirectly get hardware drivers & firmware that confirm with your $30k software is not a big cost.

BUT, there are large segments that do not need those special drivers in their software set and are restricted by circumstance to use OS X only, such as iOS developers. Or just people who want high performance GPUs with their mac who don't need the FirePro feature set. There are also many software packages that do GPGPU or OpenCL just fine with consumer segment GPUs too.

I would of loved it if it was a mac pro with dual CPUs vs. dual GPUs for example, something you really can't physically get without the xeon level chipset, even though we all know it's very possible with a consumer chipset.

I just remember that at my last work, the hardware designer was using Solidworks for his CAD work, and the single-threaded rendering was an issue. There was an active community looking for the best cards to do that rendering on, and moderately high-level gaming cards did significantly better than the 'workstation' cards by Matrox and similar.

I don't know what price tier Solidworks is in, but looking at their site now, it's in the "get a quote" category, so they're not a consumer-level bit of software.

"with the same parts" is a quote from the original comment I was replying to way up there. No goalpost-shifting is occurring on my end.

This xeon is $343 at retail for 3.5GHz quad core. http://www.neweggbusiness.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9B-1...

I know it's not linear, but you really expect Apple to be paying $1000 to $1500 for a 3.7GHz quad core?

I'm sure I'm one of those people you're thinking of. I built a PC last year for $1k and it appeared either identical or better than the maxed out iMac which was ~$3k.

While that is not the correct CPU, the overall sentiment is correct; there's no way that the CPU would constitute such a significant portion of the purchase price.

Intel's own product page pegs the recommended price as $294 (oem packaging, tray): http://ark.intel.com/products/75779/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-...

And indeed one may be able to obtain a ready to ship and in stock OEM packaged version of the CPU in the upcoming Mac Pro for $303.99 (+2.99 UPS ground + CA tax as applicable): http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?p=E5-1620V2

Thanks. I wasn't sure how to find that, even though I did do some searches on superbiiz.

I'm not sure I understand the discrepancy. Why would the CPU be so cheap ($303.99) compared to the one I posted, which several commenters are claiming is severely under powered in comparison?

These new lower end E5 16xxs are essentially Core i7s and priced about equivalently[1]. The 26xx's are much beefier (I think people were expecting 26xx's across the line but matching specs[2], this is obviously not the case).

I'd be pleasantly surprised if the 12C Mac Pro sold for less than $6K but as you can see the big ($1500!) bump is between the 6C/8C and they didn't talk pricing beyond the 6C so if they don't eat the cost you're looking at a $6K 8C and a $7K/$8K 12C.

4C exact match: $294 Xeon E5-1620 v2 4C 3.7GHz/3.9GHz 10MB L3 130W TDP

6C exact match: $583 Xeon E5-1650 v2 6C 3.5GHz/3.9GHz 12MB L3 130W TDP

8C closest match (underclocked?): $2057 Xeon E5-2667 v2 8C 3.3GHz/4GHz 25MB L3 130W TDP

12C exact match: $2614 Xeon E5-2697 v2 12C 2.7GHz/3.5 GHz 30MB L3 130W TDP

Tom's Hardware did some superficial (mostly desktop workload) testing on the E5-2697 v2 a couple months ago: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ivy-bridge-ep-xeon-e5-26...

[1] http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2013/2013091401_Intel_Xeon_E5-...

[2] https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/ and the description text: "Intel Xeon E5 with 10MB L3 cache and Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz. Configurable to 3.5GHz 6-core processor with 12MB L3 cache, 3.0GHz 8-core processor with 25MB L3 cache, or 2.7GHz 12-core processor with 30MB L3 cache"

I don't expect Apple to, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were putting in a CPU that we would pay that much for.

The CPU you cite is an E3 versus an E5 (not that I have any clue what that means), runs slower, and has less L3 cache. I don't know how much those add but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a lot. Just once, it would be nice if someone making a Mac versus PC price comparison could compare against a part that was better than the one in the Mac....

Xeon E3s have half the memory bandwidth, only 40% of the peripheral bandwidth, and at best 80% of the cache of the low-end E5s. A Xeon E3 is just a consumer CPU with ECC support. A Xeon E5 is a pro part.

>Just once, it would be nice if someone making a Mac versus PC price comparison could compare against a part that was better than the one in the Mac....

I'm very sorry. I couldn't find a faster xeon for sale and I thought it would suffice to demonstrate how a 200MHz increase most likely isn't worth $1000.

I imagine you think it logically impossible that Apple could be marking up the cpu, since I can't currently buy the cpu myself (and thus the cost for me is infinite)...

When I'm the most valuable company in the world and not just some guy searching newegg, I'll get back to you.

You may not be aware of this, but there has been a years-long practice of people making claims about outrageous markup of Apple hardware versus BYO systems, and not actually using the same hardware. It's irritating. (There certainly are cases of outrageous markup, but in this case, we don't really know yet, and the prices for Xeons are high.)

This reminds me of complaints about Apple laptops. I'm sold now, but when I first purchased one I was still a Linux/Windows dual-booter. So I specced out the Macbook Pro that I wanted, specced out (roughly) equivalent systems with every major brand at the time (circa 2006, this was the Core 2 Duo CPU version). I got a lot of systems that were close enough (+/- 50GB depending on their HDD sizes, = RAM or slightly more because I had some minimum I wanted at the time, close enough clock speeds with the same CPU (+/- .2GHz)). Every one of them ran to +/-$300 of the cost of the Macbook Pro, and not all of them had educational discounts (still in school at the time so I could take advantage of that). I haven't done this comparison in years, but ~2009 I did it again because I was tired of the noise from my coworkers and it came out similarly, similar specs meant priced within 200-300 of the Mac. Spec it out, don't just guestimate, and equivalent systems aren't significantly cheaper, if cheaper at all (either BYO or from someone like Dell or HP).

Yeah, Apple hardware is often decent value for money at launch, if your needs are exactly met by one of Apple's handful of models, with nothing that's overkill or unused and nothing missing. How many people is that true for though?

For example, if - for instance - you want a decent dedicated GPU you have to get a Mac Pro with an expensive Xeon E5 CPU and a workstation-glass GPU, even if you only need a much cheaper i7 or i5. Similarly, if you need lots of CPU power you have to pay for an expensive GPU even if you don't need it. These are hardly unusual requirements! (Also, Apple famously skimps on RAM compared to the rest of the system and then overcharges for extra RAM.)

Maybe sometime you should try the reverse exercise. Pick out a handful of popular PCs and see how much it would cost to buy an equally-powerful Mac.

I completely agree. Apple doesn't offer the ability to pick and choose, so you can end up with hardware much in excess of your needs, both in capabilities and in price.

My point is simply that this is a rather different situation. People phrase it as "Apple charges a premium" when it's more like "Apple sells high-end products". It doesn't make much difference to you if you want a medium-range product instead, but it does mean that Apple isn't just ripping everybody off.

There's a reason people pay much, much more for E5s than E3s, and it's not for clock speed. You can't get more than 32 GB of RAM in an E3 server, for example, while E5 servers can handle 256 per processor. E5s can coordinate between processors for multi processor machines, too.

As I mentioned, clock speed is only one difference. The cache is not the same, and from a bit of research, it looks like the E5 has double the memory bandwidth over the E3, so it's not at all a trivial difference.

> I imagine you think it logically impossible that Apple could be marking up the cpu

What would make you think that? I just want to see an actual comparison, not comparisons with parts people think are "close enough". Maybe that's impossible right now, in which case I want people to stop trying instead of coming up with "close enough".

The question is, how much does it cost to build a PC "with the same parts"?

>I've seen plenty of cases where someone said they could build an equivalent PC for less, and then ended up not being able to, because they were thinking of cheaper and worse components than Apple used.

If your needs align exactly with the models Apple offers, and Apple just released a product (what would the comparison look like if you needed to buy a system six months ago?) then sure.

The real-world question is to decide what your needs are in terms of specs and then compare the different ways of satisfying those needs. To choose an egregious example: I need an average CPU with a powerful GPU for real time performance. Going with Apple I am pushed into a hardware bracket where I have to spend in excess of $4000 to meet those needs. I could also satisfy those needs with a 700 PC and a 400 GPU.

I'm not sure. I just through some configuration options for a standalone tower server, and you can definitely get a comparable Xeon in there for the same or less. What's not clear to me is those video cards. There is no reference on the Dell site (or anywhere else I could find) as to what an AMD D300 FirePro is, or how much it costs. Dell lists FirePro V7800 and W7000 for ~$1500, but I don't see the D300 listed on any site so it much be an exclusive thing?

try to put PCI-Express based Flash Storage (1.2Gbit/s) in there and you will see that the MacPro is actually a good deal for people that need that kind of stuff.

Right now I think you can't, unless you can get your hands on a cheap dual socket motherboard for the new Xeons. Even then, the PCIE SSD will get you over the limit.

I really like the new Mac Pro, even if it's not upgradeable...

Lenovo Thinkstation, with the same Xeon quad-core, a bit less RAM (8 GB vs 12), and a 1TB hybrid disk instead of the 256 GB PCIe SSD, runs 2447 (plus 20 shipping!) on Amazon, and is almost 3X as heavy (30 lb vs 11).

nah, it depends :D Sometimes, it needs to inspire the creators as well. And some build it and some just want a beautiful one to get job done. And to be successful for Apple or not, it's based on their research about the market.

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