2019 Mac Pro (28-core) Review | Hacker News Reader

2019 Mac Pro (28-core) Review

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29 pointsbluedino24 comments

> Now, ordinarily these computations are run on a supercomputer and cost thousands of dollars per solution, or you’d need to build a cluster for $15-20K or more. But with 28 cores and the ability to handle up to 1.5TB of memory, the Mac Pro is a competitive alternative.

If a desktop is being considered, aren't desktops with similar performance from Dell, HP or whoever just as competitive?

(Also, that cluster is cheaper than this Mac.)

A high spec Mac Pro isn't much more expensive than a similarly spec'd HP/Dell workstation.

For the base config with the pitiful 256GB SSD maybe, but once you start loading it up to usable workstation grade configs the difference becomes wider and wider. And with DELL/HP you can also go the AMD route with even better performance/bang for your buck.

IIRC the Mac Pro is mostly aimed at music/graphic professionals for whom the software is Mac only.

That's right and the spec'd up Mac Pro can deliver you performance tailored to music/graphic/video professionals that almost no PC can.

That is not true.

How so?

That might have been the case 15 years ago, when software was specifically written to work with the different CPU architecture. Nowadays it's Intel and so any Intel (or AMD) CPU will perform just as good as the Mac Pro CPUs with these tasks.

You do know that the Mac Pro's CPU is Intel right?

Check out the machine and see the amount of other hardware components that can be attached to it that makes it outshine a PC for its use case. The spec'd up Mac Pro is a complete beast. It can run upto 1.5TB's of memory at 140GB/s, it has eight PCIE slots that can include two Radeon Pro Vega II Duo MPX Module's that provide 32GB of video memory per GPU that cranks out 28 teraflops of computing power per duo which is 56 teraflops with both modules installed. The 2080 Ti only puts out 14 teraflops.

Remember, these are designed for video editing, image processing and graphics design.

PS: I am a PC builder and avid fan of PC's.

> You do know that the Mac Pro's CPU is Intel right?

That was my point. ;-)

I don't think that Adobe or others are still optimizing their software to run better on Mac OS. How would they? Any Mac is a (special) configuration of parts from the shelves of Intel and alike.

I think it was different with the PowerPC architecture where you could do things differently internally.

The Mac Pro surely is a beast but I think you could configure/build other workstations to have the same amount of power.

Fair enough, sorry my "You do know xxx right?" was a little crude.

I was under assumption that the Apple software (Final cut etc) had special drives for the graphics elements.

Then again, that would become EOL quicker than you can poke a stick at it.

I couldn't find any dell or hp workstations that go over 64GB in RAM. The Mac Pro goes up to 1.5TB. Apples and oranges.

It looks like you can configure the Dell Precision 7920 [1] and the HP Z8 [2] both with 3TB if you want (admittedly at an absolutely bonkers price point).

[1] https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/workstations-isv-certif...

[2] https://store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/hp-z8-g4-workstation-customiz...

More bonkers than what Apple is charging?

Yes, Dell actually wants a little bit more for RAM than Apple does. Not by much though.

I don't know what you saw on heir websites but we have an EPYC powered HP workstation with 1tb of RAM in the office for almost a year now.

I had one of those original G4 PowerMacs. It was my first Apple computer and I've used Apple as my primary machine since that day. For a similar price as the Microsoft/Intel machines, you got the far better performance (though Intel caught up quite quickly) and a case that was fairly stylish (at the time) yet was amazing for its flexibility and ease of access.

The new one: it doesn't appear to offer any performance advantage at its price point. The case appears to be great for flexibility and ease of access, but it is clearly overstyled for the purpose of being as expensive as possible.

It really isn't as impressive as the original.

How are the AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo for GPGPU?

If I'm running numpy, pytorch, TensorFlow, etc. does AMD now just work? Last I looked maybe a half-decade ago, everything did CUDA smoothly and seamlessly. Support for OpenCL was a bit limited. I see a bunch more things from AMD now (ROCm, etc.), but I don't really now if they're first class citizens yet or still playing catchup.

Often, GPU performance is more important than CPU.

I use Blender and GPU rendering isn’t supported because Apple recently took away OpenCL support in favor of their Metal implementation. Maybe something to be aware of.

You need to compile from source but PyTorch and Tensorflow now support ROCm in their build configuration.

Numpy never supported GPUs and the most advanced Numpy-like was Cupy supported by the Chainer team which stopped development in favor of PyTorch.

Now I'm unsure how well Rocm is supported with Apple drivers as Apple always customized their drivers.

Would be interesting to see the same benchmarks for an AMD Threadripper or Epyc with 64 cores.

As an iMac Pro user I can relate to this review a lot.

- The iMac Pro is beautiful. Really. The space grey and black around the screen are both discrete and stylish. I absolutely despise bright colors on my computers and this machine ticked all boxes for me.

- Insanely quiet. A month ago I was working at about 4:00 AM and everything around was absolutely quiet. Then I heard a slight humming noise and I thought this might be the time I actually hear the iMac Pro. But no, it turned out to be my external HDD. To this day, after owning the iMac Pro for ~4.5 months, I haven't heard its fans, not even once.

- It's of course powerful. Haven't seen it glitch or lag once. And the rare cases I did it was definitely a software issue (like the Mac AppStore mysteriously refusing input for some odd 5 seconds sometimes). Anything that can actually use the hardware works fast. I am little worried about the SSD promised performance though; it says it should support 3.3GB/s writing speed but the very best PostgreSQL `pg_restore` performance was 1.6GB/s; I am guessing it's the quad-memory channel that might be the bottleneck, as several reviewers in the past claimed. Overall, everything just works fast.

- The iMac Pro's power highlights how flawed are so many software packages. They simply can't make use of the 10 cores I have, or that much RAM, or the insanely fast SSD. We finally arrived at a point when hardware is more than capable but software is stuck in the past. Having the iMac Pro really did drive this point home for me.

- macOS however leaves something to be desired in terms of stability. One of my external HDDs practically ruins the sleep of the iMac Pro and I often found it shut down in the morning. And one dual-rack box where I keep two old SSDs in RAID 6 configuration is always disconnected after I wake up the computer. It's weird. One time I even had to do safe mode reboot. But hey, this might be hardware vendors not fully complying to specs. Wouldn't be the first time.

---

Overall, I am extremely satisfied with the iMac Pro. But I do wonder if I should be buying a Linux workstation with the 64-core Threadripper in 1-2 years; practically only very specialised software packages can make use of such monstrous hardware.

We the programmers have to start using multicore-friendly technologies like Elixir or Rust's rayon library. We can't slack any longer. Powerful machines which will sit idle because of our crappy technologies and programming languages are coming.

If the biggest negative you have with macOS is unreliable sleep, you’re not going to enjoy linux.

source: i use linux

Yep, I've heard a lot about it. Usual advice is to make a thorough research on all your hardware and it playing well with Linux and sleep modes -- which I wouldn't mind if I fully invest myself in a beastly Linux workstation by the way.

However, with the advent of the really good AMD CPUs lately, and their attached motherboards and recommended RAM sticks, I am not really sure a proper research on what plays well with Linux and sleeping will be viable for a while. The community has to catch up with the new hardware first and whoever buys a Threadripper 3990x for Linux (together with its recommended high-end motherboard) is basically taking one for the team until proper drivers (or upstream Linux kernel support) is added and stabilised for the sleep modes of the newer AMD hardware.

So even if I had $25k laying around I'd still not spend them on a TR 3990x Linux workstation right now. I'll wait and see how the Linux community deals with potential issues with the motherboard chipsets first.

UPDATE: I figured I'll run one benchmarking tool and it actually managed to achieve 2.4GB/s on sequential writes with 1MB buffer and 4GB testing space.

Not bad at all.

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