[HN Gopher] Apple is struggling to build Mac Pro based on its ow...
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Apple is struggling to build Mac Pro based on its own silicon
Author : pulse7
Score : 180 points
Date : 2022-12-20 09:06 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| lastdong wrote:
| Many houses dropped apple, not only because of price, but also OS
| capabilities and software availability. The system became too
| limited, so where you would see rows of mac pros, you prob now
| see PCs.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| I love my M1 Air, but I never understood why these high-tier
| workstation places put up with Apple in the first place.
| xrayarx wrote:
| So the article quotes another article from bloomerg (by Mark
| Gurman), which can be found here
|
| https://archive.ph/pxQam
|
| The gist:
|
| The new high-end Mac Pro with Apple silicon is behind schedule,
| and you can blame changes to the company's chip and manufacturing
| plans.
| perfecthjrjth wrote:
| The talent behind M1 left Apple years ago, because they weren't
| giving enough stocks, bonuses. So, Apple is left with fixers. I
| don't expect Apple to bring another revolution in chips.
| justinator wrote:
| Those are some bold predictions based on no evidence and
| Apple's track record of doing just what you say will now be
| impossible.
| scrlk wrote:
| The talent exodus from Apple and its subsequent effects on
| their ability to keep delivering have been suggested for a
| while now:
|
| https://www.semianalysis.com/p/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-
| ha...
|
| https://www.semianalysis.com/p/apple-m2-die-shot-and-
| archite...
| dagmx wrote:
| I would take anything from SemiAnalysis with a heavy
| grain of salt. The author has a very biased view on
| companies and often states conjecture as fact. A lot of
| their numbers of company attrition are based on
| questionable extrapolation of a few high level employees
| that left.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I have no horse in this race, and.. isn't there a lot of
| backroom reason to cast suspicion, fear, uncertainty and
| doubt on Apple about CPU and chip design?
| novok wrote:
| That is so typical apple, penny pinching on compensation and
| worker experience with things like mandatory office commutes
| and charging for food. I've heard they've changed their tune
| recently at least comp wise, is that true?
| geodel wrote:
| Specially when best worker experience companies have
| delivered best consumer product experience.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| At staff+ levels, Apple pays aggressively IIUC.
| ladberg wrote:
| Maybe that's true (I don't know one way or the other),
| but my personal opinion as someone who left Apple is that
| the majority of the best/most positively influential
| engineers were not staff+ and didn't have amazing comp.
| pmalynin wrote:
| Not aggressively enough
| conanbatt wrote:
| Is IIUC the International Islamic University Chittagong?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I know someone who worked on the original M1, he's now at
| Google. He said they just booted macOS on the iPad's
| processor and it seemed to mostly work aside from some bugs,
| so they refactored that into a more complete solution for
| macOS-specific things that were broken.
| hooo wrote:
| Do you know where they went or what they're up to now?
| nexus7556 wrote:
| Some went to Nuvia which was later acquired by Qualcomm.
| Ian Cutress gave some history in this video:
| https://youtu.be/zhQ_ytzLUnc
| philjohn wrote:
| If they can make Qualcomm competitive with the Apple
| SoC's that would be great for everyone that isn't Apple,
| and by extension, the market as a whole. Here's hoping.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/apple-lawsuit-
| says-...
| [deleted]
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| I think this sentence from that article is a big reason why
| it's been delayed:
|
| > an M2 Extreme version of a Mac Pro would probably cost at
| least $10,000 -- without any other upgrades
|
| That would be a very niche market compared with the lower end
| devices.
| api wrote:
| ... and it's not like the M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pro or
| Studio machines are low end. They're blazing fast. It's very
| much a niche market since anyone demanding even more power
| can easily just build a Linux box with 2X the power for 1/4
| the price or use cloud.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Isn't cloud rendering cost prohibitive? i.e. don't you get
| killed on egress costs?
| api wrote:
| For some workloads yes, but as I said you can build an
| insane local box running Linux or Windows for 1/4 the
| price of the Mac Pro.
|
| Last I checked for a few thousand USD you could have 64
| CPU cores with 128 threads, 128 gigs or more of RAM, and
| one or more top tier GPUs.
| steve1977 wrote:
| There's use cases (e.g. music production) where this
| doesn't work.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I don't think music production has ever been the market
| for the mac pro.
| ace2358 wrote:
| I'm still using a 2012 max pro upgraded to 2x 6 core
| 3.6ghz and 128gb ram.
|
| I have 12tb of storage, nvme ssd and an optical burner!
|
| I've put this machine together over a few years and total
| cost is 3k Aud.
|
| They're still great value, this machine can still run
| drivers for hardware from 2005 (with FireWire!). I can
| run any os from snow leopard to big sure. I can put a
| Thunderbolt card in it. I can put most GFX cards.
|
| I have a laptop for my performances, but in the studio,
| this thing is a beast and I hope it works for quite a few
| more years as a replacement will be very expensive.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| It absolutely was for a long time. There's a number of
| studios that even still have old PowerMac and cheese
| grater Intel towers chugging along in some capacity, and
| audio professionals were among the loudest to protest the
| "trash can" Mac Pro's lack of expansion slots.
| 72deluxe wrote:
| I wonder if Thunderbolt and USB interfaces killed all
| this though? It's difficult to find a dedicated card for
| an audio interface these days.
| rewgs wrote:
| It's not at all, plenty of great PCIe cards out there.
| Most notably RME.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Not sure but two or three years ago I watched some videos
| from an audio engineer who migrated from the trash can to
| the 2019 cheese grater and he seemed pretty happy. He
| ditched several Thunderbolt enclosures and filled his
| tower to the brim with cards.
| 72deluxe wrote:
| I used to use a cheese grater Mac at work and was
| impressed at the build quality and tool-less chassis, and
| also how heavy it was! Quiet in use too.
| eunoia wrote:
| Yeah but what music production workflow needs the power
| of an "extreme" chip? The M1 Max and Pro (not to mention
| Ultra) are already practically overkill for the vast
| majority of musical workflows. Many producers work on
| plain M1 Airs as when everything has enough functional
| power, the lack of a fan becomes the most desirable
| feature.
| rewgs wrote:
| Film composers. Absolutely absurd track counts, plus
| usually working in quad or 5.1. A majority of the big
| ones have long since moved to using multiple Windows
| machines, but most of them did so begrudgingly. For a
| long time, the usual choice was a Mac Pro, but the Xeons
| were never a great choice from a processing standpoint --
| they just enabled the massive amounts of RAM needed for
| said absurd track counts, though ECC was an unnecessary
| added expense. Musicians tend to prefer macOS for a
| variety of reasons, and the Mac Studio is a breath of
| fresh air, _finally_ giving us something we actually
| need.
|
| That said, the Mac Studio still doesn't quite enable
| everything to be loaded on one machine, so the PC farms
| are still in use; worse, the primary software used to
| utilize those PC farms, Vienna Ensemble Pro, isn't yet
| Apple Silicon native, so...for the time being, the Mac
| Studio still isn't quite ready for prime time. The Apple
| Silicon Mac Pro would likely enable finally moving to
| using a single machine running macOS with the CPU
| performance _and_ amount of RAM needed, so you best
| believe that film composers will move to it in droves
| once it comes out, whatever the price, as VEP being
| native or not will no longer be a factor.
|
| Source: was a fairly successful film composer myself
| until I developed an ear condition called Hyperacusis,
| now working as a programmer writing custom tools for my
| peers, and as a tech consultant designing their rigs.
| eunoia wrote:
| Yeah that actually makes a ton of sense. I almost added a
| flippant addendum to my post along the lines of "unless
| you're running 1000 orchestral VSTs at once".
|
| And sure enough, that is a real workflow! Thanks for the
| knowledge.
| rewgs wrote:
| Totally, always happy to talk about this stuff. Making
| film/game/TV scoring a not-horrible experience is a
| fascinating problem to solve.
| mort96 wrote:
| The Mac Pro is already in the extreme niche. The current
| Intel-based Mac Pro starts at $6000.
|
| That almost-doubling from the already insanely expensive
| machine could push it past a breaking point for a lot of
| current customers though, I don't know.
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| What that costs more than my car...?????
| verzeichnis wrote:
| Where's the blues mobile?
|
| I traded it in for a microphone.
|
| Oh, okay.
| [deleted]
| layer8 wrote:
| If you take into account that $6000 when the Mac Pro came
| out adjusted for inflation is now roughly $7000, then the
| price increase is "only" around 40%, or even less when the
| new Mac Pro is eventually released.
| lapcat wrote:
| > If you take into account that $6000 when the Mac Pro
| came out adjusted for inflation is now roughly $7000
|
| That's not how it works with computer prices.
|
| For example, in 2012 the 13-inch MacBook Pro started at
| $1699. In 2022 it starts at $1299.
| brandall10 wrote:
| That's a poor example. The 14" is the true successor and
| that starts at $1999.
|
| EDIT: since I can't respond - I meant the latest and
| greatest in that size class. Back then we had that 13"
| and the 15" rMBP. Now we have the 14" and 16" M1. The 13"
| MBP is a low cost entry w/ a legacy chassis.
|
| I don't disagree computer costs can fluctuate, but
| generally where there are leaps forward in design and
| capability they do go up in price, perhaps not keeping
| inline w/ inflation though.
| lapcat wrote:
| What does "true successor" mean?
|
| How about an iMac, which started at $1299 in 2012 and
| starts at $1299 in 2022?
| rbanffy wrote:
| > The Mac Pro is already in the extreme niche. The current
| Intel-based Mac Pro starts at $6000.
|
| Oddly enough, the one I played with felt slower than the
| Mac Studio.
| dijit wrote:
| > the one I played with felt slower than the Mac Studio
|
| The Mac Studio _is_ faster than the 2019 Mac Pro.
|
| https://www.macrumors.com/guide/mac-studio-vs-mac-pro-
| buyers...
|
| When the Mac Pro came out it was the fastest Mac that
| existed, but those Intel Chips were already dated and
| were being roundly beaten by AMD chips of the era.
|
| The "killer feature" was the encoding acceleration card,
| but a faster variant is available inside Apple Silicon.
|
| I'm not sure where the cut-off is, but I think the M1 Max
| (Not ultra) is also faster than the Mac Pro 2019.
| yreg wrote:
| Why though? M2 Extreme would be cheaper for Apple than the
| current Mac Pro chips it buys from Intel.
|
| If Apple believed it has to sell it for 10k for the single
| reason of avoiding Mac Studio canibalization, and at the same
| time Apple believed 10k is too high for the customers, then
| Apple would kill the product.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > M2 Extreme would be cheaper for Apple
|
| I doubt it would be all that cheap.
|
| TSMC is said to be charging $20k for a 3nm wafer, and
| initial yields for a large die size made on a brand
| spanking new process node wouldn't be expected to be great.
| NeverFade wrote:
| The implication in the article is that M2 Extreme would not
| be cheaper, but would cost substantially more than these
| Intel chips. It would also perform far better.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| $4000 more?
| yreg wrote:
| I don't think that implication is clear, but even so I
| don't understand why Gurman believes that. Apple margins
| improved with Apple Silicon transition.
| NeverFade wrote:
| Apple margins may have improved, but the M2 Extreme that
| Gurman posits would be a beast of a chip and much more
| expensive to produce:
|
| > The company made the decision because of both the
| complexity and cost of producing a processor that is
| essentially four M2 Max chips fused together. It also
| will help Apple and partner Taiwan Semiconductor
| Manufacturing Co. save chip-production resources for
| higher-volume machines.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I think the limit would be on the package rather than the
| chip itself; the Ultra is already two Max dies in a
| single package. I wonder if this means multiple-socket
| motherboards (historically used for SMP) are again viable
| for this class of systems.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > much more expensive to produce
|
| Apple's foothold in video production is a delicate thing
| and it seems prone to disruption by a player able to
| offer a macOS comfort with generic x86 prices.
|
| edit: removed wrong part
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Huh? The M1 Ultra does use multiple dies according to
| sources. How's that different from what others call
| "chiplets"?
| rbanffy wrote:
| Sorry. I was misremembering it. It uses an interposer.
| :-(
| mrpippy wrote:
| "Cheaper" including the NRE, and having to dedicate (very
| limited) chip design resources to it? For such a low volume
| product, probably not.
| brookst wrote:
| Isn't that a decision Apple would have made years ago? I
| don't think they can be years into design and still
| working on NRE in an effort to bring NRE down.
| gjvc wrote:
| > an M2 Extreme version of a Mac Pro would probably cost at
| least $10,000 -- without any other upgrades
|
| When you're charging $1,000 for a monitor stand, all prices
| are arbitrary.
| brookst wrote:
| Close! Differentiated goods are priced based on what people
| are willing to pay, not cost of production.
| gjvc wrote:
| but how is said monitor stand a "differentiated good" ?!
| dijit wrote:
| Because it was mostly advertised wrong.
|
| The target market for that screen are buying the VESA
| mount, but Apple didn't _include_ the VESA mount and
| added it as an add-on, I 'm not sure why; meaning the
| "$600 Monitor stand upgrade" - which is _basically_ to
| prevent people buying it as a monitor unless they 're
| going for "Luxury" - became $1,000.
|
| The Pro Display XDR is competing with $40,000 screens for
| tv/movie production- and studios that use displays like
| that swap them out quite often because they lose their
| calibration; they have rows of VESA mounts.
| gjvc wrote:
| You've convinced me. $600 for a monitor stand is a
| complete steal.
| dijit wrote:
| I think you missed the part where I mentioned that it's
| not really meant to be a bargain, the bargain is the
| screen. The "luxury stand" is purely a fashion accessory,
| because anyone who would actually _buy_ the stand is not
| buying the screen for it 's intended purpose (or at least
| from the target demographic).
|
| It's like buying one of those artic polar watches that
| can go to 150M that's gold plated.
|
| The gold plating is not helping you in that situation,
| whoever is buying the gold plated edition of that watch
| is buying it as a fashion accessory, not as an expedition
| watch.
|
| If they want to part with their money: let them.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Is the monitor stand advertised as a luxury good or as a
| basic necessity because maybe that is a source of
| confusion, especially if it's presented as a default
| accessory.
| mlyle wrote:
| It's a $5k display that's intended for pro-use.
|
| You can buy it with nothing, with a relatively cheap VESA
| adapter, or a stand for desktop use cases.
|
| The high-end display market is niche; using such a
| display with a stand to sit on a desk is even more niche.
| It's a very low volume stand but it also has to be
| relatively good in both form and function so that people
| don't whinge that they got what feels like a flimsy $300
| monitor's stand for their $5k monitor.
|
| Who buys the stand? Unusual pro uses where they're better
| off with a stand than a VESA mount; and people who are
| just looking for the highest end "fanciest" monitor ever.
| gjvc wrote:
| > It's a $5k display that's intended for pro-use.
|
| You make a clear case, except paying 20% of the cost of
| the device for a stand that sits on the desk seems
| ridiculous to me.
| mlyle wrote:
| 20% of the cost of the device for a stand is probably
| typical in actuality-- just it's usually bundled.
|
| If it seems ridiculous, don't buy it-- most of us would
| be using a monitor arm for a monitor like this.
|
| It has a nice 4 bar linkage, bearings, etc. It's
| intrinsically not cheap and is made in extraordinarily
| low quantities.
| philjohn wrote:
| As has been stated ad nauseam (and you seem to be
| ignoring) it's a red herring. You instead spend $200 for
| the VESA adapter and put it on a monitor arm. Which is
| reusable for your next monitor (and the monitor after
| that, and the monitor after that etc. etc.)
|
| Heck, I can't remember the last monitor I had that I kept
| the stand - it goes back in the box, and into storage
| until the warranty expires and then it goes in the trash.
| The Monitor goes on a VESA mount arm.
| gjvc wrote:
| The bully always accuses the the victim of what they
| themselves are guilty of.
|
| This chatter about VESA mount arms and if you buy them or
| not is irrelevant. The price of the monitor stand as
| stated by Apple what is being discussed.
| elzbardico wrote:
| In other words. If you buy it to put it on a desk, you
| are probably the equivalent of a suburban dweller buying
| a Ram 3500 pickup with dual rear wheels. So, it is better
| this stand looks good and expensive because that's the
| whole point of your purchase.
| mlyle wrote:
| That's one reframing. Mine is simpler:
|
| * Apple realistically needs to provide a stand, even
| though most users in their target market won't use it
|
| * The target market is already small/niche
|
| * The stand has to be relatively nice
|
| * All in all, this means low quantity, high quality ==
| very high cost.
| gjvc wrote:
| > Because it was mostly advertised wrong.
|
| Wrong advertising makes it a differentiated good?! I bet
| you believe the BS about holding your iPhone wrongly,
| too.
|
| Apple is a real cult.
| mirchiseth wrote:
| And where you have monopoly - true or due to cartel
| nature. Why does medicines cost so much in US. They are
| not differentiated for sure.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Again, what monopoly are you talking about?
|
| The market of high end computers? Apple definitely does
| not have a monopoly there. Bringing in US medicine is not
| really a relevant arguement.
| hengheng wrote:
| I assume that the monitor stand has much lower initial
| costs and needs to sell in lower quantities to break even.
| Maursault wrote:
| I don't really accept that. So what if it's $10K? Even if
| they doubled the price, so what? There are lots of firms that
| would outfit their studios with dozens of $20K Mac Pros. In
| 1996/7, the ANS/700, running a special version of AIX, was
| upwards of $25K. Not many were sold, and yet the ANS group
| _was still profitable._ Steve Jobs killed it along with A /UX
| in his return.
|
| This "$10K is too expensive" line doesn't fly. Right now,
| just upgrading a Mac Pro processor can push the price over
| $13K. Again, so what? I'm certain there were more than a
| handful $50K configured 2019 Mac Pros sold. This kind of
| thing is expensive for the individual, but for a business
| it's merely a commodity. $50K is cheap because it couldn't
| even pay the salary of one developer for a year, and the Mac
| Pro is useful for at least a few years, so cost is more like
| $16K/yr. That's an absolutely nothing business expense.
| acchow wrote:
| > Not many were sold, and yet the ANS group was still
| profitable.
|
| Profitability isn't sufficient for a company like Apple. It
| has to be the best use of these resources - it needs to be
| more profitable than dedicating the team to work on
| something else at Apple.
| Maursault wrote:
| I don't think that was it. Jobs wouldn't tolerate any
| other UNIX at Apple except NeXTSTEP. He killed A/UX while
| still in negotiations for Apple to purchase NeXT. I don't
| even think Apple worked on those versions of AIX. IBM
| likely provided it under contract. ANS only ever ran AIX
| and NetBSD.
| ryanwaggoner wrote:
| At Apple's scale, selling tens of thousands of these could
| both be very profitable and still not worth the effort and
| distraction.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| And it is relatively less than what one would pay for, say,
| an sgi workstation years ago. Overall, I don't think it's
| the price that is off-putting for a pro.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| In 1996 a high end SGI desktop workstation cost about
| $45,000. The low end was $14,000.
|
| In todays dollars that's $85,000 for a high end graphics
| production workstation to $27000 for a low end.
|
| Kids these days are spoiled.
| Hamuko wrote:
| But the Mac Pro was always for a highly niche market. Even
| the cheapest Intel-based Mac Pro is $6000. And that's with a
| pretty meager 8-core CPU that gets worse single-core and
| multi-core Geekbench scores than the M1 Max found in a $2000
| Mac Studio.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| It was not always like that. It's the current generation.
| Old generations had more reasonable pricing.
| rconti wrote:
| Yup. My 2006 Mac Pro (first gen intel mac pro, the
| original cheese grater tower) cost me under $3000. IIRC,
| that plus a 24" Dell display added up to $3k total, or
| $4400 in today's money.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I feel like the switch was the garbage can pro.
|
| I wonder if it's just more of a 'it's not where the
| market is' thing. Working in tech and creative industries
| even previous to the garbage can there was a dramatic
| shift in people just opting into laptops instead of
| desktops. With only the people with really demanding
| workflows sticking with the desktops. Now I mostly only
| see mac desktops in video production contexts (editing
| stations, compositing/effects, 3d.. maybe you'd also see
| that in high end audio production as well).
|
| As offices have changed over the years with more hot
| desking etc. it's hard justifying a desktop machine...
| not to mention the pandemic. So maybe apple made a
| conscious decision. Keep the mac mini to serve a lower
| end mostly stationary workforce or for installation type
| work, kill the whole middle-to-lower-highend desktop line
| and cater to a high end 'studio' workstation.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Yup. I asked for an OG intel cheese-grater at an old job.
|
| The boss blinked and said something along the lines of
| "we're not spending that kind of money for your system"
| and I pointed out that with 16gb of ram but otherwise
| base config, it was about the same price and a much
| better deal performance-wise than a Macbook Pro. Xeons
| versus an intel mobile i5, and the widest/fastest memory
| bus around at the time? No contest.
|
| The water-cooled ones were an absolute shitshow...Apple
| was pushing the edge too hard on that. AIO coolers are
| still kinda hit-or-miss (the good, well-made ones are
| fine.)
| NeverFade wrote:
| Fair, but there's still a big difference between the base
| model currently costing $6,000 and a base model that will
| cost over $10,000. That's a 70% price hike.
| Hamuko wrote:
| It's possible that they're positioning the $4000 Mac
| Studio as the replacement for the entry-level $6000 Mac
| Pro, and the $10,000+ Apple Silicon Mac Pro is a
| replacement for the upmarket SKUs.
|
| If the M2 Extreme is to the M2 Ultra what the M1 Ultra is
| to the M1 Max, namely that it's just two chips pasted
| together, then the M2 Extreme might start with 128 GB of
| RAM (Max: 32 GB, Ultra: 64 GB). That alone is a $1000+
| upgrade to the current Mac Pro.
| brookst wrote:
| That "price hike" depends on how many people buy the base
| model. If 90% of customers were spending $10k+ anyway, it
| might make economic sense to just not offer a model at
| the $6k price point.
| lapcat wrote:
| In 2012, Apple was still selling an Intel Mac Pro for
| $2500.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| > that gets worse single-core and multi-core Geekbench
| scores than the M1 Max found in a $2000 Mac Studio.
|
| That's also because they didn't bother updating it for
| years. Just like the previous trashcan model.
|
| I don't really understand how Apple gets away with that.
| The people that spend this kind of money to get top of the
| line hardware are the same ones that are ok buying 4-year-
| old hardware at introduction price???
| jeffybefffy519 wrote:
| It sounds like the killed off their own top tier Mac by being too
| performant in lower tiers.
| pulse7 wrote:
| It is "too performant" because it is integrated. But because
| "it is integrated" it can not be easily expanded with other
| needed "performant gear"...
| dblooman wrote:
| For those people who use a high workstation, what is the typical
| price? I feel like people spending more than 10k on a machine
| must not be bothered, they want the performance
| the8472 wrote:
| $employer procures workstations equipped with 64C Threadripper
| Pro + A6000 48GB GPUs for CG artists. They haven't said what
| they're actually paying but list prices of those machines are
| north of 15k. Devs get a similar setup except smaller GPUs.
| rekoil wrote:
| $10k is easily double what a beast workstation has
| traditionally cost. Yes, you've been able to configure Mac Pros
| or iMac Pros for similar prices in the past, but it's always
| been the ultra high-end with niche use cases, currently if you
| max out a Mac Studio you're up to around $10k.
|
| That's with 20x general compute cores, 32x neural engines, and
| 64x GPU cores, 128GB RAM, and 8TB of storage. I guess it's
| probably useful for 8K video workloads, but not much else.
|
| If the article is right and they're targeting a $10k base price
| for the Extreme version of the chip, then they better get it
| VERY right for it to be worth the effort, and I wouldn't expect
| many customers to be lining up regardless.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| > $10k is easily double what a beast workstation has
| traditionally cost
|
| I was thinking similarly. Not Mac, but $4-5k will get you an
| extremely well specced Dell/HP workstation suitable for
| nearly anything. Staying under $5k can also make it easier to
| push it through finance where higher price premiums typically
| require more paperwork.
| kergonath wrote:
| Here (research lab doing computational materials science),
| we get a EUR8k workstation every three years or so. AFAIK
| there is no review from the accounting people below EUR15k.
| In any case, honestly, the expense is tiny compared to the
| salary and other costs of whoever is using it for 3 years
| (close to a quarter million overall).
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| > ...the expense is tiny compared to the salary and other
| costs of whoever is using it for 3 years
|
| No argument there, but a line is drawn somewhere on ease
| of purchasing and it usually falls short of $10k.
| dagmx wrote:
| 10k is fairly normal for professional workstations when you
| factor in high memory Quadros and xeons.
|
| I would really not recommend comparing to home built
| machines. Studios tend to lease from Dell/HP and those
| workstations will often be in the 10k+ range.
| a2tech wrote:
| I regularly see people in the scientific and engineering fields
| spend more than 10k on a workstation without blinking. A
| company I work with that does antenna design for example
| dropped 12k (plus a bit more) on a workstation within the last
| year. No fancy video cards, just super beefy CPUs and tons and
| tons of RAM.
| [deleted]
| mrchucklepants wrote:
| I'm on a $12k Dell workstation. Modeling and simulation work.
| gumby wrote:
| If they really cared about this niche market I think they would
| need to rethink the problem. A lot of the important rendering is
| done in rendering farms (AKA cloud these days).
|
| So build a two part design: a rack form factor with a storage
| fabric and a lot of processors combined with a super mac studio
| for display and control, all connected with 10 GB. The investment
| would be immense compared to the market (not just in hardware but
| with the end user tools) and hard for most companies to develop
| software for.
|
| The only upside for Apple with this approach would be that their
| cloud back end could benefit from this development.
|
| It's the classic Innovator's Dilemma: I don't see this market
| being worth investing in at all for a company like Apple.
| highwaylights wrote:
| Or just market bundles of Ultra studios for those customers
| with some niche zero-conf convenience feature as a hook.
|
| Only thing is at that point it makes sense to have either a
| monster PC somewhere out of sight or cloud resources, so
| whatever hook they come up with would at least need to _appear_
| like it usefully alters the workflow, because it 's going to be
| _really_ expensive relative to an out-of-sight PC.
|
| It really begs the question of who the Mac Pro is really for
| anymore? If you need that amount of power you're probably
| better off with a MacBook and an external compute resource like
| above, or even just an eGPU (I know, the ARM chips don't
| support them, but you could just buy used Intel SKUs in a
| pinch).
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| They don't have much of a cloud back end at the moment though
| do they? Thought they used Google.
| rmorey wrote:
| Apple runs their own DC's for some things, but is also
| primarily an Azure customer, IIRC
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The old Intel Mac Pro is available in rack-friendly form
| factor. Alternately, people have racked Mac Minis, so I think
| Mac Studio's would be mostly the same?
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| A quick search came up with 3U plates that will allow you to
| mount two Mac Studios.
|
| https://www.macrumors.com/2022/09/06/sonnet-mac-studio-
| rack-...
| scarface74 wrote:
| You overestimate how much work is actually done in the cloud.
|
| While I can't speak definitely how much rendering is done in
| the cloud, I can speak to how much general IT spend is done in
| the cloud from someone who should know...
|
| https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud/amazon-shocker-ceo-jas...
|
| Disclaimer:Jassy is my skip*7 manager
| gumby wrote:
| Not an external cloud, but those pixar movies are generated
| by big server farms. The cloud just resides in pixar's
| buildings, not amazon's.
|
| And that's the point of the cloud metaphor (starting from the
| original Internet protocols paper from Cerf et al): you don't
| care. It doesn't mean "a computer somebody else owns"
| dagmx wrote:
| You still need high performance and low latency for local
| rendering so the artist can make interactive changes
| scarface74 wrote:
| That's no more "the cloud" in modern parlance than the two
| servers sitting in a server room and arms throw away that
| we accessed via a green screen in the 90s,
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Assuming that thet use dynamic provision of services
| abstracted from physical servers, that is exactly the
| modern definition of "private cloud".
|
| You seem to be confusing cloud with "public cloud", but
| private (and hybrid) cloud is very much a part of the
| modern understanding of cloud.
| scarface74 wrote:
| You could do that with old IBMs. Does that mean if I have
| one laptop where I can provision multiple VMs, I'm doing
| "cloud computing" from my house?
| bmitc wrote:
| > Mac Pro systems are often used for cinema and video production,
| and such workloads are getting more demanding as resolutions and
| color depths increase. And such systems not only need
| performance, but the also versatility and flexibility of a
| desktop PC, as they need to install a variety of add-in-cards,
| accelerators, advanced storage devices, and so on. To add these
| boards, a new Mac Pro would need advanced I/O, which is somewhat
| of a departure from Apple's SoC ideology that entails a very high
| level of integration.
|
| I have always wondered: why do these industries effectively bet
| their industry's computation on the whims of a company like
| Apple, who does what they (Apple) want when they (Apple) want and
| loves to shut out integrations?
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| > I have always wondered: why do these industries effectively
| bet their industry's computation on the whims of a company like
| Apple, who does what they (Apple) want when they (Apple) want
| and loves to shut out integrations?
|
| Do they? Last I heard, most of the industry uses Linux render
| farms...
| bmitc wrote:
| I guess I don't really know and was kind of going off of the
| article. I sort of thought the industries heavily used Macs,
| but it does make sense that some use much more industrial
| setups.
| berkut wrote:
| Most of the high-end VFX/CG industry uses Linux for both
| workstations and render farm nodes. Some studios like Pixar
| allow a bit more flexibility to some artists in certain roles
| (generally those that don't work in the pipeline that much -
| i.e. concept artists) to use other software / OSs, but
| otherwise it's mostly Linux.
|
| Smaller studios use Windows/Mac a bit more (boutiques use
| Macs the most), but the removal of the Xserve and the lack of
| competitiveness in the MacPro for several years have shifted
| some away from Mac.
| viraptor wrote:
| > Most of the high-end VFX/CG industry uses Linux for both
| workstations
|
| How do they deal with HDR content? As far as I know it's
| not supported yet and the colour management is lacking,
| which seems like a big problem for today's content.
| berkut wrote:
| ICC support works fairly well, and anyway, each DCC
| (Katana, Nuke, Houdini, RV, etc) has custom (normally via
| OCIO) colour profile support itself, so even if the OS'
| support isn't perfect, it doesn't really matter (as long
| as the graphics drivers can push the correct result out).
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| > As far as I know it's not supported yet
|
| Linux can support it, just not every display
| server/application (yet)...
| [deleted]
| suction wrote:
| dusted wrote:
| My impression is that when they look to buy, they get whatever
| is the best fit for them at that moment.. (maybe biased by
| various "gifts" and such to the right people)
|
| When it's time to upgrade the old stuff, the process happens
| again, and the previous gear more or less entirely retired..
| KaiserPro wrote:
| For movies (not sound) most macs are/were used for video
| editing or matte painting.
|
| Something that either needed final cut (and the rather good
| final cut studio) or photoshop.
|
| But final cut has been somewhat overtaken by adobe (or was when
| I was leaving the industry) and blackmagic fucking with the
| entire software stack by making resolve and fusion free(ish)
|
| There are some niche bits like cinesync that allows remote
| viewing of footage securely and colour accurately that might
| still need a mac.
|
| Apart from laptops, apple have lost the VFX market pretty well.
| dmitriid wrote:
| It amazes me how Apple completely screwed over Final Cut Pro.
| They went from ostensibly 60% market share in video editing
| to low double digits, maybe?
| windowsrookie wrote:
| They did make a huge mistake with Final Cut Pro X.
| Professionals continued to use Final Cut Pro 7 until just a
| few years ago.
|
| That said, everyone I hear who uses Final Cut Pro today
| seems to prefer it over any other editor. You can
| flawlessly edit multiple 4k color corrected video streams
| on an $800 fanless MacBook Air with 8GB RAM, and get 10+
| hours of battery life while doing it. Nobody else can touch
| that.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Yeah, FCPX had massive growing pains but after a few
| years, it has matured to be eons better for a modern
| editing workflow than FCP7. It's sad they had to take so
| long to get there, a number of people switched to
| Premiere during that time, but there are still a huge
| number of individuals and studios who edit on FCPX today.
| dmitriid wrote:
| The main criminal thing they did IMO is offering no
| upgrade path, at all until very late. IIRC you couldn't
| even import FCP7 projects for two years or so after FCPX
| release.
| Maursault wrote:
| > But final cut has been somewhat overtaken by adobe (or was
| when I was leaving the industry)
|
| I'm pretty certain the industry standard has always been Avid
| Media Composer, even if today and for years nearly all of the
| market share is Final Cut Pro X with the minority remainder
| split between Premier Pro and Da Vinci. Most of the choices
| being made out there are, "do I want Media Composer or FCPX?"
| And FCPX is a lot less expensive, so that's how it goes.
| SSLy wrote:
| And for indie filmmakers, Adobe's AE is still the VFX king.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| These industries typically give so few shits when it comes to
| money that replacing a fleet of 100 2020 Mac Pros with 100 2022
| Threadripper based machines is seen as a minor inconvenience at
| best. Apple provides good hardware at the moment ? Use Apple
| hardware. Apple can't let us plug in our Quadro cards on our
| VFX guys machines ? Buy a new workstation somewhere else, who
| cares ?
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I think as tech got more standardized, we're seeing industries
| move away from this (eg. new movies use AWS as a render-farm
| instead of just buying powerful desktops for the office).
|
| Interestingly, there is historic reasons that apple has
| disproportionately been successful with creatives and its not
| the marketing of MacBooks to hapless poets. Some of it is just
| "photoshop was first available on a Mac so other software was
| first made for a Mac".
|
| Early Macs were historically faster and more capable due to
| using POWER chips, which made them desirable for performance
| oriented work. It led to a story that Macs were export-banned
| like weapons due to performance (reality is more fuzzy here)
| [1]. Other unique advantages Macs supposedly have: the first
| color monitor (def better for creative work).
|
| Additionally, apple (Steve Jobs?) cared about graphics and
| color more than competitors, so any creative would want to use
| a system that cared about what they cared about. Even today,
| apple advertises their very expensive "reference grade"
| monitors. I'm not a creative, so I don't know how truly the
| apple monitor fills that purpose. The aesthetic and big $5k
| monitor (which works best with a Mac) was claimed to replace a
| $30k small and ugly reference monitor, which would leave lots
| of budget to splurge on a Mac Pro.
|
| --- [1] https://www.techjunkie.com/apples-1999-power-
| mac-g4-really-c...
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Exactly how are you supposed to get 4PB of raw video to aws
| and back to color correct?
|
| Or edit? The cloud makes 0 sense for most of video
| production.
| rescbr wrote:
| Shipping it! AWS Snowball all the way. I know that many
| production houses move those huge files in this way.
| docandrew wrote:
| "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon
| full of backup tapes."
| ben7799 wrote:
| Early Macs didn't use Power chips.. that came quite a bit
| later.
|
| They went through Motorola 65XX -> 68XX -> 68XXX -> Power PC
| -> Intel.
|
| That portion before Power PC was a long time, 18 years.
| wtallis wrote:
| The Apple I, Apple II and Lisa were not Macintosh
| computers. The first Macintosh used the 68k processor, and
| was only 10 years before PowerPC, not 18.
| pjmlp wrote:
| This is the official stack for movie industry as standard,
|
| https://vfxplatform.com/
| scarface74 wrote:
| There was only a very slim window of time that the PPC was
| faster than x86 in real life besides synthetic benchmarks and
| even then they were hobbled by slower busses, slower graphic
| cards (if they had any at all) and an operating system that
| wasn't fully native.
| aprdm wrote:
| New movies don't use aws. Don't believe the marketing . None
| of the big vfx studios uses the cloud as their main render
| farm, mostly for bursts .. it's crazy expensive
| fredoliveira wrote:
| Well... I read this earlier today:
| https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/avatar-the-way-
| of...
| gamblor956 wrote:
| "It usually uses its data centers to process multiple
| films at the same time. With Avatar: TWOW, even the
| entire data center was not enough."
|
| "Rendering each frame took 8,000 thread hours, or the
| combined power of 3,000 vCPUs in the cloud for an hour."
|
| ""we couldn't architecturally expand our data center
| because that would require infrastructure that would go
| to the city council, and we all know what it's like to go
| through local government," he said.""
| speedgoose wrote:
| Yes you don't need that many months of workloads to make a
| on premise cluster worth it. Surprisingly.
| lambdasquirrel wrote:
| That doesn't surprise me at all. Just the entry level
| p3.xlarge is $2k USD a month. You'll be able to build your
| own in short order if you're actually using it all the
| time.
| ihatepython wrote:
| > Additionally, apple (Steve Jobs?) cared about graphics and
| color more than competitors?
|
| Did they really care about color? The original Mac didn't
| have color (it didn't get color until about System 7?) I
| think they chose higher-resolution over color. It's the same
| with the NeXT I believe, higher-resolution is more important
| than color.
| kalleboo wrote:
| It took a while for Apple to add color support, but when
| they did they were early out with proper color management
| in the whole chain from scanner to display to printer
| (ColorSync). IIRC when Adobe needed this on Windows for
| PhotoShop they had to re-implement it themselves (rather
| than relying on Windows)
|
| According to this MacOS got OS-level color management in
| 1993, and Windows wouldn't get it for another 4 years https
| ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_management#Operating_sys...
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| And funny enough to this day color management on Windows
| is a terrible mess. Kind of incredible, feels like low
| hanging fruit for wooing creative users, but I guess
| that's what happens when you're dominant and can maintain
| that dominance through sheer inertia.
| scarface74 wrote:
| A while? The first Mac came out in 1984. The Mac II came
| out in 1987.
| prewett wrote:
| Given that color monitors were 16 colors at the time of the
| first Mac, color calibration wasn't going to be of much
| help. Most people were using green and black monitors,
| anyway, except for the labs with the amber VT320. The
| memory requirements for color were just too large to be
| affordable.
|
| According to Wikipedia, the Macintosh II [1] came out in
| 1987, System 4.0, with 256 colors--for the equivalent of
| $17,000. I doubt color calibration is much use with 256
| colors (although apparently the Mac II support 16.7 million
| colors but you could only use 256 of them), but I can't
| find anything on when color calibration was supported.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_II
| anikom15 wrote:
| The black and white Mac monitors and software were
| carefully tuned to match the output of black and white
| offset printers, so yeah, they really cared about color
| before they even had color.
| timc3 wrote:
| Its more that the whole operating system was better for
| creative tasks, from font management to color management, as
| you touch upon, then the software started building on that.
|
| The Studio XDR display is not a replacement for a reference
| monitor and Apple ended up back pedalling on claiming it was.
| I don't know why you think what it looks like matters, or the
| size as they are a professional tools.
|
| I used Photoshop on Irix running on an SGI, and the SGI back
| in the day was way more powerful than anything Apple produced
| for serious tasks (not sure it was a better Photoshop machine
| though).
| plufz wrote:
| I don't work at any big studio but as a long time designer
| I would say that creatives (generalizing here) care deeply
| about the aesthetics of everything around them. If I was
| going to build a studio to attract good creatives I would
| definitely pay for having aesthetic monitors (they would of
| course also need to function for the purpose).
| bostik wrote:
| The SGI Indigo ("Indy") workstations looked gorgeous back
| in their time. Our university had an entire computer
| class kitted out with them, and out-of-hours access was
| meted out ... sparingly.
|
| AFAIK the class was mostly used for computer graphics
| courses. For OpenGL stuff written in C, they were quite
| beasts. For everything else, it was still Irix.
|
| Of course, when the room was used in the evenings, it was
| mostly for bzflag LAN melees.
| amelius wrote:
| And despite all this, they still didn't manufacture their own
| display panels.
| Maursault wrote:
| > It led to a story that Macs were export-banned like weapons
| due to performance (reality is more fuzzy here)
|
| The US government classified the G4 as a "supercomputer" and
| banned their export. Apple tried to make hay of this, but it
| hurt them, and within months Apple was lobbying to lift the
| ban.
| timc3 wrote:
| It's not based on the whims of a company, it's usually based on
| what runs the software they need to run well, and what the
| operators like working with and how well it integrates with the
| rest of the production line.
|
| The higher up in the food chain you get with production the
| less these machines are used as general purpose computing boxes
| and the more they just run one task (be it color grading,
| compositing, editing, sound editing & foley).
|
| Yes, you can use Windows/Linux PCs, and they make more sense
| for a lot of 3D work and certain other tasks but at the end of
| the day Apple macOS and hardware just make sense and the cost
| is not a problem.
| amelius wrote:
| I think it is simply not true and big production houses all use
| Linux. Or at least any software that also runs on Linux.
| pavlov wrote:
| During the late PowerPC era (2000-2005), Apple was at risk of
| losing this industry entirely. Every new professional content
| creation application was being built primarily for the Windows
| NT platform which had already successfully killed off SGI
| workstations and their proprietary Unix software stack. Intel
| and AMD CPUs were consistently delivering both better
| performance and pricing, despite the brief glimmer of hope from
| IBM's PowerPC G5 CPU in 2003.
|
| What kept Apple alive in this market was 1) Pro Tools, 2) their
| own suite of applications like Final Cut Pro and Logic, 3) the
| 2006 Mac Pro that finally delivered everything users had hoped
| for -- latest Intel CPUs, Windows compatibility, enough fast
| PCI slots for everyone. It was really the best of both worlds
| and became the x86 media desktop to beat. (In typical Apple
| fashion, the 2013 Mac Pro swung too far the other way towards
| Apple-specific integration and was an abysmal flop with massive
| heat problems and non-upgradeable GPUs stuck in the past.)
| conradfr wrote:
| Ironically Pro Tools is still not M1 native.
|
| One cool thing in MacOS that Windows can't do is aggregates
| of audio devices/interfaces.
| foxhill wrote:
| > Ironically Pro Tools is still not M1 native.
|
| that does not surprise me at all, unfortunately.
|
| > One cool thing in MacOS that Windows can't do is
| aggregate of audio devices/interfaces.
|
| it does come at the cost of latency & jitter: fundamental
| issues that ultimately stem from having two separate audio
| clocks. and it's not really a specific limitation of
| windows, which tend to use ASIO for low-latency audio.
| there's nothing stopping a an aggregate ASIO driver from
| being written, i just can't imagine it'd be that useful,
| indeed, i've only ever used the macOS aggregate device a
| handful of times, mostly only to try it out.
| ilyt wrote:
| I used it in Linux, but that's because it detected
| 2-in/4-out audio interface as just three stereo pairs and
| I needed to split those inputs off to mono.
|
| It was a lot of CLI fuckery, not a pleasant experience...
| and of course pulseaudio can't just _remember_ it, need
| to be re-applied after every USB reconnect.
|
| Can be done with UDEV but not exactly something random
| user would know how to do.
| steve1977 wrote:
| The one time I've actually used an aggregate device, I
| synced the clock of one device to the other. It worked
| fine as far as I remember (it's been a couple of years).
| 72deluxe wrote:
| Mine didn't in practice. I think one was a FireWire audio
| interface and the other USB. Never could get it to work
| properly.
| lightedman wrote:
| "One cool thing in MacOS that Windows can't do is
| aggregates of audio devices/interfaces."
|
| Some of us didn't need it, software at the time allowed us
| to record and mix from and playback to different audio
| hardware devices simultaneously already. I remember doing
| that in Windows ME with some audio editing software.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Ironically Pro Tools is still not M1 native._
|
| Public beta this month, though.
| https://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=422724
| dijit wrote:
| Honestly this area is so frustrating technologically.
|
| MacOS has easily the best Audio subsystem across MacOS &
| Windows.
|
| In Linux we have JACK, which is as good as MacOS (if not
| better honestly).
|
| But then Linux suffers from having very little commercial
| support _and_ worse than that, a lot of problems with
| hardware video encoding.
|
| Windows doesn't have any problems encoding video, but it
| has a terrible filesystem (which is forced on you) that
| causes problems for the insanely large files that you
| _must_ work with on video production _and_ in addition: the
| audio subsystem is the worst of all three platforms.
|
| Linux could be a contender, if someone threw $100M USD at
| the problem, but getting adoption for a linux solution
| would be hard because the Apple stuff works "fine" and
| movie productions are more time constrained than cost
| constrained.
| viraptor wrote:
| > In Linux we have JACK, which is as good as MacOS (if
| not better honestly).
|
| And now we have Pipewire which is not only better, but
| can also pretend it's Jack for compatibility.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Pipewire still had its issues (mixing setups can easy
| cause weird sound issues) but it's much better than
| anything that came before it.
|
| I'd go as far as to say Pipewire made connecting to my
| Bluetooth headphones more reliable on Linux than on
| Windows, though neither audio stack is particularly good.
| ilyt wrote:
| > In Linux we have JACK, which is as good as MacOS (if
| not better honestly).
|
| _screams in terror_
|
| The ideas are great, the realization is jackshit. Sooo
| much finicky crap that partly also depends of whether
| your sound output is special enough to work well with it.
| And trying to make it play nice with pulseaudio is
| another nightmare.
|
| Pulseaudio itself also suffers massively from UI
| problems, pretty much all non-basic use cases is either
| mess with configs or "just run a bunch of commands on
| runtime or every time your USB interface reconnects".
| Jack at least gets that part right
|
| Trying to get some audio interface to be connected
| properly was... an experience, it just showed in system
| as one stereo input (it was 2 mono inputs) and 4.0 output
| (it had 4 separate outs) so there was a good deal of
| pulseaudio fuckery to run to just split it properly
|
| > Linux could be a contender, if someone threw $100M USD
| at the problem, but getting adoption for a linux solution
| would be hard because the Apple stuff works "fine" and
| movie productions are more time constrained than cost
| constrained.
|
| I wonder if someone figuring out how to run the usual
| tools via Wine/Proton and somehow integrate nicely with
| pipewire would've been enough...
| nobleach wrote:
| I thought to myself, I think I'll stream some Codewars
| challenges on Twitch. I have a Shure mic, a Sony ZV-E10,
| and some speakers for listening to music. Surely Linux
| can handle all this and pipe the audio into OBS...
|
| Yes... it is possible. No, it's not something I ever want
| to do ever again.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I don't understand why you bring pulsaudio to the table
| when answering about JACK. This is unrelated.
| dijit wrote:
| Pulseaudio is so extremely over complicated that it took
| _years_ of distro maintainers trying to wrangle it into a
| working default configuration for many people, and it was
| adopted because ALSA didn't (but was going to) support
| multiple inputs to a single output.
|
| It is a prime example of short-sighted "just rewrite it
| then!" Style Behaviours in FOSS and continues to be
| brought up in conversations about subsystem replacements
| (such as systemd).
|
| Pipewire is a good replacement, but pulseaudio is to JACK
| what windows movie maker is to Final Cut.
|
| It doesn't deserve to be brought up when talking about
| professional solutions.
| ilyt wrote:
| It really is amalgamation of "whatever works fine as
| default on Lennart Poettering's private laptop". Hell, I
| still remember where "sec, I need to restart pulseaudio"
| was common thing I've read from my colleagues any time
| they needed to run some voice chat app...
|
| ALSA before that wasn't great either, the fact you didn't
| get any software mixing by default and needed to fuck
| around with dmix gave way to endless problems with
| various software, and the fact dmix was still working
| subtly different than "real" device also reared its ugly
| head in many "pro audio" apps.
| dijit wrote:
| > ALSA before that wasn't great either, the fact you
| didn't get any software mixing by default
|
| It was being developed.
|
| People jumped on Pulseaudio and made it the default
| before it was finished because the ALSA contributers
| wanted to do it in a way that was either going to work
| for embedded or be optional in a reasonable way, IE; they
| were trying to do it right, took too long, and it got
| replaced with something much worse that did the job.
|
| Which, happens unfortunately frequently.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Similar story for how ALSA came to exist, really. Linux
| folks looked at OSS and said "this blows, let's replace
| it" and made ALSA.
|
| The FreeBSD folks looked at OSS and said "this blows,
| let's fix it". And did. And they're still on that while
| Linux is headed into its third major audio shake-up in
| the same time span (OSS -> ALSA -> PulseAudio ->
| PipeWire).
| 0x457 wrote:
| Saying this as FreeBSD user: FreeBSD didn't switch this
| many times because no one is working on a new thing. The
| community is already small, the community of people using
| it on desktop is even smaller. Developers that can work
| on any of this - almost doesn't exist at all.
|
| Corporate money and contribution go to: storage, network,
| scheduler. Anything desktop related doesn't get any love.
| I bet that PR for EoL drm-kmod from linux still not
| merged.
| 72deluxe wrote:
| I could never understand why it was adopted. It was
| written to solve problems that nobody faced. I still
| remember Fedora Core 2 (??) being useless with audio due
| to them adopting PulseAudio. I try to minimise my contact
| with any of Poettering's software as much as possible
| since then.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I still remember being shocked at the bloat. It sat there
| eating something like 100x the memory of my entire sound
| stack before that (granted, easy to hit a large multiple
| when the baseline is _very_ low), with pretty frequent
| CPU spikes, all while _no sound was playing_. WT actual
| F. And the CPU use was straight-up _vulgar_ when it was
| actually doing anything.
|
| It was then that I decided whoever was responsible for it
| had no software-architectural taste whatsoever. I didn't
| yet know his name. His work since then hasn't changed my
| mind.
| alushta wrote:
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| windows still has the audio mixer to beat
| steve1977 wrote:
| Which is why every professional audio tool uses ASIO and
| every audiophile player is going to great lengths to
| avoid the audio mixer and uses things like kernel
| streaming.
| chris222 wrote:
| Does MacOS even have OS level independent volume control
| for each app yet?
| yamtaddle wrote:
| This was what everyone said was _the_ reason for wrecking
| Linux with PulseAudio, all those years ago.
|
| I've still never cared and don't know why I should. What
| am I missing? I've used systems with that, but never
| bothered to try using it because... why would I? Every
| media player has a volume control, YouTube has a volume
| control, every game has a volume control (usually
| multiple, for different types of sound), and 99% of the
| time I just want everything at about the same level
| anyway. The last thing I want to do is have _another_
| place a given program could have its volume set or muted
| or whatever, so then I have another place to look when it
| 's not doing what I want. One per-program (built in to
| the programs) and one global is quite enough.
| error503 wrote:
| For me it wasn't so much the per-app/stream mixer but
| per-stream dynamic _routing_ that was the important
| feature of Pulse (though I 've moved on to PW now).
|
| I'm not too sure how this is handled on other platforms,
| but pre-PA the in-app volume control would often modify
| the global mixer, rather than implement an in-app
| mixer/attenuator, which is definitely not what you
| usually want. In most Linux apps these days, those
| controls manipulate and are synchronized with the PA
| mixer, so there's still only one actual mixer, they are
| the same control. I assume that other OSes also do per-
| stream mixing in a similar manner, and just choose not to
| expose the mixer for whatever reason.
|
| As much as people complain about PulseAudio it's always
| worked well for me, and from what I've seen of Windows
| and macOS alternatives, it's more featureful and usable
| out of the box.
| the_other wrote:
| Why should the OS solve app problems?
| dijit wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| Why do we need `open()` anyway?
|
| (this is sarcasm, the OS exists _only_ to solve app
| problems).
| brookst wrote:
| Sort of? The kernel supports this and has forever, but
| the OS doesn't ship with an app that exposes the
| capability. It's super annoying. There are a number of
| third party apps, some free, some paid.
| mayoff wrote:
| I use SoundSource for this, but I did pay $39 for it.
|
| https://rogueamoeba.com/soundsource/
| larrik wrote:
| Not that I've found!
| leoh wrote:
| How did NT beat SGI? Cheaper hardware?
| dagw wrote:
| First cheaper hardware, and later simply better
| performance. I worked at a small animation studio around
| 1999-2003 and the sudden price/performance improvement that
| Windows on Intel + Nvidia all of a sudden offered was
| unlike any I've seen since. A Geforce 2 Ultra and dual
| Pentium IIIs stomped all over our SGI workstation at most
| workloads, at less than quarter of the price.
|
| Plus since virtually all the animators used Windows at home
| and where very comfortable with it, the need for support
| and hand-holding was much less than with Irix.
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| It's always strange to hear Windows being actually good
| in the 90s and early 2000s, but so much of that was the
| fact that the consumer oriented, DOS based OSes, were so
| poor.
|
| The switch to the NT platform in Windows XP was
| incredible. Of course, a lot of that was lost in teh
| beginning with the "Fisher Price" UI, and the massive
| rise of malware, but by SP2 most of these issues were
| resolved... Windows XP SP2 was one of the most stable and
| long lasting consumer OS of probably all time.
|
| I wonder if Microsoft could have switched to NT for its
| consumer OSes earlier, and if so, how much better Windows
| based computing for most people would have been. Combine
| that with the Longhorn disaster, and MS lost so many
| years of precious development time.
| 72deluxe wrote:
| The sad thing is that we remember that era and being used
| to fast user interfaces and applications even on the
| ancient hardware. Today's software is so sluggish and
| slow and all web based even when native toolkits are
| perfect. Makes me weep.
| pavlov wrote:
| Windows NT 4.0 was tight in its time. (Despite the name,
| NT 4 was really version 2.0 of the NT operating system.)
|
| It had the new kernel that could compete with (and even
| outperform) commercial Unix for workstation use, and also
| the new GUI from Windows 95 which meant it was both
| familiar and had an enormous range of apps easily
| available.
|
| Not only was Windows NT 4 enormously better than DOS, but
| it was also objectively better as a total package than
| Mac OS 8, the Sun Solaris CDE desktop, and everything
| else. Open source Linux desktops were still very early.
|
| Windows 2000 (a.k.a. NT 5) was still good and a much more
| practical desktop OS than the first Mac OS X which had
| absolutely horrendous performance. Somehow Microsoft
| managed to squander this lead by focusing on consumer
| Windows XP and their own endless .NET API turf wars that
| ended up destroying the credibility of the Windows
| platform.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > Not only was Windows NT 4 enormously better than DOS,
| but it was also objectively better as a total package
| than Mac OS 8, the Sun Solaris CDE desktop, and
| everything else.
|
| The issues were that Windows NT needed much more RAM than
| consumer Windows at a time when RAM was still extremely
| expensive, and only a subset of the hardware that would
| work under consumer versions of Windows had drivers for
| Windows NT.
|
| However, NT (and especially Windows 2000) was night and
| day better than Windows 9x.
| steve1977 wrote:
| You could always turn off the Fisher Price UI and switch
| to Windows Classic style, up to Windows 7 actually.
| gumby wrote:
| > later simply better performance
|
| You probably know this but a reminder: it was a double
| whammy of scale (network effect): SGI was selling to
| roughly three markets (video production, high end CAD,
| and midrange number crunching). NT was selling to
| anybody, and despite its multi-architecture support,
| Intel was selling to the same people. This threw off cash
| both of them could invest in improving their offering.
|
| There is a good argument, though I don't know how good,
| for Apple to do an SGI with the Mac Pro. Its main value
| would be a "halo" effect: make the argument that Apple is
| so technically great that the people with the hardest
| problems turn to them, so you can too. Also Apple helps
| bring you the stuff you like, movies and music and such.
| That was an important argument back when Apple was
| lagging. If this argument still makes sense it might even
| worth doing so at cost or even a small loss paid for by
| the marketing department. But the green eyeshade side of
| Apple's planning hates that kind of excuse for good
| reason.
|
| The Mac Pro has some minor benefits in being a practical
| way to push the design envelope in ways that will later
| trickle down, though as this article points out it
| requires investment in areas not otherwise critical, or
| even important to the company.
| [deleted]
| gfxgirl wrote:
| At the time a single seat of PowerAnimator, the predecessor
| to Maya, cost $50k-$60k. $30k was for the SGI machine to
| run it and the other half was the software license.
|
| Microsoft bought Softimage, one of the top competitors to
| Maya at the time. They charged iirc $4k or $8k and a PC to
| run it would run $4k-$5k
|
| Softimage is long gone but it's what Valve used for the
| Source Engine and Half Life 2
| inkyoto wrote:
| The same old story: the rise of <<worse is better>>. UNIX
| workstations hardware was always miles and miles better[0],
| although it could no longer compete with the commodity PC
| hardware due to being exorbitantly priced. Coupled with
| highly aggressive and anticompetitive practices of
| Microsoft, the demise was inevitable and quick.
|
| [0] With the exception of the lower end UNIX workstations
| which were still better, yet a tad bit more expensive
| compared to the commodity PC hardware.
| alxlaz wrote:
| > UNIX workstations hardware was always miles and miles
| better[0], although it could no longer compete with the
| commodity PC hardware due to being exorbitantly priced
|
| This was true early on, as in, early 90s-ish. But in the
| second half of the decade the balance shifted
| significantly and by the late 90s, Unix workstations
| could no longer compete with the commodity PC hardware
| due to being slower. I was doing sysadmin grunt work for
| a studio at the time and beige boxes ran circles around
| later generation Octane and Onyx machines.
|
| They were also a nightmare to maintain by then. The
| market for peripherals and the like wasn't exactly open
| and there were all sorts of weird servicing deals. With
| beige boxes we didn't even need a formal procurement
| process for peripherals like keyboards and the like, we
| let people buy their own shit and reimburse them within
| some limit.
| brookst wrote:
| "Worse is better" is just a framing of "economies of
| scale beat niche products" from a niche enthusiast's
| viewpoint.
| jandrese wrote:
| Cheaper hardware, cheaper software, and PC vendors didn't
| try to force you into ludicrously expensive support
| contracts. All in all just way more customer friendly than
| the workstation companies.
|
| And of course the huge number of people buying x86 hardware
| meant PC hardware manufacturers could afford big R&D
| budgets that allowed them to surpass the workstation CPUs
| and GPUs in performance.
| pavlov wrote:
| Cheaper hardware, faster CPUs, open OS platform.
|
| In the end SGI tried to enter the Windows NT market with
| its own system that had a unique GPU with unified memory
| and also used SGI's own firmware instead of a PC BIOS:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation
|
| Despite the GPU, it wasn't competitive with cheaper, more
| standard x86 hardware.
| pipo234 wrote:
| I think "NT", here, should more accurately read "the Wintel
| platform". NT bringing a "modern GUI" to DOS computers (as
| well as some RISC systems) and intel retaking some of the
| high end previously lost to Sun, Silicon Graphics, DEC,
| etc. So yes: price, primarily.
| Maursault wrote:
| > NT bringing a "modern GUI" to DOS computers
|
| NT wasn't a GUI on DOS. NT was different, not based on
| DOS in any way. Dave Cutler brought his pet project NT
| (which was technically Digital IP) with him when he left
| Digital. NT was new and entirely unrelated to any other
| project at Microsoft.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Traditional Unix workstation vendors made a bet for Itanium
| and against their own architectures, so in the late 90s /
| early 2000s their investment into their archs became
| minimal. But Itanium flopped and the Dotcom bubble burst.
| The latter impacted Sun a lot. At the same time x86 kept
| improving massively, mostly pushed by AMD, which also put
| AMD64/x86-64 in the market by the mid 2000s. Also in the
| same time frame nVidia and ATI created monolithic GPUs
| which started to perform better than the proprietary GPUs
| by SGI and HP. The last Unix workstations from HP actually
| had ATI or maybe nVidia COTS GPUs.
|
| All these factors together largely eliminated Unix
| workstations from most of their native markets (3D
| visualization, CAD, CAE, media) so that category of system
| just ceased to exist in the mid 2000s.
| skywal_l wrote:
| So to reword what you said, nobody was writing games for
| SGI workstations.
|
| The video game industry is so huge that whatever hardware
| benefits from it, it will eventually crush the
| professional competition.
|
| If AI is possible today, it's because billions have been
| invested in making our computers beasts at multiplying
| matrices.
| ehvatum wrote:
| For the record, I played a lot of Creeper CTF mod
| quakeworld on my Octane MXE. I don't even want to
| remember what that machine cost me. Unfortunately, the
| impact graphics chipset the MXE used in a 4x SLI-like
| configuration had an issue with sub texture support that
| kept frame rates in the 20 FPS range.
|
| A single voodoo2 in a pentium2 absolutely trounced the
| Octane, so my gaming eventually moved to pc and stayed
| there.
| fanf2 wrote:
| I thought Itanium was just an HP thing? HP killed their
| own PA-RISC and DEC's Alpha (which HP acquired via
| Compaq) in favour of Itanic, which left POWER (still
| holding on at IBM), SPARC (pretty much died with Sun),
| and MIPS (dunno, tbh).
| ehvatum wrote:
| SGI bet what little remained of the farm on Itanium and
| even sold a handful of Itanium-based supercomputers.
|
| It was an odd strategy from a company that obviously had
| no future and nothing left to offer. At the time, I had
| built up so much animus against SGI for their outrageous
| pricing and unbelievably annoying FlexLM software
| licensing that it was amusing to me. Their god damned
| MIPS Pro compiler spent more cycles checking its license
| file than actually compiling a small C file. And the
| FlexLM system was so badly written that it did nothing to
| stop piracy and any user could trick it into overwriting
| any file on the system. They claimed to patch it, but
| never actually fixed it. At least they open-sourced XFS.
| That was nice of them.
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/nasa-gets-sgi-2048-core-
| itaniu...
| dagmx wrote:
| It depends which part of the industry and which departments
| you're talking about.
|
| Animation and visual effects for large studios are all Linux
| based usually. Smaller studios vary between Mac and windows.
|
| Edit houses tend to be primarily Mac based.
|
| There's very little that competes with macOS and Apple hardware
| though.
|
| Take color accuracy and EDR. Linux and windows aren't great for
| extended dynamic range while working, and especially if you're
| using a laptop for mobile reviewing, very few laptops support
| the accurate display space most macs ship with.
|
| Macs also provide a lot more software compatibility than Linux
| for things like the Adobe suite of products.
|
| Combine that with out of the box support for many codecs,
| accelerated ProRes workflows and the ubiquity of
| airplay+airdrop, macs are very favoured for creative use cases.
| reacharavindh wrote:
| I know the article mentions operational stuff like moving
| production to a different country and such, but I can't help but
| wonder if it has anything to do with all the engineers that moved
| on from Apple to found startups and other companies that wanted a
| piece of the magic that Apple pulled with the M series chips..
|
| Curious if any HNers in the know could spill such info with a
| throwaway
| matwood wrote:
| I think the brain drain story was way overblown. People are
| always coming and going on any team. Given how long hardware
| takes to design and plan, covid lockdowns are more likely to
| have impacted processors that should be coming out now.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| Maybe it's a gross oversimplification but I thought that while
| the next iterations of the A and smaller M SoCs were designed
| in California, the bigger M chips are developed in Israel where
| the team is much younger.
| nkristoffersen wrote:
| I'm pretty sure its Austin Texas
| https://eu.statesman.com/story/news/2012/09/01/apple-buys-
| au...
| exabrial wrote:
| Anyone that has hooked up a external drive to an M1 or M2 based
| notebook knows why: the performance of external devices dropped
| off a cliff with Apple's own silicon.
|
| Not to mention single external support...
|
| Consumers Pro users are likely to look aside on the external IO
| issues, but it's doubtful that actual studios would.
| sephamorr wrote:
| Can you tell me more about this? Are you unable to hit line
| rates, or are you just commenting about lackluster io options?
| I'm looking to add some M.2 storage via thunderbolt enclosure
| to my machine and would otherwise be expecting to be able to
| saturate the pcie lanes.
| exabrial wrote:
| This regression I've personally tested and confirm:
|
| You can't hit anywhere near "line rate" with usb 3.1/3.2,
| though an Intel Mac will gladly do so with the same _exact_
| drive. You will experience write stalls and other performance
| problems. I don't have a usb4 drive to test by I wouldn't
| hold your breath.
|
| I do not have a Thunderbolt 3 device to test. Google tells me
| it's a problem: https://9to5mac.com/2022/04/18/m1-mac-
| thunderbolt-4-ports-sp...
|
| Expect _at most_half the advertised speeds and feel lucky if
| you achieve them.
|
| EDIT:
|
| From the article I linked: I just noticed they suggest try
| connecting my drive to a Thunderbolt 3 dock first. LOL, ok,
| I'll give this a try.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Anyone that has hooked up a external drive to an M1 or M2
| based notebook knows why: the performance of external devices
| dropped off a cliff with Apple's own silicon._
|
| This is false in my experience. I bought a Thunderbolt 3 to
| Dual NVMe M.2 SSD enclosure (Sabrent EC-T3DN), set up the SSDs
| in a RAID 0 array, and Blackmagic Disk Speed Test benchmarked
| that configuration at 2,500 MB/sec read and write. That's very
| close to the maximum real-world usable bandwidth for TB31.
|
| 1
| https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2019/20190128_1352-unde...
| GeekyBear wrote:
| I imagine that it has a lot to do with TSMC's 3nm being pushed
| back so far.
|
| History shows that a very large chip made on a process node that
| has just come online isn't going to have a good initial yield,
| and 3nm wafers are said to be fairly expensive.
|
| >One wafer processed on TSMC's leading edge N3 manufacturing
| technology will cost over $20,000 according to DigiTimes
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-will-charge-20000-per...
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| How is the Mac Studio, which is itself a beast even in base
| configuration, not "pro"?
|
| I also wonder, does the SEC track trades placed by Mark Gurman
| and those who republish (collectively a bandwagon of such)
| pronouncements of analysts?
| modeless wrote:
| The only thing pro about it is single threaded performance, and
| even there it's not close to the best available, as Zen 4 and
| Raptor Lake surpass it. In other areas it's lacking. A
| Threadripper will destroy it in multithreaded performance with
| 64 cores and terabytes of RAM. A 4090 will blow it away in GPU
| performance.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| I possibly misunderstand, but are you suggesting there's an
| NVidia 4090 on die with the Raptor Lake or Threadripper in
| some variant of either?
| wolftickets wrote:
| I think they mean including a 4090 in a build with either
| CPU choice would produce a more performant computer.
| _s wrote:
| Side question with the product and processor names; any one else
| finding Apple's product naming getting ... complicated? Can't we
| just have the product names based on size, and a moniker dictate
| its features + processor?
|
| Maybe something like;
|
| - Mac, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, Watch
|
| And you can get them in:
|
| - Mini, Max or just "normal size"
|
| With your choice of:
|
| - M?, M? Pro, M? Ultra
|
| Running
|
| - MacOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS
|
| We've already got a "mini" iPhone (SE), MacBook (Air), Mac. Plus
| the normal sized ones; 14" for the laptops and studio for the
| Mac, and then max being 16" laptops, or a tower mac, and the
| 12.9" tablet etc. Same for the watch too, and the iMac has played
| around the 21/24/27 sizes already.
|
| Perhaps I just don't understand the product differential
| requirements from branding / marketing perspectives.
| xnx wrote:
| There's a reason why naming things is one of the "two hard
| things".
| mort96 wrote:
| You're forgetting the M? Max monicker. I would love to run an
| M1 Max Mac Max.
| dagw wrote:
| _Apple 's product naming getting ... complicated?_
|
| On the other hand, compared to just about every other
| computer/tech company out there I find it by far the easiest
| and most sane. Is the 15" MSI GE67 better or worse than the 15"
| MSI Bravo 15? And where does the MSI GP67 fit into the whole
| picture?
| Razengan wrote:
| > _Apple 's product naming getting ... complicated?_
|
| Compared to Apple's/Steve Jobs' own standards, yes.
|
| In some cases, it's complicated by _being TOO SIMPLE:_ e.g.
| try figuring out iPad versions.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Aside from iPad Air being better than iPad and iPad Mini,
| it all makes sense?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The closest thing to a MacBook mini would actually be the
| 12-inch fanless MacBook that was always highly constrained by
| thermals on the Intel platform. It would be a lot more
| interesting on Apple Silicon, perhaps for the school education
| market that seems to mostly use Chromebooks these days.
| davnicwil wrote:
| it continues to baffle me that they haven't yet reintroduced
| this model. It was always an assumption of mine, perhaps
| incorrectly, that that model was a design/engineering
| experiment that was just the wrong side of the line on
| practicality but served as a market test for that form
| factor.
|
| Anecdotally it seemed very popular, and loved by the people
| who bought one. Perhaps the numbers said otherwise, because
| otherwise I have no idea why they didn't reintroduce it as an
| M1/M2 machine.
|
| Perhaps, and this is maybe just being hopeful, they're
| waiting for the even better efficiency of the M3 etc before
| reintroducing it because they want to do it, but absolutely
| nail it when they do without any battery life compromise.
| After all, they already ran the market demand test, so this
| would make sense if so. If that turns out to be the case I'll
| almost certainly buy one.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| I thought the same thing (got one for a gf), but since the
| introduction of pointer support in iPadOS, I look at the
| kinds of things most folks with the 12" books do (word
| processing, light spreadsheets, web), and I think Apple is
| correctly betting that that market is going for iPads with
| keyboard/trackpad folios now.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| They kinda did? The M1 Air is basically a better version of
| the 12" skinny Macbook. It's fanless, has a slightly larger
| screen (13" vs. 12"), and swaps a single USB 3.1 Type-C
| port for two TB3/USB4 Type-C ports, while knocking $300 off
| the price and dumping the awful butterfly keyboard. The
| only downside is that it's a tenth of an inch thicker
| (0.16"-0.63" vs 0.14"-0.52").
| em500 wrote:
| It's also 0.37kg (0.77lbs) heavier, which is almost +40%.
| gumby wrote:
| >Anecdotally it seemed very popular, and loved by the
| people who bought one. Perhaps the numbers said otherwise,
| because otherwise I have no idea why they didn't
| reintroduce it as an M1/M2 machine.
|
| I loved mine, and put a couple of hundred thousand miles in
| carrying it (even wrote a lot of code in Emacs, but I
| remember the days when every compile was an excuse to stand
| up and get coffee, so the speed didn't matter to me).
|
| AFAICT its target market was actually Asia, same as with
| the ultralight (for its time) Powerbook 2400c which was
| actually built by IBM Japan. But it didn't sell as well as
| expected even there.
| rekoil wrote:
| I would love one of those for traveling.
| joakleaf wrote:
| Even smaller; there was an 11" Macbook Air discontinued in
| 2016. It was too slow for me, but I really like the form
| factor. Would like to see that return with AS.
| Dunedan wrote:
| While featuring a smaller screen the 11" MacBook Air wasn't
| smaller than the 12" MacBook!
|
| Here are their sizes for comparison:
| MacBook Air 11" 300 mm x 192 mm x 17 mm 1,08kg
| MacBook 12" 280,4 mm x 196,6 mm x 13,2 mm 0,92kg
| amelius wrote:
| And include the year as a version number.
|
| Then we can say things like "2022 was (not) a good MacBook-
| year".
| jupp0r wrote:
| Are Mac Pros even a viable platform for professional users given
| the infrequency of upgrades of the platform? Intel Xeon W-3275M
| is more than 3 years old at this point. Can people with demand
| for so much compute even afford to not get modern hardware?
| jscipione wrote:
| If Apple really cared about their pro users they would have
| launched an Intel Mac Pro update to fill the gap but they didn't
| because they don't. Pros were ready to jump ship after the
| disastrous iMac Pro was launched in April of 2017 which is why
| Apple held a round table discussion with members of the press in
| April 2017 to allay those fears by promising that a new modular
| Mac Pro was coming. Two years later in December 2019 Apple
| fulfilled their promise by releasing the Mac Pro. But between
| 2017 and 2019 Nvidia made serious gains over the competition
| which left the Mac Pro obsolete on launch. Fast forward 3 years
| later to today and the pro market has really started to abandon
| Apple in favor of machines running Nvidia GPUs. Apple is
| attempting to create an updated Mac Pro that will bring those
| pros back to the platform and to do that they have to compete
| with Nvidia and to do that they have to ramp up the GPU core
| count significantly which has been difficult delaying the product
| further.
| spicymaki wrote:
| The semiconductor business is not easy.
|
| The M-series chip makes sense because you can share it between
| mobile and desktop machines. The A-series and the M-series are
| very closely related. Once you start to enter the high-end server
| market you have to add more IP, change the processor
| interconnect, topology, and increase the transistor count on the
| IP you already developed. This leads to the necessity to design
| another line of processors which needs additional design,
| verification, validation, software development, etc that you
| won't be able to share with your profitable chips. You then need
| to ask, is there really a market for this?
|
| When Apple used 3rd party CPUs they outsourced the cost of that
| server development work, the 3rd party Intel already had a large
| market for their Xeon class chips so development costs were
| spread across customers. The business made sense. Let's face it,
| the Pro side of the business is tiny relative to the mobile
| market and it does not make business sense.
| anikom15 wrote:
| My naive solution to this would be to build a multi-CPU system
| instead of making a higher performance CPU.
| sroussey wrote:
| It would be cool if Apple's Pro machine used an expandable
| "blade" design, so you could have 4x Ultra/Extreme in a NUMA
| arch.
|
| SOC with soldered memory, yet still expandable.
|
| https://twitter.com/sroussey/status/1512934509540360195?s=20
| BooneJS wrote:
| I presume dropping a few cores and replacing with PCIe lanes is
| what's on tap. But man, the volume for that chip will be the
| smallest of any silicon, and the yield won't be great.
| efields wrote:
| Better to figure out long term production plans, i.e. "we need to
| get out of china bc the US/china relationship is deteriorating",
| before committing to production. This is fine.
| concinds wrote:
| What I don't get, is that Apple lost their foothold in both the
| creative market & education markets, and don't seem to be trying
| to address it. Why is the Mac Pro still the same price, three
| years after its release? Why not work with aeronautics,
| engineering, CAD, architecture vendors to port their apps to the
| Mac? Why not sacrifice hardware margins, now that they're moving
| into services?
|
| I read an estimate from a French firm that Mac Pro volumes are
| orders of magnitude lower than Power Mac volumes were two decades
| ago; are they doing anything about it?
| tibbon wrote:
| One thing to note is that you used to _need_ a Power Mac for
| lots of tasks. Now it's just a nice bonus over your MBP and
| harder to justify
| strict9 wrote:
| True. I remember a video editing class in college and we had
| to use the cheese grater Mac Pro render our work. I don't
| remember all the details but I know I didn't want to try it
| at home on my white MacBook.
|
| The gap between laptop and desktop with today's M1 MBPs is
| much more narrow for sure.
| concinds wrote:
| True, a lot of this moved to laptops for Innovator's Dilemma-
| reasons, but surely they have a plan to secure a more few
| niches, beyond FAANG software developers for the Mac, and
| students for the iPhone and Watch? The iPad was intended to
| dominate "what comes after PCs", but PCs never went away; and
| it just seems like Apple never course-corrected from that
| vision. That's what I'd like to see: a coherent vision for
| the future of computing. We haven't seen that since the
| failed post-PC thing in 2010.
| _moof wrote:
| There is an unbelievable amount and diversity of software used
| in aerospace that is Windows only, from general mechanical
| engineering tools to highly specialized data acquisition and
| analysis packages, microcontroller interfaces, optics design,
| you name it. Getting all that to move over to a new platform
| would be an enormous undertaking for essentially no benefit on
| the part of the vendors. I suppose you could do it piecemeal if
| you really wanted to, but it's still an uphill battle in an
| industry where Windows is pretty solidly entrenched.
| ActionHank wrote:
| Gaming was super solidly entrenched on the Windows side.
| Valve put some muscle behind Wine and proton and that is no
| longer the case. I mean Apple even made Rosetta 2 for this
| silicon migration. If they really wanted it, it's totally
| within reach.
| jwagenet wrote:
| Gaming (on PC) is also full of people who care about Linux
| and escaping windows, so aside from Valve trying to get out
| from under Microsoft's thumb, they have a dedicated user
| base to make their efforts worth it. The people and
| companies using engineering tools don't really care about
| Linux.
| runjake wrote:
| > education market
|
| Apple cannot compete with $200 Chromebooks. Not without
| compromising the whole reason you'd choose Apple in the first
| place. It's a game of razor-thin margins and those aren't
| Apple's thing.
|
| > Why not $thing?
|
| Apple is focused on services, not hardware or software unless
| it boosts their services.
| novok wrote:
| It's because those markets are tiny compared to the bigger
| markets that they focus the company on, which is why they
| slowly drifted away from their focus on it. The HDR [0]
| youtuber creator machine they created with the new macbook pro
| alone probably dwarfs them by several orders of magnitude for
| example.
|
| [0] Yes I know HDR is not much of a thing currently on social
| media, but apple tends to invest tech wise to where they see
| the market going, and do it earlier. Removing the floppy drive
| early is an indicator of this, and they realize it's a bit of a
| chicken & egg thing.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > What I don't get, is that Apple lost their foothold in both
| the creative market & education markets
|
| Macbooks (Airs, at least) and iPads are still huge in
| education.
| concinds wrote:
| On that front, it's funny to me that Google was so successful
| with Chromebooks, when Jobs called thin clients the future
| for decades yet failed to ever make one.
| ralmidani wrote:
| Thin client commoditizes your platform and reduces the
| benefits of owning the entire hardware and software stack.
| Even if you needed an Apple device to connect to an Apple
| mainframe, the application running on the mainframe could
| probably be replicated (but better and cheaper) by Google.
| andix wrote:
| If they care for pro users (to keep the platform macOS alive),
| they need to develop it even if it's a loss. If they lose most of
| their pro users, a lot of regular users may follow.
| ryanwaggoner wrote:
| Eh, I disagree. The Mac Pro market is a tiny niche. I've been
| doing iOS and macOS development for more than a decade and I've
| never met someone with a Mac Pro, so I'm pretty skeptical of
| the idea that the macOS platform is in any way dependent on a
| tiny fraction of (mostly corporate) users being able to use
| macOS for their 8k video editing workflows or whatever.
| matwood wrote:
| Similar. The last MacPro I saw was a friends PowerPC cheese
| grater MP over a decade ago. Laptops were taking off with
| Intel's Core architecture, and I haven't seen an MP since.
| schappim wrote:
| The amount of advertising on that site is bonkers, even covering
| the text!
| kome wrote:
| Please use Firefox with ublock origin, for a better web.
| 72deluxe wrote:
| Or even better LibreWolf for a better web without tonnes of
| Mozilla telemetry!
| sbuk wrote:
| 1Blocker on Safari does the same...
| kennend3 wrote:
| Opera browser on a Hackintosh.
|
| When I went to the site it had no ads on it thanks to Opera's
| built in ad-block.
| catfishx wrote:
| Also the intercepting of the back button should be forbidden
| Tepix wrote:
| Yes i hate that Microsoft does it, too
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| Turn off javascript then it is impossible, barring a shitty
| redirect.
| jmkni wrote:
| I didn't even notice until I read this comment, uBlock Origin
| (on Firefox) does a really good job of getting rid of the ads.
| bartvk wrote:
| Same here. I didn't notice anything. I just read the article
| without being bothered about anything whatsoever.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I am skeptical that "power users" need more than a Mac Studio
| with possibly some of the feature upgrades.
|
| While having power on the desktop is great, for real compute use
| cloud resources.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| A lot of Mac Pro users are involved in high end media
| production. For those users, the power is beneficial so that
| you never have to wait for your computer.
|
| For a more specific example, music producers liked the fact you
| could have over a terabyte of RAM on the Mac Pro. This allows
| keeping their entire library of VST plugins loaded into memory,
| meaning they never have to wait to load plugins into their
| project.
| htag wrote:
| A very fast internet connection would be 4gbps symmetrical. A
| modern NVME can read ~5gbps. DDR5 supports up to 51GBs. PCIE6
| has a symmetrical 128GBs connection.
|
| If file size is a bottleneck for you then you'll see better
| performance computing locally, especially if you can cache
| workloads in DDR5 before saving to the filesystem.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| True enough. My Dad, who is 101 and does video editing and
| animation as a hobby, seems to suffer from long rendering and
| other processing bottlenecks. I have mentioned using cloud
| resources, and he doesn' want the hassle. He does buy
| whatever best Pro box Apple has about every 3 years.
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