Posted on 06/05/2017 12:38:58 PM PDT by Swordmaker
“That’s a false comparison.”
You are giving a false comparison. The iMac Pro is using workstation level parts with Xeons, and ECC RAM. Systems incorporating those parts command a price premium (whether it should be as much as it is is a different question, but it is what it is).
If you look at comparable workstations from Dell, HP or other manufacturers you’ll find the pricing is similar, if not more expensive.
Apple’s build quality on “pro” machines has generally been excellent as well, FWIW.
It’s an awesome looking computer. Too bad I’ll never be able to afford one lol.
I’ll keep riding my 2009>2010 Mac Pro until Apple obsoletes it completely.
Then I will run Windows 10 on it until it dies lol.
My only comparison was based for price point, not performance.
Since several components for the new iMac Pro arent even sold at retail presently — the GPU and CPU — all I have to go on is the price of the current line of products that will be deprecated in price when the new releases become available. History suggests they occupy close to the same spot in retail price. Everything else is just commentary.
As I said, people complain as if $5K is a lot to spend now. Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was the norm, and income was a whole lot less back then! Thinking back to the 286 PC I bought for $3K, it was around 8MHz - quickly obsolete within a year. Tech gets better and better, and it's us buyers who are driving tech to get better. And you're right, Macs have a longer useful life these days than the PCs of the past, which were only good for a couple years (or less). Back in the early 1980s, Apple created AppleNet, AppleTalk and AppleBus to network together Macs and devices, beginning with the Lisa in 1983. I still have some of these AppleTalk and PhoneNet networking modules. They later dropped it in favor of TokenRing and Ethernet. I know, not the same as joining Macs in clusters to distribute workloads, which would be nice.
NO, I did not. I priced out what was available according to Intel's price listing, unlike you or The KG9 Kid. Neither one of you looked at what Apple specs were saying about the Xeon processor that they are putting in the iMac Pro at either the low end or high end. I did. Since neither one of you looked at the hints Apple revealed both in their spec listing— 2666 MHz ECC RAN, 4.5 GHz Turbo Burst — or what was stated in the WWDC Keynote discussion of the iMac Pro's features— "latest, as yet unreleased most powerful Xeon processor— you did not determine what Xeon processor Apple was equipping each version with. I did.
I listed those hints and went to Intel's page on their Xeon processors and found which announced, but unreleased Xeon processors in 8, 12, and 18 core configurations matched those hints. They have yet to put a price on these Xeon. . . But I made the assumption, one that follows their past practices, that the prices would be close to the prices of the previous versions these are upgrades for plus a slight bump upwards. The highest grade E7 18 core the new one is replacing from last year, one which could NOT reach a turbo boost of 4.5 GHz and could NOT support 2666 MHz ECC RAM, has a current suggested retail price of just under $7700. Ergo, the new one will have a suggested retail price somewhere in that same price range! QED.
I don't give a damn that you found a $600 2.0 GHz 8 core, version 2, E7 Xeon processor from circa April 3, 2011 on NewEgg. It's a SIX YEAR OLD ANTIQUE, fer crying out loud! What it does demonstrate is that you don't have a clue what you are talking about.
What? There is no difference - most workstations ARE desktop computers, unless you're in an environment with remote workstations run off a central server(s). But that's not what we're talking about here. Workstations generally do need higher computing requirements depending on the business, but all that is is just a desktop with better stuff in it, whether it's a tower or an all-in-one.
No difference? Of course there is a difference. Desktop grade consumer or even office grade computers have ZERO need for expensive error correcting RAM but it's routinely installed in workstation class computers. Why? Because the work being done on such computers is critical and any mistake can cost millions of dollars, but more important, lives. An error that's acceptable on an office or consumer grade computer is not on an engineering or scientific workstation computer, running computations to multiple decimal places.
The Solid State Drives that Apple installs in these computers are not your run-of-the-mill SSDs, just as the Flash memory drives Apple puts in their iPhones and iPads are not the same as what other phone makers put in theirs. Apple's are faster by a high percentage. . . and therefore more expensive. You selected an off-the-shelf, inexpensive SSD. That's a wrong choice for a workstation class machine.
And who, exactly, is working in 5k resolutions? I work in AV, and we run big screens (as in 26'x15' most recently) in 1080. Sometimes even 720. And, if you're interfacing with systems like the Myerson Symphony, you send them a 480i composite signal because that's all they can take. 5k is only in the realm of Hollywood (theatres still think it's a selling point to have 4k), or very few small-time video companies. And many of them aren't going to be able to drop this much $$ on their Photoshop machine. I would guess more amateurs with GoPros are using -just- 4k than professional companies
Say what? What are you? A projectionist? No one "works" with a 26' x 15' screen to do editing, ray tracing, 3-D rendering, color correction, etc., especially in today's 4K video. They work with workstation grade computers with multiple high-resolution video monitors with more than a billion color gamut such as Apple's professional grade 5K screens which provide a 4K screen area and room for editing tools in the area below the video image, so they can see in real time what their changes are doing to the image, clip, or entire video. 1080 is passé.
Workstation class computers are not gaming computers. The two are not even in the same stadium.
Again, you display you lack of tech orientation and ignorance in a single paragraph. You did it again with this comment: "many of them aren't going to be able to drop this much $$ on their Photoshop machine. I would guess more amateurs with GoPros are using -just- 4k than professional companies" because professional are using as high a resolution as they can to do their work, otherwise their product will rapidly be unsaleable as the playback devices outpace their content. Even 4K video is being talked about being replaced soon by 8K Ultra High Realism at super high frame rates.
Again, I was merely correcting the price comparison. And yes, the parts I quoted were not shopped around, or waited for sales. It was a quick search on Newegg only for a quick price point.
YOUR POINT WAS MISTAKEN. The Kid was attempting to show what the high end would price out at. . . And you assumed he was pricing the LOW END. He was not. It's obvious from your listing. Yet you low end list, using outdated and consumer parts inappropriate for a workstation class computer, by the rime you included everything a low end iMac Pro comes with, STILL priced out HIGHER than the $4995 it would cost you to buy the IMac Pro. It would be much worse if you had used the actual 32GBs of 2666 GHz ECC RAM, and the newest 3.2 GHz up-to-date 4.5 Turbo Boost 8 core Gold Xeon processor the low end iMac Pro comes equipped with. You get a break on Xeon pricing here, maybe, as the previous 3.2 GHz 8 core Xeon E5 (that the low end Mac Pro is probably equipped with) and is being replaced by an 8 core Gold Xeon 3.2, was selling for only $2067 per unit. So the new 8 core Gold Xeon may be in that price range, or, it may actually be in the price range of the other top end 2.5 GHz Xeon E5 8 core, which sold for $4667. I kinda lean toward the 3.2 myself. Makes more sense, since the Turbo boost has to be in the 4.5 GHz range.
Pricing was from discount prices from Amazon, NewEgg, Crucial, and estimated on the graphic GPU based on best industry guesses and comparables. The total of all components, not counting labor, overhead, shipping, sales tax, profit margin, advertising and marketing, allowance for warranty, plus other software licensing, is $18,134.00.
To find the price of duplicating the Apple low end, only the processor, amount of RAM, the GPU, and size of storage changes.
Those items total to $3,988.00
Add that figure to the other fixed component costs that remain the same of $3,134.00
That gives us a cost to duplicate the low-end iMac Pro in a Windows PC workstation version of about $7,092.00.
That's $2,097 more than what you'd pay for the basic minimal configured Xeon powered iMac Pro with more features and including more software.
I'm a pretty heavy Virtualization user and there's just no way I'd ever pay $5k for an Intel based PC to sit on my desk. Don't care if it's Mac or Windows, just not going to do it.
Wonder how many of these they're going to sell?
I have an 8 core PC at home with 32GB of memory and haven't seen anything use all 8 cores.
Buying a PC/Mac with so many cores is the equivalent of buying a Bugatti Veyron and being stuck in city traffic with it. All that power and speed but nowhere to go!
Not sure who pays for that kind of power to sit unused on their desktop, maybe people with more money than brains?
You obviously have not done 3D animations, ray tracing, major video editing, or heavy duty simulation science. Those are the thing that use 18 or even more cores in a workstation grade computer, sometimes in realtime. I was looking at Intels Xeon processor page and their new Platinum line starts with 20 cores. Some had 60. I saw one that was priced over $60,000 for a single processor chip! Yes, there is software that will use those cores and they do produce lots of heat!
Great.
So again, how many of these does Apple believe they're going to sell? Seems to be a rather niche market. (I used to work for a large world renowned advertising agency in Chicago that did video pre and post editing, btw. We had maybe a handful of high end video processing systems because of their cost.)
My secondary point was that anyone (meaning any average/home user) who purchases one of these likely has more money than brains. My compute requirements do include audio & video editing & compilation, virtualization and other fairly cpu, memory and disk intensive tasks. Still, I hardly touch the 8 cores (16 threads) in my pc today. Then again it's highly unlikely I'm using software intended to take advantage of those cores and threads.
I should've qualified my statements a whole lot better than I did....
Apple users very commonly run Windows in a VM. Maybe you prefer Win7, but need to run Win10 as well (this is my situation). Or you have an old copy of some special application that only works on XP. Your original "lots" of cores are down to maybe 4-6 for each VM plus the ones retained for the macOS host.
Even if you only run one VM, you've halved your original core complement.
I would bet personal (non-datacenter) virtualization is at least as big a market for a high-end iMac, as high-end engineering or video work.
I'll tell you this: sitting here FReeping with a dual-core hyperthreaded CPU (4 total virtual cores), split between my OS X host and my Win7 VM, I sure would love to have a dozen more! :-)
I bet Apple will sell a lot of them. Watch and see. They aren't targeted toward the home/office market at all, but they are targeted toward the professional/technical crowd. I could use one in my office to replace our 2013 Mac Pro six core Xeon we use for 3D cone beam radiography. We could eliminate a tower Linux machine we use to render the CT scan raw data that come from the 3D PANELIPSE X-ray machine as 360 discrete slices through the skull into a manipulable, rotatable, false color 3D image showing bone, teeth, soft tissue, fillings, appliances, etc. The Mac Pro the takes that image and does the actual real time display in High-Definition, calculating on the fly the views from every angle, creating potential virtual repairs, and measurements for casting and computerized machining of implants, etc.
We could assign each of those tasks to a set of cores in one machine, one set running the Linux proprietary 3D rendering software, then storing it on the same SSD as the Display Mac Pro uses to present those data to the doctor for diagnosis. This would speed the process up by eliminating file transfers.
“Problem: What software is going to use 18 cores? Answer: NONE. Probably not any in the near future either.”
Didn’t you just say you’re a “heavy virtualization user”? Uh huh... Virtualization is one area that can very efficiently use multicore.
More and more software is being written to take full advantage of multicore, since that’s the only way to get major speedups these days. Clock speeds are only creeping upwards, largely due to power consumption (and heat) going as the square of clock speed. Even the most recent graphics APIs (Metal, Vulkan and DirectX 12) are fully multithread capable.
That said, there should be a couple of other options between 8 and 18 cores as well.
It’s worth noting that AMD is about to come out with workstation/server CPUs with 32 cores that directly support 64 threads via hyperthreading...
PCs still dominate the computer market no doubt. Even laptops.
Why? Cost.
Where Apple wins is in the cell phone and media player markets and their cell phones are tied to their music players.
I'm a home virtualization user and I use VMWAre which won't use more than 8 cores. Which bolsters my point, does it not?
Now, I do run Data Centers with 96 core plus blade servers, and that's where VMWare Enterprise comes into play.
So back to my original point: what home user is going to require that much power? Answer: Few, if any. That many cores is really a niche market, which is what Apple is after. Not saying it's a bad thing (it's not) just not for home users is all.
Video production, heavy virtualization, pre/post production and data mining for example are all good examples of use cases -- they're just not that many in the grand scheme of things is all I'm saying.
Apple has already announced the iMac Pro would be available configured with a Xeon with 12 cores. But interestingly, the iMac Pro is user configurable. The user can swap out processors and RAM and put in any logic board compatible components he or she desires. That implies that one could put in a 24 core Xeon Platinum or even a 60 core Platinum Xeon if one desired. . . and if you could afford it, more ECC RAM if the processor could support beyond 128GB. The current Xeon Gold and Platinum lines are designed to handle six RAM sticks. The last version Xeon only four.
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