
iMac Pro 18-core Follow Up Review - ek750
http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20180202/
======
plg
A lot of the negative comments wrt cost are versions of this: what a ripoff,
you can get better components for way less money in some other PC and/or if
you build your own.

That's nice but it's not Apple's market. Apple's market is not other PCs, and
it's not build your own.

This criticism of Apple has been around ever since Apple has been around
(1970s). While the criticism has basically stayed the same since then, Apple
has not stayed the same, they have grown. Their products have improved. Their
market share has grown and it continues to grow.

Some people pay more money for a Benz, and other people say Hey that's a
ripoff, I can buy a Toyota that gets me to work and back, just like your
expensive Benz, for half the price! What a ripoff!

Apple is not in the business of making inexpensive PCs (and accepting all of
the tradeoffs therein). The trends show that more and more people are willing
to spend their money on Apple products.

They are clearly doing something right.

If you are enraged by their success, perhaps you are not their target market.
And that is ok.

~~~
ghostcluster
Some of the harshest criticisms of Apple have been coming from diehard fans in
Apple's market niche, such as Marco Arment. See: the Touch Bar, the keyboards:
[https://marco.org/2017/11/24/fixing-the-macbook-
pro](https://marco.org/2017/11/24/fixing-the-macbook-pro)

> They are clearly doing something right.

Mac sales are down 5%.

~~~
gaius
_Some of the harshest criticisms of Apple have been coming from diehard fans
in Apple 's market niche_

My first Mac was an LC475 upgraded with a real '040 to run MATLAB, back in oh,
'94 I think. Also had a second-hand SE30 to run Word 5.1 (still the best
version). Next up was a Power Mac 7600 when I needed more grunt to run FORTRAN
code. Amazing machine, the price/performance was incredible. It was faster
than a DEC Alpha 3000 at a fraction of the price! A few more both desktop and
laptop between then and now. So I think I count as a long-term Mac user and
loyal customer.

My current machines are a 2008 MBP and a 2014 Mac Mini. Apple simply haven't
given me any compelling reason to upgrade, in fact have pushed me to offload
my compute needs to Azure. Now that I have made that leap, I'm actually not
particularly interested in a real Mac Pro anymore, I just don't need it. I
can't be alone, and this will bite Apple in the ass at some point.

Who's buying the current MBP then? Not professional users, just people looking
to flash the brand. Which is fine, but the fashion crowd is fickle. Apple has
chosen to court them rather than 20+ year customers. And that's OK too, it's
their business to run as they see fit. But a third thing that is fine is for
people to post their opinions of it...

~~~
Veen
Perhaps your definition of professional is too narrow. I'm a professional
writer (and hobbyist coder). I used a MacBook Air for four years before
upgrading to a MacBook Pro.

My reasons for upgrading to a MacBook Pro were: (i) the better screen (which
matters when you're looking at it eight hours a day), (ii) improved
performance compared to the Air or the MacBook, (iii) the ability to drive a
couple of high-definition external screens, and (iv) all the above on on a
portable device that runs MacOS. Number iv is probably the most important
reason: I prefer MacOS.

If you construe "professional" as someone with high CPU and GPU processing
demands, then perhaps I don't count. But that's a tiny market: most
professionals who choose a MacBook choose it for the same reasons I did.

~~~
gaius
_Number iv is probably the most important reason: I prefer MacOS._

Yes, me too, so I find myself in a weird no-mans-land - I don't want to switch
to another platform, and I don't want to buy anything in the recent line-up. I
will be forced to when my Mini becomes unsupported for OS updates, then I will
spend as little as I can to get back in the game, because they have already
pushed me into the mindset and workflow of offloading the heavy lifting. But
offer me a machine as radical my old 7600 was relative to what I had
previously and relative to the rest of the market, and I'll jump at it.

------
blt
Sounds great, but I still have trouble with the idea of a $10,000 machine that
is permanently married to one monitor and unexpandable. If I'm spending that
much on a computer I want PCI slots. Especially now that it's common to keep a
desktop for 5+ years.

~~~
morganvachon
I agree, and I'm eager to see what we get in the rumored "new Mac Pro tower"
that is supposed to be announced some time this year.

Still, the iMac Pro can be considered a good buy if you do like many Apple
users and sell it after a few years for a hefty percentage of the purchase
price, using the funds to offset its replacement. It's how I progressed from a
PowerBook Pismo G3 -> eMac G4 -> Mac mini G4 -> two Intel Mac minis (2006 &
2011) -> Mac Pro tower, only keeping the first gen Intel Mac mini when I moved
away from the platform for daily use. Because I recovered at least half the
purchase price of each successive unit (again minus the first Intel mini) I
was able to upgrade for more or less the same cost as a comparable PC
workstation.

Conversely, good luck selling a used custom built PC for pennies on the dollar
even if you used top of the line components. Even name brand, quality PC
workstations don't have a healthy used market; eBay is full of 2016 era
corporate machines that were $800 new, now going for $200 or less.

------
saagarjha
> Though I haven't mentioned it, if you look back through the various
> benchmark results, you'll see that the 18-core iMac Pro shows no
> disadvantage for single-core performance, despite running at a lower clock
> speed (2.3GHz/4.3GHz) than the 10-core iMac Pro (3.0GHz/4.5GHz). Often
> times, the price of scaling a CPU architecture to more cores is a loss of
> single-core performance, but no such penalty seems to exist here. The
> 18-core iMac Pro brings 8 more cores to the table on the high end with no
> loss of performance on the low end.

I remember this being an issue on the older Mac Pros; it's interesting that
this isn't an issue anymore. What's the reason behind it? Better thermals?
Turbo Boost?

~~~
rsynnott
Turbo boost, yeah. Modern Intel chips generally have a much higher clock cap
if only a core or two is active. I think to an extent this should be true of
the 2013 Mac Pro, too, but less so for the cheesegrater, which used much older
chips.

~~~
013a
I wonder if per-core performance is impacted if every core is being blasted. I
imagine most benchmarks do single-core runs by running one process of work,
and do multi-core runs by maxing out the cores and then totaling the
performance. Do any benchmarks max out the cores, but only report the
performance of one process of work?

~~~
dboreham
>I wonder if per-core performance is impacted if every core is being blasted.

Yes.

>I imagine most benchmarks do single-core runs by running one process of work,
and do multi-core runs by maxing out the cores and then totaling the
performance.

Aggregate throughput, yes.

>Do any benchmarks max out the cores, but only report the performance of one
process of work?

Sort of. You can get that figure by dividing the aggregate throughput by the #
cores. Sometimes it is reported explicitly.

------
NKosmatos
Would love to see a “real world” benchmark involving Lightroom, Photoshop,
Camera raw and Premier. I don’t think the target customer of the iMac pros
would run CFD on them ;-)

~~~
Recurecur
Actually I think a good number of high-end Mac users are scientists and
engineers. These benchmarks are good data for them.

~~~
sgillen
I haven’t seen very much of this in my experience. Most Mac using scientists
and engineers I know use a MacBook for email/webrowsig etc. but when they need
some serious computation they use an external cluster (which they talk to with
their Mac).

That being said I do know one such scientist with the same workflow but who
remoted into a Mac Pro, not sure what they are doing now.

~~~
acdha
Most of the scientists I know do both: interactive work to prove the idea or
for moderate sized data sets, and the cluster for when they have stable code
and a huge amount of data. Since the capacity of a laptop has steadily
increased, the relative ratios have shifted over the years.

------
UncleEntity
> CFD tends to be a good real-world benchmark...If this was a car test drive,
> running CFD would be like showing up at the dealership with three tons of
> gravel on a trailer and hitching it up.

Ummm...perhaps the author has a different definition of "real-world" than I
do?

~~~
wtallis
It's an 18-core workstation. You don't buy it for photo editing and web
browsing.

~~~
Terretta
Unless you’re a photo pro shooting sports or fashion with 50MP RAW images at
10 FPS then picking and correcting on a deadline. Then yes you do.

Top three consumers of CPU and IOPS on my Mac Pro or MacBook Pro: video
editing and transcoding, photo triage and conversion, and Kubernetes clusters
(minikube+xhyve) doing whatever.

------
et2o
Is anyone running production computational fluid dynamics simulations on a
desktop anyway? Seems like something that would get farmed out on an HPC
cluster with a couple hundred cores minimum.

------
ghostcluster
It's incredibly expensive with a mediocre AMD GPU. No Nvidia option, meaining
no CUDA. No TensorFlow.

A really weird machine that seems overly strong in some areas and absolutely
weak in fundamentally critical places.

~~~
arcanus
Tensorflow has been supported on AMD GPUs since at least November.

[https://www.anandtech.com/show/12032/amd-announces-wider-
epy...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/12032/amd-announces-wider-epyc-
availability-and-rocm-17-with-tensorflow-support)

~~~
arvinsim
See peterspy reply.

------
jaak
> My 10-core test unit prices out at $9,599, and a comparable 18-core unit
> would be $11,199, a 17% increase in cost.

All I can say here is "Wow!!!" That's an amazing price for a computer that is
completely user hostile to upgrade or repair.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Yes, it's insane. It's a lifestyle accessory.

But put in the context of _workstation_ prices -- which I guess is what it's
sort of in the category of -- check out what a Sun 2 (68010) workstation cost
in 1986:

"A color 2/160 with 8Mb of memory, two 71 Mb SCSI disks and 60 Mb 1/4" SCSI
tape cost $48,800 (1986 US price list)."

That's $109,766.16 in today's dollars.

Or more modest and perhaps more comparable, an HP 9000 Model 705 PA-RISC
workstation (32mhz, HP-UX) in 1991 was priced around $5000. That's $9000ish in
today's dollars.

People bought stuff like that back then. Low volume, prestige item,
specialized market, and I guess Apple must figure they will still do that now.

Workstation class machines have always been overpriced.

~~~
jcadam
Yea, you know, if I'm doing work that requires 18+ cores of CPU and gobs of
RAM, I'm going to pack that beast into a rack (bet I could build a sweet epyc
based system with more capability for less than $10k) and connect to it from a
laptop/small desktop.

Besides, that thing is going to get hot, and Apple doesn't exactly have the
best track record when it comes to thermal design (see: apple ///)

~~~
scarface74
Really the Apple /// a computer that came out in 1980? Is that what you are
going to base your doubts on the thermal design of the iMac?

~~~
jcadam
It was the start of Apple's long tradition of form over function.

~~~
scarface74
How has Apple survived over 40 years if it were just about form over function
while most of its contemporaries over the years have disappeared?

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Arguably it's not the same Apple. I don't see a lot of continuity in approach
between the company that brought us the Apple IIe and the company that makes
the iPhone.

~~~
scarface74
Both the company that brought the Apple //e and the company that brought the
world the iPhone had Steve Jobs in charge and very much went for vertical
integration.

------
cutler
£4900 for the 8-core iMac Pro. It seems Apple worship has plumbed new depths
of lunacy.

~~~
BoorishBears
If you make 6+ figures a year off your computer, do you really care if your PC
cost 5,000$ instead of 2,000$? Especially if you can write off a large part of
that cost?

~~~
cutler
What does the figure you make from using your computer have to do with its
retail value? By that measure Mark Zuckerberg's dorm-room Dell was worth
billions.

~~~
scarface74
in the grand scheme of things $5000 is not that much money if computer work is
your livelihood. Especially considering that if you are a developer, that may
be the only equipment or software you have to buy.

Even at a low rate of $100 an hour, I could make that on the side with 50
hours of work.

~~~
mgkimsal
if your computer is your livelihood, presumably you already have work lined up
for those 50 hours using your current hardware. you'd need to be able to bill
an extra 50 hours due to the increased productivity from a faster machine to
have this not be an impact to your finances. otherwise, it's still an extra
expense you need to consider, and for a lot of people, $5k is still a non-
trivial amount of money. if computer work is your livelihood, you're likely
bringing in income and have regular expenses. adding an extra $5k in to that
mix is not something most people will do without moderate consideration.

"I could make that on the side with 50 hours of work." if you're already
working full time, fitting in another 50 hours of billable work is non-
trivial, and may take months to actually do.

~~~
scarface74
I had a $4000 setup in college in 1992. A Mac LCII with a //e card, 10 MB of
RAM, a monitor, a LaserWriter LS and SoftPC.

But let me give you another real world example of how little $5000 is in the
grand scheme of things. Last year, my after tax rate as contract to perm was a
little over $50 an hour. I easily put in an extra 100 hours in a month.

I’m not going to spend $5000 on the iMac Pro because I don’t need it. But I
probably will spend around $3000 on a 27 inch 5K iMac with 32GB of RAM just
because that’s what I want and it should last at least 5 years just as a
development machine for hobby projects and learning. What would be an extra
$2000 if it were going to make me money?

~~~
mgkimsal
> I easily put in an extra 100 hours in a month.

There are around 700 hours in a month. Most people are already "working"
(billable/salary/etc) for ~180 of those. Eat/sleep/travel/family/friends/life
eats up a lot more. Fitting in a _extra_ 100 hours of anything in a single
calendar month will be extremely difficult for most people. If you have the
spare time and money, I'm presuming you may be younger and not have a family
that you have responsibilities towards (nothing wrong with that, and just an
assumption). The majority of heads of households I know - even professionals
earning decently - would indicate they have competing interests for $5-$10k on
discretionary purchases.

You went from a 'low rate' of $100/hr to $50/hr in your examples?

I get it - $5k isn't a massive crippling amount of money for most western
professionals. Most of those professionals would probably want the $10k pimped
out version too, and that expense just isn't trivial for most individuals.
Larger companies with equipment budgets and whatnot - less of an issue, for
sure.

~~~
scarface74
No, I'm neither young nor single. I'm in my mid 40s.

I went from $100 a month - as an independent consultant where you own your own
business and the $5000 would be pre-tax to a real world example for me -
Earned $80 hour as a W2 contractor where the consulting company gets a cut and
pays the employer's part of the taxes. The $50 is after tax.

I'm not saying the extra 100 hours was easy. But I had to do what I had to do
and I was willing to do it for the extra money. It's actually somewhat easier
for a married person with a supportive spouse to put in extra hours. My one
child who is in the house is in high school.

