The Most Powerful iMac Pro Now Costs $15,927 (vice.com) 201
Apple recently updated the upgrade options for the iMac Pro, and getting the very best will cost you. A baseline model will cost you just under $5,000, and maxing out the hardware to absurd heights runs a whopping $15,927. An anonymous reader writes: The most expensive possible upgrade is a $5,200 charge for upgrading the RAM from 32GB to a startling 256GB. Other addons include an additional $700 for a 16GB Radeon video card and $2,400 for a 2.3 Ghz Intel processor with 18 cores. Almost $16,000 is a lot of money for a computer, especially one so overpowered that there are very few reasonable applications of its hardware. Most people will never need more than 16GB of RAM to play video games, and 32-64GB will take care of most video editing and 3D modeling tasks. With 256GB of RAM, you could run advanced AI processes or lease computing power to other people.
What is this, MacDot? (Score:2)
News for Appleheads [binged.it], stuff that costs a shit ton of money.
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Poor article... (Score:3)
Most people will never need more than 16GB of RAM to play video games Sounds familiar to me. No comments, other than the famous "640K ought to be enough for anybody." is often attributed erroneously [wikiquote.org] to Bill Gates.
With 256GB of RAM, you could run advanced AI processes or lease computing power to other people.. Of course, because both tasks are memory-bound, and not compute-bound /sarcasm.
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640k *was* enough for anyone, at the time the arbitrary limit was created. The problem was that that it was a difficult-to-circumvent limitation in an an operating system that migrated across various platforms for almost two decades, and couldn't be removed without breaking backwards compatibility. And Moore's law had already been in full force for more than a decade when the first version of DOS was released, so there was little excuse for such an assumption. And while there's very little evidence that
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The ~3.5GB boundary was because of a technical limitation. 32-bit machines can address memory up to 4GB. XP couldn't handle virtual memory space (initially at least, maybe after one of the service packs). And some of that 4GB space was reserved for drivers.
They could have handled
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That's true for the original IBM PC as well. The processor could only address 1MB and drivers, video memory etc needed some of that address space.
These limits all seemed fine at the time as maxing out memory was expensive.
Perhaps in a decade we'll be bitching about the 16PB limit or whatever it is.
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I used to do desktop field service, and had a client that actually paid us to handle warranty work on their Dell workstations. One such machine had 64MB RAM (oh yeah!), back in the Windows 98 days, and the client being a research outfit, they wanted to do serious statistical analysis, so the RAM was critical. The software vendor made it mandatory - 64mb. No less.
They had all kinds of problems with that workstation form the beginning, and called us in to figure out why only 48MB of RAM was shown as available
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Similar for Atari 800/400 (Score:2)
The Atari 800/400 had similar problems.
It was designed for an SS-50 bus, and actually had the connectors for the edge connector on the motherboard.
However, by the time it was near market, the newer FCC regs meant that it just wouldn't be possible for it to pass.
The result is that the board was wrapped in a think (1/4"? It's been a while . . ) RF case, with limited connections.
And *that* in turn mandated those idiotic serial diskette drives.
At least they eventually figured out (Rev B ROM on them, iirc) that
Re: Poor article... (Score:2)
I recall vividly when WordPerfect was updated and perceived as terribly slow. The official responses referred to the dev team having 64MB of RAM, 'ran fine'... Most secretaries had machines with 16MB, not at all uncommon for 486 machines. 64MB was never common for my small business customers.
The Dell bug started with missing address lines, though by itself that's not the problem, clearly. This would have been seeing 1992, so yes, W4WG... Which I loved.
I never saw anything back then with GB RAM, modules typi
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The address line thing may have been that it didn't support 128MB total address space, so stuff like the chipset and PCI devices got mapped into the 64MB address space.
Same thing happened when machines started hitting 4GB of RAM, but only showed up 3.5GB due to 32bit address limits.
Re: Poor article... (Score:2)
Well, it may have been W4W...a long time ago...
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1995 called, they want their PAE back
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Re:Poor article... (Score:5, Interesting)
I saw a comment on a hardware hacking blog a few years ago about a musician who used a repurposed server as his composing workstation. He wrote music for films, TV shows, entertainment and promotional work for a well-paid living.
His workstation/server had four 8-core Xeons so he could composite multiple channels of music in real-time and 512GB of RAM so he could keep several hundred GB of music samples in RAM as he worked. He reckoned the server paid for itself in time saved and delivery-to-customer scheduling with the first two projects. He had used high-end Apple kit before he moved to this solution but nothing out of Cupertino could match what he had built himself.
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I saw a comment on a hardware hacking blog a few years ago about a musician who used a repurposed server as his composing workstation. He wrote music for films, TV shows, entertainment and promotional work for a well-paid living.
His workstation/server had four 8-core Xeons so he could composite multiple channels of music in real-time and 512GB of RAM so he could keep several hundred GB of music samples in RAM as he worked. He reckoned the server paid for itself in time saved and delivery-to-customer scheduling with the first two projects. He had used high-end Apple kit before he moved to this solution but nothing out of Cupertino could match what he had built himself.
This.
I used to work for Geoscience and Geospatial companies. This is where you're trying to manipulate images in the 10's of gigabyte ranges (back in 2009). Only the HP and Sun workstations could even hope to match what you could custom build for the GIS and Remote Sensing analysts and the Sun ones only ran Solaris or Linux IIRC and both options were hideously expensive and I think they top out at $8000 odd. It was worth it to custom build as if a part broke, you'd just go buy a new one off the shelf (t
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Well, depends on what you're working on.
If you are working say, on 4K RAW video, in Davinci Resolve, and have some serious color grades on there, doing some sound work, AND...using Fusion in there too doing basically VFX....well, that can bog a machine down pretty badly if you don't have something pretty beefy.
Hell, even with just HD video, RAW or not,
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Also I want to point out on How stupid it is to point out on the max cost of the product, when you go and select the top of everything in the customize bucket.
Most people won't need the max spec, but the system is designed to handle the max spec, for that small handful of people who need it.
For most Professional that 15k investment is probably better served with getting a 3k system every 5 years for 25 years.
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That small handful of people who need it would get way more value from a Threadripper box, which absolutely demolishes Intel's 18 core part for less money, and has a stupidly large number of PCI lanes.
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Most people will never need more than 16GB of RAM to play video games
Not to mention no one* is buying these for playing games in the first place. Plus the upgrades are available for people who think they have workloads that require it. They are OPTIONAL. I can spec out a $90,000 server blade as well. Doesn't mean I spend $90K every time I order a new blade.
*Yes, I know some idiot will, but overall, no one is buying them for games!
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Came here to say the same...mod parent up.
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Most people will never need more than 16GB of RAM to play video games Sounds familiar to me. No comments, other than the famous "640K ought to be enough for anybody." is often attributed erroneously [wikiquote.org] to Bill Gates.
With 256GB of RAM, you could run advanced AI processes or lease computing power to other people.. Of course, because both tasks are memory-bound, and not compute-bound /sarcasm.
The average user will not need 16 GB in the near future. Even gamers aren't RAM limited, my 12 GB is enough to make my graphics card the bottleneck.
I suspect they won't require 16 GB as a recommended amount for some time yet. We've been on 4GB for a while and the average user still isn't utilising all of that.
The only people who need a lot of RAM are people who are running very RAM intensive programs like databases, image processing, virtualisation, et al. where you need to keep huge volumes of data in memo
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Everyone come back here in 3 years on this date, and then we'll evaluate if 16GB of RAM is enough!
Heck, go back 2.5 years and read that 16 GB isn't enough: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/16/10/28/2010202/new-macbook-pros-max-out-at-16gb-ram-due-to-battery-life-concerns [slashdot.org]
Still cheaper than an Apple Lisa (Score:2)
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....256 GB ram will be in celeron laptops a few decades from now.
A few decades? If Celerons can ever access all of 256GB, I'd predict just 5 years.
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Never mind the IIfx... When introduced in 1990, it cost $9000 to $12,000. That's $17,500 to $23,000 or so in today's dollars.
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When My coworker bought a Lisa back in '84, it was $10000...$24,328.78 today according to http://www.in2013dollars.com/u... [in2013dollars.com]
16GB should be enough for anybody! (Score:2)
Just putting this here for posterity.
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I already use 32gigs on my laptop, for my servers I am happy with 128gigs.
Now why so much where we could had nearly the same type of work 20 years ago with 1/1000 of the resource?
While there is some bloat, there is the annoying factor of security being a big concern, Back 20 years ago, shared memory was common, no sandboxes, if you keep on moving your pointer values you will finally run into some other line of ram for an other system. Today we have sandboxes and virtualization, for added levels of protectio
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Back 20 years ago, shared memory was common, no sandboxes, if you keep on moving your pointer values you will finally run into some other line of ram for an other system. Today we have sandboxes and virtualization, for added levels of protection, to make sure App 1 will not overwrite App 2. ... not on unix or anything else with an MMU.
On windows or Mac OS
Expensive is relative (Score:5, Informative)
There's a good reason to max out internal storage (Score:2)
I work with a lot go photo and video stuff, it's really nice to have internal storage be as large as possible to hold large projects, then when I'm done I can save them off to traditional larger external spinning discs.
Every now and then I look into faster external RAID arrays but that itself is a very expensive option and can be kind of fragile.
Having a lot of internal storage also saves you time in that you don't have to be as picky in cleaning out your system from time to time. I fought for way too long
Re:There's a good reason to max out internal stora (Score:5, Interesting)
I work with a lot go photo and video stuff, it's really nice to have internal storage be as large as possible to hold large projects, then when I'm done I can save them off to traditional larger external spinning discs.
Every now and then I look into faster external RAID arrays but that itself is a very expensive option and can be kind of fragile.
Having a lot of internal storage also saves you time in that you don't have to be as picky in cleaning out your system from time to time. I fought for way too long with a laptop that was always too close to the edge of available hard drive space, which was really annoying.
You're looking for a NAS. If an article regarding a $15,000 workstation is at all appealing whatsoever, then having a dedicated storage array is entirely practical for 1/4 of the price.
"But Voyager, they're expensive!"
Let's assume you're a DIY tinkerer. A quick Newegg build on a Ryzen3 with 32GB of ECC RAM, a case, and 5x4TB drives is about $1,350 soup to nuts; in RAIDz2 (RAID6), that's still 12TB of storage with two drives fault tolerance, and I only limited it to 5 because that's the maximum number of drives I could buy at a clip (the build supports three more on the case and the mobo). Do two drive orders and you can hit 24TB before you hit physical limits.
Let's assume you're not a tinkerer and basically want a thing in a box. $1,500 will get you the aforementioned 5 drives and an 8-bay QNAP.
"But network connectivity is slow!"
Add about $400 to the QNAP and $600 to the DIY build and you've got 10-gigabit connectivity, possibly a bit more if you're on a Mac and need a thunderbolt-to-10GbE adapter.
"But then I can't access my data when I'm not home!"
The $15,000 Mac won't let you do that. However, all of these systems have some form of remote access, bit it the more arcane SFTP on the DIY build, or the shiny WebUIs and dropbox-like mobile apps of QNAP and Synology.
"But Thunderbolt has lower latency!"
Possibly, but 10GbE over Fiber is pretty damn quick, especially if you do a direct connect to your machine. An 8-bay TB enclosure will cost you $2,000 before you put drives in it, and you get zero options for multi-user or remote access.
"But it's ugly!"
Both Cat6 and fiber cables support long enough runs to put the storage appliance wherever you'd like to hide it. Thunderbolt doesn't. If you're willing to go a bit higher on the DIY front, Lian Li makes some beautiful cases with a price tag to reflect them.
There are countless combinations out there; if storage is your only concern and you've got somewhere to put an 8U rack, QNAP has a rack mounted NAS with a companion storage expander that you could fill with 4TB drives, landing you with 80TB of storage (assuming 4 disk fault tolerance) and *still* spend less than this $15,000 Mac.
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The problem with using NAS/SAN drives is pure economics.
A lot of people who require high end workstations will be doing work on consumer OS's. With GIS, it's Windows (ArcGIS).
The GP was talking about photos and videos, not GIS datasets, so the goalposts just got shifted. To address it though, at $16,000 for the Mac in TFA, A Poweredge with plenty of storage and an Optiplex or two to access it are entirely practical alternatives.
The setup for an iSCSI over Ethernet connection requires a separate network (well it should if you're doing it properly) and If for any reason the drives are disconnected which is a problem on Windows desktop operating systems it costs a lot of money.
We're already quite far away from 'storing lots of photos and videos', and iSCSI seems like a weird protocol to implement in this context, and I really don't understand what you're getting at with respect to Windows losing access to network storage vs. an
Tech support is expensive (Score:2)
When I have a project large enough to support a tech support then I buy linux machines cause they can be cheaper than macs.
But when I have to do my own or I'm using the interface I buy macs. Trying to keep a linux boxed patched and all the ports closed takes expertise to be confident it was done right. Getting hacked one time on a linux box for me was so expensive it killed a multi-year project.
The premium to get a powerful mac is pretty cheap compared to an employee recruitment, retention
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Even if the speed merely lets you continue your workflow without distracting delay, keeping the creative process going unabated...
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For most people maxing everything is going to be a waste of money.
You may need to Max out on RAM, or get a Top video card, But maxing everything is just Luxary and bragging rights, and nearly every professional will not be fully utilizing everything, as every professional has their specialty and uses the computer differently.
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I use MacOS everyday and it is steaming pile of shit. I have been a Mac user for 25 years and a MacOS developer for 10 years. Sure, I like the UI, but the OS is dying on the vine thanks to Apple. At this point, the Mac is just a platform for developing iOS applications. That is its only purpose to Apple.
This is the company that removed sub-pixel rendering because it was too hard for them, yet Microsoft has no problem with it. Are the people in Cupertino not that smart? Now every non-Retina monitor has blurr
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Server iMac.
Sometimes, too much is a good thing (Score:5, Informative)
Sixteen grand for a machine like this is still dirt cheap for a high end animation studio like Pixar or Ghibli.
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Ten years ago it would cost $20K for a fully stocked Mac Pro and two 30" Apple Cinema monitors.
Or $599.99 for an equivalent windows system.
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A high end animation studio involves rooms and rooms full of racks and racks of high performance CPUs ( not GPUs , mind you ).
I took a tour of one of Pixar's render farms and it was almost 15000 square feet of AMD servers.
You're not getting that for 16 grand, even if it is AMD stuff.
Workstations (Score:1)
Well, Pixar would be using these as workstations, not rendering nodes, right?
When my friend worked at a pre-press facility for a few years, their standard practice was to buy everyone doing graphics work machines with the RAM maxxed out, or nearly so. It was just too much hassle to go around and upgrade them later, and nobody complained about having too little but nearly everyone complained about not having enough.
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Pixar never used Macs for animation or rendering
There actually used to be MacRenderMan. I'd be surprised if they never used it for anything.
32GB useful for dev (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't say 32-64GB is too much for some of those tasks, CAD and the like could easily spike 128GB with modern systems. The RAM is just an option because the Intel processor is designed for servers/workstations and simply allows you to. It's also useful if you have a rig of GPU's, which this iMac is capable of powering a number of eGPU systems so for very remote circumstances I can see it being useful.
In comparison, a Dell workstation can run you a lot higher, the CPU and RAM being the primary cost drivers, one of those Xeons by itself can cost upwards of $10k on the street.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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With BIM we easily max out 64GB when working with point clouds.
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You call it browser bloat, but really it's javascript librairies bloat and images bloat. Nothing else on the web can waste CPU and RAM as fast as those two things.
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Incorrect and old thinking (Score:2)
Granted it will begin to slow down at some point, much sooner than with more, but it will work just fine.
What you are seeing is the system doing what it's supposed to do, using what is available. What's the point of having all that ram if it's just sitting there idle? It will release it if needed, but it will take what it can because that's what makes it most efficient. This is especially important on a laptop where you can trade ram for cpu and drive
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I'm being dead serious when I say that the amount of web browsing activity has pushed that computers CPU and RAM harder than gaming.
You're spot on. Even past the porno jokes, Chrome is an absolute hog, and I'm terrible about closing browser windows and/or rebooting my computer. It's pretty ridiculous that a 16GB with an i5 is overtaxed from browsing the Internet.
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I find this interesting. I run Cent Browser at home (A fork of Chrome) and with 25 tabs open (just counted them) Cent, and all its sub processes, eats up 1.5 Gigs of RAM.
Now, I have 32GB (ECC DDR3) of memory in my system, so I don't notice, but you are not the only one complaining of high RAM usage from a browser.
Now, I am totaling the memory usage from Resource manager...are you calculating it is a different way perhaps?
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This is precisely the point.
If your professional workload needs a lot of RAM, Apple will sell you a system for it. They're not going to question why or say "Gee, that's a lot." They'll just put in the higher-end components and send it with a bill. What it's used for is up to the customer.
You want to edit 4K video with a huge RAM-backed cache? This will do it.
You want to run 50 VMs to test your shiny new software? This will do it.
You want to take advantage of your newly-minted CTO's "upgrade everything!" dri
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and you don't see any more upgrade funding until the Lions win the Super Bowl
Wait, all my Lions fan buddies are CONVINCED that is going to happen any year now. Any. Year. Now.
Go Pack!
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I don't see RAM being as big of a factor as CPU and/or GPU capacity. A full-on CG render (still-frame or animation sequence) is among the most taxing (depending on settings and resolution, natch), and can swallow your CPU (or GPU) whole for hours on end if you let it. Maxing cores and going 4-way(or higher) SLI/Crossfire on the CPU and GPU fronts (respectively) will give you more love for your buck in the CG world, so long as your software and OS (and modules/drivers) can keep up with the extra horsepower.
N
Almost enough RAM (Score:2)
. . . that Chrome won't eat it all.
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Now that's just crazy talk.
You can upgrade the RAM yourself, but expensive (Score:3)
You don't have to pay Apple's prices to upgrade RAM, you can buy the chips yourself. The process to get to the ram slots is somewhat involved [youtube.com], but you can also just have Apple install the ram you bring them.
The thing is the RAM the iMac Pro uses is not cheap (2666MHz DDR4 ECC / PC4-21300), so you'll be paying a lot regardless of the path you take. For instance an iFixit RAM upgrade kit to 128GB is $2,000.00 [ifixit.com]. To reach 265GB you'll need four 64GB memory chips... and probably best not to use the cheapest ones. Crucial does not even list chips that will work with the iMac Pro...
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Dust is not much of an issue (Score:2)
You can't clean dust from them easily or at all
Do you need to though? With a wholly vertical design there's really not much of a way for dust to build up. It gets flushed out the system by the fans and doesn't really have anywhere to collect the way it would with a flat motherboard and/or case design that has a lot of area at the bottom to collect dust.
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Oh, did Apple release a new laptop?
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My two Mac Pros 5,1s are still chugging along (Score:2)
48 Gigs of RAM and room for eight hard drives plus SSD raid card internally et cetera makes these a great option still and sadly the only option. The future will be what it is. Likely Ubuntu servers for the drives if Apple can't get their heads out of the sand and with no value added for the rest of the system, well, the main workstations / laptops can be anything.
Hey, Apple, the point of a walled garden is to make the garden nice. You're at the point where you've stopped even maintaining the walls. I'm not
One letter: R (Score:2)
As in the statistics system. I deal with data scientist that do spend $16k+ per week on data modeling and forecasting at AWS. With that expense, it's should be easy to justify that desktop. But they'd complain about only 18 cores.
I double people would spend $16K for video games (Score:2)
Let's do some basic math my friends!!! (Score:1)
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256GB 2666 DDR4 (64x4) is over $2,000 (not $1,000), and for ECC sodimms this goes up to over $6,000.
The Intel i9 9980XE doesn’t support 256MB or RAM. A 18-Core 2.3 GHz Intel Xeon W is $3,000.
28" 5k monitor (good brand): Around $1200 (not $500)
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Why do I hate Apple so much?
Did you ever have a Mac?
Or an iPad?
Or an iPhone?
See ... so why do you hate them? If you have mental problems please seek counseling instead of going postal.
At Your Service
Let's check your assumptions! (Score:2)
Why do I hate Apple so much? Because they are literally raping their fanboy customers. Let's do a comparative breakdown of this so-called "$16k Build" based on NewEgg's prices:
-256GB DDR4 RAM: Around $1,000
-16GB GPU (Radeon VII): $700
-18-core Intel CPU (Intel i9 9980XE): $2,000
Intel's ark says [intel.com]
Memory Specifications
Max Memory Size (dependent on memory type) 128 GB
Memory Types DDR4-2666
Max # of Memory Channels 4
ECC Memory Supported No
Half the memory and no ECC support.
Frankly, I find it difficult to imagine why someone would need a graphics workstation with more than 128 GB RAM (as opposed to offloading the work to a server, or a HPC cluster) So I can't say that ECC is an absolute must...
FFS (Score:2)
> Most people will never need more than 16GB of RAM to play video games, and 32-64GB will take care of most video editing and 3D modeling tasks. With 256GB of RAM, you could run advanced AI processes
AI, Games and 3D modelling may be popular things, but they don't come close to the space and computationally bounded computational problems that you come across in engineering and physics.
In my case, an arbitrary amount of compute power and memory can be thrown at randomness distinguishability testing and en
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I would use a multi socket server motherboard with a couple of high core count Xeons and gobbets of memory. That would happily run Linux and could come in at less than $15K.
My life got easier since I put multiprocessing and multithreading support into my analysis code. Most of my compute bound problems scale linearly with core count.
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Though sadly, our sims will probably never support multithreading and scales.. ahm.. odly.... we tend to want a smaller number of higher clocked cores and as much memory/disk write bandwidth as we can get.
At that price (Score:1)
$16,000? Why not get a server (Score:1)
I thought people hated lack of choice? (Score:4, Informative)
I mean, in all the years I've used Apple products, that's always a complaint about them from detractors; They don't give you enough flexibility or choice!
Well, here's a system from Apple that you can configure in all sorts of insane, over the top ways, IF you actually want to -- and people are complaining because it's too much?
I actually own one of these iMac Pros, but I purchased it in the standard "base" configuration. I was also able to buy it for $1,000 off the regular price on a sale that Micro Center stores ran on it, shortly after it was released. They ran various sales on it for months after that, varying between about $500 off and that $1000 discount -- but there were definitely some opportunities to get one for less than Apple's advertised pricing.
It's been a great computer and I have no regrets purchasing it.... The 5K display in it is excellent and partially justifies the base cost of the computer when you see how much equivalent monitors sell for separately. I certainly don't see the need to buy the upgraded configurations for many thousands more? But I'm glad those were available, in case people needed them. I can see someone running a lot of virtual machines in test environments, as a developer, possibly needing a lot more RAM. Maybe not 256GB but 128GB? Yeah .... could happen.
Future proofing. (Score:3)
What will make my shiny new imac pro obsolete? (bearing in mind that nothing on the imac pro can be upgraded without surgery)
Will it be new graphics hardware?
Will it be the widespread availability of cpus with more than 18 cores?
Will it be higher resolution displays?
No. It will be the emergence of bloatware the likes of which even god has never seen.
Boss Mode. (Score:2)
He doesn't know much about computers. But he wants a better one than everyone else to read email on.
Disposable Screens (Score:2)
Dr. Frink, a man ahead of his time (Score:2)
Frink's prediction might come true after all. [youtube.com] "I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them "
People don't know what computers are for anymore (Score:2)
Underutilizing computers has apparently become so commonplace the general people doesn't even know what computers are used for anymore.
No, computers are not devices just to browse Facebook or play video games.
Some people actually use them to run real programs on them.
256GB is also pretty mundane, pretty much any half-decent machine has that. RAM is cheap.
As a developer, I can easily use up more than 16GB just by starting an IDE or a compilation. And I'm not even doing hardware synthesis.
Extra, Extra (Score:2)
Incorrect (Score:2)
Apple's been shitting the bed on cooling solutions and just jamming more powerful hardware into their passively cooled units.
The iMac pro has an excellent cooling system with two huge fans (hint: fans are not passive), it's extremely quiet and does a great job keeping the system cool.
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The last Power Mac came out 14 years ago.
And the problem with it wasn't lack of cooling, it's that when it gets old the cooling system leaks.
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Honestly... if you wanted to do that, you'd take your machine, pay for VMWare Workstation, install MacOS in a VM and allocate the other 90% of the resources to the host OS.
May not be "legit" but will show up this machine in a second... basically I can run OS X in a window on an 8-year-old laptop (with 3D games and browsers running on the main OS) faster than it runs on native Mac machines that were sold with that OS. I tried it once - initially to investigate how easy a Mac port of a game I was writing was
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only to discover that unless you're using XCode, you may as well forget it ... that is all. You can use Emacs or Vim as long as you want.
That is nonsense. XCode is an IDE
A makefile calling gcc etc. works on a Mac just like anywhere else!
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10 years ago I was using an MSI gaming laptop that had two drive bays, 12Gb, and cost way less than $5k. Like, half that.
Apple has always been underspecced and overpriced. Just look at the Mac Mini's and laugh yourself silly on any comparison site.
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Safari eventually stops grabbing memory-- I have 24 GB, and have never run out-- even after opening my extensive bookmark folder structure into tabs.
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Are you sure you're not thinking of RAD drives on the Amiga? MacOS didn't get RAM drives until close to the release of OSX, and not all Mac models supported it.