The top-specced Mac Pro could cost around $45,000

midian182

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Bottom line: Yesterday saw Apple unveil its new Mac Pro at the WWDC event. Designed for the likes of professionals, 3D artists, musicians, video editors, and other creatives, the machine starts at $5,999, but those who want the top specs might have to pay around $45,000.

Apple never revealed how much the most powerful 2019 Mac Pro would cost, so The Verge put together some estimates of its own based on the same or similar components. While Apple could charge less or more for this version of the Mac Pro, it gives a ballpark idea of what to expect. The final price? Around $45,000.

Starting with the $6,000 base model, which includes the motherboard, PSU, and cheese grater-style chassis, The Verge estimated that filling its 12 DIMM slots with twelve 128GB sticks of DDR4 EEC memory would cost $17,867.88—1.5TB of RAM definitely doesn’t come cheap.

Next is the storage. As Apple charges $2,400 to upgrade its iMac Pro to 4TB, it’s speculated that upgrading the Mac Pro’s 256GB to that capacity will cost the same. We still don’t know if Apple will allow users to add extra storage themselves, which would bring the price down.

While $6,000 gets you a Mac Pro with an 8-core Xeon W processor, moving up to a 28-core model is going add a lot to the price. Intel’s Xeon W-3275M CPU, which features 28 cores/56 threads, 66.5MB cache, 2.5GHz base/4.4GHz boost speeds, and support for up to 2TB of 2933MHz memory costs $7,453. Apple lists a 28-core processor with a much higher cache size, but the rest of the specs are similar, so the prices will likely be around the same.

The GPU costs are the hardest to estimate. The top-end Mac Pro will hold Two Radeon Pro Vega II Duo cards, making a total of four AMD Radeon Pro Vega II GPUs. These will be installed in two of Apple’s MDX Modules and linked with its Infinity Fabric.

AMD hasn’t yet released the price of its Pro Vega II Duo card, but if they cost around the same as Nvidia’s similar pro-grade Quadro RTX 6000, expect it to be around $6,000. That means paying at least $12,000 for all four GPUs.

Add in the Afterburner accelerator card, magic Keyboard and Trackpad, and the price reaches around $45,000. For those who also want the $5,000 Pro Display XDR monitor and its $1,000 Pro Stand, the amount jumps above $50,000.

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This is what you call "clickbait".... you can go on pretty much any server building website and customize a PC that costs about the same - or more!

RAM and Storage, when maxed out on servers, always costs tens of thousands of dollars.... Try building a Dell PowerEdge server... you can easily go over $250,000....
 
If I was a “professional “ making movies for Hollywood ...yeah, I’d have this.

A $15,000 computer and monitor is nothing when you have a “pro” budget or are backed by a corporation.
 
If I was a “professional “ making movies for Hollywood ...yeah, I’d have this.

A $15,000 computer and monitor is nothing when you have a “pro” budget or are backed by a corporation.
As I see it, it really depends on the corporation. Not all corporations have deep pockets, and at least some of those that do may have other, more important, uses for their money.

Unfortunately, money is no indicator of value, either, IMO. IIRC, there are benchmarks out there that pretty much show that that 28-core Xeon may be the best performer, however, it is certainly does not offer the best performance/$.
 
As I see it, it really depends on the corporation. Not all corporations have deep pockets, and at least some of those that do may have other, more important, uses for their money.

Unfortunately, money is no indicator of value, either, IMO. IIRC, there are benchmarks out there that pretty much show that that 28-core Xeon may be the best performer, however, it is certainly does not offer the best performance/$.

#1 Most of these computer purchases will be used to gain tax credits in both small and large businesses.

FOR EXAMPLE: filing 1099 as a Youtubber allows me to reap RIDICULOUS tax rebates as in when I spent over $10,000 on new computers last year, and more the year before that as a "small business". Obviously corporations can file even larger claims.

#2 Apple Style alone will make these the desirable devices in businesses where impressing the consumer is a consideration. They LOVE having these things on desks because of their neatness and the fact they exude professionalism.
 
"...or if you’re looking for even higher performance, you could just plug in two Radeon Pro Vega II Duo graphics card and get 128 GB of HBM2 VRAM, 56.8 TFLOPs of FP32 Compute and 112.8 TFLOPs of half-precision Compute performance which is just insane."



Now I am going to lay this on you real slow.

That Vega GPU configuration is for the Mac Pro... ($35,ooo +), can you imagine what AMD is going to do with high-end Navi for gaming..? Given what was told here, and what we know about Navi, it will support even greater bandwidth, because Navi uses Infinity Fabric 2.0.

Not only that, this MAC Pro card is PCI3.0, while Navi is PCIe4.0/5.



I can now see a Radeon RDNA Navi X2 coming...
 
As I see it, it really depends on the corporation. Not all corporations have deep pockets, and at least some of those that do may have other, more important, uses for their money.

Unfortunately, money is no indicator of value, either, IMO. IIRC, there are benchmarks out there that pretty much show that that 28-core Xeon may be the best performer, however, it is certainly does not offer the best performance/$.

#1 Most of these computer purchases will be used to gain tax credits in both small and large businesses.

FOR EXAMPLE: filing 1099 as a Youtubber allows me to reap RIDICULOUS tax rebates as in when I spent over $10,000 on new computers last year, and more the year before that as a "small business". Obviously corporations can file even larger claims
To the extent your computer expenses were necessary, ordinary, reasonable and directly related to your business as a YouTuber, yes tax law means that effectively a portion of the total money you paid for those computers, is money you would otherwise have had to pay to the IRS (assuming you could still earn the same total income without it, which in part may be a violation of the first assumptions.)

But there is no "REBATE" here. You can lower the net income you report, causing you to owe less tax. But as a small business you can not take your income below $0 and get cash back from the IRS. You are giving the money up one way or another.

There is also no RIDICULOUS here. If you had this necessary and ordinary legitimate expense, and assuming you properly reported the % personal use vs % business use, and properly depreciated vs. expensed where required to do so, it is fitting that you not be required to report as income money that was not in fact income.

Now if your "expense" was not ordinary, necessary, reasonable, and directly related to your business, or was more personal in nature then you made it out to be, well that's between you, your conscience, and the IRS. They may not catch everyone but they're not exactly chumps either. Ultimately the IRS's computers are watching the percent of revenues taken as expenses by all small businesses within the same industry, and will eventually flag those that seem out of line.
 
If I was a “professional “ making movies for Hollywood ...yeah, I’d have this.

A $15,000 computer and monitor is nothing when you have a “pro” budget or are backed by a corporation.

Then you wouldn't be working in Hollywood or anywhere else, since professionals don't use Macs and haven't for many years. And professionals DO pay attention to budget and price/power - which is why they'd be using Threadrippers and Nvidia cards, not Intel and AMD GPUs. AMD GPUs are fine for gaming but are notoriously sloppy in almost every CC app, from Maya to Photoshop to Nuke. Nobody in CGI uses a Mac. Okay, like four people.
 
Then you wouldn't be working in Hollywood or anywhere else, since professionals don't use Macs and haven't for many years. And professionals DO pay attention to budget and price/power - which is why they'd be using Threadrippers and Nvidia cards, not Intel and AMD GPUs. AMD GPUs are fine for gaming but are notoriously sloppy in almost every CC app, from Maya to Photoshop to Nuke. Nobody in CGI uses a Mac. Okay, like four people.


That's not true at all.

None of anything you just said is true at all.
 
There's a reason why I chose Alienware AREA 51 over one of those "circus toilet" cases with RGB everywhere.

It's because the case is huge.

My i9ex CPU came with a closed loop liquid cooler and dedicated fan.

I can hold 3 GPU each with their own liquid cooler (although I only have one 2080ti with liquid cooling)

The compartment on my Triad towers holds up to 10 SSD drives.

It's a convenient to move tower (if you can lift 60 pounds).

I feel apple built their case too small and like the "Trashcan", they may have built themselves into a thermal corner. I don't want air cooling anymore. Liquid cooling keeps the machine cool and it runs far quieter at load.
 
There's a reason why I chose Alienware AREA 51 over one of those "circus toilet" cases with RGB everywhere.

It's because the case is huge.

My i9ex CPU came with a closed loop liquid cooler and dedicated fan.

I can hold 3 GPU each with their own liquid cooler (although I only have one 2080ti with liquid cooling)

The compartment on my Triad towers holds up to 10 SSD drives.

It's a convenient to move tower (if you can lift 60 pounds).

I feel apple built their case too small and like the "Trashcan", they may have built themselves into a thermal corner. I don't want air cooling anymore. Liquid cooling keeps the machine cool and it runs far quieter at load.
Agreed - you need a big case when you want to go extreme :) Personally, I prefer the Corsair 900D.... BIGGER IS BETTER!!
 
Absolutely unreasonable upgrades and pricing speculation.
  • 12 DIMM slots with twelve 128GB sticks of DDR4. Who in the world would ever configure a personal system with 1536 GB of memory?? I haven't see servers with that much!
  • iMac Pro storage to 4TB. Same comment, excessive beyond belief
  • moving up to a 28-core model is going add a lot to the price -- and show just how foolish one can be.
  • The top-end Mac Pro will hold Two Radeon Pro Vega II Duo cards, making a total of four AMD Radeon Pro Vega II GPUs -- great heat generators and hard to get all for busy.
IMO, the article is click bate without any other purpose but to incite flaming Apple.
 
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