New Mac Studios AND an AS Mac Pro!

[uptheoctave]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Double? It does boat loads more than double PCIe bandwidth. A Thunderbolt 3/4 expansion chassis has 4 x PCIe 3 land of bandwidth.

If early reports that the new Mac Pro has 6 open slots coop CDC 2 x 16 PCIe 4 lane slots and 4 x 8 PCIe 4 lanes are correct then

I am talking about the drive speeds comparing the (2019) Mac Pro to the (2022) Mac Studio based on testing the same drives, on the same PCIE cards, not the bandwidth of PCIE vs Thunderbolt.

With new machines it all changes again because of the move to PCIE 4.0 in the Mac Pro. I didn't see if the Mac Studio has made that move too or not).

[uptheoctave]

Originally Posted by RobertDorn

The sonnet/avid branded chassis noise is very annoying indeed, I also have it put away from my control room because otherwise the noise of the chassis won’t let me record anything with a mic in the control room.

As for the bandwidth, sure it’ll be much greater when having it on a pci slot in the Mac Pro instead of over Thunderbolt3, but in real world practice I guess we never ever get to use the max bandwidth available with TB , left alone that we need a PCI 16x gen4 slot bandwidth .

I do, anytime I try to move huge files between drives.
Which is often.

For recording audio it is a non issue.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by uptheoctave

I am talking about the drive speeds comparing the (2019) Mac Pro to the (2022) Mac Studio based on testing the same drives, on the same PCIE cards, not the bandwidth of PCIE vs Thunderbolt.

With new machines it all changes again because of the move to PCIE 4.0 in the Mac Pro. I didn't see if the Mac Studio has made that move too or not).

Somebody buying a $10k "high-end" computer likely wants to run more than one SSD. And the whole Thunderbolt 3/4 chassis is just so slow compared to modern PCIe slots.

PCIe 4 slots on the Mac Pro will deliver SSD speeds the PCIe 4 M.2 manufactures claim. All the credible players like Samsung are good with specs, although the sheer complexity of SSDs mean performance can vary greatly depending on what exactly is being measured. But as a data point Samsung 990s on PCIe4 deliver up to 7.2/6.7 GB/s read/write sequential large block I/O speeds. Who knows for sure what SSDs exactly Apple have in the new Mac Pro but I expect them to largely the same as what is in the Mac Studio and have similar performance. Although the performance of the those Mac SSDs is great it's one of those that needs to be measured carefully. I largely expect/hope nobody cares about Apple SSD performance in those Mac Pro. Just enough to build up boot drive(s) and then get everything on cheaper and faster via PCIe 4 M.2 storage.

Unfortunately I expect the Mac Pro will not support PCIe bifurcation, and if so folks will want PCIe switch based M.2 to PCIe adapter cards when installing more than one M.2 drive in a PCIe slot. And you won't want to use the PCIe3 switch based cards like the Sonnet 4x4 in a new Mac Pro, it will just throttle all drives on it to PCIe 3 speeds. Hopefully Sonnet will have a PCIe 4 version of that card out.

All current Apple Silicon Macs internally use PCIe 4 technology. The PCIe 4 in the latest M2 Ultra SOCs is nothing new or surprising. It's disappointing it's not PCIe 5 but we know the M.2 family is in large part a stopgap until TSMC and Apple sort out M3, and hopefully M3 might be PCIe 5. And by then some of the issues with bleeding edge PCIe 5 M.2 cards will be sorted out. Especially thermal throttling.

[K Roche]

Originally Posted by Carl Lie

It's a $3,000 PCI expansion chassis!

Yes well actually more like a $3000 PCIe gen 4 expansion chassis with say a $25,000 to $35,000 or more, Dell 7960 computer thrown in for fun

[Carl Lie]

Originally Posted by K Roche

Yes well actually more like a $1000 to $2000 PCIe gen 4 expansion chassis with say a $25,000 to $35,000 or more, Dell 7960 computer thrown in for fun

I'm done with my rant on the mac pro. I think with the M3 chips it may become something I'd want. But to get the facts a little straighter, the machine is $6,999. The same spec'd Studio is $3,999. That's where I came up with that comment (you can do the math).

C

[uptheoctave]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Somebody buying a $10k "high-end" computer likely wants to run more than one SSD. And the whole Thunderbolt 3/4 chassis is just so slow compared to modern PCIe slots.

Indeed.

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

PCIe 4 slots on the Mac Pro will deliver SSD speeds the PCIe 4 M.2 manufactures claim. All the credible players like Samsung are good with specs, although the sheer complexity of SSDs mean performance can vary greatly depending on what exactly is being measured. But as a data point Samsung 990s on PCIe4 deliver up to 7.2/6.7 GB/s read/write sequential large block I/O speeds. Who knows for sure what SSDs exactly Apple have in the new Mac Pro but I expect them to largely the same as what is in the Mac Studio and have similar performance. Although the performance of the those Mac SSDs is great it's one of those that needs to be measured carefully. I largely expect/hope nobody cares about Apple SSD performance in those Mac Pro. Just enough to build up boot drive(s) and then get everything on cheaper and faster via PCIe 4 M.2 storage.

Unfortunately I expect the Mac Pro will not support PCIe bifurcation, and if so folks will want PCIe switch based M.2 to PCIe adapter cards when installing more than one M.2 drive in a PCIe slot. And you won't want to use the PCIe3 switch based cards like the Sonnet 4x4 in a new Mac Pro, it will just throttle all drives on it to PCIe 3 speeds. Hopefully Sonnet will have a PCIe 4 version of that card out.

All current Apple Silicon Macs internally use PCIe 4 technology. The PCIe 4 in the latest M2 Ultra SOCs is nothing new or surprising. It's disappointing it's not PCIe 5 but we know the M.2 family is in large part a stopgap until TSMC and Apple sort out M3, and hopefully M3 might be PCIe 5. And by then some of the issues with bleeding edge PCIe 5 M.2 cards will be sorted out. Especially thermal throttling.

Thanks, this is helpful.

[K Roche]

Originally Posted by Carl Lie

I'm done with my rant on the mac pro. I think with the M3 chips it may become something I'd want. But to get the facts a little straighter, the machine is $6,999. The same spec'd Studio is $3,999. That where I came up with that comment (you can do the math).
C

Obviously if you don't need PCIe slots the Studio makes perfect sense for many maybe even most users ...
But comparing apples to cumquats is definitely rant based and specious or disingenuous at best.
Considering (when you to get to the actual objective " facts") by the time you ad the latest gen PCIe 6-8 slot expansion chassis with apparently less speed performance, you will likely be $5 k to $7k anyway so where is the logic in that ?

[JFreak]

What you want for bragging rights are "a thousand" nodes connected together via infiniband or such, totalling +1000 cores. Those processors (combined in terahertz range) offer capability of tens of terabytes of memory and hundreds of terabytes of storage.

In other words, PT would limit number of tracks without that kind of beast would run out of juice. But it is not cheap. Then again, the cheapest Mac Mini is enormously more powerful than Apollo 11 that landed on the moon and got its crew back safely.

[K Roche]

Originally Posted by JFreak

What you want for bragging rights are "a thousand" nodes connected together via infiniband or such, totalling +1000 cores. Those processors (combined in terahertz range) offer capability of tens of terabytes of memory and hundreds of terabytes of storage.

In other words, PT would limit number of tracks without that kind of beast would run out of juice. But it is not cheap. Then again, the cheapest Mac Mini is enormously more powerful than Apollo 11 that landed on the moon and got its crew back safely.

Wait what are you saying ?? I will have to ditch my Intel iMac and get a new Mini so I can record my cover of Fly Me To The Moon ? (not that I can sing like Ol' Blue Eyes )

[moogboy100]

Originally Posted by Carl Lie

The $6,999 starting price for the Pro is silly!!!!!

The new Mac Pro is silly. Keeping the same old chassis was just lazy, though I guess they want to keep their investment in the tooling and machining equipment used to build that chassis.

The Mac Pro is just a $3k 6-slot expansion chassis in an absurdly large chassis with 3 fans that blow air through an empty box and over a CPU that generates virtually no heat, lol!!! The fans prob. use more wattage than the CPU.

A Mac Studio with an expansion chassis that holds as many or as few cards as you actually need is the way to go (unless you're an enterprise facility). The Mac Studio is just the perfect professional desktop computer in Apple's lineup - I love mine and it's the best Apple computer I've ever used in 37 years of owning Apple desktops!