Can’t wait to hear all about it! I’m very heavily contemplating upgrading to the MacStudio, but held off until the M2 chip was announced. Good to see if finally make an appearance, the M1 was a beast in its own right
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As Randy mentioned there are several card options. Just make sure you’re ordering a Gen4 Raid card and nvme drives. Even if you search gen 4 nvme m.2 there are gen 3 drives that get mixed into the results.
I’m assuming that the pci bus for storage will be faster than an external thubderbolt nvme solution?
Whats the bandwidth of the pci bus when it comes to storage
Thanks @randy, you’ve got me going down the rabbit hole a bit. Apparently OWC has an 8-NVME slot heatsink/fan cooled Gen4 PCIe (what the MacPro has), running at 26,000MB/s?!?
16TB is $2500 bucks. 8TB is $1750
Superfast, quiet non-spinning disk storage (plus no external enclosures / power supplies), the Mac Pro has me really intrigued now…
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Yeah. I’m intrigued as well. Throw in a $200 Decklink and a Highpoint and off to the races in a single, quiet box with onboard 10gig.
Just want to see how fast it is…
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Judging by how many logik folks are enjoying the M1 Studios, and MacBook Pro performance, I’d venture to guess it’s serviceable. Still may not be as fast as the fastest Linux threadripper, but Flame, Resolve, Ableton/ProTools all on one machine? This might be my stop…
Question though. Are the high point and sonnet pci nvme raids preferable over the owc stuff? I’m not terribly versed in the best pci enclosures and nvme sticks. @randy, you seem to have done your homework on this?
I like the Highpoints. I’ve got the 7504 and a few of the 7101-a.
A member of this forum have had very bad experiences with the 8 bay cards from Highpoint and Mac. It’s unknown whether that problem is with the card or with Mac.
I’ve had perfect experience with the 8 bay cards and Linux.
Five bucks says you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference in real world performance of any of those enclosures.
Id go for some thing that is readily available, moderately priced, and get a back up card. Or perhaps even a used one off of eBay as a back up.
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I recently bought my own box and after a bit of obsessive deliberation/rumination went for a P620/5955/128gb/2tb/a5000rtx/Highpoint7504/4x2tb NVME/Decklink combo.
All in with tax I came in just under 5.6k USD. I bought some bits open box, some bits refurbed and some bits new.
For me, the notion of being able to have a machine that could grow with my needs outweighed the mac factor—if I need more performance, I just buy the bits I need and I still have my M1 Max laptop sitting beside which can do it all in a pinch.
It doesn’t mean that I don’t see value in the MacPro, but for 12k all in and no option to upgrade ram/gpu/cpu, I’d want a machine performing at the top end of the benchmark so it would remain viable for say 36-48 months of amortization. I firmly believe the P620 will hobble nicely over that line with (some) grace given the cpu can be popped out, a new GPU can be added and ram upgrades abound.
I suspect that this MacPro could come close despite lacking access to all those things and that’s pretty exciting.
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100% @cnoellert, I hear ya. Literally half the cost for a high performing homebuilt Flame. Makes total sense. Those little Decklink cards are perfect too! For my uses, consolidating into a single Mac ecosystem outweighs having multiple machines (I still have my 2012 Retina, which miraculously still lives), I lean pretty heavily on music software & would be looking at PCI DSP cards, etc to further minimize outboard gear as well. Not to mention all the other outboard stuff I could consolidate, dumping everything into one chassis.
Given I’m typing this on my 2017 iMac Pro gives me a little sense of solace that I should be able to get either a Studio or Pro across the 4 year mark. Also doing a fair bit of PCOIP, trying to factor that in as well…
@randy thanks for the tips on the PCI NVME cards! Roger on the extra card as well. I have an identical drive sitting around for my spinning RAID somewhere… Have you ever had a NVME stick fail? Zero NVME experience here, but really excited at the prospects. Audio, much like image sequences is all about multi-file read speed etc, so this is really promising on a lot of fronts.
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No but it happens. They are so cheap these days, less than an hour’s wages. Heck, for about a day’s wages you can get a whole backup set of x4 NVME and a RAID card. Sleep easy, yeah?
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So you just RAID-1 your 2 NVME cards? The fact that all these 4-stick setups are getting crazy speeds with Raid 0 scares me a little. That said I don’t think we’ve had to rebuild stones from parity since the IRIX days, but still…
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Nah just RAID0 the primary and leave the backup on the shelf. It’s just a cache. All the important data is on a NAS with another local backup avail via high availability and another offsite backup.
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Wow.
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Grats to Apple on their top tier workstation gpu tying Nvidia’s mid-tier gaming card from last year I guess?
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Yeah yeah, fair. But if you slap on a wider lens, it’s far more interesting.
M2 Ultra has 192GB of RAM with 100% available to the GPU, 90w, tiny.
4070ti has 12GB of VRAM, 250w, double height.
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Sure, the Nvidia card is an absolute pig compared to the M2. And I’ll bet Resolve absolutely screams on the new Studio and MP. I haven’t looked at Flame benchmarks in a bit, but when the M1 Studio came out it was benching slightly faster than my 6ish year-old z840/p6000. I’m really curious to see how things shake out after the Vulkanization is all said and done!
In the current state of affairs, AI & ML on Apple Silicon is much, much slower than on NVIDIA but this will certainly change. As will Flame benchmarks for Apple Silicon vs Threadripper/NVIDIA, Linux will still be faster for Flame for the short term at the very least, but not so far ahead now that you were taking a massive Flame performance hit by heading down the Apple path.
So in the end, it really is a personal decision and the best option is the one you decide is best for your use case.
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Well well well.
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I’m sure Autodesk is aware of CopyCat and ML progress as of late… Here’s to hoping they’ll be able to keep up!
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Out of curiosity, have you ever run into hardware compatibility issues with Highpoint 8 bay cards on Linux?
We had a supplier push back at our decision to go for the Dell Threadripper configuration recommended by Autodesk and push us instead towards the HP. One of the concerns was compatibility as I understood it…but that doesn’t make much sense to me since the os will be the same and to my mind PCIe compatibility with these things is a binary it works or it doesn’t.