The Mac Pro Review (Late 2013)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 31, 2013 3:18 PM ESTPlotting the Mac Pro’s GPU Performance Over Time
The Mac Pro’s CPU options have ballooned at times during its 7 year history. What started with four CPU options grew to six for the early 2009 - mid 2010 models. It was also during that time period that we saw an expansion of the number of total core counts from 4 up to the current mix of 4, 6, 8 and 12 core configurations.
What’s particularly unique about this year’s Mac Pro is that all configurations are accomplished with a single socket. Moore’s Law and the process cadence it characterizes leave us in a place where Intel can effectively ship a single die with 12 big x86 cores. It wasn’t that long ago where you’d need multiple sockets to achieve the same thing.
While the CPU moved to a single socket configuration this year, the Mac Pro’s GPU went the opposite direction. For the first time in Mac Pro history, the new system ships with two GPUs in all configurations. I turned to Ryan Smith, our Senior GPU Editor, for his help in roughly characterizing Mac Pro GPU options over the years.
Mac Pro - GPU Upgrade Path | ||||||||||
Mid 2006 | Early 2008 | Early 2009 | Mid 2010 | Mid 2012 | Late 2013 | |||||
Slowest GPU Option | NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT | ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT | NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 | ATI Radeon HD 5770 | ATI Radeon HD 5770 | Dual AMD FirePro D300 | ||||
Fastest GPU Option | NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 | NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 | ATI Radeon HD 4870 | ATI Radeon HD 5870 | ATI Radeon HD 5870 | Dual AMD FirePro D700 |
Since the Mac Pro GPU offerings were limited to 2 - 3 cards per generation, it was pretty easy to put together comparisons. We eliminated the mid range configuration for this comparison and only looked at scaling with the cheapest and most expensive GPU options each generation.
Now we’re talking. At the low end, Mac Pro GPU performance improved by 20x over the past 7 years. Even if you always bought the fastest GPU possible you'd be looking at a 6x increase in performance, and that's not taking into account the move to multiple GPUs this last round (if you assume 50% multi-GPU scaling then even the high end path would net you 9x better GPU performance over 7 years).
Ryan recommended presenting the data with a log scale as well to more accurately depict the gains over time:
Here you see convergence, at a high level, between the slowest and fastest GPU options in the Mac Pro. Another way of putting it is that Apple values GPU performance more today than it did back in 2006, so even the cheapest GPU is a much higher performing part than it would be.
If you’re a GPU company (or a Senior GPU Editor), this next chart should make you very happy. Here I’m comparing relative increases in performance for both CPU and GPU on the same graph:
This is exactly why Apple (and AMD) is so fond of ramping up GPU performance: it’s the only way to get serious performance gains each generation. Ultimately we’ll see GPU performance gains level off as well, but if you want to scale compute in a serious way you need to heavily leverage faster GPUs.
This is the crux of the Mac Pro story. It’s not just about a faster CPU, but rather a true shift towards GPU compute. In a little over a year, Apple increased the GPU horsepower of the cheapest Mac Pro by as great of a margin as it did from 2006 - 2012. The fastest GPU option didn’t improve by quite as much, but it’s close.
Looking at the same data on a log scale you’ll see that the percentage increase in GPU performance is slowing down over time, much like what we saw with CPUs, just to a much lesser extent. Note that this graph doesn't take into account that the Late 2013 Mac Pro has a second GPU. If we take that into account, GPU performance scaling obviously looks even better. Scaling silicon performance is tough regardless of what space you’re playing in these days. If you’re looking for big performance gains though, you’ll need to exploit the GPU.
The similarities between what I’m saying here about GPU performance and AMD’s mantra over the past few years aren’t lost. The key difference between Apple’s approach and those of every other GPU company is that Apple spends handsomely to ensure it has close to the best single threaded CPU performance as well as the best GPU performance. This is an important distinction, and ultimately the right approach.
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OreoCookie - Thursday, January 2, 2014 - link
You link to a $2000 workstation without graphics cards and just 8 GB RAM. How does that invalidate Anand's claim?DukeN - Thursday, January 2, 2014 - link
I paid $144 for the extra RAM and re-used my old workstation cards.Hardly double the price.
zsquared - Thursday, January 2, 2014 - link
So you are not counting the original cost of the workstation cards but you think you proved you point.And you're telling Anand "Shame"?
Ppietra - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link
memory: 1600 MHz vs 1866 MHzSSD: SATA600 vs PCIe
no thunderbolt
no graphics
clearly the same specs
DukeN - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link
Even with a decent card it's something like $1500 less.This is a fact that isn't acknowledged by Anand, of course because not cozying up to Apple is potentially bad for business.Oh well I'll never be able to convince the Apple fanboys writing or reading here.
Ppietra - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link
the comparison wasn’t about what you can get with the same processor, but how much does it cost to have the same specs, and your comparison doesn’t do that, and you certainly don’t get a machine with the same performance since memory and storage are slower.How do you get it for $1500 less when your machine base price is 1000$ less. If you add 2 decent graphic cards (with comparable performance) and the extra memory to match you quickly get at the Mac Pro price and still you would probably get worse performance!
Liquidmark - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link
Where's your graphics card?8GB of ram?
SATA SSD?
Here's what I got so far from lenovo's site...
Intel Xeon E5-1620 v2 Processor (10MB Cache, 3.70GHz)
Windows 8 Pro 64 Downgrade Windows 7 Professional 64 English
Tower 5x6 Mechanical Shell with low inrush current power supply
Windows 8 Pro 64 RDVD English
16GB ECC 2Rx4 PC3 1600MHz RDIMM
NVIDIA® Quadro K2000D (2GB Dual link DVI+DVI, Mini DP) - (For Windows 7 ME8.0)
NVIDIA® Quadro K2000D (2GB Dual link DVI+DVI, Mini DP) - (For Windows 7 ME8.0)
DVI to VGA Dongle
Integrated Audio
Intel SATA HDD support (1-3 HDDs)
Internal RAID - Not Enabled
2.5" 256GB SATA SolidState Drive
29-in-1 Media Card Reader - (For Windows 7 ME8.0)
DVD Burner/CD-RW Rambo Drive (SATA) - Win7 ME8.0
Integrated Ethernet
USB Preferred Pro FullSize Win8 US Euro English 103P
Lenovo USB Optical Wheel Mouse
LineCord - US
Publication - English
$4,128.00
Mac Pro with 16 gb instead of 12 for ram...
$3,099.00
Come on man...
Liquidmark - Friday, January 3, 2014 - link
Oop, I forgot the Applecare!Ok, Mac Pro= $3,348.00
Lenovo Lenovo S30= $4,128.00
RollingCamel - Thursday, January 2, 2014 - link
No engineering software performance review?wheelhot - Saturday, January 4, 2014 - link
I wonder why as well, I don't see anything wrong to do some windows engineering software tests