“Apple was kind enough to send me a 10-core iMac Pro with 128GB of memory for testing and evaluation purposes. I spent just short of a week running the machine through my typical workflows in aerospace engineering and software development, and also ran some benchmarks and tests,” Craig A. Hunter writes for Hunter Research and Technology. “The iMac Pro made strong impressions on me in terms of performance and productivity.”
“Paired with a stunning 5120×2880 Retina ‘5K’ display, the iMac Pro is a graphics powerhouse — I continually marveled at how crisp and clean everything was rendered with no apparent overhead or impact on performance. I’m used to choosing between performance or detail when visualizing complex 3D datasets, and the iMac Pro gives both,” Hunter writes. “From 4 to 10 cores, the iMac Pro runs away. Or if you can take advantage of AVX-512 (not available on a standard iMac) the iMac Pro runs away. This sort of reinforces one of the main advantages of the iMac Pro — moving to a workstation class CPU gives access to more cores, advanced processing features, and a bigger, more scalable, performance envelope than you can get in a standard iMac. Other key advantages are memory capacity and graphics capability. If your work benefits from any of these things, then the iMac Pro is the natural choice.”
Hunter writes, “It will be interesting to see how the higher end models price out, especially the 18-core model, but if the trend is in line with the base model, this will be quite a deal for people that are ready to spend money on a true workstation-class Mac.”
Much more in the full review here.
MacDailyNews Note: Dr. Craig Hunter is a mechanical/aerospace engineer with over 25 years of experience in software development.
Hunter has extensive experience in programming, app development, and scientific computing on macOS and iOS. He received the NASA Software of the Year Award and an Apple Design Award (Best Scientific Computing Solution on macOS) for his contributions to the NASA TetrUSS CFD software suite. TetrUSS is used for multiple classes of aerodynamic analysis in government, industry, and academia throughout the United States.
SEE ALSO:
With iMac Pro, has Apple once again changed its approach to media? – December 12, 2017
Apple’s new iMac Pro offers a remarkable 200%-300% speed increase – December 12, 2017
One week with Apple’s iMac Pro: Completely sealed, non-upgradeable, and super powerful – December 12, 2017
Apple’s powerful new iMac Pro launches December 14 – December 12, 2017
And I’m certain Dr. Hunter wouldn’t object if it were upgradable.
The upgradable modular mac pro is coming soon for what u want.
But these imacs are beasts.. just make sure u order the right configurations from the get go.
Answer me this…
Who does non-upgradability serve? Who does upgradability hurt?
He probably would just update it by emptying the change in his pocket and buying a new one. Or buy the upgradable high end machine when it arrives with the extra loose change in his other pocket. For some of us the cost might be a little more of a concern.
I’m sure I read that it is upgradable, just not by the user. You have to take it into an authorized shop. That fits with the all-in-one market, the people buying these aren’t going to upgrade it themselves. Could be some aspect of the hardware design made user upgradability not practical, or too easy to damage the iMac if attempted. I doubt very much it was anything nefarious.
Question…did the good Doctor get his iMac pro for free?
I would review almost anything in a positive way if I got it for free… just saying…
Do u have any doubts these are incredibly powerful and beautiful machines?
NO ONE disputes that these will be (when they actually ship in quantity to the public) the fastest Macs yet. For an iMac it will be a true beast.
However, anyone with more than one functioning brain cell must realize that a completely closed machine is not a machine for true pros and number crunchers.
MDN can recount the background of this guy all it wants. I can stack mine up against his any day: started with true supers back with the CDC-6600, moved to the Cray-1 (COS), to the Cray-XMP-4/4 (both COS and UNICOS), to the IBM 3090-600VF, and so forth. Coded and ran simulations that took over 80 hours to run on those machines — and that’s after highly optimizing them. Front ended a super computer with a Mac PLus over a 1,500 mile link back in the 80s. (Thanks Apple for that RS-422 interface.)
I’ve developed and run simulations ranging from life shorting effects of non stochastic processes to nuclear device simulations to extremely large satellite constellation interference analyses.
I don’t do as much coding and simulation as I used to, but I still occasionally need to do simulations that can take over 24 hours to run. (Partly it’s just to keep my hand in.)
So if I want to add in an Nvidia V100 based card (or a pair of them), can I do that? NO. The V100, for some of the work I do is more than twice as fast as anything AMD puts out today–up to 7 TFLOPS double-precision. But, with the iMac Pro I’d be stuck with a far lesser AMD solution. Plus the V100 (as expensive as it is) is much less expensive than getting a lot of time on one of the top 50 machines. (It’s similar to the days of the VAXs. We’d develop and run on VAXs to prove out the simulation, then port to a big machine to do the full run. Or, coding and testing on a Mac then porting over to a super for full runs.)
Note, I am not saying the iMac Pro is a useless machine. I’ve done nuclear event simulations on a Mac Plus back in the day. It’s that the upcoming iMac Pro, with its 100% sealed nature, is not a true “Pro” machine, in my opinion.
As I said before, the iMac Pro will be a true beast — for an iMac. For true pros, it just does not fit the requirements.
Come on…at least read the article before posting cynical remarks! The very first frigging sentence says:
“Apple was kind enough to send me a 10-core iMac Pro with 128GB of memory for testing and evaluation purposes.
Testing and evaluation. No keepsies. Although it would not surprise me if he and other early evaluators are offered the option to keep the hardware for a discount price. After all, it is used already…
He probably would just update it by emptying the change in his pocket and buying a new one. Or buy the upgradable high end machine when it arrives with the extra loose change in his other pocket. For some of us the cost might be a little more of a concern.
I would have rather more faith in his objectivity than the average hack from my experience. Would be interesting to know if these machines were for keeping mind.
Let’s see what shows up on BareFeats. Those reviews and benchmarkings will be more interesting that virtually any others. The postings there typically try to separate reality from fantasy.
These test units are never for keeps. They are often used again by other testers.
Other reviews have specifically addressed your cynical question, which most of us already knew the answer to anyway.
Vincent Laforet’s review starts with him writing “Last week I received a pelican case from Apple with a very special Mac inside of it…”
If it was intended to be a one-way trip, then the iMac pro would have been packaged in a cardboard box, just like every other computer. The fact that it was shipped in a rugged and durable flight case demonstrates that it was expected to be replaced into that case and returned to Apple.
As an aside, I’m a great fan of Pelicases. I have a lot of them to house my audio equipment when it’s used away from home and on one occasion several Pelicases were in a fast RIB which hit a huge wave and we capsized. The Pelicases simply bobbed about on the sea until we were able to recover them and when returned to dry land, the contents were totally dry. We watched other flight cases sink, some almost instantly and others slowly, never to be seen again. On another occasion at a race track, a collection of flight cases were lying on the ground while setting up during a private test day, when an unauthorised and unexpected car spun off the track at high speed and smashed into them. Many of our ( thankfully empty ) flight cases were either written off or badly damaged, but all the Pelicases survived unscathed.
If you have precious equipment, then a Pelicase is the best way to keep it safe, even under quite extreme circumstances.