Hi David,
There's the 'gotch'ya' only 64Gb of RAM in the vanilla iMac v 128 in the iMac Pro. I defer to your tech expertise (I'm not buying another computer without checking w/ you first
) but in my experience, particularly in photography, the additional RAM doesn't go to waste. So the question is for the OP , and others myself included - at what point does the cheaper Mac become , if not obsolete, a poor decision compared to the machine w/ the additional RAM.
Or, to put it another way, 64GB of RAM, today, seems to me to the very minimum requirement looking into the future. I haven't checjked the pricing , but my gut tells me that if I was a buyer today, I'd probably be inclined to go w/ the iMac Pro and it's 128GB capacity, $$$ permitting of course.
It'd be interesting if some of us who bought the trashcan MacPro when it came out, thinking of Bernard and Chris Sanderson, could give us some real-world experiences and feedback (that is when Chris isn't too busy locking threads and deleting posts .. [/leg-pull, Chris]
Anyway, David, thanks for your input.
Best,
M
Hi Manoli,
I haven't read too much about the new Intel Xeon Bronze/Siver/Gold/Titanium processors with the exception of benchmarking related to server-type software: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd-epyc-7000-cpu-battle-of-the-decade/4 . That I do it for work, but these are completely different scenarios. The main problem it is that these processors are two different type of beasts.
So, for normal photographer usage, the better solution will be to go to an i7-8700k system or an i9 system if they need more cores because they also are doing some video editing. The Xeon W processors that Apple is using for their iMac Pro are more similar to these i7 or i9 than the Xeon processors HP is using.
Now, why HP decided to build their workstations with these other processors? For starters, because these processors support to be put in pairs into one system. So, you can buy two cheap Intel® Xeon® Silver 4110 Processors (they are around 400$ each) and get a 16 core system (32 core with hyperthreading). Also, these are server grade processors so they support ECC memory. It is not really important for a photographer, since memory errors are not common... but if you are running a several days simulation in one of these workstations, you will not like it to stop because a memory read/write error. Also, these processors support 48 PCI-E lines directly to the processors (the chipset adds more) vs the 16 lines of the i7-8700k, so you can put several GPUs at 16x speed directly talking with the processor, that it could be interesting for some kind of simulations. The chipset Intel gives to those Xeon processors comes already with 10Gigabit ethernet cards that could be interesting for a server/workstation place. They support up 768 GB of RAM, the i7-8700k "only" 64 GB.
At the end is a balance. For photography and even 4k vídeo editing, one of the latests i7 and i9 will be more than nice. If you are doing simulations or using software that benefits a lot of cores (Lightroom or Capture One are not the case), even if those cores are running at lower speed. Or your app benefits a lot tons of GB of RAM, etc...
