smatovic wrote: ↑Tue Jun 04, 2019 9:36 am
Hmm, Apple ships them with an 2*2 AMD Radeon Pro Vega II GPU option,
up to 16384 cores, 128 GB HBM, 56.4 TFLOPs fp32, 112.8 TFLOPs fp16 in sum,
so the new Mac Pro competes with Nvidia's DGX-1 Station with 4 Voltas,
and these are pricey, 37K to 52K Euros...
so the question is, which dude will tune LC0 for Apple's AMD Vega II GPU
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Srdja
Considering that dot product in OpenCL is at least 10x slower than in cuDNN, probably no one.
Sources please.
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Srdja
You can check LC0 benchmarks using cuDNN and NVIDIA RTX cards and using openCL and AMD RX Vega cards.
That shows what a great job Ankan has done.
Who knows what can be gained if some skilled guy takles LC0 for OpenCL on AMD GPUs...
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Srdja
Re: The Mac Pro is back - finally
Posted: Tue Jun 04, 2019 10:17 pm
by M ANSARI
Apple always charges about 3 x what you can get with similar hardware and that seems to be about right with this new Mac desktop. All the specs seem impressive but 28 cores ... I don't know but for such a machine that might become outdated as 64 cores might soon become the norm for that type of hardware.
A major advantage to the Mac Pro is that its consistently a Skylake-X CPU + AMD Vega GPU. Anyone writing programs for a Mac Pro can very specifically tailor their application for that combination.
In particular, we know that SkylakeX has PDEP, PEXT, and AVX512 implemented. AMD Vega GPUs have different performance attributes than NVidia. In particular: AMD Vega GPUs are faster at 24-bit multiplication than 32-bit, require far more threads to utilize the GPU, have extremely good bandwidth thanks to the HBM2 RAM but a shallower cache structure and more latency to access that RAM.
...obviously the new Mac Pro does not play in the same NPS/Dollar league like
systems based on recent AMD Zen CPUs for Stockfish, or Nvidia RTX series for LC0,
but for Video/CGI the quad-GPU deal seems a good one, you get 4 AMD Vega II GPUs
(with each 32 GB HBM) for ~10K $.
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Srdja
Re: The Mac Pro is back - finally
Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2019 9:08 pm
by mwyoung
Apple Engineer explaining MacBook Pro! -
Re: The Mac Pro is back - finally
Posted: Mon Dec 16, 2019 5:26 am
by dragontamer5788
smatovic wrote: ↑Thu Dec 12, 2019 5:04 pm
...obviously the new Mac Pro does not play in the same NPS/Dollar league like
systems based on recent AMD Zen CPUs for Stockfish, or Nvidia RTX series for LC0,
but for Video/CGI the quad-GPU deal seems a good one, you get 4 AMD Vega II GPUs
(with each 32 GB HBM) for ~10K $.
--
Srdja
The main issue with that is that the Radeon VII is available for $550 to $600 these days, which is almost as good as the Vega II that is in that Mac Pro.
The Vega II is the only AMD GPU with 32GBs of HBM RAM, which is incredible. But the Radeon VII still has 1TBps memory bandwidth, so as long as your dataset fits inside of 16GBs, the Radeon VII will probably be a better buy. Only for those who need more than 16GBs of RAM will benefit fro the Mac Pro. Build your own will always be much cheaper. I'd estimate that a "self-built MacPro" with 4x GPUs and Threadripper 24-core would be maybe $6k or so.
But how many people are building Threadrippers + Radeon VII computers? If I were a software developer, do I write something for Mac Pro, or for Windows workstations? Simply choosing to write your software on the smaller platform (Mac Pro) has its benefits... business research is required (make sure enough of your potential customers are actually buying Mac Pros before writing software for it).
--------
From a chess-perspective... there is one programmer over on the Technical forums who is actually using those PDEP / PEXT instructions for interesting stuff. That requires an Intel processor, and the 28-core Intel is the top-of-the-line, and appropriately priced. If you were going the PDEP / PEXT / AVX512 route, the Mac Pro might be worthwhile to look at.
But if you're a GPU-programmer, in Chess in particular, the 16GB Radeon VII should be more than sufficient RAM.
smatovic wrote: ↑Thu Dec 12, 2019 5:04 pm
...obviously the new Mac Pro does not play in the same NPS/Dollar league like
systems based on recent AMD Zen CPUs for Stockfish, or Nvidia RTX series for LC0,
but for Video/CGI the quad-GPU deal seems a good one, you get 4 AMD Vega II GPUs
(with each 32 GB HBM) for ~10K $.
--
Srdja
...
The Vega II is the only AMD GPU with 32GBs of HBM RAM, which is incredible.
...
The Radeon Instinct MI60 has 32 GB too, and is in the 10K $ range afaik.
