Has anyone done real world benchmarks on the iMac Pro?

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Level 8

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Has anyone done real world benchmarks on the iMac Pro?

I tried the iMac Pro in the Apple Store and there were few Pro Apps other than Final Cut Pro to test. Pages 6 with an array of around 900 circles rapidly slowed it down

and brought up the spinning beach ball of death.

A quick test of processing power would be to convert a large high resolution video to x265 mp4 and see how long it takes and what frame rate it does.

Overall it does not seem dramatically snappier for opening Apps, files etc.

The Geekbench of 35,000 is fast but far short of comparable Linux or Windows workstations, and the poor ventilation is an obvious and painfully repeated Apple design flaw.

i assume Apple will fix the inevitable overheating after dust accumulates inside the sealed case by its usual fix of underclocking and/or letting it simply cook itself to death.

Peter

Posted on Dec 30, 2017 9:34 AM

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Answer 1

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as_909

Level 2

228 points

Dec 30, 2017 10:31 AM in response to PeterBreis0807

Seems you are getting ahead of yourself with the assumptions about overheating and other so called issues.

In terms of speed, it is indeed very fast. How fast it will appear to someone will be based upon what system they used prior. In my case, a 2012 12-core Mac Pro. The internal drive on the iMac Pro is around 33-times (not a typo; thirty-three) faster than the internal drive on the Mac Pro. This leads to extremely quick application launches over the old system.

In general, all the apps I'm using (Final Cut, Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Strata Design 3D, Xcode, etc.) are all running much faster. And in some cases, much much faster. Part of the speed boost though is tied to storage. i.e. moving to a solid state internal drive, and also RAID units for external storage in levels 0, 1 and 10. My Mac Pro just had internal storage on single hard drives (no RAID).

To your specific question about HEVC, I took a 3 minute 18 second clip in 10-bit 4:2:2 XAVC and exported it using HEVC on both computers. The Mac Pro is still chugging along as of this writing. So far over 9 minutes, and around 36 minutes to go. The Mac Pro lacks hardware acceleration for HEVC. The iMac Pro took just 60.5 seconds.

Both computers running macOS 10.13.2. Two separate drives used during the conversion (source disk separate from the destination disk). Mac Pro's drives achieve around 125 MBps. The source RAID (level 10) on iMac Pro around 600 MBps and destination RAID (level 0) around 400 MBps. Although file I/O was not the limiting factor here.

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Answer 2

PeterBreis0807 Author

Level 8

41,241 points

Dec 30, 2017 2:13 PM in response to PeterBreis0807

Glad something is faster. Apple needs to set up its in-store models to better show what it can do.

Pages 6 is exceptionally badly written, I was almost certain it would bring down the iMac Pro and can’t say I was disappointed when it did what it always seems to do. fall over.

I already have external SSD and Fusion drives to launch my iMac so no great gains there for me. My initial assessment of the Mac Pro was pretty spot on, as was the habitual neglect it would get after Apple’s initial enthusiasm. Hopefully the iMac Pro and still vapourware Mac Pro Mk ii will be exceptions.

As to overheating, watch this space. Mechanics and physical laws have a way of outing fingers crossed, maybe no-one will notice optimism.

Peter

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