When, last June, Apple revealed its most powerful iMac, indeed its most powerful Mac of any kind, it made clear that this was designed for pro users who liked the look of an all-in-one computer but needed performance that was workstation-class.
The design was eye-catching - identical to the iMac with a 27-inch Retina 5K display except instead of a silver-colored finish it was space gray. This looked good, especially on the super-cool space gray wireless extended keyboard, trackpad and mouse.
The price is also a head-turner: it starts at $4,999 (£4,899 in the UK), much more than the $1,799 entry price for the regular 27in iMac (£1,749 in the UK). In other words, Apple knew it was for a niche market.
Which made it hard to review. In my time with the machine I've been repeatedly bowled over by its power, speed and responsiveness, but the truth is that a regular iMac is easily a fast enough computer for me.
I have been impressed with the way it whizzes along, whether you're using Final Cut Pro X or Cinema 4D (an advanced 3D modeling, animation and rendering application used in the creative industries). Final Cut Pro X, Apple's own professional video editing app, introduced a series of features when the iMac Pro arrived, including 360-degree VR video editing. Among other things, the program allowed users to edit 8K video on a Mac for the first time.
So, in a sense, the iMac Pro is wasted on me. Although, oh boy, I do really like that space gray finish.
To find out exactly what it's capable of, I had to turn to really demanding programs (and users). The kinds of people who want to edit eight streams of 4K video in real time.
Or 3D designers who want to visualize 3D models or render scenes.
Twinmotion 2018 v2 is a virtualization and VR exploration program which is used by architects, urban planners and others. For me, it emphasizes the point of a machine like the iMac Pro. When you are working on a complex project, like visualizing a new company headquarters, you don't want to answer any question with the words, 'No, this program can't do that' or, 'I can render that but it'll take a day or two.' The reason you need the power is so that with a couple of mouse clicks you can instantly do the things you need to, creating an airport with a hard-to-render curvy roof, a car park with recognizable vehicles and passengers. You want to be able to see what the building will look like in the rain, sunshine or snow. I've seen Twinmotion in action and on the iMac Pro it can create remarkable-looking buildings and astonishingly detailed surroundings in nothing flat.
Or take a scientist like Craig Hunter, from NASA, who reviewed the 10-core iMac Pro and then went back to take a look at the 18-core version. Of the first one, he says, '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. Even when just working in Xcode or a terminal window, the clarity and brightness of the screen made it really easy on the eyes.'
He went on to study how the machine performed with, and stay with me here, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for aerodynamic design and development. No, I hadn't heard of this either, but Hunter explains, 'A typical use of CFD is to evaluate the aerodynamic performance of aerospace vehicles like rockets and airplanes. The first step in this process is to create a mesh of the vehicle geometry from a CAD definition. This essentially lets us break the problem down into thousands or millions of small cells in which we numerically simulate the physics that govern flow. An analogous process is used in other areas of engineering analysis including structures and heat transfer. And though it doesn't involve simulation, OpenGL game programmers are well aware of the process of meshing a 3D object with triangles or quads in order to create a solid model that can react to lighting, shading, and other visual effects.'
Now, of course, he's not saying the iMac Pro is a computer you should buy if you're a keen gamer, rather it's the machine to use if you're creating a game, instead of just playing it.
The benchmarks which he reports are keen: 'Timing results look very good for the iMac Pro, which comes in fastest of the ten systems I’ve tested over the last five years by a notable margin.' These systems include recent MacBook Pro, the Mac Pro from 2013 and several Linux servers.
Hunter adds, 'I also looked at scaling performance, which is interesting and tells a lot about a computer’s architecture. Contrary to what many people expect, there isn’t always a perfect gain when you throw more cores at a problem — at some point the cores start to compete for various system resources like memory and disk, and performance begins to flatten out.'
Hunter also compares the iMac Pro to the most recent standard iMac and gives interesting advice on exactly who the new machine suits. 'I was able to get some limited data on a 2017 iMac with a 4.2GHz quad-core Core i7 processor, and while that machine is slightly faster than the iMac Pro on single-core, the performance flattens out with more cores and the advantage is gone by 4-cores. From 4 to 10 cores, 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's take on the 18-core iMac Pro is striking. 'In summary, we see performance increases ranging from 27% to 79% for the 18-core iMac Pro when compared to the 10-core model. I suspect many computations and applications will be in the middle of that range depending on how well they can take advantage of multiple cores, but there will certainly be some hot rod uses that get closer to that 79% end of the scale (and may do even better). The 18-core iMac Pro shows no disadvantage for single-core performance, despite running at a lower clock speed (2.3GHz/4.3GHz) than the 10-core iMac Pro (3.0GHz/4.5GHz). Often times, the price of scaling a CPU architecture to more cores is a loss of single-core performance, but no such penalty seems to exist here. The 18-core iMac Pro brings 8 more cores to the table on the high end with no loss of performance on the low end.'
Let's remember that these are pricey machines - Hunter says the 10-core model he tried was priced at $9,599 and the 18-core $11,199. 'Those are both lofty prices for sure, but considering the performance increases we've seen here, the upcharge for the 18-core model is a bargain.'
Now, it's true that for most of us, bargain isn't the word we'd associate with $11,000, but for super-advanced users, that is, the guys who are using Twinmotion, Final Cut Pro X and so on to do intensive work at speed, or, you know, those NASA guys, you can see why the iMac Pro might be an appealing purchase.
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