Rendering scales fairly linearly with hardware. If I'm rendering with Arnold for example, it can saturate all my cores pretty well and gives back an almost linear rendering time reduction.

Same with GPU systems like redshift, alternatively I can dedicate half the machine to rendering and the other half to continued work.

Does 16+ threads actually contribute to render times with Redshift?

I know

Unless you’re using Houdini, I think you’ll get the same result using Redshift with 16 threads. Houdini is the only DCC that uses more than one thread to prep the scen

Deep learning. CPUs do data augmentation, GPUs do linear algebra. I already have a Core i9, but it’s “only” 10 cores, and it’s struggling to keep up with GPUs

Deep Learning, once you’ve got enough GPUs you end up bottlenecking on the CPU.

Cinema4D and Blender are both very CPU intensive as well as taxing on the GPU.

Blender 2.8 Eevee is reducing rendering by factor of 100, with a modest reduction of quality. It's basically using game rendering techniques, but instead of catering to realtime, it'll take a couple seconds to produce a frame. It's almost entirely GPU driven, so in the future there may not be a need to really go full Threadripper unless you use Cycles daily.

If you want to use Cycles for animations, you'll probably need the full Threadripper.

Cycles is easily 5+ minutes a frame, maybe 20+ minutes on a threadripper if you have an interior scene or something hard to light. Even with Cycle's denoiser, you need a lot of rays to get a decent animation.

Even a short 10-second animation through Cycles will take multiple days to render on a Threadripper.

Because it's awesome.

Self driving car simulation. :) LIDAR by itself scales nicely across any hardware you have.

Small to mid-scale CFD.

for my purposes? editing and recompressing 110Mbps H264 3840x2160 30fps video into lower bitrate H265 formats.

It can take a very long time just to process a 5 minute video.

For the same reason Apple is selling an 18-core Mac Pro for $20,000 or whatever the price is now. Some people need that power. It's just that with AMD, you can get more of it and for a tiny fraction of the cost of Apple's Mac Pro.

That's just abusive pricing. If you're stuck with Apple software then I guess you have no choice. I have a 10-core 128GB ram workstation that's two years old now, it cost me half as much as a MacBook Pro. I need a new laptop soon, but the difference between the i9 Dell and the i9 MacBook is $800 CAD. Plus the Dell is for sure going to work better with a Linux install, in terms of drivers, which is better for me for work than MacOS. I won't be buying Apple.

He made that number up. The most expensive possible iMac Pro is ~$13.5K (see here: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/imac-pro/3.2ghz-1tb).

Note that most price comparisons show that the iMac Pro is actually quite the deal.

iMac Pro is cost-effective on the Intel platform. But AMD's Threadripper is the topic of discussion here, and I think for most people... those 32-cores for $1799 is just a way better deal.

Do remember that this 32-core Threadripper offers quad-channel memory, 64x PCIe lanes, and ECC support (!!). So the Threadripper offers pretty much everything a professional wants.

The only downside to Threadripper is that its multi-threaded performance is similar to a quad-socket / quad-CPU design (~200ns to ~300ns latencies to memory, depending on how many "hops" and NUMA nodes and stuff...). So audio professionals and gamers who are IIRC latency bound may want to stick to Intel.

But almost everyone else is bandwidth bound (video editing, 3d rendering, compilers, web servers, LT Spice...). So most professionals would probably prefer a Threadripper.

Threadripper is the broadest point of topic in the thread. Down here, the question was about if Apple actually charged $20K for a particular computer. They don't and given the particular hardware choices, the iMac Pro is a great deal. The ideal choice of hardware is a separate topic.

Still heavily marked up. 32GB ECC isn't $800. Current nVidia GPUs will run circles around those Radeons - even more so with Turing.

Yeah, it's like $500. Of course there's a markup on it. Apple doesn't make money by assembling parts at stock prices and then sending it to you.

It's the case that building a comparable computer (in terms of the specific iMac Pro hardware) is very similarly priced BUT requires labor, the purchase of an OS and additional peripherals: https://youtu.be/SONKIJd8xRM?t=187

That said, your point that Apple could've chosen better hardware at its price, is reasonable but off topic.

He did not. He is talking about the Mac Pro not iMac Pro. The former goes from 3000.0 to 4000.0 USD https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro

[update]Sorry he said $20,000. SO you are right

Maxed out Mac Pro is $6K...