Actually it is far worst than that. TB is rated at 20Gbps that is Giga BITs per second. PCI Express however delivers about 985 MBps per lane, that is BYTES per lane. Most PCI Express supporting machines usually have at least one card slot supporting sixteen lanes. So you can see it is far worst than it might first seem, TB is about two lanes worth of PCI Express.
Drivers are always an issue, most cards won't run without drivers, anywhere. As to specifics the only way to get a straight answer would be to ask the cards manufacture after the Mac Pro ships.
Wikipedia has an excellent intro to PCI Express.
It should be noted though that few cards saturate a sixteen lane PCI Express slot. However many cards will be performance constrained in a 4 lane implementation.
As to external GPU cards that idea was nuts when it was first offered, up when TB first came out and it is still nuts. Think about why Apple offers up this new Mac Pro with the GPU card built in. They gave those fast PCI Express lanes to the hardware that needs the performance the most.
Now the flip side; do these Max rates make that much difference for many Mac Pro usages? I'd say no because you don't even need 20GBps for many DAW station usages for example.
As to the Mac Pro implementation. The rumor is that the six TB ports are implemented with 3 controller chips, if true this is a good thing and should mean that we will see very good through put on many of the ports at the same time. In the end it looks like Apple has done a very good implementation in this rev one Mac Pro. Well it is good if you can tolerate having no PCI Express slots. In effect the new Mac Pro brings the same frustrations any other technology transition has offered up. Like dropping SCSI and other hardware ports over the years people will get over it.
I would think that the ProTools HD HDX cards are PROBABLY going to saturate when utilized to their fullest level. Just a hunch. To connect up to an external RAID box, I wouldn't think they would since hard drives aren't THAT fast. I'm just spiff balling and I've done no calculations. I have no idea what the RED PCI cards require in terms of bandwidth or other video capture. Same applies to MADI cards.
Yep, 6 ports, but on two busses. Phil said so during the keynote.
I thought it had 3 chips. The chips cover 2 ports each. There was no reference spec for greater than 1 chip, so it's obviously custom work. It appears to be designed with Xeon 1600s chips in mind more than anything.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
This new Mac Pro essentially gives you six x4 instead of one x16 + two x4. It's the same overall bandwidth but distributed differently. A redesigned Mac Pro with PCIe 3 slots would have offered more bandwidth per slot but the extra bandwidth doesn't really get used in practice and if you had two GPUs, you'd be stuck with just two x4 PCIe 3, which is fine speed-wise but some people would run out if they wanted a RAID card too. Audio processing is very low bandwidth. Video is higher but much fewer streams. Thunderbolt 1 might have had some bottlenecks but they didn't really show up much in a whole variety of tests. TB2 shouldn't have any real-world problems.
No disagreements on the rest of it, but I am pretty sure bandwidth allocation is per chip rather than per port meaning three x4 spread over 6 total. TB2 seems aimed more at 4k display support than anything, as it introduces channel bonding as opposed to separate display and data channels.
I can't say either as I don't know much about these cards and possible transfer rates. In the end though I suspect that they will be replaced with new technology. Some of this stuff is rather old (speaking in electronic terms) and frankly could use an update. I've also been wondering about dynamic compression and decompression of the data stream which could impact transfer rates some. I say some because often the data is already compressed to some extent.
It will be interesting to watch how this all plays out over the next year or two. I suspect progressive companies will embrace TB 2 with open arms. Effectively TB 2 eliminates some of the interconnect issues that the use of PCI express cards create.
I would think that the ProTools HD HDX cards are PROBABLY going to saturate when utilized to their fullest level. Just a hunch. To connect up to an external RAID box, I wouldn't think they would since hard drives aren't THAT fast. I'm just spiff balling and I've done no calculations. I have no idea what the RED PCI cards require in terms of bandwidth or other video capture. Same applies to MADI cards.
So what you're saying is that we're getting a PCI slot 'upgrade' in practice. Sure, they're not as fast, technically as PCIe 3? ...but you get a practical upgrade because we're not dealing with only theoretical bottlenecks? eg you have the 'two' gpus taking up what would have been the '16' lane PCI slots. (which is what you would have had anyway in the old design...except that Apple never offered SLI and there was no chance they were ever going to do that...many said...Apple doesn't do 'SLI', right? Apple doesn't even do decent GPUs on their old Pro design shipping with crap gpus as standard but with the new one...oh wait...2 gpus and wow Pro-GPU-ness...) Plus you get 6 external '4' lane slots. In practice, it's more.
That's it, if Apple had put two GPUs in a machine designed like the old one, it would have left just two slots. People could have removed a GPU but Thunderbolt gives people up to 36 devices with chaining. People have chained a Red Rocket to a Pegasus to a display from a single laptop port. It's difficult to mix and match that easily with PCIe as it's not plug and play.
"Kuo said sales of the 17-inch MacBook Pro amounted to about 50,000 units during the first quarter of 2012, compared to 1.5 million of the 13-inch models and 500,000 for the 15-inch models."
It's believable for the MP too though.
He mentioned the idea that they might go back to adding slots in a future model. I think for a while, people will have doubts about living without slots but external PCIe ports will just keep getting faster. Someone here is running BF3 on ultra 1080p 35FPS+ using a GPU on a pass-through adaptor for expressCard (PCIe x1):
[VIDEO]
You can see it's not plug and play as he has to reboot with it connected. This is why TB drivers have to be reworked but bandwidth should be fine.
You always come back with this idea that they give away something by offering a headless PC. Yet Apple already offers the Mini and the Mac Pro. I really don't see a valid argument here.
It would be harder to upsell from a $1250 MP to a $2500 iMac when a Cinema Display is $1000. It would be faster and cheaper to get a MP. You can bet MP buyers would then get 3rd party displays so Apple's average selling prices drop as do their profits. I think having a $2k starting price would be a good idea but I don't think the lower end of the $1-2k range would work out better for them.
I was under the impression that the two ports on one controller could see contention
There are different controllers: 2-channel and 4-channel. They use 2-channel in the Air but 4-channel in the dual-port Macs. The channels are all dedicated so there's no bandwidth sharing between devices on different ports.
No disagreements on the rest of it, but I am pretty sure bandwidth allocation is per chip rather than per port meaning three x4 spread over 6 total.
Right but the MP has PCIe 3 lanes so 3x PCIe 3.0 x4 would allow two PCIe 2.0 x4 per controller. It could well be that it's shared between the ports in this case but that hasn't been the case in other dual TB Macs - the achievable bandwidth has topped the bandwidth of a single port.
I thought it had 3 chips. The chips cover 2 ports each. There was no reference spec for greater than 1 chip, so it's obviously custom work. It appears to be designed with Xeon 1600s chips in mind more than anything.
I could see three chips or maybe better three interface units. Intel could squeeze them into one package if they wanted.
No disagreements on the rest of it, but I am pretty sure bandwidth allocation is per chip rather than per port meaning three x4 spread over 6 total.
That is my impression also. After all if you have only 4x PCI Express lanes feeding a chip you can only achieve so much bandwidth. PCI Express though is full duplex so you might get interesting results where you can effectively receive on one channel at full bandwidth and transmit on the other at full bandwidth. Possibly though that might create other issues with drivers and such that make it impossible to realize full duplex data transfers from two separate devices.
TB2 seems aimed more at 4k display support than anything, as it introduces channel bonding as opposed to separate display and data channels.
Yep! I'm expecting a "surprise" announcement of a greater than 4K display panel, at the time Mac Pro starts to ship. I will even go and say that this is a far higher probability than the XMac I've been promoting over the years.:smokey:
I can't say either as I don't know much about these cards and possible transfer rates. In the end though I suspect that they will be replaced with new technology. Some of this stuff is rather old (speaking in electronic terms) and frankly could use an update. I've also been wondering about dynamic compression and decompression of the data stream which could impact transfer rates some. I say some because often the data is already compressed to some extent.
It will be interesting to watch how this all plays out over the next year or two. I suspect progressive companies will embrace TB 2 with open arms. Effectively TB 2 eliminates some of the interconnect issues that the use of PCI express cards create.
What ProTools cards to is all of the audio processing and plug-ins specific for ProTools which is the de facto standard in the audio recording industry. yeah some put a HD or HDX card in an external chassis and run from a MBP or IMac, but they aren't doing production work that I can tell for the higher end film production. Example. If you are doing audio recording. MOST recordings don't use much more than maybe 24, 32, 48 tracks. That's not a lot of processing needed. But a film or even a sound track for a game can use up to 200 or even up to the maximum 768 tracks. each noise, actor's dialog, etc. takes one track, even if the track is 2 seconds long in a movie. They have to have adjustability before they mix down into 2, 5 or 7 tracks for final release.
If you go to Magma, they have the rack mounted PCI card systems that have a PCI card interface that cost around $5000. If that PCI interface card can be changed into a TB 2 solution, then problem solved, but I don't know enough to say they can or can't, since if you have a large audio/video production studio that has a Magma PCI chassis, they will have many HD or HDX cards, MADI, of GOD knows what else since they can stuff a BUNCH of cards into one chassis. Those are the guys that I would think would be best to address this issue. IF they can do it, then that's the answer.
Yup, and your iPhone says "5" even though it's actually not the fifth iPhone.
The current version followed version 7. There was no version 8 or 9. You're right though, I shouldn't have referred to it as "version 8" and instead called it the eighth version or incarnation or something.
If you take what I say as insulting then that is really your problem not mine.
You don't believe calling users "children" and "whiners" is insulting?
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
The problem is you simply can't expect your vendors to support hardware from technologies dark ages forever
I already addressed this: it's NOT about retiring old technologies, it's about dropping support for CURRENT, in-use systems with a vague promise to add it back later. The former is understandable and reasonable. The latter is a "downgrade."
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
\Now obviously PCI Express is a different story here as there is a certain mass of hardware within the industry that will be around for a long time. Apple could build hardware to support the past but then their ability to innovate goes out the Window.\
I don't understand what you're getting at. I don't get what the revision of the Mac Pro has to do with the change to FCP?
Overall I'm not sure I'm clear on your position towards FCPX except that you'e down on those who didn't like it. On one hand you say it's an improvement, but then say those who need advanced features have to accept that they're missing in a "new" product. It can't be both. Either it's an upgrade, in which case the advanced features should have been retained, or it's a new product that doesn't yet support advanced features. Either way, it lacked advanced features that were included in the previous version. The fact that *some* users were unaffected by the loss of those features doesn't alter the fact.
And I'm not negative towards FCPX anymore. My understanding is that it's just fine now. It took two years, but it eventually got there. What I'm negative about is the way Apple handled the transition. I think they blew it.
And I'm not negative towards FCPX anymore. My understanding is that it's just fine now. It took two years, but it eventually got there. What I'm negative about is the way Apple handled the transition. I think they blew it.
That is basically what I said from the start. Bad transition. Multi-cam was one of the biggest ones as you may need to track and edit footage captured from different cameras. That is certainly not a deprecated feature. I would argue with the number of capable dslrs out there today, overall demand has probably increased. I do not spend a lot of time editing video, so I am not exactly an authority on the matter. I was just pointing out that you can buy secondary cameras for less money today in relation to that feature.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
I could see three chips or maybe better three interface units. Intel could squeeze them into one package if they wanted.
That is my impression also. After all if you have only 4x PCI Express lanes feeding a chip you can only achieve so much bandwidth. PCI Express though is full duplex so you might get interesting results where you can effectively receive on one channel at full bandwidth and transmit on the other at full bandwidth. Possibly though that might create other issues with drivers and such that make it impossible to realize full duplex data transfers from two separate devices.
Yep! I'm expecting a "surprise" announcement of a greater than 4K display panel, at the time Mac Pro starts to ship. I will even go and say that this is a far higher probability than the XMac I've been promoting over the years.
It may happen at some point depending on voltage, including what it has to pass to peripherals, assuming that is still within the spec. I haven't looked. The tests are somewhat variable. There are tons of thunderbolt gpu tests as an example. The results do drop on some of the more bandwidth intensive tests. On lighter ones they aren't so bad. Personally I don't see this machine as a move toward that. If that was all that was required or all that would sell, the mac pro would no longer exist.
I'm not sure about a 4K display this year, but it absolutely should have that capability. Consider that it is unlikely to see a single major update prior to 2015. Someone buying in 2014 would not enjoy being told a year later that their machine can't run the new display. It seems perfectly logical to me. The displays are primarily aimed at the notebook docking station market with everything else sort of leveraged. They can sell a 27" display + dock for $1000 as opposed to users buying a Belkin for $400 and a cheaper 1080 27" for $400. It's close enough to leverage those guys. Some people will also buy it because they can add it at the time of purchase including Applecare, but I don't think it's going after the top 5% or so that is mostly catered to by NEC, Eizo, Dreamcolor, Quato, as well as Panasonic and a few others when it comes to true broadcast displays. I don't know how many people are dropping $4k or more for a broadcast display + the $7k~ for a deck, but I've never viewed those guys as Apple's market territory.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
I'm almost 54 years old and I never seen the country as bad as it is know. Probably in most respects I grew up different than many far removed from city life or even small town life by the time I got to my teens it was the mid seventies. I doubt that anybody would have approved of the drastic curtailment of freedoms we have seen in recent years back then. Sadly liberalism was indeed associated with freedom back then, today if not a nazis a liberal is just an oppressive individual take joy in tormenting others. For the voter though who do you vote for today that actually believes in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Hard question to answer especially with the corruption in the news media and the biased reporting associated with it.
Why even post this here? Because forums like this take people's minds off what has been lost.
I'm not old enough to remember that. Personally I've tried to avoid the political label abstractions as I prefer topics to ideologies. It's also more interesting to hear someone's personal reason rather than something wrapped in ideology. Today politicians don't seem that different to me. It seems like many of the differences are exaggerated through out of context quotes. It's annoying as it can be a lot of work to dig up the real statement on every one of them.
…a 27" display + dock for $1000 as opposed to users buying a Belkin for $400 and a cheaper 1080 27" for $400.
Just remember, the 27" Apple Thunderbolt Display also has stereo speakers, a mic and an iSight camera built-in…
I am hoping Apple keeps the 27" Thunderbolt Display in the line-up, just bump the I/O specs to have USB3 & TB2 onboard & go with the less-glossy of the current iMacs…
I WOULD like to see a second display available from Apple, if this would be 27" or larger (30"+), I do not know…
But I WOULD expect it to be the Apple Retina Display, increasing the resolution to 5120x2880…!
I would expect this to be at LEAST US$2,000.00 and to be marketed towards the Mac Pro market…
An Apple Retina Display & a Wacom Cintiq 24HD touch monitor driven by a top-end Mac Pro would be a SWEET DCC workstation…!
So what is the point here? Even with the old Mac Pro you still have a bling breakout ones or worst octopus like split cables. At least with the new MAC Pro you have an opportunity to put te I/O in a decent box near where it is used.
So what is the point here? Even with the old Mac Pro you still have a bling breakout ones or worst octopus like split cables. At least with the new MAC Pro you have an opportunity to put te I/O in a decent box near where it is used.
Point being that 'everything' is now external, as opposed to the tower model. Not that I fully agree; it looks like some video equipment shown would be external with the old tower as well, but like I said, merely posting the pic for discussion.
Just remember, the 27" Apple Thunderbolt Display also has stereo speakers, a mic and an iSight camera built-in…
I am hoping Apple keeps the 27" Thunderbolt Display in the line-up, just bump the I/O specs to have USB3 & TB2 onboard & go with the less-glossy of the current iMacs…
I WOULD like to see a second display available from Apple, if this would be 27" or larger (30"+), I do not know…
But I WOULD expect it to be the Apple Retina Display, increasing the resolution to 5120x2880…!
I would expect this to be at LEAST US$2,000.00 and to be marketed towards the Mac Pro market…
An Apple Retina Display & a Wacom Cintiq 24HD touch monitor driven by a top-end Mac Pro would be a SWEET DCC workstation…!
Well they weren't the only ones to drop the 30" lines. Every brand basically went to 27", even if their implementations differed. I will probably stick with NEC regardless. You got me on the additional stuff. I don't own one, so I hadn't thought of any of that. 27" to me seems like a good size to scan visually. You mention the Wacom. I like the Cintiqs due to their mapping. Your hand and cursor are in much better synchronization. I've used them, but I don't own one personally. I find an extra screen still helps for some things. It's generally just reference or documents or whatever for me, but that way I don't have to deal with overlaps.
The picture assumes that the Mac Pro changes but everything else stays the same, i.e. people still want DVD, Blu Ray and hard drives. Is that a valid assumption though?
What if DVD dies out within a year, Bu Ray within 2 years, and external storage quickly changes from HDs in boxes to small memory sticks that plug in to the back of the Mac Pro, out of sight?
Unfortunately Apple doesn't, so now they don't have any matte displays anymore. I wonder if they'll make them again, presuming we can get a 4k monitor together with the new Pro.
Overall I'm not sure I'm clear on your position towards FCPX except that you'e down on those who didn't like it. On one hand you say it's an improvement, but then say those who need advanced features have to accept that they're missing in a "new" product. It can't be both. Either it's an upgrade, in which case the advanced features should have been retained, or it's a new product that doesn't yet support advanced features. Either way, it lacked advanced features that were included in the previous version. The fact that *some* users were unaffected by the loss of those features doesn't alter the fact.
And I'm not negative towards FCPX anymore. My understanding is that it's just fine now. It took two years, but it eventually got there. What I'm negative about is the way Apple handled the transition. I think they blew it.
Apple values the broader market far more than any niche. If there are a million professional video editors in the world (and I’m just pulling that out of thin air for the sake of debate), then there are 500 million amateur video editors. And it’s that larger group that Apple really wants to hit.
I feel the same way about the new Mac Pro, I really don't believe their going after the uber professional market here. Yes their will be those cool ultra high spec'd configurations that cater to that market segment but the overall sales will be minuscule in comparison to the starting and mid level configurations. The prosumer crowd or whatever term is being thrown around nowadays is Apple's target audience here. Just looking back at all of those great professional applications that have been canceled, add the Xserver and now closed box Mac Pro to equation, well it just shouts Apple's vision of tomorrow doesn't include the professional market.
Just remember, the 27" Apple Thunderbolt Display also has stereo speakers, a mic and an iSight camera built-in…
I am hoping Apple keeps the 27" Thunderbolt Display in the line-up, just bump the I/O specs to have USB3 & TB2 onboard & go with the less-glossy of the current iMacs…
I WOULD like to see a second display available from Apple, if this would be 27" or larger (30"+), I do not know…
But I WOULD expect it to be the Apple Retina Display, increasing the resolution to 5120x2880…!
I would expect this to be at LEAST US$2,000.00 and to be marketed towards the Mac Pro market…
An Apple Retina Display & a Wacom Cintiq 24HD touch monitor driven by a top-end Mac Pro would be a SWEET DCC workstation…!
The cheapest 4K monitor on the market is made by Asus, has a rez of 3840 x 2160 and cost's 5,000 dollars. 2,000 is highly improbable, especially from a company who historically has very high margins on their products.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
Actually it is far worst than that. TB is rated at 20Gbps that is Giga BITs per second. PCI Express however delivers about 985 MBps per lane, that is BYTES per lane. Most PCI Express supporting machines usually have at least one card slot supporting sixteen lanes. So you can see it is far worst than it might first seem, TB is about two lanes worth of PCI Express.
Drivers are always an issue, most cards won't run without drivers, anywhere. As to specifics the only way to get a straight answer would be to ask the cards manufacture after the Mac Pro ships.
Wikipedia has an excellent intro to PCI Express.
It should be noted though that few cards saturate a sixteen lane PCI Express slot. However many cards will be performance constrained in a 4 lane implementation.
As to external GPU cards that idea was nuts when it was first offered, up when TB first came out and it is still nuts. Think about why Apple offers up this new Mac Pro with the GPU card built in. They gave those fast PCI Express lanes to the hardware that needs the performance the most.
Now the flip side; do these Max rates make that much difference for many Mac Pro usages? I'd say no because you don't even need 20GBps for many DAW station usages for example.
As to the Mac Pro implementation. The rumor is that the six TB ports are implemented with 3 controller chips, if true this is a good thing and should mean that we will see very good through put on many of the ports at the same time. In the end it looks like Apple has done a very good implementation in this rev one Mac Pro. Well it is good if you can tolerate having no PCI Express slots. In effect the new Mac Pro brings the same frustrations any other technology transition has offered up. Like dropping SCSI and other hardware ports over the years people will get over it.
I would think that the ProTools HD HDX cards are PROBABLY going to saturate when utilized to their fullest level. Just a hunch. To connect up to an external RAID box, I wouldn't think they would since hard drives aren't THAT fast. I'm just spiff balling and I've done no calculations. I have no idea what the RED PCI cards require in terms of bandwidth or other video capture. Same applies to MADI cards.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PhilBoogie
Yep, 6 ports, but on two busses. Phil said so during the keynote.
I thought it had 3 chips. The chips cover 2 ports each. There was no reference spec for greater than 1 chip, so it's obviously custom work. It appears to be designed with Xeon 1600s chips in mind more than anything.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
This new Mac Pro essentially gives you six x4 instead of one x16 + two x4. It's the same overall bandwidth but distributed differently. A redesigned Mac Pro with PCIe 3 slots would have offered more bandwidth per slot but the extra bandwidth doesn't really get used in practice and if you had two GPUs, you'd be stuck with just two x4 PCIe 3, which is fine speed-wise but some people would run out if they wanted a RAID card too. Audio processing is very low bandwidth. Video is higher but much fewer streams. Thunderbolt 1 might have had some bottlenecks but they didn't really show up much in a whole variety of tests. TB2 shouldn't have any real-world problems.
No disagreements on the rest of it, but I am pretty sure bandwidth allocation is per chip rather than per port meaning three x4 spread over 6 total. TB2 seems aimed more at 4k display support than anything, as it introduces channel bonding as opposed to separate display and data channels.
It will be interesting to watch how this all plays out over the next year or two. I suspect progressive companies will embrace TB 2 with open arms. Effectively TB 2 eliminates some of the interconnect issues that the use of PCI express cards create.
That's it, if Apple had put two GPUs in a machine designed like the old one, it would have left just two slots. People could have removed a GPU but Thunderbolt gives people up to 36 devices with chaining. People have chained a Red Rocket to a Pegasus to a display from a single laptop port. It's difficult to mix and match that easily with PCIe as it's not plug and play.
I noticed he said the old Mac Pro was down to 50,000 units per quarter. I wonder if he read that about the 17" MBP:
http://investorplace.com/2012/04/monday-apple-rumors-end-of-the-17-inch-macbook-pro/
"Kuo said sales of the 17-inch MacBook Pro amounted to about 50,000 units during the first quarter of 2012, compared to 1.5 million of the 13-inch models and 500,000 for the 15-inch models."
It's believable for the MP too though.
He mentioned the idea that they might go back to adding slots in a future model. I think for a while, people will have doubts about living without slots but external PCIe ports will just keep getting faster. Someone here is running BF3 on ultra 1080p 35FPS+ using a GPU on a pass-through adaptor for expressCard (PCIe x1):
[VIDEO]
You can see it's not plug and play as he has to reboot with it connected. This is why TB drivers have to be reworked but bandwidth should be fine.
It would be harder to upsell from a $1250 MP to a $2500 iMac when a Cinema Display is $1000. It would be faster and cheaper to get a MP. You can bet MP buyers would then get 3rd party displays so Apple's average selling prices drop as do their profits. I think having a $2k starting price would be a good idea but I don't think the lower end of the $1-2k range would work out better for them.
There are different controllers: 2-channel and 4-channel. They use 2-channel in the Air but 4-channel in the dual-port Macs. The channels are all dedicated so there's no bandwidth sharing between devices on different ports.
Right but the MP has PCIe 3 lanes so 3x PCIe 3.0 x4 would allow two PCIe 2.0 x4 per controller. It could well be that it's shared between the ports in this case but that hasn't been the case in other dual TB Macs - the achievable bandwidth has topped the bandwidth of a single port.
Yep! I'm expecting a "surprise" announcement of a greater than 4K display panel, at the time Mac Pro starts to ship. I will even go and say that this is a far higher probability than the XMac I've been promoting over the years.:smokey:
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
I can't say either as I don't know much about these cards and possible transfer rates. In the end though I suspect that they will be replaced with new technology. Some of this stuff is rather old (speaking in electronic terms) and frankly could use an update. I've also been wondering about dynamic compression and decompression of the data stream which could impact transfer rates some. I say some because often the data is already compressed to some extent.
It will be interesting to watch how this all plays out over the next year or two. I suspect progressive companies will embrace TB 2 with open arms. Effectively TB 2 eliminates some of the interconnect issues that the use of PCI express cards create.
What ProTools cards to is all of the audio processing and plug-ins specific for ProTools which is the de facto standard in the audio recording industry. yeah some put a HD or HDX card in an external chassis and run from a MBP or IMac, but they aren't doing production work that I can tell for the higher end film production. Example. If you are doing audio recording. MOST recordings don't use much more than maybe 24, 32, 48 tracks. That's not a lot of processing needed. But a film or even a sound track for a game can use up to 200 or even up to the maximum 768 tracks. each noise, actor's dialog, etc. takes one track, even if the track is 2 seconds long in a movie. They have to have adjustability before they mix down into 2, 5 or 7 tracks for final release.
If you go to Magma, they have the rack mounted PCI card systems that have a PCI card interface that cost around $5000. If that PCI interface card can be changed into a TB 2 solution, then problem solved, but I don't know enough to say they can or can't, since if you have a large audio/video production studio that has a Magma PCI chassis, they will have many HD or HDX cards, MADI, of GOD knows what else since they can stuff a BUNCH of cards into one chassis. Those are the guys that I would think would be best to address this issue. IF they can do it, then that's the answer.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bergermeister
That's odd. My copy says version 10.0.8.
Yup, and your iPhone says "5" even though it's actually not the fifth iPhone.
The current version followed version 7. There was no version 8 or 9. You're right though, I shouldn't have referred to it as "version 8" and instead called it the eighth version or incarnation or something.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
If you take what I say as insulting then that is really your problem not mine.
You don't believe calling users "children" and "whiners" is insulting?
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
The problem is you simply can't expect your vendors to support hardware from technologies dark ages forever
I already addressed this: it's NOT about retiring old technologies, it's about dropping support for CURRENT, in-use systems with a vague promise to add it back later. The former is understandable and reasonable. The latter is a "downgrade."
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
\Now obviously PCI Express is a different story here as there is a certain mass of hardware within the industry that will be around for a long time. Apple could build hardware to support the past but then their ability to innovate goes out the Window.\
I don't understand what you're getting at. I don't get what the revision of the Mac Pro has to do with the change to FCP?
Overall I'm not sure I'm clear on your position towards FCPX except that you'e down on those who didn't like it. On one hand you say it's an improvement, but then say those who need advanced features have to accept that they're missing in a "new" product. It can't be both. Either it's an upgrade, in which case the advanced features should have been retained, or it's a new product that doesn't yet support advanced features. Either way, it lacked advanced features that were included in the previous version. The fact that *some* users were unaffected by the loss of those features doesn't alter the fact.
And I'm not negative towards FCPX anymore. My understanding is that it's just fine now. It took two years, but it eventually got there. What I'm negative about is the way Apple handled the transition. I think they blew it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by v5v
And I'm not negative towards FCPX anymore. My understanding is that it's just fine now. It took two years, but it eventually got there. What I'm negative about is the way Apple handled the transition. I think they blew it.
That is basically what I said from the start. Bad transition. Multi-cam was one of the biggest ones as you may need to track and edit footage captured from different cameras. That is certainly not a deprecated feature. I would argue with the number of capable dslrs out there today, overall demand has probably increased. I do not spend a lot of time editing video, so I am not exactly an authority on the matter. I was just pointing out that you can buy secondary cameras for less money today in relation to that feature.
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Originally Posted by wizard69
I could see three chips or maybe better three interface units. Intel could squeeze them into one package if they wanted.
That is my impression also. After all if you have only 4x PCI Express lanes feeding a chip you can only achieve so much bandwidth. PCI Express though is full duplex so you might get interesting results where you can effectively receive on one channel at full bandwidth and transmit on the other at full bandwidth. Possibly though that might create other issues with drivers and such that make it impossible to realize full duplex data transfers from two separate devices.
Yep! I'm expecting a "surprise" announcement of a greater than 4K display panel, at the time Mac Pro starts to ship. I will even go and say that this is a far higher probability than the XMac I've been promoting over the years.
It may happen at some point depending on voltage, including what it has to pass to peripherals, assuming that is still within the spec. I haven't looked. The tests are somewhat variable. There are tons of thunderbolt gpu tests as an example. The results do drop on some of the more bandwidth intensive tests. On lighter ones they aren't so bad. Personally I don't see this machine as a move toward that. If that was all that was required or all that would sell, the mac pro would no longer exist.
I'm not sure about a 4K display this year, but it absolutely should have that capability. Consider that it is unlikely to see a single major update prior to 2015. Someone buying in 2014 would not enjoy being told a year later that their machine can't run the new display. It seems perfectly logical to me. The displays are primarily aimed at the notebook docking station market with everything else sort of leveraged. They can sell a 27" display + dock for $1000 as opposed to users buying a Belkin for $400 and a cheaper 1080 27" for $400. It's close enough to leverage those guys. Some people will also buy it because they can add it at the time of purchase including Applecare, but I don't think it's going after the top 5% or so that is mostly catered to by NEC, Eizo, Dreamcolor, Quato, as well as Panasonic and a few others when it comes to true broadcast displays. I don't know how many people are dropping $4k or more for a broadcast display + the $7k~ for a deck, but I've never viewed those guys as Apple's market territory.
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Originally Posted by wizard69
I'm almost 54 years old and I never seen the country as bad as it is know. Probably in most respects I grew up different than many far removed from city life or even small town life by the time I got to my teens it was the mid seventies. I doubt that anybody would have approved of the drastic curtailment of freedoms we have seen in recent years back then. Sadly liberalism was indeed associated with freedom back then, today if not a nazis a liberal is just an oppressive individual take joy in tormenting others. For the voter though who do you vote for today that actually believes in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Hard question to answer especially with the corruption in the news media and the biased reporting associated with it.
Why even post this here? Because forums like this take people's minds off what has been lost.
I'm not old enough to remember that. Personally I've tried to avoid the political label abstractions as I prefer topics to ideologies. It's also more interesting to hear someone's personal reason rather than something wrapped in ideology. Today politicians don't seem that different to me. It seems like many of the differences are exaggerated through out of context quotes. It's annoying as it can be a lot of work to dig up the real statement on every one of them.
Indeed, I later corrected that, a few posts above yours. It's at 59 minutes into the keynote.
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Originally Posted by hmm
…a 27" display + dock for $1000 as opposed to users buying a Belkin for $400 and a cheaper 1080 27" for $400.
Just remember, the 27" Apple Thunderbolt Display also has stereo speakers, a mic and an iSight camera built-in…
I am hoping Apple keeps the 27" Thunderbolt Display in the line-up, just bump the I/O specs to have USB3 & TB2 onboard & go with the less-glossy of the current iMacs…
I WOULD like to see a second display available from Apple, if this would be 27" or larger (30"+), I do not know…
But I WOULD expect it to be the Apple Retina Display, increasing the resolution to 5120x2880…!
I would expect this to be at LEAST US$2,000.00 and to be marketed towards the Mac Pro market…
An Apple Retina Display & a Wacom Cintiq 24HD touch monitor driven by a top-end Mac Pro would be a SWEET DCC workstation…!
[IMG ALT=""]http://forums.appleinsider.com/content/type/61/id/28137/width/350/height/700[/IMG]
So what is the point here? Even with the old Mac Pro you still have a bling breakout ones or worst octopus like split cables. At least with the new MAC Pro you have an opportunity to put te I/O in a decent box near where it is used.
Point being that 'everything' is now external, as opposed to the tower model. Not that I fully agree; it looks like some video equipment shown would be external with the old tower as well, but like I said, merely posting the pic for discussion.
And so, you made a good point, thanks.
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Originally Posted by MacRonin
Just remember, the 27" Apple Thunderbolt Display also has stereo speakers, a mic and an iSight camera built-in…
I am hoping Apple keeps the 27" Thunderbolt Display in the line-up, just bump the I/O specs to have USB3 & TB2 onboard & go with the less-glossy of the current iMacs…
I WOULD like to see a second display available from Apple, if this would be 27" or larger (30"+), I do not know…
But I WOULD expect it to be the Apple Retina Display, increasing the resolution to 5120x2880…!
I would expect this to be at LEAST US$2,000.00 and to be marketed towards the Mac Pro market…
An Apple Retina Display & a Wacom Cintiq 24HD touch monitor driven by a top-end Mac Pro would be a SWEET DCC workstation…!
Well they weren't the only ones to drop the 30" lines. Every brand basically went to 27", even if their implementations differed. I will probably stick with NEC regardless. You got me on the additional stuff. I don't own one, so I hadn't thought of any of that. 27" to me seems like a good size to scan visually. You mention the Wacom. I like the Cintiqs due to their mapping. Your hand and cursor are in much better synchronization. I've used them, but I don't own one personally. I find an extra screen still helps for some things. It's generally just reference or documents or whatever for me, but that way I don't have to deal with overlaps.
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Originally Posted by PhilBoogie
..."merely posting for the sake of discussion"
The picture assumes that the Mac Pro changes but everything else stays the same, i.e. people still want DVD, Blu Ray and hard drives. Is that a valid assumption though?
What if DVD dies out within a year, Bu Ray within 2 years, and external storage quickly changes from HDs in boxes to small memory sticks that plug in to the back of the Mac Pro, out of sight?
Dell still sells the 30"
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&sku=225-4429
Unfortunately Apple doesn't, so now they don't have any matte displays anymore. I wonder if they'll make them again, presuming we can get a 4k monitor together with the new Pro.
A new 4k Monitor for the Mac Pro would be very nice.
Hope this one is bigger than 27".
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Originally Posted by v5v
Overall I'm not sure I'm clear on your position towards FCPX except that you'e down on those who didn't like it. On one hand you say it's an improvement, but then say those who need advanced features have to accept that they're missing in a "new" product. It can't be both. Either it's an upgrade, in which case the advanced features should have been retained, or it's a new product that doesn't yet support advanced features. Either way, it lacked advanced features that were included in the previous version. The fact that *some* users were unaffected by the loss of those features doesn't alter the fact.
And I'm not negative towards FCPX anymore. My understanding is that it's just fine now. It took two years, but it eventually got there. What I'm negative about is the way Apple handled the transition. I think they blew it.
Apple values the broader market far more than any niche. If there are a million professional video editors in the world (and I’m just pulling that out of thin air for the sake of debate), then there are 500 million amateur video editors. And it’s that larger group that Apple really wants to hit.
I feel the same way about the new Mac Pro, I really don't believe their going after the uber professional market here. Yes their will be those cool ultra high spec'd configurations that cater to that market segment but the overall sales will be minuscule in comparison to the starting and mid level configurations. The prosumer crowd or whatever term is being thrown around nowadays is Apple's target audience here. Just looking back at all of those great professional applications that have been canceled, add the Xserver and now closed box Mac Pro to equation, well it just shouts Apple's vision of tomorrow doesn't include the professional market.
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Originally Posted by MacRonin
Just remember, the 27" Apple Thunderbolt Display also has stereo speakers, a mic and an iSight camera built-in…
I am hoping Apple keeps the 27" Thunderbolt Display in the line-up, just bump the I/O specs to have USB3 & TB2 onboard & go with the less-glossy of the current iMacs…
I WOULD like to see a second display available from Apple, if this would be 27" or larger (30"+), I do not know…
But I WOULD expect it to be the Apple Retina Display, increasing the resolution to 5120x2880…!
I would expect this to be at LEAST US$2,000.00 and to be marketed towards the Mac Pro market…
An Apple Retina Display & a Wacom Cintiq 24HD touch monitor driven by a top-end Mac Pro would be a SWEET DCC workstation…!
The cheapest 4K monitor on the market is made by Asus, has a rez of 3840 x 2160 and cost's 5,000 dollars. 2,000 is highly improbable, especially from a company who historically has very high margins on their products.