Apple's Mac Pro Afterburner Card is now available for standalone purchase

AppleInsiderAppleInsider
Posted:
in General Discussion
Those who held off on the Afterburner card to save money can now upgrade at their convenience -- Apple has made the card available to purchase on its own.




The Mac Pro Afterburner Card comes with a $2000 price tag. While the card has been available when purchasing a Mac Pro, Wednesday marks the first day that the card has been available as a discrete purchase.

The card is now able to be preordered through Apple's online store, with an expected delivery date between March 30 and April 3.

Afterburner is a card for the Mac Pro that is designed for use in video production. Rather than relying on the processor or graphics cards, the Afterburner takes over for some tasks, specifically those relating to video encoding and decoding, freeing up the rest of the system components to perform other tasks.

The Afterburner card is built to accelerate ProRes and ProRes RAW codecs, namely the encoding and decoding of the codecs, which is a processing-heavy task in most cases. Apple claims the card is capable of handling up to six streams of 8K ProRes RAW video simultaneously at 30 frames per second, making it extremely useful for video editors working at the highest possible level.

On less demanding video specifications, it is able to work on up to 23 streams of 4K ProRes RAW video at 30 frames per second, or at 4K ProRes 422, up to 16 video streams.

In terms of compatibility, Apple advises it will work with ProRes and ProRes RAW codecs in Final Cut Pro X, QuickTime Player X, and "supported third-party apps," though at this time it is unclear what these will be.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    bsbeamerbsbeamer Posts: 77member
    I'm more curious - where is the W5700X and what is the pricing?  It's been 3+ months of "coming soon" with no update.
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 2 of 7
    Mike WuertheleMike Wuerthele Posts: 6,861administrator
    bsbeamer said:
    I'm more curious - where is the W5700X and what is the pricing?  It's been 3+ months of "coming soon" with no update.
    Solid question. We keep asking, and they keep not answering the question.
  • Reply 3 of 7
    rob53rob53 Posts: 3,253member
    So this card is only for the Mac Pro. Is it Intel based? Apple's website says it uses a FPGA and a quick search says Intel makes them. Would this device work on a Hackintosh or other ARM-based macOS-compatible device? If not, is it software, firmware or hardware tied to the Mac Pro? Just wondering how this device might work if/when Apple starts moving towards ARM-based Macs.
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 4 of 7
    polymniapolymnia Posts: 1,080member
    I know there are no answers at this time, but I’d love to know if/when Adobe apps could use this card. Presumably it could be programmed to accelerate Photoshop functions which would be very useful to me. 

    I want to want a Mac Pro, but without Adobe optimizing for the hardware, it’s unlikely I’ll go that route. 
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 5 of 7
    sjworldsjworld Posts: 94member
    Too bad you can’t slap a Quadro into that machine.
  • Reply 6 of 7
    michelb76michelb76 Posts: 621member
    polymnia said:
    I know there are no answers at this time, but I’d love to know if/when Adobe apps could use this card. Presumably it could be programmed to accelerate Photoshop functions which would be very useful to me. 

    I want to want a Mac Pro, but without Adobe optimizing for the hardware, it’s unlikely I’ll go that route. 
    The card is single-purpose at the moment, focused on specific video codecs. Single it is reprogrammable in theory, we'll see if Apple will allow it (probably not). But I doubt there's market for speeding up Photoshop with this card, it's cheaper to get a beefy Windows PC with a top of the line GPU.
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 7 of 7
    zimmiezimmie Posts: 651member
    rob53 said:
    So this card is only for the Mac Pro. Is it Intel based? Apple's website says it uses a FPGA and a quick search says Intel makes them. Would this device work on a Hackintosh or other ARM-based macOS-compatible device? If not, is it software, firmware or hardware tied to the Mac Pro? Just wondering how this device might work if/when Apple starts moving towards ARM-based Macs.
    Intel makes FPGAs, most notably the Cyclone line through their Altera subsidiary. It's a PCIe card, and drivers are OS-level, so I would expect anything which can use the same OS as the Mac Pro to be able to use the card. Drivers like this are pretty low-level, so it would need work to make it ARM-compatible. If Apple is planning on ARM Macs, they definitely have the technical capability to make it work. Whether they care is another question.

    I wonder just what FPGA the card uses. Large, high-throughput FPGAs can easily cost $2k just for the chip with no supporting hardware or software. This probably doesn't need to be that large, but would definitely need to be high-throughput.

    As an unrelated aside, Intel/Altera's current Cyclone line of FPGAs have a "hard processor system" integrated. For the Cyclone 5 line, it's a dual-core ARMv7-A.
    watto_cobra
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