This is IBM encouraging Apple to play a game that its wanted to play for ages so that IBM get coverage on both sides of the field.
Go to IBM's web site and check out the way the x445 expands to a 32-way configuration running Xeons contained in multiple interconnected chassis.
That's superficially how a 64-way Apple box would be put together. But to make it work from a software performance POV, a 64-way system has to be NUMA-based because classic SMP does not scale well beyond 32-way because, I seem to remember, that the overhead of managing/maintaining a coherent cache outweighs the performance that can be gained from splitting an application and an OS into 64 symmetric chunks.
However, the pricing is wrong - there is no way a 64-way system will rollout at $50,000, more like $250,000.
So my guess is that there may well be a Dark Star, but at the moment it's a research project to discover how OS X behaves in such an environment and to iron out some of the engineering requirements before such a box really gets built using a .65 980 for release sometime in the 2007 timeframe.
As I've said in other posts in other topics, an 8-way G5 xServe is an inevitable product sometime in the next 18 months, and I suspect you'll see two G5 xServe models from the get go sometime in the next six months, namely the two-way unit we know now and the eight-way box with only four processors supported for the first 12 months.
The 8-way box will effectively act as a staging post to a 16-way box around the time the 970 reaches its peak around the middle of 2005.
A 32-way system using four fully populated chassis would then appear on a .90 980 in 2006.
This is a market in which credibility is built slowly and on a reputation for reliability.
Going from 2-way to 64-way in an instant is a non-starter commercially, but gradually changing through the gears using reliable SMP technology makes more sense, especially as both the PowerBook and the iMac need to see G5 technology in the next 18 months before embarking on more exotic lower-volume products.
Yes, ILM uses Macs, though as of now, the have pretty much shuttered the Rebel Mac 3D unit, leaving only the Rebel Matte unit using Macs for AfterFx, and probably Shake work now. No real production 3D work is done (animatics, yes...) on Macs as of right now.
As for SGI not being worried until a better GPU is used. Odd, SGI's new machines use standard ATI GPUs, aren't those available to Apple if wanted?
Pixar, now see there's the giveaway. Pixar will have Renderman for OS X in beta at the same time that the G5s will begin shipping, with a release version expected by the end of the year.
So, yeah, if you could dedicate 2 - 4GB of RAM to each processor, and have an 8 proc box for a good deal, I don't see why Pixar, ILM, or anyone wouldn't want one of those boxes. Ultimately they don't care about the GPU in those instances anyhow. Well, until you find the GPUs doing hardware accelerated Renderman rendering, but we won't let that cat out of the bag just yet.
Kickaha and Amorph couldn't moderate themselves out of a paper bag. Abdicate responsibility and succumb to idiocy. Two years of letting a member make personal attacks against others, then stepping aside when someone won't put up with it. Not only that but go ahead and shut down my posting priviledges but not the one making the attacks. Not even the common decency to abide by their warning (afer three days of absorbing personal attacks with no mods in sight), just shut my posting down and then say it might happen later if a certian line is crossed. Bullshit flag is flying, I won't abide by lying and coddling of liars who go off-site, create accounts differing in a single letter from my handle with the express purpose to decieve and then claim here that I did it. Everyone be warned, kim kap sol is a lying, deceitful poster.
Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.
Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.
Kickaha and Amorph couldn't moderate themselves out of a paper bag. Abdicate responsibility and succumb to idiocy. Two years of letting a member make personal attacks against others, then stepping aside when someone won't put up with it. Not only that but go ahead and shut down my posting priviledges but not the one making the attacks. Not even the common decency to abide by their warning (afer three days of absorbing personal attacks with no mods in sight), just shut my posting down and then say it might happen later if a certian line is crossed. Bullshit flag is flying, I won't abide by lying and coddling of liars who go off-site, create accounts differing in a single letter from my handle with the express purpose to decieve and then claim here that I did it. Everyone be warned, kim kap sol is a lying, deceitful poster.
Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.
Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.
If all you're doing in rendering your ass off, and the G5 is already 64bits, what difference does it make?
Well, since one can use hardware rendering in Maya v5.0, and get good quality @ broadcast rez for an average scene, with REALLY short rendertimes per frame (like less than a minute per)...
Makes sense that if one needed to do the same trick, but with more complex scenes, more poly handling ability might be a good thing...
Oh yeah, hardware render can also seperate out the different passes in a render, for tweaking in Shake later...
And the connects between actual physical boxes... SGI is a player that has been doing this forever, it is NUMA-based (came over from the initial Cray acq.), and it seems only logical for the new Apple (Hollywood Pro v1.0) to go this way...
If all you're doing in rendering your ass off, and the G5 is already 64bits, what difference does it make?
sorry... should have clarified that to read Video I/O (as in Discreet throughput).
SGIs are still in another league when it comes to bit depth in the broadcast world.
Shake is getting there, but slowly.
As for high-end rendering and visualization, Renderman will help, but if you want to do Mental Ray particle systems for smoke and fog in a massive model with >100Mb textures, anything but big iron is asking for progress bar blues.
I'm sorry to tell you this - MacRonin from Sarasota Florida - but speaking like a Brit won't make your beer any better.
Well, I guess that it is beyond your comprehension that someone from Great Britain might actually move to the States, and settle down in sunny Sarasota, FL...?!?
My boss did just that...
As for my varigated speech patterns, what can I say? I am a product of a highly diversified world culture...?!?
And for the beer, I don't drink domestic...
Okay, I might try a decent microbrew, but those are becoming harder to find...
Usually I stick to Harp (ah, Irish Budweiser), or Newcastle... Since most places here have shitte for beer...
Except for the Horse & Carriage, over on University & Lockwood Ridge...
General Rule of Thumb - Never go with an expatriate Brit to a Stateside 'traditional English pub' if you don't really want to get snockered...
If I want to get drunk, I move straight to the tequila...
No one in this forum, (except for 2 or 3) would ever see one of these things. (if they exist) And much less buy one.
Big iron is fine, but it's not going to help market share.
Hopefully, it would be profitable though and pay some kind of benefit to the pro line and consumer line.
It also seems stiupid to consider putting so many CPU's in a desktop machine - case when the XServe RAID would seem a more suitable case. (Except make it 5 times taller almost filling up a full rack.)
Yes 970s are SMP . . . but no . . .970s aren't designed to do 64 processors, nor 32. 16 maybe do-able, 8 for sure. I should also say "in one machine" (beauwolf clusters not icluded).
Well, I guess that it is beyond your comprehension that someone from Great Britain might actually move to the States, and settle down in sunny Sarasota, FL...?!?
My boss did just that...
As for my varigated speech patterns, what can I say? I am a product of a highly diversified world culture...?!?
And for the beer, I don't drink domestic...
Okay, I might try a decent microbrew, but those are becoming harder to find...
Usually I stick to Harp (ah, Irish Budweiser), or Newcastle... Since most places here have shitte for beer...
Except for the Horse & Carriage, over on University & Lockwood Ridge...
General Rule of Thumb - Never go with an expatriate Brit to a Stateside 'traditional English pub' if you don't really want to get snockered...
If I want to get drunk, I move straight to the tequila...
Isn't it the Coach & Horses Pub?
Your also forgetting about the Cock 'n Bull off of Cattleman. Even better selection.
Why not just use POWER 4 or upcoming POWER 5 clusters?
They are designed for this sort of thing, and the latter will soon power the world's two fastest computers, both running in the hundreds of teraflops region.
The companies and agencies mentioned above can easily afford that sort of thing.
It just isn't Apple's territory; why start now?
That said, the post (Amorph, I think) about clustering at high speed sounds like a nice little bonus from the new architecture.
Speaking hypothetically of-course... but what if MacBiddle misunderstood the information that led to this article and what they perceived as multiple processors was instead a combination of chips with multiple *cores* of which were put in multiple chip configurations?
If each of those chips had 8 cores and shipped with 8 processors that would give us the equivalent of 64 processors.
As long as we're playing math games, lets assume that they could put 16 cores in chip, then they would only need to ship a quad processor tower to achieve the equivalent of 64 processors....
"I'll show you my member, if you show me yours..."
I dont think that anyone makes a 4 core, let alone an 8 core chips. Hypothecally or not, that is generations beyond the G6, since the G5 wont even see Dual cores. I also doubt that Apple would skip Quad processor models and go straight to Octo's. Better to ship the Quads, rake in cash for 6-8 months, then come out with Octo's and beyond.
perhaps they mean 64 machines or cpu's can be connected together somehow,thats the only thing that makes sense.
the most telling element of this story is about how graphic cpus will be configured in some parallel configuration offering greatly enhanced rendering.
dont you guys remember the series of architosh articles on how
apple went to many companies in hollywood and asked them what they needed from apple in order to make them a player.
this is gonna happen folks,believe me.
apple has been acquiring all the elements it needs and the picture is almost complete.
werent there rumours about some secret technology that apple had that allowed computers to be connected and computing power
shared over a network?
MAC OS/X and the G5 were only the opening salvos from apple.
Comments
Go to IBM's web site and check out the way the x445 expands to a 32-way configuration running Xeons contained in multiple interconnected chassis.
That's superficially how a 64-way Apple box would be put together. But to make it work from a software performance POV, a 64-way system has to be NUMA-based because classic SMP does not scale well beyond 32-way because, I seem to remember, that the overhead of managing/maintaining a coherent cache outweighs the performance that can be gained from splitting an application and an OS into 64 symmetric chunks.
However, the pricing is wrong - there is no way a 64-way system will rollout at $50,000, more like $250,000.
So my guess is that there may well be a Dark Star, but at the moment it's a research project to discover how OS X behaves in such an environment and to iron out some of the engineering requirements before such a box really gets built using a .65 980 for release sometime in the 2007 timeframe.
As I've said in other posts in other topics, an 8-way G5 xServe is an inevitable product sometime in the next 18 months, and I suspect you'll see two G5 xServe models from the get go sometime in the next six months, namely the two-way unit we know now and the eight-way box with only four processors supported for the first 12 months.
The 8-way box will effectively act as a staging post to a 16-way box around the time the 970 reaches its peak around the middle of 2005.
A 32-way system using four fully populated chassis would then appear on a .90 980 in 2006.
This is a market in which credibility is built slowly and on a reputation for reliability.
Going from 2-way to 64-way in an instant is a non-starter commercially, but gradually changing through the gears using reliable SMP technology makes more sense, especially as both the PowerBook and the iMac need to see G5 technology in the next 18 months before embarking on more exotic lower-volume products.
As for SGI not being worried until a better GPU is used. Odd, SGI's new machines use standard ATI GPUs, aren't those available to Apple if wanted?
Pixar, now see there's the giveaway. Pixar will have Renderman for OS X in beta at the same time that the G5s will begin shipping, with a release version expected by the end of the year.
So, yeah, if you could dedicate 2 - 4GB of RAM to each processor, and have an 8 proc box for a good deal, I don't see why Pixar, ILM, or anyone wouldn't want one of those boxes. Ultimately they don't care about the GPU in those instances anyhow. Well, until you find the GPUs doing hardware accelerated Renderman rendering, but we won't let that cat out of the bag just yet.
Cheers.
Originally posted by curiousuburb
SGI won't really sweat until GPU and media I/O options for the Mac start adding zeros to their polygon and texture specs. quite a gap still exists.
Please explain?
If all you're doing in rendering your ass off, and the G5 is already 64bits, what difference does it make?
Originally posted by MacRonin
You folks are (mostly) a bunch of silly twits...
As for ILM using only SGI, bullshitte...!
I'm sorry to tell you this - MacRonin from Sarasota Florida - but speaking like a Brit won't make your beer any better.
Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.
Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.
Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.
Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.
Originally posted by OverToasty
Please explain?
If all you're doing in rendering your ass off, and the G5 is already 64bits, what difference does it make?
Well, since one can use hardware rendering in Maya v5.0, and get good quality @ broadcast rez for an average scene, with REALLY short rendertimes per frame (like less than a minute per)...
Makes sense that if one needed to do the same trick, but with more complex scenes, more poly handling ability might be a good thing...
Oh yeah, hardware render can also seperate out the different passes in a render, for tweaking in Shake later...
And the connects between actual physical boxes... SGI is a player that has been doing this forever, it is NUMA-based (came over from the initial Cray acq.), and it seems only logical for the new Apple (Hollywood Pro v1.0) to go this way...
Originally posted by OverToasty
Please explain?
If all you're doing in rendering your ass off, and the G5 is already 64bits, what difference does it make?
sorry... should have clarified that to read Video I/O (as in Discreet throughput).
SGIs are still in another league when it comes to bit depth in the broadcast world.
Shake is getting there, but slowly.
As for high-end rendering and visualization, Renderman will help, but if you want to do Mental Ray particle systems for smoke and fog in a massive model with >100Mb textures, anything but big iron is asking for progress bar blues.
Originally posted by OverToasty
I'm sorry to tell you this - MacRonin from Sarasota Florida - but speaking like a Brit won't make your beer any better.
Well, I guess that it is beyond your comprehension that someone from Great Britain might actually move to the States, and settle down in sunny Sarasota, FL...?!?
My boss did just that...
As for my varigated speech patterns, what can I say? I am a product of a highly diversified world culture...?!?
And for the beer, I don't drink domestic...
Okay, I might try a decent microbrew, but those are becoming harder to find...
Usually I stick to Harp (ah, Irish Budweiser), or Newcastle... Since most places here have shitte for beer...
Except for the Horse & Carriage, over on University & Lockwood Ridge...
General Rule of Thumb - Never go with an expatriate Brit to a Stateside 'traditional English pub' if you don't really want to get snockered...
If I want to get drunk, I move straight to the tequila...
No one in this forum, (except for 2 or 3) would ever see one of these things. (if they exist) And much less buy one.
Big iron is fine, but it's not going to help market share.
Hopefully, it would be profitable though and pay some kind of benefit to the pro line and consumer line.
It also seems stiupid to consider putting so many CPU's in a desktop machine - case when the XServe RAID would seem a more suitable case. (Except make it 5 times taller almost filling up a full rack.)
I think this rumor is a wild one.
MSKR
Originally posted by Yevgeny
NASA: I am not famililar with what they would need so many CPU's for.
Um, how 'bout space travel?
Mac Hooz-ee-whatzitze is full of it.
Originally posted by MacRonin
Well, I guess that it is beyond your comprehension that someone from Great Britain might actually move to the States, and settle down in sunny Sarasota, FL...?!?
My boss did just that...
As for my varigated speech patterns, what can I say? I am a product of a highly diversified world culture...?!?
And for the beer, I don't drink domestic...
Okay, I might try a decent microbrew, but those are becoming harder to find...
Usually I stick to Harp (ah, Irish Budweiser), or Newcastle... Since most places here have shitte for beer...
Except for the Horse & Carriage, over on University & Lockwood Ridge...
General Rule of Thumb - Never go with an expatriate Brit to a Stateside 'traditional English pub' if you don't really want to get snockered...
If I want to get drunk, I move straight to the tequila...
Isn't it the Coach & Horses Pub?
Your also forgetting about the Cock 'n Bull off of Cattleman. Even better selection.
They are designed for this sort of thing, and the latter will soon power the world's two fastest computers, both running in the hundreds of teraflops region.
The companies and agencies mentioned above can easily afford that sort of thing.
It just isn't Apple's territory; why start now?
That said, the post (Amorph, I think) about clustering at high speed sounds like a nice little bonus from the new architecture.
Originally posted by COS
Speaking hypothetically of-course... but what if MacBiddle misunderstood the information that led to this article and what they perceived as multiple processors was instead a combination of chips with multiple *cores* of which were put in multiple chip configurations?
If each of those chips had 8 cores and shipped with 8 processors that would give us the equivalent of 64 processors.
As long as we're playing math games, lets assume that they could put 16 cores in chip, then they would only need to ship a quad processor tower to achieve the equivalent of 64 processors....
"I'll show you my member, if you show me yours..."
I dont think that anyone makes a 4 core, let alone an 8 core chips. Hypothecally or not, that is generations beyond the G6, since the G5 wont even see Dual cores. I also doubt that Apple would skip Quad processor models and go straight to Octo's. Better to ship the Quads, rake in cash for 6-8 months, then come out with Octo's and beyond.
Originally posted by curiousuburb
Dark Star *orchestral voices chorus*.
A million suns shine down
But I see only one
Tryin' to think I'm over you
I find I've just begun
The years go faster than the days
There's no warmth in the light
How I miss those desert skies
Your cold touch in the night
CHORUS:
Benson, Arizona, the warm wind through your hair
My body flies the galaxy, my heart longs to be there
Benson, Arizona, the same stars in the sky
But they seemed so much kinder when we watched them, you and I
The years pull us apart
I'm young and now you're old
But you're still in my heart
And the memory won't grow cold
I dream of times and spaces
That I left far behind
Where we spent our last few days
Benson's on my mind
CHORUS:
Benson, Arizona, the warm wind through your hair
My body flies the galaxy, my heart longs to be there
Benson, Arizona, the same stars in the sky
But they seemed so much kinder when we watched them, you and I
64 processors in the g5 case?
no way.
perhaps they mean 64 machines or cpu's can be connected together somehow,thats the only thing that makes sense.
the most telling element of this story is about how graphic cpus will be configured in some parallel configuration offering greatly enhanced rendering.
dont you guys remember the series of architosh articles on how
apple went to many companies in hollywood and asked them what they needed from apple in order to make them a player.
this is gonna happen folks,believe me.
apple has been acquiring all the elements it needs and the picture is almost complete.
werent there rumours about some secret technology that apple had that allowed computers to be connected and computing power
shared over a network?
MAC OS/X and the G5 were only the opening salvos from apple.
prepare to be amazed all over again