RAID is the storage for the computer ProBoxes -- all the ProBoxes have is Dual Thunderbolt, RAM, GPUs, CPUs and enough SSD to run the OS and whatever buffers for data.
Edit: The beauty of this is you can start small where the compute box is a Mini. The Mini has only 1 Thunderbolt port so it must be at one end of the daisy chain,
So the Mini is a ProsumerBox -- you upgrade by adding ProBoxes inboard of the Mini.
I used to build RAIDs for digital TV production systems in the mid 1990s. In my day we used the original meaning where the 'I' meant 'Inexpensive' Of course we were going for speed over SCSI not redundancy. I was meaning I didn't see what a RAIDed in the context of CPUs meant, it seemed as if it were being used instead of clustered, that's all.
BTW to those on this sub topic , let's not forget the fact Mac Pros were clustered to create one of the top super computers in the World at one time. This isn't new to OS X...
Off topic ... p.s. Am I the only one that goes between Mac and iPad and wishes for consistency in the auto correction?
That would be awesome. I don't know if Apple would do it but it would be Apple's answer for a "home" built pc. Except it would be drop dead easy, plug and play.
Yeah, this is so right in so many ways -- [distributed] Power Computer for heavy-lifting: video transcoding and rendering; home-server: media-center, backup, staging to/from cloud...
Mmm... Me likum Thunderbolt!
And, yes, for many this would displace an iMac -- and obviate a Midi.
Realistically the Thunderbolt i/o actually is the best solution. You would need to move the source data from your 3D and video editing apps that are on your notebook to the RAID connected to the Mac Pro so that the memory, CPU, GPU, storage, app and OS are in close proximity to the main bus architecture in order to leverage the multicore power. You can't be sending all the CPU commands from a remote i7 notebook to the workhorse platform over the Thunderbolt connection. It just isn't fast enough. The Mac Pro needs to be running the app locally.
Agreed, I was never thinking of anything but TB as the interconnection of members of a cluster. Having said that it's been done before without. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=530504 But then PCI express is built into TB so this is a domestic low cost way we could all do this now. I want a super computer
If Apple wants to keep existing, they'll leave it alone.
Why do they need a Mac Pro to keep existing?
Quote:
Originally Posted by digitalclips
Don't quote spam! Please ...
Thanks for saying this.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum
A case, at that time, against IBM, was dismisssed by a judge who said, essentially: it is not illegal to dominate a market by providing excellent products, marketing and services. 97% of the maimframe computer market. 97%
I think the point is that it's not the percentage itself that is a problem, but if that position of market dominance abused.
Quote:
Originally Posted by quinney
Is that a funny typo, or did you mean it? (I know personally the type of damage mainframes and their associated ecosystems have done to certain people).
As in physically injured? Did they get holes punched into their fingers by a tape machine?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Granmastak
To say that Steve is headstrong is an understatement, but then that's him. He does it his way! Looking back at NeXT and Pixar you can say in retrospect they were his early attempts at success. He really won (unlike Charlie Sheen who won in his own mind only)
If you take the long view, I'd say NeXT succeeded, because most of Apple's current products are heavily based on the software infrastructure developed at NeXT. I recall that Pixar really didn't pay off until Toy Story, despite a long time in the software business. Sometimes success takes a while.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Prof. Peabody
I could never see the attraction of a laptop.
They aren't *that* portable and they don't even come close to the power of a desktop. They also don't sync so you have to be "either-or" for your main computer. Using a desktop as well as a laptop is just awkward at best.
I like the idea of a powerful desktop (if you need it) and iPad for everything mobile. So far this is the perfect combo for me.
What do you do that requires the power of a desktop?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Aquia33
“… Macs that are "absolutely different from current products” - Sounds like a product transition to me.
But they've updated most Macs just a few months ago.
Yeah, this is so right in so many ways -- [distributed] Power Computer for heavy-lifting: video transcoding and rendering; home-server: media-center, backup, staging to/from cloud...
Mmm... Me likum Thunderbolt!
And, yes, for many this would displace an iMac -- and obviate a Midi.
Do you think Apple would dare call such a TB based CPU add on 'Thunder Box'?
(I hope that joke translates from UK English to American ...)
What if the Mac pro becomes just a box containing major RAM, CPU, GPU, Reasonable SSD.... and dual Thunderbolt ports.
These could be daisy chained ad infinitum including RAID HDDs and some Displays. a kb, mouse and maybe an iPad.
Or, make it something like a Mac Mini with hard disk. (would probably need to be slightly larger for CPU cooling and a faster hard disk).
Now, what it really needs is ZFS. My understanding is that ZFS reallocates storage space dynamically. You could set this up so that each box has a hard disk, CPU and RAM. When you plug in a new one, ZFS creates a new RAID adding the new disk to the old ones without losing data. (you could do the same thing with SSD, but it would be far more expensive).
Sure they're portable. An iMac or MacPro isn't. Regarding power... what don't they have enough power for? One can also say that a MacPro isn't powerful enough for some tasks. Can you see trying to run an airline reservation system on a MacPro instead of some giant mainframe?
iCloud allegedly takes care of the "either or" question. At lease I guess we'll find out if that's true.
I just said they aren't *that* portable, not that they weren't portable. Everything that isn't bolted to the floor or tied to a power supply the size of a room is technically "portable" including a Mac Pro.
I never liked laptops or used them much because it's a trade-off of power vs. portability. They don't sync with another computer, so if you buy a laptop it only makes sense if it's your main computer. As a main computer, the trade-offs are many. There is processing power for one, but also the screens are small, the ergonomics are bad, and the connectivity is somewhat less than a desktop overall.
As portable devices, they are the heaviest of the lot, and require one to basically carry a large heavy bag full of stuff around most of the time (power supply, mouse, spare batteries, dongles etc.). Battery life has never been stellar until very recently, hard drive space is small etc.
I've always used a Mac Pro (and before that a G4 tower), with a large screen, at a desk. With that as your main computer, portable devices don't make much sense unless they sync so for mobile I have used Palm's, PocketPC's, iPaq's etc. until the iPhone came along and blew them all out of the water.
Now I do about 50% of my work on the desktop and the other half on the iPad. If you could draw on the iPad and do any kind of serious graphic work, I would probably only need the Mac Pro about 10 or 20% of the time.
Why on earth would your terabytes of source files be on a MacBook Air to start with? Did you edit and create all the 3D models and HD video, that now need a render farm, with a tiny Air? No, you would use a Mac Pro from the beginning.
Quote:
Originally Posted by digitalclips
True but to be fair he was following up on my post about this where I specified an i7 MBP and this exactly what I do do now. The conversation was about the addition of some new low cost Apple made CPU render box that worked on all compliant OS X apps. Which as I no longer have the Mac Pro I for one would love to see as an option ... all pipe dreams probably
Yes, consider this:
You are in the field (a soccer field, in my case) or onsite at an event.
-- With your camera you capture your video onto SD cards.
-- You plug these into a SD Card reader and transfer the compressed card* to the Mac (or iPad)
-- With FCPX you begin processing the SD card in compressed form
-- In the background, you can transcode (expand) the video to ProRes Proxy if desired
* A compressed 8 GB AVCHD card yields about 56 GB uncompressed data.
Then, back at the ranch, you transfer the compressed SD card to RAID and let the ProBoxes do the heavy lifting:
-- transcoding to better ProRes codec
-- analysis of clips for color correction
-- analysis of clips for camera shake and roll correction
-- analysis of clips for sound defects (wind noise and camera hum)
-- analysis of clips for people
-- analysis of clips for closeup, intermediate or wide shots.
This is all going on while you sit at your laptop or a kb/mouse/display and process the ProRes Proxy files.
As the ProBoxes finish their work the advanced FCPX automatically uses the advanced ProRes files instead of the Proxy files.
-- You flesh out your story line.
-- You insert some cut-away clips based on the people and distance analyses.
-- You do color correction, then grading, then color matching.
I used to build RAIDs for digital TV production systems in the mid 1990s. In my day we used the original meaning where the 'I' meant 'Inexpensive' Of course we were going for speed over SCSI not redundancy. I was meaning I didn't see what a RAIDed in the context of CPUs meant, it seemed as if it were being used instead of clustered, that's all.
BTW to those on this sub topic , let's not forget the fact Mac Pros were clustered to create one of the top super computers in the World at one time. This isn't new to OS X...
Off topic ... p.s. Am I the only one that goes between Mac and iPad and wishes for consistency in the auto correction?
Yes, to the latter. Apple already has OS/Middleware solutions to handle distributed processing.
And I suspect that this is a "yet-to-be-revealed" feature of FCPX (as described in an earlier post).
My loaded iMac 27 handles data faster (2-3 times faster??) from the Thunderbolt pegasus RAID than from the internal iMac HDD. This should be due to the parallelism of the RAID and the capacity of Thunderbolt.
Never thought I'd say this... FireWire 800 is really slow.
The beauty of the ProBox concept is that it doesn't really require any breakthrough hardware -- just Thunderbolt (which they already have) and repackage current RAM/CPU/GPU/SSD.
As better hardware comes along, you don't upgrade your old box -- you just buy a new ProBox and add it to your network.
AIR, the next upgrade to Thunderbolt will use fiber instead of copper, extend the cable length, increase capacity and increase the number of devices on the daisy chain.
Yes, to the latter. Apple already has OS/Middleware solutions to handle distributed processing.
My loaded iMac 27 handles data faster (2-3 times faster??) from the Thunderbolt pegasus RAID than from the internal iMac HDD. This should be due to the parallelism of the RAID and the capacity of Thunderbolt.
Never thought I'd say this... FireWire 800 is really slow.
"FireWire 800 is really slow." So we enter the next phase BTW is your iMac using a 7200 or 5400 drive?
I wonder if this new Family product, all dreaming aside on my personal wishes, if not an HDTV maybe a server with local storage that auto communicates with the cloud for those items tagged for remote backup.
Agreed, I was never thinking of anything but TB as the interconnection of members of a cluster. Having said that it's been done before without. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=530504 But then PCI express is built into TB so this is a domestic low cost way we could all do this now. I want a super computer
I remember that article. I don't recall reading what exactly they were doing with it, but I imagine the same application was running locally on all the boxes and it was being fed small batches of data to process, much like the Sun render farms were doing at Pixar. One computer can control many others, but the application needs to be running locally on each of them. Only a small subset of a movie or large number theory is being worked on and then the pieces are reassembled later. Sun had several huge multi CPU computers designed for banks, and stock trading and also there is the IBM Watson, but those are different since the CPUs were all connected to one box with a single instance of the OS.
I think the best example of clustering today is Google's data centers. How they can bring back a query result so fast is mind boggling.
This is a ridiculous attitude. Every OS is based on a particular vision of how a computer should work. You can agree with it or not, but it's got nothing to do with, "we know better than you"; it's a matter of, "this is our vision, if you like it, buy it."
The trouble is that I have already bought it. I own the iMac. Now I'm being abandoned because they've changed the interface rules. It's one thing if you introduce a new product with a new way to interact with it. It's another to change existing systems. Yes, today I can undo many of those interface changes. But we all know Apple. Eventually, they will remove the tools to return the Mac to its classic interface.
You are in the field (a soccer field, in my case) or onsite at an event.
-- With your camera you capture your video onto SD cards.
-- You plug these into a SD Card reader and transfer the compressed card* to the Mac (or iPad)
-- With FCPX you begin processing the SD card in compressed form
-- In the background, you can transcode (expand) the video to ProRes Proxy if desired
* A compressed 8 GB AVCHD card yields about 56 GB uncompressed data.
Then, back at the ranch, you transfer the compressed SD card to RAID and let the ProBoxes do the heavy lifting:
-- transcoding to better ProRes codec
-- analysis of clips for color correction
-- analysis of clips for camera shake and roll correction
-- analysis of clips for sound defects (wind noise and camera hum)
-- analysis of clips for people
-- analysis of clips for closeup, intermediate or wide shots.
This is all going on while you sit at your laptop or a kb/mouse/display and process the ProRes Proxy files.
As the ProBoxes finish their work the advanced FCPX automatically uses the advanced ProRes files instead of the Proxy files.
-- You flesh out your story line.
-- You insert some cut-away clips based on the people and distance analyses.
-- You do color correction, then grading, then color matching.
-- You do sound correction.
-- You add titles and effects.
Ta Dah!
Alas my HD Camera, a Sony HDFX is still tape based ... I think I'd better sell this and although not as good at many things go for a Nikon DSLR with HD ... Oh but all those tapes and no way to re digitize if I sell it! Groan... (I'm torn between Canon and Nikon but the HDR stills and auto focus options on video are not yet there on Canon ... last time I checked.)
What a waste of an article. Where is the news in that. Someone predicts that something different will come out in the future. wow
It's a frakking rumors site, this is a juicy rumor. Doesn't matter how likely it is on face value, go ahead and discuss it. Go to a real vetted news site and be confused by their blind indifference to news vs opinion. Don't be confused by rumor and innuendo on a rumors site.
Agreed, I was never thinking of anything but TB as the interconnection of members of a cluster. Having said that it's been done before without. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=530504 But then PCI express is built into TB so this is a domestic low cost way we could all do this now. I want a super computer
And you shall have one! Steve says you -- OK! Me -- No Way... you're still doing it wrong!
The trouble is that I have already bought it. I own the iMac. Now I'm being abandoned because they've changed the interface rules. It's one thing if you introduce a new product with a new way to interact with it. It's another to change existing systems. Yes, today I can undo many of those interface changes. But we all know Apple. Eventually, they will remove the tools to return the Mac to its classic interface.
What is it you feel is being abandoned by Apple with regard your iMac? Do you mean Lion is too radical or the rumors of further changes even to Lion. Just asking for clarification..
THis is like saying you wish OS X could still be like OS 9. You have to move along or stay by the wayside... Just hold on tight for a fun ride I'd say
Something that holds all data and applications in the cloud, yet has a real keyboard, can run iOS apps as well as re-compiled Mac apps, but offers a touch screen too.
Think MacBook Air with very little local storage, an ARM quad-core chip and insane battery life.
Apple had a few patent applications about notebook/tablet conversions...
Latency kills that idea dead. Cloud is powerful, but it has to respect latency and that means meaningful secondary storage in the device. Every attempt to the contrary over the past 20 years failed for exactly that reason. So don't just change the name to cloud and make the same old mistakes.
Comments
RAID is the storage for the computer ProBoxes -- all the ProBoxes have is Dual Thunderbolt, RAM, GPUs, CPUs and enough SSD to run the OS and whatever buffers for data.
Something like:
RAID*---ProBOX*--DIsplay*===USB/Firewire peripherals
*You can add multiples of these as needed.
RYO Mac Pro!
Edit: The beauty of this is you can start small where the compute box is a Mini. The Mini has only 1 Thunderbolt port so it must be at one end of the daisy chain,
So the Mini is a ProsumerBox -- you upgrade by adding ProBoxes inboard of the Mini.
I used to build RAIDs for digital TV production systems in the mid 1990s. In my day we used the original meaning where the 'I' meant 'Inexpensive' Of course we were going for speed over SCSI not redundancy. I was meaning I didn't see what a RAIDed in the context of CPUs meant, it seemed as if it were being used instead of clustered, that's all.
BTW to those on this sub topic , let's not forget the fact Mac Pros were clustered to create one of the top super computers in the World at one time. This isn't new to OS X...
Off topic ... p.s. Am I the only one that goes between Mac and iPad and wishes for consistency in the auto correction?
That would be awesome. I don't know if Apple would do it but it would be Apple's answer for a "home" built pc. Except it would be drop dead easy, plug and play.
Yeah, this is so right in so many ways -- [distributed] Power Computer for heavy-lifting: video transcoding and rendering; home-server: media-center, backup, staging to/from cloud...
Mmm... Me likum Thunderbolt!
And, yes, for many this would displace an iMac -- and obviate a Midi.
Realistically the Thunderbolt i/o actually is the best solution. You would need to move the source data from your 3D and video editing apps that are on your notebook to the RAID connected to the Mac Pro so that the memory, CPU, GPU, storage, app and OS are in close proximity to the main bus architecture in order to leverage the multicore power. You can't be sending all the CPU commands from a remote i7 notebook to the workhorse platform over the Thunderbolt connection. It just isn't fast enough. The Mac Pro needs to be running the app locally.
Agreed, I was never thinking of anything but TB as the interconnection of members of a cluster. Having said that it's been done before without. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=530504 But then PCI express is built into TB so this is a domestic low cost way we could all do this now. I want a super computer
If Apple wants to keep existing, they'll leave it alone.
Why do they need a Mac Pro to keep existing?
Don't quote spam! Please ...
Thanks for saying this.
A case, at that time, against IBM, was dismisssed by a judge who said, essentially: it is not illegal to dominate a market by providing excellent products, marketing and services. 97% of the maimframe computer market. 97%
I think the point is that it's not the percentage itself that is a problem, but if that position of market dominance abused.
Is that a funny typo, or did you mean it? (I know personally the type of damage mainframes and their associated ecosystems have done to certain people).
As in physically injured? Did they get holes punched into their fingers by a tape machine?
To say that Steve is headstrong is an understatement, but then that's him. He does it his way! Looking back at NeXT and Pixar you can say in retrospect they were his early attempts at success. He really won (unlike Charlie Sheen who won in his own mind only)
If you take the long view, I'd say NeXT succeeded, because most of Apple's current products are heavily based on the software infrastructure developed at NeXT. I recall that Pixar really didn't pay off until Toy Story, despite a long time in the software business. Sometimes success takes a while.
I could never see the attraction of a laptop.
They aren't *that* portable and they don't even come close to the power of a desktop. They also don't sync so you have to be "either-or" for your main computer. Using a desktop as well as a laptop is just awkward at best.
I like the idea of a powerful desktop (if you need it) and iPad for everything mobile. So far this is the perfect combo for me.
What do you do that requires the power of a desktop?
“… Macs that are "absolutely different from current products” - Sounds like a product transition to me.
But they've updated most Macs just a few months ago.
Yeah, this is so right in so many ways -- [distributed] Power Computer for heavy-lifting: video transcoding and rendering; home-server: media-center, backup, staging to/from cloud...
Mmm... Me likum Thunderbolt!
And, yes, for many this would displace an iMac -- and obviate a Midi.
Do you think Apple would dare call such a TB based CPU add on 'Thunder Box'?
(I hope that joke translates from UK English to American ...)
Complete with digital compass.
*rimshot*
LOL... and maybe a little cart to wheel it around
Oh....
What if the Mac pro becomes just a box containing major RAM, CPU, GPU, Reasonable SSD.... and dual Thunderbolt ports.
These could be daisy chained ad infinitum including RAID HDDs and some Displays. a kb, mouse and maybe an iPad.
Or, make it something like a Mac Mini with hard disk. (would probably need to be slightly larger for CPU cooling and a faster hard disk).
Now, what it really needs is ZFS. My understanding is that ZFS reallocates storage space dynamically. You could set this up so that each box has a hard disk, CPU and RAM. When you plug in a new one, ZFS creates a new RAID adding the new disk to the old ones without losing data. (you could do the same thing with SSD, but it would be far more expensive).
Sure they're portable. An iMac or MacPro isn't. Regarding power... what don't they have enough power for? One can also say that a MacPro isn't powerful enough for some tasks. Can you see trying to run an airline reservation system on a MacPro instead of some giant mainframe?
iCloud allegedly takes care of the "either or" question. At lease I guess we'll find out if that's true.
I just said they aren't *that* portable, not that they weren't portable. Everything that isn't bolted to the floor or tied to a power supply the size of a room is technically "portable" including a Mac Pro.
I never liked laptops or used them much because it's a trade-off of power vs. portability. They don't sync with another computer, so if you buy a laptop it only makes sense if it's your main computer. As a main computer, the trade-offs are many. There is processing power for one, but also the screens are small, the ergonomics are bad, and the connectivity is somewhat less than a desktop overall.
As portable devices, they are the heaviest of the lot, and require one to basically carry a large heavy bag full of stuff around most of the time (power supply, mouse, spare batteries, dongles etc.). Battery life has never been stellar until very recently, hard drive space is small etc.
I've always used a Mac Pro (and before that a G4 tower), with a large screen, at a desk. With that as your main computer, portable devices don't make much sense unless they sync so for mobile I have used Palm's, PocketPC's, iPaq's etc. until the iPhone came along and blew them all out of the water.
Now I do about 50% of my work on the desktop and the other half on the iPad. If you could draw on the iPad and do any kind of serious graphic work, I would probably only need the Mac Pro about 10 or 20% of the time.
Finally! I just saw a commercial
MacTini/Nano and revolutionary
iToilet
Congratulations.
Why on earth would your terabytes of source files be on a MacBook Air to start with? Did you edit and create all the 3D models and HD video, that now need a render farm, with a tiny Air? No, you would use a Mac Pro from the beginning.
True but to be fair he was following up on my post about this where I specified an i7 MBP and this exactly what I do do now. The conversation was about the addition of some new low cost Apple made CPU render box that worked on all compliant OS X apps. Which as I no longer have the Mac Pro I for one would love to see as an option ... all pipe dreams probably
Yes, consider this:
You are in the field (a soccer field, in my case) or onsite at an event.
-- With your camera you capture your video onto SD cards.
-- You plug these into a SD Card reader and transfer the compressed card* to the Mac (or iPad)
-- With FCPX you begin processing the SD card in compressed form
-- In the background, you can transcode (expand) the video to ProRes Proxy if desired
* A compressed 8 GB AVCHD card yields about 56 GB uncompressed data.
Then, back at the ranch, you transfer the compressed SD card to RAID and let the ProBoxes do the heavy lifting:
-- transcoding to better ProRes codec
-- analysis of clips for color correction
-- analysis of clips for camera shake and roll correction
-- analysis of clips for sound defects (wind noise and camera hum)
-- analysis of clips for people
-- analysis of clips for closeup, intermediate or wide shots.
This is all going on while you sit at your laptop or a kb/mouse/display and process the ProRes Proxy files.
As the ProBoxes finish their work the advanced FCPX automatically uses the advanced ProRes files instead of the Proxy files.
-- You flesh out your story line.
-- You insert some cut-away clips based on the people and distance analyses.
-- You do color correction, then grading, then color matching.
-- You do sound correction.
-- You add titles and effects.
Ta Dah!
I used to build RAIDs for digital TV production systems in the mid 1990s. In my day we used the original meaning where the 'I' meant 'Inexpensive' Of course we were going for speed over SCSI not redundancy. I was meaning I didn't see what a RAIDed in the context of CPUs meant, it seemed as if it were being used instead of clustered, that's all.
BTW to those on this sub topic , let's not forget the fact Mac Pros were clustered to create one of the top super computers in the World at one time. This isn't new to OS X...
Off topic ... p.s. Am I the only one that goes between Mac and iPad and wishes for consistency in the auto correction?
Yes, to the latter. Apple already has OS/Middleware solutions to handle distributed processing.
And I suspect that this is a "yet-to-be-revealed" feature of FCPX (as described in an earlier post).
My loaded iMac 27 handles data faster (2-3 times faster??) from the Thunderbolt pegasus RAID than from the internal iMac HDD. This should be due to the parallelism of the RAID and the capacity of Thunderbolt.
Never thought I'd say this... FireWire 800 is really slow.
The beauty of the ProBox concept is that it doesn't really require any breakthrough hardware -- just Thunderbolt (which they already have) and repackage current RAM/CPU/GPU/SSD.
As better hardware comes along, you don't upgrade your old box -- you just buy a new ProBox and add it to your network.
AIR, the next upgrade to Thunderbolt will use fiber instead of copper, extend the cable length, increase capacity and increase the number of devices on the daisy chain.
Yes, to the latter. Apple already has OS/Middleware solutions to handle distributed processing.
My loaded iMac 27 handles data faster (2-3 times faster??) from the Thunderbolt pegasus RAID than from the internal iMac HDD. This should be due to the parallelism of the RAID and the capacity of Thunderbolt.
Never thought I'd say this... FireWire 800 is really slow.
"FireWire 800 is really slow." So we enter the next phase
I wonder if this new Family product, all dreaming aside on my personal wishes, if not an HDTV maybe a server with local storage that auto communicates with the cloud for those items tagged for remote backup.
Agreed, I was never thinking of anything but TB as the interconnection of members of a cluster. Having said that it's been done before without. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=530504 But then PCI express is built into TB so this is a domestic low cost way we could all do this now. I want a super computer
I remember that article. I don't recall reading what exactly they were doing with it, but I imagine the same application was running locally on all the boxes and it was being fed small batches of data to process, much like the Sun render farms were doing at Pixar. One computer can control many others, but the application needs to be running locally on each of them. Only a small subset of a movie or large number theory is being worked on and then the pieces are reassembled later. Sun had several huge multi CPU computers designed for banks, and stock trading and also there is the IBM Watson, but those are different since the CPUs were all connected to one box with a single instance of the OS.
I think the best example of clustering today is Google's data centers. How they can bring back a query result so fast is mind boggling.
This is a ridiculous attitude. Every OS is based on a particular vision of how a computer should work. You can agree with it or not, but it's got nothing to do with, "we know better than you"; it's a matter of, "this is our vision, if you like it, buy it."
The trouble is that I have already bought it. I own the iMac. Now I'm being abandoned because they've changed the interface rules. It's one thing if you introduce a new product with a new way to interact with it. It's another to change existing systems. Yes, today I can undo many of those interface changes. But we all know Apple. Eventually, they will remove the tools to return the Mac to its classic interface.
Yes, consider this:
You are in the field (a soccer field, in my case) or onsite at an event.
-- With your camera you capture your video onto SD cards.
-- You plug these into a SD Card reader and transfer the compressed card* to the Mac (or iPad)
-- With FCPX you begin processing the SD card in compressed form
-- In the background, you can transcode (expand) the video to ProRes Proxy if desired
* A compressed 8 GB AVCHD card yields about 56 GB uncompressed data.
Then, back at the ranch, you transfer the compressed SD card to RAID and let the ProBoxes do the heavy lifting:
-- transcoding to better ProRes codec
-- analysis of clips for color correction
-- analysis of clips for camera shake and roll correction
-- analysis of clips for sound defects (wind noise and camera hum)
-- analysis of clips for people
-- analysis of clips for closeup, intermediate or wide shots.
This is all going on while you sit at your laptop or a kb/mouse/display and process the ProRes Proxy files.
As the ProBoxes finish their work the advanced FCPX automatically uses the advanced ProRes files instead of the Proxy files.
-- You flesh out your story line.
-- You insert some cut-away clips based on the people and distance analyses.
-- You do color correction, then grading, then color matching.
-- You do sound correction.
-- You add titles and effects.
Ta Dah!
Alas my HD Camera, a Sony HDFX is still tape based ... I think I'd better sell this and although not as good at many things go for a Nikon DSLR with HD ... Oh but all those tapes and no way to re digitize if I sell it! Groan... (I'm torn between Canon and Nikon but the HDR stills and auto focus options on video are not yet there on Canon ... last time I checked.)
What a waste of an article. Where is the news in that. Someone predicts that something different will come out in the future. wow
It's a frakking rumors site, this is a juicy rumor. Doesn't matter how likely it is on face value, go ahead and discuss it. Go to a real vetted news site and be confused by their blind indifference to news vs opinion. Don't be confused by rumor and innuendo on a rumors site.
What a waste of an article. Where is the news in that. Someone predicts that something different will come out in the future. wow
What a coincidence. I was just thinking the same thing about your post!
Agreed, I was never thinking of anything but TB as the interconnection of members of a cluster. Having said that it's been done before without. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=530504 But then PCI express is built into TB so this is a domestic low cost way we could all do this now. I want a super computer
And you shall have one! Steve says you -- OK! Me -- No Way... you're still doing it wrong!
The trouble is that I have already bought it. I own the iMac. Now I'm being abandoned because they've changed the interface rules. It's one thing if you introduce a new product with a new way to interact with it. It's another to change existing systems. Yes, today I can undo many of those interface changes. But we all know Apple. Eventually, they will remove the tools to return the Mac to its classic interface.
What is it you feel is being abandoned by Apple with regard your iMac? Do you mean Lion is too radical or the rumors of further changes even to Lion. Just asking for clarification..
THis is like saying you wish OS X could still be like OS 9. You have to move along or stay by the wayside... Just hold on tight for a fun ride I'd say
Perhaps some kind of cloud computer.
Something that holds all data and applications in the cloud, yet has a real keyboard, can run iOS apps as well as re-compiled Mac apps, but offers a touch screen too.
Think MacBook Air with very little local storage, an ARM quad-core chip and insane battery life.
Apple had a few patent applications about notebook/tablet conversions...
Latency kills that idea dead. Cloud is powerful, but it has to respect latency and that means meaningful secondary storage in the device. Every attempt to the contrary over the past 20 years failed for exactly that reason. So don't just change the name to cloud and make the same old mistakes.