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Someone explain this…
I get that the capacity of a TB or TB2 is 1/4 or 1/2 the lanes of a PCI card. That limitation should be significant. How on God’s green earth did this happen? (old video, I know):
https://tv.adobe.com/watch/davtechtable/tech-demo-thunderbolt-macbook-air-red-rocket/
If the new Mac Pro, that no one has seen or used, is such a useless piece of trash in part because of its dependence on thunderbolt, how is this even possible? I just need to know if I should be okay with the new TB paradigm, or join the 2 minutes hatred.
I’m being snarky here, but in part I’m completely serious. What the heck is this???
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20 Replies
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ThB won’t help you if you want more GPU power than the machine ships with. ThB 1 is equal to a 4x PCIe slot. ThB 2, I would assume, is equal to an 8x slot. GPUs typically sit in a 16x slot.
For data through-put ThB is fine. For adding external GPUs, though, it’s slow.
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It just isn’t pushing the GPU to the limits. Even at partial utilization, they got those results.
Best,
Andy -
We don’t know a lot about the 2 GPUs it will ship with except they each have 6GB GDDR5 video memory and have more bandwidth than AMD’s top-of-the-line S10000, so lets wait about four months before pronouncing it useless. And not all of the cards that people are used to require 16 lane PCIe. I don’t know the significance or impact of using PCIe 3 but I assume it helps too.
Rick Lang
iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB
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Exactly – the specs we have on the new GPU’s look way faster than anything currently shipping from nVidia or even ATI and you get TWO OF THEM! Overkill for most folks – but i look forward to using them – daily 🙂
Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Downtown Long Beach, California
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1680680/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1 -
Then how was this guy running RED 4K video at full resolution, without hardware assistance on the mercury playback engine, coloring it, recording a screencast, and a webcast, on a MacBook Air, at the same time? What else can you throw at it?
So are we just talking about raw data transfer? The read/write speeds of the fastest drives are below the transfer rates of TB 1, aren’t they? What am I missing?
Forgetting for a moment the specs, what about as a tool to do a job? Does it not do it? And if it worked in this case, what does it take to demonstrate the shortcomings?
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Lance, did you see the post from Grant Petty about the new Mac Pro and the performance of Resolve 10 using the new version of OpenCL? In a word, “screaming.” Until I read that post I was feeling nervous, but I trust Grant.
Rick Lang
iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB
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Andy, you snuck in while I was replying, but you sort of answered my question. They’re not pushing it all the way, but dang. I don’t expect to be filming 4K in the near future, but even so. What else do you think they can throw at it to get a really good test?
And someone mentioned 3D on another thread, and how they really wanted 24 cores. Aren’t they doing a workshop with Pixar tomorrow? If Sully’s hair isn’t taxing enough, I don’t know what is.
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[Bobby Mosca] “Then how was this guy running RED 4K video at full resolution, without hardware assistance on the mercury playback engine, coloring it, recording a screencast, and a webcast, on a MacBook Air, at the same time? What else can you throw at it?”
I think you misunderstood something in the video. The RED Rocket card (in an enclosure connected via ThB) is allowing him to do all of that because it’s processing the RED footage. Before he enabled the RED Rocket card the computer couldn’t even playback the footage.
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[Bobby Mosca] “Andy, you snuck in while I was replying, but you sort of answered my question. They’re not pushing it all the way, but dang. I don’t expect to be filming 4K in the near future, but even so. What else do you think they can throw at it to get a really good test?”
The thing about GPGPU is it doesn’t need all the bandwidth the card can push all the time. If someone were so inclined, I don’t see any reason someone couldn’t built a compute-only Thunderbolt GPU box that does what that demo shows is possible, but doesn’t have any monitor connections. A little bit goes a long way, eh?
[Bobby Mosca] “And someone mentioned 3D on another thread, and how they really wanted 24 cores. Aren’t they doing a workshop with Pixar tomorrow? If Sully’s hair isn’t taxing enough, I don’t know what is.”
Pixar isn’t going to be walking away from their custom Linux stuff for their real work, but there is considerable muscle in the new Mac Pro. It isn’t my ideal box (can I still call it a box?), but it will be very powerful, and the idea of hanging a GPU off of it’s TB ports seems awfully superfluous given the GPU muscle inside.
Best,
Andy -
Here’s trip down memory lane when we talked about this 1.5 years ago. I apologize for getting punchy, I was all alone on a Thunderbot raft in a sea of pcie cards.
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/24438
Jeremy
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