-
Apple and Thunderbolt 3
-
[Darren Roark] “It does run hotter that way.”
Hmmm… It would be interesting to know how the machines in question were installed/mounted.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
I’m guessing though that the beta version of PP was the culprit since the safety measures in the machines seemed to fail.
Transcoding Red footage in FCP X varies in speed transcoding the same shot depending on how hot the machine already is. If they didn’t account for that anything’s possible.
-
[Oliver Peters] “AMD showed some really nice GPU cards at NAB that are only PC-compatible for now. If you have an old tower, Sapphire 7950 is about as good as you can go with a “blessed” AMD card. You get a high-end Nvidia (that’s what they edited with on “Gone Girl”) or a flashed Nvidia gaming card. Expansion chassis don’t really help you much for editing if you have a nMP. So a lot of us are stuck.”
Back in 2012 when the nMP was designed, Apple may have not foreseen how rapidly 4K would proliferate in post and the huge jump in GPU performance from moving to 14/16 nm fabrication this year.
Usually both CPU and GPUs only increase at 10-15% per generation. If Apple planned around that and the nMP as released had excellent performance on a mostly HD workflow, then you could see (from the 2012 design perspective) maybe 5-6 years is OK and customers will just replace it.
The problem is 4K (esp H264) is very common and Premiere can struggle with this. Unexpectedly AMD and nVidia are releasing 14/16 nanometer GPUs which promise up to 250% performance increase. People on the nMP are sort of stuck. It does OK on FCPX but not everybody runs that. Does Apple want to limit nMP hardware sales to people running FCPX? I doubt it.
It appears that major performance improvements in Premiere, AE and Photoshop are at hand from Adobe using Metal, so that might help soften the blow for those on the nMP. However it will be very interesting to see if Apple modifies their “sealed box” philosophy when the updated nMP is released.
You can sort of write off an iMac and replace it more frequently but a Mac Pro is more expensive and the repercussions of a non-upgradeable design are more severe.
-
There is a known issue related to the GPUs on some new Mac Pros and I wonder if the pool of dead nMPs in question were some of those machines?
The symptoms described by Apple sound exactly the same as the GPU problem on many MBPs were the GPUs got too hot and eventually fried. I don’t remember if it was a design flaw or a manufacturing defect but a replacement logic board is the only fix.
-
[Andrew Kimery] ” pool of dead nMP”
I see what you did there 🙂
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
A lot of times it was bad thermal paste application. I’ve opened up my fair share of older MBP’s that were running hot and there was a thick pancake of paste. Reapplied the right amount and it cooled down a lot.
-
I have a feeling that when the new nMP’s hit there will be GPU upgrades available for the older models. The SSD and the RAM are user upgradeable officially, the GPUs seem just as easy to swap out.
-
[Oliver Peters] “I see what you did there :)”
Couldn’t help myself… 😉
-
[Darren Roark] “I have a feeling that when the new nMP’s hit there will be GPU upgrades available for the older models. The SSD and the RAM are user upgradeable officially, the GPUs seem just as easy to swap out.”
If true I’ll bet there will be a nice amount of sticker shock to go with it. I can’t imagine custom GPUs for a low volume computer will be cheap.
-
[Charlie Austin] “Take this with a grain of salt, but, regarding Deadpool MP meltdowns, some of the team believe it’s a computer issue, but some are just as convinced that it was caused by issues with the Beta versions of PP they were running at the time. FWIW”
[Oliver Peters] “It may be a combination of both.”
[Darren Roark] “I’m guessing though that the beta version of PP was the culprit since the safety measures in the machines seemed to fail. Transcoding Red footage in FCP X varies in speed transcoding the same shot depending on how hot the machine already is. If they didn’t account for that anything’s possible.”
If GPUs are “melting down,” it is a hardware problem, period. Electronics generate resistive heat when they are used, and the harder you push them, the hotter they get. If a design does not accommodate this fact, it is flawed. The system should stay in a safe operation range and be prevented from entering an unsafe state by design.
We’ve had thermal throttling in hardware for decades. The hardware itself enforces that performance slow-down to keep itself safely cool, and it should shut down completely before it ever reaches the point where the heat would be damaging.
Maybe if Apple system designs put performance on equal footing with case size and aesthetics, this wouldn’t be an issue?
A couple of related quotes from apple.com/macpro:
A unified thermal core. The new Mac Pro packs an unprecedented amount of power in an unthinkable amount of space. A big reason we were able to do that is the ingenious unified thermal core. Rather than using multiple heat sinks and fans to cool the processor and graphics cards, we built everything around a single piece of extruded aluminum designed to maximize airflow as well as thermal capacity. It works by conducting heat away from the CPU and GPUs and distributing that heat uniformly across the core. That way, if one processor isn’t working as hard as the others, the extra thermal capacity can be shared efficiently among them. No computer has been built this way before. And yet it makes so much sense, it’s now hard to imagine building one any other way.
A single breakthrough fan. An incredible amount of innovation went into designing a fan system capable of cooling such a high-performance device. Instead of adding extra fans, we engineered a single, larger fan that pulls air upward through a bottom intake. As air passes vertically through the center of the device, it absorbs heat and carries it out the top. It’s simple and elegant — and also astonishingly quiet. To achieve that, we had to consider every detail: the number of blades, the size of the blades, the spacing of the blades, and even the shape of the blades. By minimizing air resistance throughout the system, we were able to design a fan with backward-curved impeller blades that runs at fewer revolutions per minute, draws air more efficiently as it spins, and creates considerably less noise.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn]
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up