Could it be true?

[Joe Murray]

It would be fun to know how many of these new quad G5s Apple actually sells. My guess is the numbers are going to be pretty low.

Joe Murray

[Jeff Bernstein]

Walter,

Did Apple go back to putting ADB and SCSI on the motherboard? Do Apple go back to NuBus? Personally, I think it was idiotic that Apple went totally PCIe without any PCI or PCI-X slots. There are no other bus architectures on the horizon to replace PCIe right now. PCI lasted about 11 years and counting. PCIe is only about a year old. I think we can agree, it has plenty of mileage left.

As to current PCIe cards not working in an Intel Mac motherboard, this is ridiculous. PCI/PCIe cards are platform agnostic. It is their drivers that are platform specific. As an example, an ATTO UL4D is the same product for Macs or PCs. Even AJA’s LHe is the same card for both platforms. So peeps, don’t sweat it. You just have to sweat the entire conversion of software to Macintel.

Jeff Bernstein

Digital Desktop Consulting
Apple Pro Video VAR
XSAN Certified

323-653-7611

[Gary Taylor]

I for one am not too worried about AJA providing driver support for future Intel based Macs. Like Jeff said the cards are platform agnostic and it is only the driver that has to be updated. With external storage the only thing I am worried about are HBAs and capture cards.

One very cool thing about the move to PCIe is our ability to get the latest GPU hardware instead of waiting for an AGP version. This should give Motion users a great feeling, and if Apple finds a way to implement GPGPU funtionality in other apps then the benefits are clear.

One thing that I have heard many people talk about is the opportunity PCIe provides to card vendors. From what I understand just about every card on the today has ceiling based on PCI-X. I have been told that is one of the reasons RAID solutions peak out where they do.

It’s possible this might provide an incentive for vendor not to use bridge chips to enable PCIe compatibility and instead go to the effort of creating a native solution. Imagine an external 16 port infiniband SATA solution that can go up to 1 GigaByte per second bidirectional. Apple move to PCIe only might make this happen sooner.

Of course I say this as someone who doesn’t have in investment in legacy hardware. I think when the dust settles Apple’s
Quad machine just might be able to handle a number of 2K workflows, and that is WAY more than I need right now. Why should I worry if the new MacTels are better in some way? These machines once they are proven should be great for some time to come.

The G5 has incredible floating point performance and nothing Intel has comes even close to it. I think for the way that I plan on working the new Quad is likely to be as fast as anything released for a while to come. Just like everyone who bought one of the original dual 2.0 G5s should be able to keep working happily for some time to come. Like a bunch of other people I am just waiting to make sure there are no unexpected gotchas…
Gary