Does This Kill The Mac Pro?

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Kevin Patrick] “I haven’t read this thread enough times to get to the point where I can say “Ah, I see … ” “

You mean all the speculation hasn’t formed a crystal clear image of the future????? What’s wrong with you, man? 😉 Just kidding around, Kevin.

[Kevin Patrick] “Would this be the CPU that people have speculated Apple has been waiting for? Assuming of course they are still planning on updating the Mac Pro.”

In what we talked about yesterday CPU speed doesn’t have a ton to do with it.

Think of the internals of the computer as plumbing. The data is the water that flows through the pipes (which is the PCIe and other busses, ram/cpu/etc). The ports on the computer (fw, fibre channel, DVI, displayport, thunderbolt, whatever) are the faucets. It varies a little bit because water not only comes out, but can also go in to these faucets, but let’s just say for simplicity that these ports are faucets that all the water comes flowing out of.

If the pipes in the wall (in the computer) are 2″ diameter, that means a massive amount of water can be pushed around the inside of the walls, but if those pipes get restricted down to 1/8″ just before hitting the faucet, that water pressure is severely restricted. Sure, it can get from the water heater to the faucet really fast and with a lot of pressure, but once it comes out of the faucet, that pressure is reduced.

In a laptop environment, Thunderbolt represents an advantage as the all the pipes were 1/8″ to begin with. With thunderbolt, they have all been replaced by 1/2″ pipe. Sweet.

In a desktop environment, the pipes are already at 2″ so a 1/2″ faucet will do nothing but reduce water pressure on the whole system. this sucks if you need a lot of water pressure.

In both of these cases, the size of the water heater (call it the CPU) doesn’t do much to add to the overall water pressure.

It’s not a highly accurate analogy as the data in a computer can flow in multiple directions, but hopefully it helps to visualize what we have been talking about.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Walter Soyka] “On the Mac, they didn’t have this option, so they have to push rendered frames back from the card to the computer. Guaranteeing realtime performance was apparently quite an engineering challenge.”

Isn’t this perhaps that Adobe is having some challenges with capture cards at the moment? They rely heavily on GPU processing, adding a capture card in to PPro slows everything down (system becomes sluggish). Turn off the capture card, and it’s faster.

[Walter Soyka] “Even if it’s possible to render graphics on one card, pipe the rasterized frames over the PCIe bus in real time, and output them over another card, this would be lousy system design. You’d be building a large bottleneck into the system and soaking up several PCIe lanes for no reason at all.”

But isn’t this how anything works with a capture card and GPU based processing? What about DaVinci? At some point, the frames need to be handed off to a professional video output device that is NOT the displays connected to the GPU (that is, a broadcast monitor connected via SDI). How does DaVinci do it without system speed penalty?

Jeremy

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Michael Gissing] “Thunderbolt and Lightning
Very Very Frightning….”

To resurrect this nearly one year old post.

Apple just lunched a connector called Lightning.

What else can you tell us about Apple’s future, Michael?

Jeremy