Does This Kill The Mac Pro?

[Frank Gothmann]

I totally understand the reasoning and how you feel. But that’s pretty much how everybody feels who’s been with a certain OS for a long, long time. And change seems hard. But sometimes an end with fear is better than fear without end. 2 month using anything on a daily basis and you’ll start to feel at home with it. And slowly things will come as naturally as they do now. Same goes for Linux. Or using the Terminal which still puts pure fear in a lot of people’s eyes but once you get the hang of it things start to make sense and may actually make your life easier and more flexible.
That is really my main beef with Apple. I don’t want to hand in the ropes and be totally dependable on a company that has proven again and again that they are happy to flush down anything they consider “old” or in which they have lost interest. And they do it without giving proper notice.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “I thought NTFS was death? read, but no OS X write?”

metaSAN, brother. It’s quite incredible.

Basically, our macs see a huge wad of hfs+ storage, even though the files that our macs see are stored on physical NTFS media, metaSAN handles the rest . The nice thing is metaSAN (or metaLAN) scales up AND down nicely.

Genreally, as far as SANs go, they are usually pretty strict, or run strict file systems (XSAN runs a proprietary file system, for example).

While metaSAN has some rules, it changes that game big time, and the rules are kinda loose within reason.

They also do some really crazy things with a program called PoolIt that will aggregate a number of disparate drives and present it to all the SAN clients as one mass. And it’s dynamic, so you can add and remove drives/volumes. It’s pretty bonkers. No, it’s really bonkers.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Frank Gothmann] “I totally understand the reasoning and how you feel. But that’s pretty much how everybody feels who’s been with a certain OS for a long, long time. And change seems hard. But sometimes an end with fear is better than fear without end. 2 month using anything on a daily basis and you’ll start to feel at home with it. And slowly things will come as naturally as they do now. “

I totally hear you and you’re right.

There are certain things I’m not “scared” of.

I don’t fear changing NLEs for instance. I like those challenges. Learning new tools is fun for me, but the van has to start in order to drive the tools to the gig.

Uptime is important for us, and blue screens cause down time as I have no idea to where to even start.

With a Mac, I can reboot and hold shift, if I even need to go that far.

Or boot to a clone.

Or restore from a clone. And that works on a Mac mini as well as a MacPro.

I guess if I had to go Windows I’d start slowly and learn over time, just like anything else. You’re right.

[Aindreas Gallagher]

whither ZFS? apple had something there,

time machine would have been pinging incredibly volume efficient queries then eh?

I read about the windows tech of cobbling drives together for a contiguous volume in windows media centre?
there is, to be fair, something to be said for the great outdoors…

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[David Roth weiss]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I guess if I had to go Windows I’d start slowly and learn over time, just like anything else. You’re right.”

Actually Jeremy, you’re not all that off-base, at least not on this subject.

Having come over to the Mac side from Windows only about seven years ago, I can assure you that the Windows OS and Windows machines are not nearly as easy to troubleshoot as Macs. The operating system is not nearly as forgiving, because it has to accommodate more hardware brands, more software brands, and the hazards of viruses and anti-virus software.

Making Windows that much more difficult is the fact that clones and cloning software not nearly as reliable and easy to use as anything we’re used to on the Mac side, and certainly not free. In fact, the freeware available on the Windows side is not as reliable either as it would be on a Mac.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.com

Don’t miss my new Creative Cow Podcast: Bringing “The Whale” to the Big Screen:
https://library.creativecow.net/weiss_roth_david/Podcast-Series-2-MikeParfitandSuzanneChisholm/1

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Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[David Roth Weiss] “Actually Jeremy, you’re not all that off-base, at least not on this subject. “

Ha! I’ll take that as a humourous dig.

[David Roth Weiss] “Making Windows that much more difficult is the fact that clones and cloning software not nearly as reliable and easy to use as anything we’re used to on the Mac side, and certainly not free. In fact, the freeware available on the Windows side is not as reliable either as it would be on a Mac.”

Then there’s the whole registry edit situation.

And run certain programs as administrator.

Dlls or whatever those things are called.

Gag.

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

Here’s my thought. The Mac Pro as we know it is definitely dead. And I’ll tell you why:

Thunderbolt. It contains both a PCIe signal and a Display Port signal.

So how’s that Display Port signal going to get in there? Easy. But it means the end of the user replaceable main GPU.
I would be willing to bet that Apple will never again release a computer without a built in GPU. Think about what would happen if they did:

The Thunderbolt ports would only have a data connection, no video. You couldn’t use Apples nice fancy thunderbolt display. You’d ether get working ports, or you could plug it into your GPU card and get video, but not both. Apple would never do that. They could i guess, make a custom Card that sent the video signal back through it’s PCIe interface to the onboard Thunderbolt controller, Or they could make a card that had the thunderbolt ports on it.
But nether setup works the moment the user changes out the card.

My point, simply, is this. Because the display signal is folded into the Thunderbolt connection, Apple has to use an onboard GPU.

Now I guess they could stick this into the current design, but do you think they would?

It seems to me that to add Thunderbolt to the Mac Pro Apple is forced to do a redesign.

That’s my theory. Now onto speculation:
If the GPU is no longer connected by a PCIe port, what’s stopping them from getting rid of PCIe expansion all together? It would be just like apple to think that Thunderbolt is fast enough to replace PCIe…

It seems to me we may have a couple of generations of Macs which just aren’t useable for high-end 3D/compositing/color work until 100Gb Thunderbolt comes along and Thunderbolt connected GPUs become feasible. (From looking at the DiVinci message bords, I see that DiVinci doen’t work with GPU’s connected by 4x PCIe connections.)

[Jeremy Garchow]

[John-Michael Seng-Wheeler] “My point, simply, is this. Because the display signal is folded into the Thunderbolt connection, Apple has to use an onboard GPU. “

Hmm.

But what about the computers that already have thunderbolt?

They have dedicated GPUs as well as on board GPUs (minus the air/macmini of course).

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

Sorry, poor choice of words. I didn’t mean “onboard” as in, part of the processor. I meant onboard as in built into the computer, like every other mac other then the current Mac Pro

[Jeremy Garchow]

[John-Michael Seng-Wheeler] “Sorry, poor choice of words. I didn’t mean “onboard” as in, part of the processor. I meant onboard as in built into the computer, like every other mac other then the current Mac Pro
“

Still not following.

iMacs before thunderbolt has built in GPUs as well as MacBook Pros.

If MacPros go away, it’s becuae they aren’t selling enough of them.