Dual Opterons and Avid Xpress Pro HD v 5.0 – Will it work?

[Oakmozart]

It’s risky. AMD chips aren’t supported by Avid at this time. If you do go with an AMD system, avoid buying a motherboard with a VIA chipset, since they’re well-known to cause problems with Avid’s software/hardware.

I was at an Avid seminar in May, showcasing Avid’s new offerings from NAB. The guy who was giving the presentation was talking about how much new added RT capabilities have been added to the software since XPro and MCA’s launch 2 years ago. He told about how many streams you could push 2 years ago with an HP xw8000, then what was capable this year, using an xw8200. Then he mentioned how excited Avid is about how many streams they’ll be able to push by NAB ’05, where all their demo machines will be HP xw9300’s. The xw9300’s use dual-AMD Opterons, plus dual graphics cards. To me, that says that AMD support is coming. That’s a good thing for us, the end-users.

[Oakmozart]

I suppose one could call this a coincidence. I was just reading on the Avid Xpress Pro forums over at Avid.com, when I found a posting started 1.5 years ago, regarding XPro and Mojo on an AMD system. One of the XPro software engineers at Avid, a friendly fellow named Mr. Brian Williams, posted this explanation of why XPro doesn’t support AMD, only Intel. I quote him exactly:

“Xpress Pro uses SSE and MMX heavily. Although many users report using Athlon systems successfully, it really is not recommended for Mojo. The great benefit of Mojo is the ability to output full resolution material. This means that Xpress Pro needs to manipulate 4 times the number of pixels as you might do previewing effects without a Mojo. Because of the increase of the workload per frame, you want the best SSE and MMX performance possible. Right now, that’s either a Pentium 4 or a Xeon. Athlons and P4s have the same multimedia performance per clock cycle, but an atlon running at a 3200+ rating is really running at a 2GHz clock speed, compared to a P4 running at a true 3.2GHz clock.

To really unleash the power of a Mojo, a dual Xeon P4 should be used.”

This is a fascinating explanation, which garnered quite a bit of interest. Of course, within a few postings, someone asked the million-dollar question: Will Avid ever support AMD systems? The answer, again from Mr. Williams:

“We have evaluated Opteron systems and they still suffer the same multimedia instruction performance limitations. From all public information, it doesn’t sound as though AMD plans on improving this situation any time in the near future.”

Again, keep in mind that this was talked about 1.5 years ago, when XPro + Mojo had only been out for about 4 months or so. Xpress Studio hadn’t been announced, and XPro HD was still a year away. A lot can change in a year-and-a-half in the computer world. I guess we’ll just have to wait-and-see on the AMD issue.

And just for your info, Mr. Willams was one of the engineers who was principally responsible for adding in scroll-wheel support (at the last minute, sacrificing his time as well as the time of the other engineers involved—Kudos, folks! Thanks!) for the latest release of XPro HD 5.1.5. So for those of you who say that “Avid never listens,” you’re dead-wrong. It’s just that engineering doesn’t frequent the “other” forums (like this one) as much as they frequent the ones on Avid.com. No offense, Bessie!

Take care.

[Brant Mills]

Thank you for the info. I certainly appreciate it. I still have a few months before I absolutely have to buy a new system – so I think I’m going to wait it out anyway for prices on certain components to fall a bit. Thanks again for your time!