Goodbye macpro towers…

[Craig Seeman]

[Frank Gothmann] “So, Craig, if your envisioned Mac-Mini with TB connectivity “

Nope, never claimed MacMini. It’ll be the same form but much (MUCH) larger, rack mountable. It’ll have two 16PCIe slots. It will LOOK LIKE a LARGE MacMini. It will NOT be a MacMini.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Craig Seeman] “GPUs, by the nature of the beast for example, will still require PCIe. That won’t go away. My guess is the new machine will have two PCIe 16x slots. Some will use it for 2nd GPU, others may use them for fiber for example.”

But in that thread, we pretty much surmised that you won’t be able to have DVI+Thunderbolt. That 16x GPU will get routed through 4x Thunderbolt. That means GPU manufacturers will have to make custom DVI less GPUs. Do you think that’s viable?

I’m not worried about data speeds, those are pretty fast.

[Craig Seeman]

I’m not sure that GPU processing for grading and FX work needs to be passed out through the system, or maybe I’m missing something. I’d differentiate GPU as a system resource vs DVI as an output.

[Frank Gothmann]

That doesn’t answer my question. If you think this is what’s coming, and it is a proper replacement performance wise for a tower archtitecture, why is Apple using “stoneage” server-class xeon hardware and pcie connectivity from other manufacturers?

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Craig Seeman] “I’m not sure that GPU processing for grading and FX work needs to be passed out through the system, or maybe I’m missing something. I’d differentiate GPU as a system resource vs DVI as an output.”

Well, then we went on to say that rendering on to the GPU, then passing frames back to the system via PCIe is sloppy and “slow”. This means you’d render your GPU stuff, it gets passed back via PCIe to other resources, then shoe horned down the thunderbolt port. I was under the same moression as you at first, but after having that discussion, I’m not so sure. In a 10Gb system, Thunderbolt present a bottleneck to full length PCIe machines as all data and display info must pass through the thunderbolt controller.

[Jamie Franklin]

Good god man. Nothing in your post is a justification, reason, nor immediate legitimacy to spend resources to port a 64bit, multi-core, gpu powered, software that requires, at best, minimum screen real estate to manipulate and edit a video…

A clock can be any size. Watching video can be any size. Creating video can be any size. But there are things that are just not (lets go caps here) PRACTICAL

So it becomes a gimmick. I’d rather Adobe spends their resources on meta data and management. Fixing bugs. Talking to editors. Continuing to innovate *how* we work, not *where* we work. Going out in the field. Than having to worry about porting a robust edit suite seriously not practical for the padders of the world. It can have it’s uses in a variety of ways…but good god that’s not what was said here…it was GET IT ON THE IPAD TRAIN BEFORE APPLE….

[Craig Seeman]

[Frank Gothmann] “why is Apple using” . . .
Because the MacPro replacement hasn’t been delivered yet. It may depend on when and what volume they can get the chips they plan on using from Intel.

[Craig Seeman]

I’ve understood from a few sources that the lack of broadcast monitoring, for example, is OS related and apparently that will be resolved by the time the next major release of FCPX happens which should also follow a Lion update that I suspect will be needed. How Apple is tackling this issue, we just wont know, until they release it. I do suspect though, that this is a big reason why broadcast monitoring isn’t there yet.

[Frank Gothmann]

You cannot honestly believe that’s the reason, do you?
And when your anticipated machines arrive the put 12 Petabyte of Isilion storage and all the HP servers on Ebay, right?

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Craig Seeman] “I’ve understood from a few sources that the lack of broadcast monitoring, for example, is OS related and apparently that will be resolved by the time the next major release of FCPX happens which should also follow a Lion update that I suspect will be needed. How Apple is tackling this issue, we just wont know, until they release it. I do suspect though, that this is a big reason why broadcast monitoring isn’t there yet.

“

That’s broadcast display.

I’m talking about GUI/GPU display. Just wondering how you felt about a 4x machine, really.