New Mac Pro

[Al Arnold]

Haha… Beat me to it. Not that impressed at this point.

[Vladimir Kucherov]

I’m fairly impressed. If it works. They’re basically taking what everyone is doing right now anyway – expanding a tower with external boxes, and designing around it.

This allows them to sell a GPU accessory kit with extra power and room for the craziest stuff that comes out. Should make the system more upgradable.

[John Sellars]

But isn’t external I/O limited to TB 2.0 speeds? Still half the speed of external PCI-e.

[Chris Kenny]

[John Sellars] “But isn’t external I/O limited to TB 2.0 speeds? Still half the speed of external PCI-e.”

But fast enough for 4K. That means (at least as it’s relevant to this industry) it’s really only going to be a bottleneck for external GPUs. So the big question is going to be, how well will Resolve run with the on-board GPU options? They’re AMD, so no CUDA, which is less than ideal, but I imagine Blackmagic will invest some work into optimizing for these systems since they’ll clearly become the standard choice for high-end Resolve work on the Mac platform.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.

[Eric Hansen]

But TB2.0 doesn’t compare to PCIe 3.0 speeds for GPU work. Maybe if you could bond the 6 TB ports together to feed a Cubix…

i think my head just exploded

e

Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv

[Laco Gaal]

So.. Supermicro will get our money.
Just think of the expenses…thunderbolt expansion chassis for adding HDDs, or buying a Promise Pegasus.
Thunderbolt expansion chassis for PCI cards like a RAID controller, a firewire card, a 10GigE card, etc.
Thunderbolt expansion chassis for GPUs, because the onboard AMDs won’t get you anything like a Titan for example.

All they were supposed to do, is upgrade to USB3, add 4 Thunderbolt ports, get the New Xeons, increase the number of SATA, and PCI ports, and increase the PSU performance, and that’s all.
Instead of this, future mac pro users will have to buy 2-3 Thunderbolt expansions chassis just to get where the 2011 Mac Pro was.

Argh…

[Vladimir Kucherov]

What are the bandwidth differences we are talking about?

PCIe 2 x16 which is what is in all the current mac pros is currently 8gb/s from the reading I could find. TB2 according to the presentation supports 20gb/s. What am I missing in terms of it not being fast enough for GPU work?

[Steve Connor]

https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=8898

Well Grant seems to like it!

Steve Connor

There’s nothing we can’t argue about on the FCPX COW Forum

[Juan Salvo]

[Vladimir Kucherov] ” What am I missing in terms of it not being fast enough for GPU work?”

PCIe 2.0 x16 is 80Gbps, and it’s a few years old. PCIe3.0 x16 is 128Gbps. Way faster than ThB2. But that’s not the only issue. There’s also much higher latency, and the fact that ThB is point-to-point interface.

As of today, ThB can’t support any GPUs. In the future the os may be updated to support this. And clever programming may allow for ThB 2.0s limited bandwidth to be used for GPGPU. But performance will still fall behind that of a 4 year old interface, and WAAY behind that of a modern one. Heck it’s even behind that of PCIe1.

That said, I’m sure clever people will make it work as best they can. Not to mention that there are a pair of onboard GPUs.

Colorist | Online Editor | Post Super | VFX Artist | BD Author

https://JuanSalvo.com

[Nate Weaver]

I just found that link. I don’t see any reason for Grant to go out of his way to say something like that other than it’s really the way he feels.

I also was carefully reading the Apple new Pro pages and the way it’s worded, it looks like it might be possible that each TB2 port has it’s own bandwidth and controller. I’d expect the new school will be bonded TB2 lines to a Cubix, 1, 2 or maybe even 3 or 4 TB2 lines to an enclosure.

Either way, with his nice words about “new” OpenCL, maybe I don’t have to worry about much.

HDMI 1.4 to a 4K monitor (that is, when it gets to the point when we need such things) and off you go.

Nate Weaver
Director/D.P., Los Angeles
https://www.nateweaver.net