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New Mac Pro – ATI 5770 and no USB 3 ?
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Wait a minute!! Walter, are you in charge of Steve’s email? Because, that was perfect! LOL
Winston A. Cely
Editor/Owner | Della St. Media, LLCMac Pro 3GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
8 GB RAM | Final Cut Studio 3 | Aja Kona LHe“If you can talk brilliantly enough about a subject, you can create the consoling illusion it has been mastered.” – Stanley Kubrick
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[walter biscardi] “”The new Mac Pros are swell!” Steve”
Nice! How about this:
“CUDA is a big bag of hurt.”
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Winston A. Cely] “Wait a minute!! Walter, are you in charge of Steve’s email? Because, that was perfect! LOL”
Wouldn’t THAT be sweet?
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” featuring Sigourney Weaver coming soon.
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[Winston A. Cely] “Maybe one of us needs to email Steve about his company’s apparent lack of interest in pro-apps/machines”
But he HAS responded, to both. There’s a thread a while back in this very forum, from a customer email from Steve saying that there would be an awesome pro apps update before the end of the year.
Although you’d never know it from some of the posts here, but that would actually be AHEAD of the recent schedule – NAB 2005, NAB 2007, July 2009.
In fact, going back to the beginning, you’ve got FCP 1: 1999, FCP 2 and 3: 2001 — I think that calling the second release version 3 was bogus, but still, two years until — FCP 4: 2003, then, as I mentioned, the rest in 2005, 2007, and 2009.
In other words, with one (bogus) exception, they’ve ALL been two years apart. And they’ve all been in odd-numbered years! NAB 2011 would be right on time. Anything earlier is a rare exception…which Steve has said will happen. So there you go.
Look, say what you want about Steve and the reality distortion field – and I do, frequently 🙂 – the fact is that he has never, ever said that something is coming, and then it not show up.
Which brings us to what he said in an email to a developer re: no news about new desktop or laptop news at WWDC, that something was coming soon. For desktops, it has, with laptops expected to follow later in the year.
Which brings us back to the ATI. My biggest disappointment with Macs over the years has been the poor, sometimes outright pathetic, range of options for high-end graphics. This looks like a step back. As disappointed as I’ve historically been by Mac graphics, I’m still kinda surprised by this.
Anyway, Apple’s idea of “interest” and yours might differ, but based on Steve’s recent correlation between words and actions, I think he’s earned the benefit of the doubt that something will indeed be happening before the end of the year.
Unless, as with the white iPhone, Apple says around then that it will be delayed. 🙂
Even so, itchy or not, we’re still at least NINE MONTHS ahead of the next “regularly scheduled” Pro Apps update.
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW MagazineMy Blog: “Is this thing on? Oh it’s on!”
Don’t forget to rate your favorite posts!
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Does anybody know if the new Imacs support jumbo frames on the ethernet ports?
don walkerJohn 3:16
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[Tim Wilson] “Which brings us back to the ATI. My biggest disappointment with Macs over the years has been the poor, sometimes outright pathetic, range of options for high-end graphics. This looks like a step back. As disappointed as I’ve historically been by Mac graphics, I’m still kinda surprised by this.”
Agreed — high-end consumer ATI cards are a bizarre choice. I understand that Apple wants to push OpenCL, but there’s a tremendous amount of cross-industry momentum behind CUDA, so Apple not shipping these with NVIDIA has me puzzled.
So who exactly is the target market for Apple’s workstation, if not video, 3D, CAD, or science professionals?
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Tim Wilson] ”
Which brings us back to the ATI. My biggest disappointment with Macs over the years has been the poor, sometimes outright pathetic, range of options for high-end graphics. This looks like a step back. As disappointed as I’ve historically been by Mac graphics, I’m still kinda surprised by this.”Keep in mind, ATI is the preferred card for Color and in fact slower ATI cards scream over the fastest nVidia cards when it comes to Color. This goes all the way back to the Silicon Color days so the ATI card comes as no surprise to me.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” featuring Sigourney Weaver coming soon.
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I switched to FCP last year from Adobe, but in the last couple of months I have cut all my major TVC’s on CS5 (Mac). The CUDA/Nvidia thing is just so advanced compared with FCP’s ATI alternative. In CS5 I can play even complex multi-layered sequences through my Kona (albeit stuttery if I have too many layers), but I can’t play nearly anything on FCP without having to render. The Mercury rendering means I am finishing projects MUCH quicker than I was with FCP.
I’m just weighing up whether I trade up to the new Mac Pro or get a HP Z800 and go back to Windows. I do love my Mac Pro, but Apple is really losing my interest with Final Cut and the hardware.
Peter Corbett
Powerhouse Productions
http://www.php.com.au -
[Tim Wilson] “Heck, Macs were out for 3 years before the first model to support to COLOR was released! Not the software – I mean anything besides black and white. This was back in 1987.”
That’s why I bought an Amiga 1000 in 1984. I just couldn’t get the hoopla over a black and white computer when the Amiga had color and later the Video Toaster (which I did not buy).
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It\’s hard at the moment to say which machine is the most bang for the buck but I\’d imagine for a lot of task the single CPU 6-core option will be the best option. For apps that are limited to fewer cores it might very well be THE fastest option as it\’s got the highest clock-speed of the lot.
That said, it could be the dual-CPU machines win on some task due to I presume a dual-memory controller setup and thus higher memory through-put. Still, the 6-core single CPU has faster memory than the dual-CPU 4-core machine so hard to say before some tests are out.
Aside from this I\’d go for the 5870 GPU. Apps like Motion and Color SHOULD see a boost here. Future OpenCL ready apps will also notice this. General RAM-memory is not to be forgotten. I\’d say a decent figure is 2GB per core in the system.
4 core = 8-16 GB
6 core = 12-24 GB
8 core = 16-32 GB
12 core = 24-48 GBThese are just rough-takes, but an 8-core system running AfterEffects with 8GB of RAM makes RAM being a limiting factor. Depending on the given work for the machine a faster drive-solution is recommended, even if only using 2-3 internal drives raided (do keep them back-ups running :-)).
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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se
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