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Opitical Thunderbolt cables. On a Thinkpad.
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I looked at that workstation too, and had to image the jet-engine roar the fans must make when that thing’s at full-tilt boogie.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Am I wrong to think that this might be cool?”
It’s very cool. And as they say, horses for courses.
[Jeremy Garchow] “What I thought most intriguing about Smoke was that they are actually developing for this type of future on OSX, and that’s what interests me. I know it doesn’t interest you.”
I’m interested, I simply won’t give Autodesk any of more of my money.
[Jeremy Garchow] ” We can then have the ATTO Thunderbolt to Fibre hookups right in the noisy CPU room”
I’ll be very interested to hear how this works out for you. To me this is the crux of it, can Tbolt handle PCIe raids as well as internal cards. If they can, then I don’t need a tower, and I have some real options in the OSX world.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Herb Sevush] “To me this is the crux of it, can Tbolt handle PCIe raids as well as internal cards.”
Right now, it offers more connectivity to smaller machines that any other option in history.
Sure, there’s going to be some growing pains.
[Herb Sevush] “If they can, then I don’t need a tower, and I have some real options in the OSX world.”
If you only have one machine, then direct connect to a Raid makes sense, but we have many machines and a RAID that they all share. It’s different.
What do you need PCIe wise?
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Today. Today, you are right. How much bandwidth do we need realistically?”
What do you want to do with it? For any one thing, 10Gb is a nice sized pipe. It is double what you will push with a small RAID like a Pegasus. It is a lot more than you will push for HD or 2K I/O (depending on the codec). But combine those two? You’re saturating the bus already. 10Gb is not nearly enough if you want an outboard GPU to give you all its got. Maybe all this 4K stuff is overkill, but if people want to work with it, they are going to need more than a single duplex 10Gb pipe to do it.
Even if Thunderbolt 2.0 (being based on PCIe 3.0) doubles throughput, you’re still way south of what multi-lane slots give you. As Mr. Soyka has said, expectations rise in proportion to capability.
Best,
Andy -
[John Kaley] “I looked at that workstation too, and had to image the jet-engine roar the fans must make when that thing’s at full-tilt boogie.”
They say it’s very quiet, but I’d have to hear it to believe it, but I doubt it’s any noisier than my current Maxx Digital Raid + MacPro. You could check with our own David Roth Weiss, who now works at Promaxx.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[John Kaley] “I looked at that workstation too, and had to image the jet-engine roar the fans must make when that thing’s at full-tilt boogie.”
Sure, at full tilt, but then so is a Mac Pro at full tilt. The idea is several large diameter fans turning slowly can cool very quietly. Presumably, the ProMax rig is monitoring its internal temps and has a fan controller only turning the them as much as it needs to to keep cool.
Best,
Andy -
[Jeremy Garchow] “What do you need PCIe wise?”
High speed raid. Can’t get enough speed. Multicam is a beast on bandwidth. Other than that, BM I/O cards, LTO5 deck, GPU. For me MacPro’s do not have enough PCIe slots, it’s one of the temptations of the PC world. And yes, at this point I’m down to a single machine. I used to have a multi seat facility, but those days are gone. So the temptations to have everything in one box, with less cabling, less mess, is very strong – as long as I can open the box myself for upgrades and repairs.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Andrew Richards] “Maybe all this 4K stuff is overkill, but if people want to work with it, they are going to need more than a single duplex 10Gb pipe to do it.”
I guess if you’re working in uncompressed 4k.
the highest that we have been required to deliver is 1080, and there’s the occasional odd aspect ratio (like 1080×3), but those jobs are more rare.
My fibre connection is 8Gb now. Seems to be all good.
Jeremy
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[Herb Sevush] “High speed raid. Can’t get enough speed. Multicam is a beast on bandwidth.”
How fast is your RAID today?
Best,
Andy -
[Jeremy Garchow] “I guess if you’re working in uncompressed 4k.”
Even Pro Res 4K would be in the 500MB/sec range depending on the flavor.
[Jeremy Garchow] “My fibre connection is 8Gb now. Seems to be all good.”
And that 8Gb FC link is only doing one thing. If you are cramming 500-800MB/sec storage I/O and 200-250MB/sec video I/O into a 1.2 GB/sec Thunderbolt pipe, it could get crowded. If you are doing one thing at a time with a Thunderbolt bus, it is a lot of bandwidth. If you are splitting it up among a few bandwidth-hungry devices in a daisy chain, it isn’t.
Best,
Andy
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