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OT: Apple to drop Mac Pro?
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I don’t have to buy those “stupid cards and extra shit” (all of which is extremely useful to me and not stupid at all) because I have already bought it. I just need to take it out of the Macs and put it into the HPs. Done.
I’d have to buy tons of new gear and adapters (most of which don’t even exist yet) if we had to go the Thunderbolt route and would take ten times longer for certain tasks than a proper workstation.
Then, even if all those adapters interfacing with Thunderbolt were available, given the cable length limitation of Thunderbolt in its current copper incarnation, I’d have 100TB of storage sitting three meters away from me. Great! I may as well put a hoover right under my desktop. Plus everybody else who is accessing a shared storage solution would have to sit in a 6meter radius from. We may as well tear the entire office down and build everything from scratch.
But, as you’ve said, I can always access my media from the cloud, right? I wanna see you accessing 2K DPX files from the cloud. Brilliant idea.The cost of switching to Windows for us is zero, zilch, plus freedom of choice, cheaper prices for hardware and components plus it is future proof.
The cost of switching to a Thunderbolt enabled Mac solution is in the tens of thousands of dollars with issues and problems all over the place plus a moody and completely unpredictable company behind all this that may pull the plug whenever they feel like it. -
I would agree. At the moment, I do a lot of 3D work which requires significant CPU horsepower to accomplish. I added a 1U server to start my “Farm” but if I had my druthers, I’d much rather use the “Cloud” when I needed it than build my own. I know, there are services out there for just this thing and they are starting to come available. I’ve looked into them and for the moment, for my needs, the current overhead to use those resources is fairly significant. Another current restriction is the pipe in and out of my home/office. Current ISP services suck especially when it comes to the going out side of the equation. Again, hopefully market pressures will make this change. I can imagine, hopefully sooner than later, a setup where I keep a modest modicum of computing resources in my office and on a needed basis I can quickly upload job’s to the cloud, render things out, and get my work back, and let someone else maintain the headache of all of those BTU’s and maintenance. It’s not there yet but starting to become visible just over the horizon.
OT – In a previous life… I worked for a short time for a company that made “smart fan controllers” for computers. They were really proud of the fact of how they could dump 1Kw out of a box. I sat in one meeting and pointed out that the first law of thermodynamics says you can’t destroy heat only move it, so great you just took 1KW out of a box but you just put it under my desk….. where I don’t want it. Their comment was, that was the integrator’s problem not theirs. This is the kind of thinking that currently has me putting servers in my closet with a small portable AC unit, all of which I would LOVE to dump but for the moment I can’t.
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Get some HP workstations, now there’s a company that may or may not be committed to the PC space.
“My Name is Steve and I’m an FCPX user”
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Irrelevant because I can “choose” to buy HP, I don’t have to. I can go with any tower I like, from any manufacturer I like, and if I want I can get individual components and build my own machine according to my liking, needs and budget. Same if I just have to replace or upgrade a component. Nobody is dictating anything to me, what I should and shouldn’t use and how to use it.
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[Bill Davis] “Looking backstage it was nothing but a bunch of racks of processor boxes. Each packed with cores – running in massively parallel arrays.”
Much like building up supercomputers with racks of Xserves. Oh, wait … 😉
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
you are just thick…you won’t need those cards in a computer with advanced internal architecture. if everything is built in it makes all the extra crap irrelevant. you can link thunderbolt drives together and have tons of storage. 3 meters is quite far away for most of us. that would easily be in another room at my place…much like your current drives are except just not as far away. and i would love to know how you gonna get a bunch of pcs for free. last time i checked hp were charging money for their machines….then you gotta stuff all that old crap into them to make them work….are you not listening to yourself?
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Just got a 1U ASUS rackmount from newegg. 2x Xenon Hex Core 2.4Ghz CPU’s with 24Gb Ram, 1Tb drive, 4 hot swap front bays, Win7 Pro, just over $2600. Gives me 24 rendering threads, which is HUGE for me, and at about 1/4 to 1/2 the cost of an equivalent MacPro (haven’t priced them lately but weren’t they running around 8K for a 12core?)
and yea…. HP’s commitment to PC’s is … ah… dubious at best. Wonder what eBay Meg is going to do with that CF.
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[Phil Hoppes] “Just got a 1U ASUS rackmount from newegg”
One of two companies that make Windows computers that have announced Thunderbolt support.
Ahh, so this wasn’t a tower either?
Looks like Asus will be the company to watch on Windows. I can imagine they’ll be gunning to be an alternative to HP which has announced they won’t support Thunderbolt which will likely hold now that they decided not to spin off their PC division. -
Craig –
The modular super-mini T-bolt system you have been espousing has one major drawback for me – the mini is a closed box. Unless you see the mini as a CPU only device, the fact that you can’t open it and swap out drives and memory easily is a major drawback. I can’t afford to shut down my operations to take a mini to an Apple store to get them to swap out system drives if I have a problem. The ability to get under the hood is essential to me. It’s why I won’t even consider an Imac for my work, or a laptop as my main computer. If the system case isn’t designed to be opened and worked on by a skilled amateur, I won’t use it.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
Just wondering, what did you make of this ipad FCPX demo here ?
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/335/19077
Was very interesting no ?
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