OWC’s Larry O’Connor on the New MacPro – MacObserver

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Craig Seeman] “Consider Foundary porting Mari to the Mac as well (demoed on Tube at WWDC). My hunch is professional GPU assisted software will move to take advantage of it quickly.”

And it also gives them an attainable target instead of an endless permutation of dual whatever GPUs, or some sort of substandard hardware config, or other technical odds and ends.

To me, at least logically, this would be a good thing for developers as long as the GPUs carry some juice and OpenCL can be leveraged.

Typical Apple, though. Despite all the recent GPU enhancements in the OS, Apple wasn’t very GPU hardware centric, now they will have two as standard.

[Marcus Moore]

[Dan Stewart] “But the fact remains that even at launch the performance gains for anything but fcpx (and that has yet to be seen) can’t possibly justify the price jump over a 2012 with a 2014 gpu & mavericks?”

I’m looking for the release performance benchmarks and pricing info you mention but I can’t seem to find it…

[Dan Stewart] “That’s even before you have to replace / thunderbodge your existing storages screens & peripherals.
And chuck in 4 drive bays & slots..”

There will be some crossover costs for sure, but existing PCIe cards/drives can be ported over to an external chassis if you want. And though I’m sure any 4K display Apple would put out will be lovely (and expensive) who says you have to get new monitors?

[Dan Stewart] “a second hand cheesegrater will make sense at launch, let alone a year or two in when those firepros are antiques and we’re onto the next chipset- “

We have no solid info that the FirePros can’t be exchanged for newer GPUs later-

[Andrew Kimery]

[Craig Seeman] “While we don’t know about other software but Apple has announced FCPX update specific to new MacPro.
Grant Petty called it the computer we’ve been waiting for (or similar) in regards to Resolve 10.”

Grant said it’s the Mac, not computer, we’ve been waiting for. Which isn’t surprising given that the current Mac Pro was last updated in 2010. I’m sure the Mac Pro Tube will be a big step up for Mac-based users but compared to Windows or Linux machines (which support many more GFX cards) it still won’t be the fastest kid on the block for running Resolve.

[Gary Huff]

[Jason Van Patten] “From a pure CPU-brute perspective, the Mac Pro will crush the laptop. But clearly something was at play here that made the export in FCPX literally twice as fast as the big monster. I’m betting it was AVX.”

That’s something I’ve been very interested in: real-world render times. I mean, how much faster *exactly* is the Xeon 12-core going to be against, say, an iMac, for FCPX/Premiere/After Effects renders? If the new Mac Pro is a significant gain over the old one, or over an iMac, that will be something.

But if I’m ultimately not going to gain that much (which could be for a variety of reasons), then perhaps the iMac is the way to go.

I mean, I know on paper the new Mac Pro should be screaming, but I’d like to see some actual numbers for that.

[Marcus Moore]

How many GPUs do you need in a Resolve suite? I’m not being sarcastic, I’m really curious. How is that measured? Is it the speed of rendering? Is it your ability to play thru complicated grades WITHOUT rendering?

If I walked into the suite of a company grading a sumer blockbuster, how many GPUs are bolted on?

[Marcus Moore]

I think we’re all looking forward to that.

[Walter Soyka]

[Marcus Moore] “How many GPUs do you need in a Resolve suite? I’m not being sarcastic, I’m really curious. How is that measured? Is it the speed of rendering? Is it your ability to play thru complicated grades WITHOUT rendering? “

As you add GPUs, you increase the number of nodes you can play in realtime in a grade.

This is especially important as you go beyond HD to 4K and really ratchet up the processing requirements.

[Marcus Moore] “If I walked into the suite of a company grading a sumer blockbuster, how many GPUs are bolted on?”

On dedicated Mac Resolve systems, it’s not uncommon to see a Cubix Expander stuffed with 3 GPUs for processing, with a non-processing GPU for the GUI in one of the Mac Pro’s internal slots. (Macs were limited to 4 GPUs until 10.8.3.)

On Linux, you can actually do an Infiniband cluster of multiple systems, each containing multiple GPUs.

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

[Marcus Moore]

Thanks for the info-

What drives the Cubix expander? If there’s only one 16x slot on a MacPro tower, where is the bandwidth coming from to drive the eternal GPUs?

In my Google searching, it looks like Cubix will be releasing a TB version (though it’s bandwidth will obviously be limited to whatever TB (or TB2 allows).

[Dan Stewart]

[Marcus Moore] “I’m looking for the release performance benchmarks and pricing info you mention but I can’t seem to find it…
“

Speculation, natch.

[Marcus Moore] “There will be some crossover costs for sure, but existing PCIe cards/drives can be ported over to an external chassis if you want. And though I’m sure any 4K display Apple would put out will be lovely (and expensive) who says you have to get new monitors?”

Yes I guess for a couple of hundred buck convertors & the loss of 2 thunderbolt ports I could carry on as I am..

[Marcus Moore] “We have no solid info that the FirePros can’t be exchanged for newer GPUs later-“

Now this one I’m prepared to bet on.. I think you’ll be more likely to upgrade your iphone.

[Walter Soyka]

[Marcus Moore] “What drives the Cubix expander? If there’s only one 16x slot on a MacPro tower, where is the bandwidth coming from to drive the eternal GPUs?”

Modern Mac Pro systems have two 16x slots and two 4x slots. Both the GPU for the GUI and the expander get 16x slots.

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