Phi

[Devin Crane]

But does it support Thunderbolt???

[Jeremy Garchow]

That would be one scenario, external to the main motherboard.

Or, this becomes an add on to current Xeon workstations via normal pcie configs.

[Brooks Tomlinson]

I hope to dream big, and I can only hope that this is in the new mac.

(please, don’t spoil my dream with reality!)

Brooks Tomlinson
“I dream in 32bit float”

[Walter Soyka]

Looks cool!

Anybody know if this processing power is available automatically to the system, or if applications need to be written with Phi in mind (as with NVIDIA/CUDA or OpenCL)? Or if perhaps Phi supports OpenCL?

I also wonder if having “only” 8 GB of RAM on the Phi PCIe card for all those cores will be limiting (8 GB holds about 260 frames of 1920×1080 32bpc RGBA), or if PCIe is fast enough to allow practical swapping to system RAM as necessary without slowing all those sizzle cores down too much.

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

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Walter Soyka] “Anybody know if this processing power is available automatically to the system, or if applications need to be written with Phi in mind (as with NVIDIA/CUDA or OpenCL)? Or if perhaps Phi supports OpenCL?”

I don’t know. Perhaps Phi means nothing to us video peoples.

Technology is simply flying off the rails:

https://www.barefeats.com/hard159.html

Jeremy

[Walter Soyka]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I don’t know. Perhaps Phi means nothing to us video peoples.”

Did you post that just to get me all riled up about sizzle core performance again? 🙂

Even if it doesn’t matter to video editorial (which is primarily throughput and secondarily processing), every advance in computing affects adjacent disciplines like animation, compositing, 3D rendering, etc. (which are primarily processing and secondarily throughput).

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

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Walter Soyka] “Did you post that just to get me all riled up about sizzle core performance again? :)”

I’m saying I don’t have a clue what Phi will do except help Stephen Hawking wrap his genius around the cosmos faster than what is possible today.

I don’t know what this means for the impending MacPro thingy, other than the rough timeline given by Tim Cook seems to roughly match up with this development.

I can bring FCPX to it’s knees, yet the software allows me to run all these process at once.

FCP7 prevented me from running all these processes at once. These are both by design.

This seems to mean to me that Apple is going to be building a decently fast machine, something that is faster than the current offerings, that will allow some sort of parallel encoding to be offloaded from the main CPU.

I don’t think this type of thing will be done with an ARM processor anytime in the near distant future.

But there are times when I am over optimistic which is why I should probably stop hanging around here so much. 😀

[Michael Gissing]

Having a multi core co processor will require software specifically tailored to take advantage of this power. I can see that having such power might make a difference to WETA and other big VFX companies. Can’t see the advantage over GPU cores like CUDA for the average editor & post house but there may be. If the card is sub $2K then sure it may be worth a consideration.

Many years ago Fairlight introduced a FPGA card (field programmable gate array) card to do all audio mix & effects processing. The power in this card was such that even Apple showed some interest and had some preliminary informal talks with Fairlight. Basically it is another way of having a multi co processing unit doing dedicated tasks rather than relying on fixed 32bit DSP chips or using the main processor.

If I was AutoDesk, I might be tempted to write software that could leverage this processing but again why go there and not just use GPU as graphics cards have become cheap powerful co processors.

[Walter Soyka]

[Michael Gissing] “Having a multi core co processor will require software specifically tailored to take advantage of this power. I can see that having such power might make a difference to WETA and other big VFX companies. Can’t see the advantage over GPU cores like CUDA for the average editor & post house but there may be. If the card is sub $2K then sure it may be worth a consideration.”

This is why OpenCL is so important. OpenCL isn’t just about parallel computing on graphics cards; it’s about parallel computing across all kinds of heterogeneous computational devices like CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and DSPs.

With technologies like GPGPU (CUDA on NVIDIA, OpenCL on AMD/NVIDIA) and soon maybe Phi, you can fit what was a render farm a decade ago (making that up, but it might not be that far off) onto a PCIe card today.

That’s just plain cool. Ever increasing computational power translates into ever increasing creative opportunities.

[Michael Gissing] “If I was AutoDesk, I might be tempted to write software that could leverage this processing but again why go there and not just use GPU as graphics cards have become cheap powerful co processors.”

Current Autodesk software is pretty reliant on the GPU for actual graphics processing (OpenGL), not general purpose computing on the the GPU (CUDA/OpenCL).

There’s actually a very interesting battle on the desktop going on now between technologies like OpenGL (Smoke, or Ae effects like Element/Magic Bullet Looks/Mir/FreeForm/ShapeShifter) and technologies like CUDA (Ae’s 3D ray-tracing renderer, GenArts Sapphire, DaVinci Resolve). I know Motion used to be OpenGL-reliant, but I’m not sure if or to what degree that has changed with FCPX/M5/OpenCL.

These are two different (but valid!) approaches to computer graphics, each with unique strengths and weaknesses. Exciting times to be a designer!

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

[Michael Gissing]

Thanks for the info Walter. Yes we live in times where processing power is so cheap it is easy to forget that what was gee whiz only a few years ago is ho hum now.