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Wait for the new MacPro or get the new iMac?
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So why would you expect to get anything beyond an iMac when enclosures already exist to turn your Thunderbolt port into an extension of 4x PCIe and even ExpressCard?
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[Gary Huff] “So why would you expect to get anything beyond an iMac when enclosures already exist to turn your Thunderbolt port into an extension of 4x PCIe and even ExpressCard?”
For the Xeons.
And let’s not forget, as of today, there’s no Xeon processor, let alone motherboard configs with Thunderbolt.
Jeremy
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Exactly- this is why I don’t agree with this theory from Craig.
Thunderbolt expansion may be a viable solution when we can address those higher speeds (presumably at the 100GB/s optical stage), but for now it’s a way to bring SOME of those higher-end tasks to the iMac (broadcast monitoring for example). It’s also the I/O for displays, storage, audio gear– and the speeds do diminish as you lengthen the chain.
PCIe is I’m sure a technology that Apple would love to be done with, but there’s no viable alternative today.
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And is that likely to change in 2013? And if not, then where does that leave the likelihood of a traditional Mac Pro arriving this year? I highly doubt Apple will release a machine without Thunderbolt. I highly doubt Apple cares about supported add-on PCIe cards for GPUs. I highly doubt that Apple is interested in pursuing any kind of connectivity outside of Thunderbolt.
Which brings us right back to the iMac as the standard desktop machine for “Pros”.
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[Marcus Moore] “PCIe is I’m sure a technology that Apple would love to be done with, but there’s no viable alternative today.”
Which is why I said I expect to see 16x PCIe. That will handle 8x and 16x cards. I do not expect to see 4x slots though. My guess would be it’ll have two 16x slots.
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From the minority camp of those wanting “a” pci-e slot. Latency is supposedly introduced over the thunderbolt to fiber channel san link adaptor. This makes thunderbolt suspect as a means to connect to fiber channel while running a metadata controller on a san.
Having said that, we are doing it with minis on one volume in particular and it seems to be working just fine.
Keith Koby
Sr. Director Post-Production Engineering
iNDEMAND
Howard TV!/Movies On Demand/iNDEMAND Pay-Per-View/iNDEMAND 3D -
I’m wondering about the same option, but if I decided to buy a top notch iMac, I would end up spending something like 3.200,00 Euro. I should then add an external RAID array. It should be as quiet as possible and at least 6Tb to equal what I have inside my MP now and to fit my needs. Maybe a Thunderbolt one, since FW800 and eSata are not present on the latest iMacs. A Pegasus G4 is about 1760,00 Euro. Then I would need a box to continue using all of my esata enclosures, RAID arrays and cards like the Intensity Pro and Sonnet Tempo. About 750.00 Euro. Total money: about 5710.00 Euro. If a new MP would come out with internal storage slot and PCIe slots, maybe it would not be much more expensive. Since my early 2008 MacPro seems to handle my current workflow with no particular problem, I think I’ll still wait for a while. If quiet and reliable single drive external quick swap Thunderbolt enclosures were available, that would possibly be a cheaper option (no RAID array but a few sparse disks and just a couple of adapters instead of a pcie box).
Fabrizio D’Agnano
Rome, Italy -
[Gary Huff] “And is that likely to change in 2013?”
Why not?
A different theory is Phi, but that’s a whole ‘nother set of pipe dream.
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[Keith Koby] “Having said that, we are doing it with minis on one volume in particular and it seems to be working just fine.”
Meaning, you are dedicating one particular volume for testing or only one volume in particular does not show the latency for whatever reason?
Have you tried an ATTO box?
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Actually it is. The next-gen Xeons arriving this year are due to have TB support as far as I know…
As for PCIe- Look, if Apple felt that the iMac was their new “Pro” machine they would have just said that by now and discontinued the MacPro. There’s no reason to have “refreshed” and kept the MacPro alive in 2012 unless it’s a stopgap for something in 2013. Thunderbolt as a I/O isn’t due to get a speed bump for at least another year if I remember correctly, and who knows how close that gets us to it actually being a PCIe replacement for the faster protocols. So I don’t see how PCIe isn’t in this new machine.
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