Andrew Richards
Forum Replies Created
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[Erik Mickelson] “The card is Pcie3. That’s the big deal. Twice the processing power of Pcie2.”
PCIe 3.0 is indeed a big deal, but it means double the effective bandwidth, not double the processing power.
[Erik Mickelson] “It will not matter the slots multiplier, you will not have to worry what slots are open.”
It would matter less compared to today’s constraints on a Mac Pro, but we don’t even know if the Mac Pro will have a successor, by any name, with slots of any kind.
[Erik Mickelson] “I don’t think anything can saturate a Pcie2 bus except for uncompressed footage.”
Uncompressed 10-bit 1080i29.97 is about 250 MB/sec, or half of one lane of PCIe 2.0. A 4x PCIe 2.0 slot would be saturated with 8 streams. The highest end GPUs can push past the bandwidth limits of PCIe 2.0 8x under load, but most GPUs do not. Putting lesser GPU cards in a 16x slot is for power requirements as much as it is for bandwidth.
[Erik Mickelson] “So put the raid on the x16 slot and the video card on a x8.”
You’d need some seriously fast storage to pull more than a PCIe 2.0 8x slot can support, not to mention an HBA with more than 8 lanes (and I’m not aware of any PCIe 2.0 16x HBAs).
Someday soon we’ll surely find ways to need all the bandwidth available in PCIe 3.0 16x and 8x slots (expansion chassis is the obvious application), but today, single cards of any sort will struggle to fill those pipes. That’s a great problem to have. In a couple years, when we have 12 Gbps SAS3, we’ll be glad to have PCIe 3.0 slots to saturate.
Then you can do all the stereoscopic 4K multi-cam you want!
Best,
Andy -
[Lance Bachelder] “This is the dilemma – stay Mac and always be relegated to sub-standard graphics cards, especially those from ATI. Or go Windows with CS6 and be able to use these incredible cards.”
Honestly, if you are shifting to Adobe, unless you need ProRes encoding, or want to run Smoke (as it stands), or have some other OS X exclusive requirement, I can’t see any good reason today to stick with OS X. I have my own bias for OS X, but I’m also not an editor. I have my own personal hangups with Windows, but if you are buying a workstation, it is hard to justify a Mac for Adobe CS6 under the current circumstances.
Maybe Apple will surprise us with a worthy successor to the Mac Pro this sumer, and maybe Intel and Microsoft’s shift to EFI will prompt NVIDIA and AMD to ship more Mac-friendly GPUs, but today those things aren’t true.
Like I said, I’m a big-time Mac bigot, but even I can’t justify choosing OS X and the currently available Mac hardware for running Adobe CS6.
Best,
Andy -
[SCRI] “. . . the company expects to “trim” its product line.”
That shouldn’t be too hard. They have 542 products after all. A little more focus could do them a lot of good.
Best,
Andy -
Three hour response time isn’t bad. Four hours or less is all some very expensive enterprise support plans will promise. Not that Apple promises anything…
Best,
Andy -
I see so many folks gushing about how easy it is to install hardware into the HP Z800, but how often are you really doing that? Sure it is nice for an integrator who is constantly in the guts of machine after machine, but for an end user, are you really opening up your tower that often?
Best,
Andy -
[Peter Corbett] “Mac-generated Photoshop PSD’s with custom OSX fonts”
What fonts do you see that are Mac-only? TrueType, OpenType, and modern PostScript fonts are all cross-platform. You do need to have them installed though. PSDs are also cross-platform.
Best,
Andy -
[Peter Corbett] “How about buying the new HP Z1 and running it as a Hackintosh?”
Why the Z1? Isn’t the Z820 the badass?
Best,
Andy -
[Shane Ross] “The clues are everywhere. The MacPro is DOA.”
Dead Mac walking!
Best,
Andy -
[Peter Corbett] “If it wasn’t for the fact we get so much video graphics and fonts in Mac format from the agencies, we would probably switch to PC.”
MacDrive works really well if that is all that is holding you back.
Best,
Andy -
Looks like it’s fixed. That was fast! Thanks!
Best,
Andy