Chris Harlan
Forum Replies Created
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[Jeremy Garchow] “It’s clear, Chris, I truly don’t get it. Sorry to waste yours and everyone’s time.”
Its not that. I just don’t think Herb is lying to you.
[Jeremy Garchow] “I just wish everyone would stop pointing to faster, and show me better.”
Jeremy, the only person who can show you better is you. No reason you HAVE to change platforms. I’m still all Mac and will probably be that way for a while, and I think very fondly of PCs and Windows. I DO have an escape route in terms of what I’ve been buying, and I like both Premiere and Avid quite a bit, so its very possible that my next CPU purchase will be a PC, though it is possible that a redesigned iMac could sway me. Depending on business, of course, whatever it is will probably be before next year’s mystery machine makes its debut. I was ready for a new Mac Pro last December, though my 2008 is still chugging away nicely (touch wood.) I ended up with the last of the 17″ Macbook Pros instead, and am very happy with it. Is it the last Mac I’ll buy? Who knows.
What I have lost over the last year is my complacency. I had become overly settled in the Apple camp, both mentally and physically. Now that I’m aware of that and am taking measures to deal with it, I feel quite a bit more comfortable.
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[Walter Soyka] “In the local sense of hardware choice, I understand and agree with you and Herb. In the global sense of workflow, Jeremy’s talking sense: you are still eventually tied to something, regardless of which platform you’re on.
“Well, as Bob Dylan is fond of singing “We’ve all got to serve somebody.” This all seems to be a bit of a semantical dust up.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “I understand the merits of going to PC, but please stop lying and say it’s more open because I can spin it the same way for Macs.
“I’m sorry, Jeremy. No one is lying to you. I don’t know why you can’t understand what people mean by “more open” but it is very clear to most of us who have spent any time in the Windows world. There are many joys to the Mac, but one of my biggest frustrations since moving to the platform a decade ago, is how profoundly limited my choices on it are. I don’t know if it is a semantics issue, or not, but I’m having a really hard time understanding your position here.
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[Rick Lang] “Tim Cook’s comments about what’s coming for high-end computers next year smells like ‘next generation’ thinking that takes time to implement right. Not taking anything away from the usefulness today of the HP Z820 for example, there may be more good things coming from a direction we weren’t even thinking about. “
Rick, I fear we’re just going to have to disagree on a whole bunch of topics from what Tim Cook’s comments “smell like” to what you can do with a Xeon Phi. To me, Tim Cook’s comments “smell” like a vague after-thought of placation. Even calling them “comments” is giving that little grunt of communication far too much credence. And, trying to bend the use of something like Xeon Phi to fit into the service of a Mac, at least from everything I’ve read about it, is wishful thinking. Customers for the Xeon Phi are companies like Cray and HPC. Unless Apple is planning a huge and momentous turn in direction, I don’t see how the Xeon Phi could be part of their 2013/14offerings. I fear that waiting to see if this is so is the province of acolytes. From my POV, it requires a great deal of belief to blend the Xeon Phi and Tim Cook’s grunt into the same milkshake.
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[Bernard Newnham] “And – for those who are making their first steps out of the closed society that is Apple -“
Yes, this trailer from The Village reminds me quite a bit of that “closed society that is Apple.”
https://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi3572826393/
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[Walter Soyka] ““The good news is Blu-ray has so much storage potential, it’s just a matter of the BDA releasing another spec and us replacing our Blu-ray players, and maybe even our HDTVs.”
Yes, the good news is that we can replace everything for HFR HD, right before we replace it all again for 4K!
Walter Soyka”
Not that they won’t work it out, but I heard that the audience that got the preview of the Hobbit reacted quite badly to the speed, and that they were pretty vocal about it. We’ll all get our own chance to see, however.
https://www.engadget.com/2012/04/25/hobbit-Cinemacon-48fps-screening-frame-rate-debate/
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[Rick Lang] “Chris:
“Its about taking stripped down specialty cpus and placing them in very intense clusters of 50 or 100 or more.”Certainly everything you say is true if you want to build a supercomputer. I just thought there might be a different way to implement the Xeon Phi using one card. Even that might be too expensive for Apple to touch. It does seem odd that 50 cores would only use 8 GB GDDR5 memory in the Knight’s Corner card.
Rick Lang
“Rick, I misspoke. I didn’t really have a good idea of what was going on here until after Jeremy started sending additional links. Its a fascinating thing that acts as a coprocessor with Sandy Bridge Xeons, and seems to do a lot or most of the floating point work. I truly don’t know whether it would be useful or not when it comes to rendering, but it seems like it would be quite expensive and would require some serious hardware to support/take advantage of it. My guess is that it is far too pricy a package for the next Mac Pro, but I’d sure be curious if you can build something out of it to render and design with. Sorry that I jumped to conclusions about your post, and thanks for posting it because I’ve enjoyed reading about it throughout the day.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “I’d imagine to be around the cost of a good GPU if that’s the market they are chasing.
“This is interesting. These folks put together a Tesla GPU workstation and have a config tool.
https://www.velocitymicro.com/wizard.php?sr=0&iid=194&gclid=CMvD47_i27ACFWLktgodkHe72g
11 or 12 grand is the starting price for a system with two Tesla Fermi Processors, which they price out at 2 grand each. 16 GPUs brings the system to 25 grand. And that is with an 8 meg video card.
Give it a real video card, top out the ram (288) and the available Xeons and you are looking at 37 grand. Not bad for a supercomputer. My guess is that the Intel cards–which apparently blow the Fermis away–will be in the same ballpark, but a tad pricier. So my guess is that a starter machine will run between 15 and 20 grand and a sizzle-core-eating top-of-the-liner will come in around 50 or 60 grand. Still, that would be an amazing amount of calculation power for under 100 grand. Now, if we can only get that into a tablet.
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[Tim Wilson] “I’m pretty sure that this’ll be the last time I talk abou it…unless I talk about it again. Not fair to expect me to change the behavior that’s gotten me here.
“Yeah, but if we had a little bit more time for preparation, say a road map of some kind, it would be as jarring when it does happen.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Have you tried it?
“Have I tried what? Editing on an iMac? I’ve looked at the newest ones. What is there to try?