Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[Marcus Moore] “If not for Monitoring, what could the rationale behind an HDMI 1.4 port be?”
It could just be feeding a typical ‘computer’ video signal. That’s what the HDMI ports on Apple’s other systems do. Of course if Apple adds 10 bit monitor support in Mavericks, makes sure the system’s color management doesn’t get in the way, and has sufficiently high-quality software de-interlacing in FCP X, a ‘computer’ video output could actually be a viable alternative to a ‘real’ broadcast video interface for most purposes. Whether this will happen is anyone’s guess. The fact that in the keynote they went from discussing triple 4K support to showing a photo of a guy with three monitors — one of them being a broadcast monitor — sure is suggestive, though.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Gary Huff] “Exactly how? What will FCPX be optimized for on the Mac Pro that it currently doesn’t support on a high-end iMac? Outside of dual GPU, which I assume would be included as part of the OpenCL framework anyway.”
OpenCL certainly lets you use two GPUs, but I don’t think this is entirely automatic — you’d have to set up a second dispatch queue, at least. And OpenCL supports reserving portions of GPUs for its own use, which you’d probably want to do differently on a dual GPU system. So there’s that.
Apple’s wording also almost makes wonder if maybe the HDMI port on the machine can actually be used directly for broadcast monitoring, and FCP is adding support for that. (Though I’d consider this a bit unlikely.)
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Jordan Mena] “I bet the new 4k apple displays are going to be pretty expensive as well.”
There aren’t many panel options on the market Apple could chose from at the moment. One of them is used in Asus’s 31.5″ 4K display which is, appropriately enough, $4K.
Apple might want something smaller, though. The problem is, 4K on a 31.5″ panel isn’t going to quite qualify as ‘retina’. If Apple wants to run a 27+ inch panel in ‘HIDPI’ mode and still provide the same virtual real estate provided by the current 27″ display, it’ll need to be 5K. Maybe they’ll chose to do something like a 4K 23″ display instead.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Timo Teravainen] “Depends on what you do. If you don’t need noise reduction and more than HD output on your laptop, just run Lite. You can’t run both, not without dual boot to different partitions.”
I do really wish they’d set it up so Resolve would just run as Resolve Lite when the dongle wasn’t attached, instead of having two separate apps.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Gary Huff] “But now, in a crunch, you’d have to make a Genius Bar appointment and probably end up having to replace an entire unit to get any kind of fast turnaround time.”
On the other hand, for facilities with multiple Mac Pros, if one of them goes down in a suite during a client session or something, you can just grab another one and swap it in by hooking up some cables — you won’t have to move a bunch of drives or PCIe cards over.
And Genius Bar turnaround can be impressive these days. A few months back Apple swapped a rMBP screen for me in less than an hour.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Ricardo Marty] “Being so tiny but so powerfull could we expect a moderate energy bill?”
It’s mostly small because they’ve come up with a really clever cooling system and reduced internal expansion, not because there’s all that much less power-hungry stuff in the out of the box configuration. The lack of HDDs should save a little power, but a the 12 core next-gen Xeon model is supposed to have a TDP in the 115-130W range; a FirePro W10000 GPU can pull 375W and this machine can be configured with two of them. So a maxed out model under full load could conceivably pull over 900W in a worst case scenario.
But keep in mind, modern hardware has pretty impressive power management features; it could easily run under 400W with workloads that can’t simultaneously max out every core and both GPUs, which most can’t, and considerably lower than that if you’re just browsing the web or whatever. And, obviously, not everyone will buy a maxed-out system.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Gary Huff] “I don’t see Apple offering that configuration at all. If you’re going that low, you might as well get an iMac.”
Dual GPUs and two additional CPU cores would distinguish that configuration from the iMac pretty effectively. That’s not to say we’ll necessarily see it, of course.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Gary Huff] “So with currently available hardware/specs alone, we’re looking at (just the guts) costing around $6533. Now, how exactly is the Mac Pro going to clock in at significantly less than that? One GPU? An Ivy Bridge Xeon with just 6 or 8 cores instead of 12? “
With a 6 core CPU, 8 GB of RAM, a 256 GB SSD and two mid-range GPUs they could probably hit a $2999 base price, especially if they’ve cut a deal with AMD that lets them get workstation GPUs without the full gratuitous price markup vs. similar high-end gaming GPUs.
They could hypothetically use 6 core i7 CPUs (which are also Socket 2011, so they wouldn’t need a second version of the motherboard) and non-ECC RAM and probably get even lower on the base model, but I’d consider that pretty unlikely.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Walter Soyka] “What’s interesting to me is that the S10000 costs $3500.
A Mac Pro with dual GPUs is not going to be cheap.”
Keep in mind, workstation GPUs are basically just gaming GPUs with more memory (and in this case ECC memory), qualified drivers, and firmware tweaks. Lots of ECC VRAM does add some cost, but not nearly as much as the markup GPU vendors charge. So, AMD can price this stuff much cheaper if they want to. Given that they don’t have to worry about undermining aftermarket GPU upgrades here (since those aren’t really going to exist on Mac platform anyway at this point), and given the promotional value of having their FirePro brand prominently featured on a new, ultra slick flagship Mac, AMD may well have cut Apple a pretty crazy deal.
Especially since this will encourage software vendors to support OpenCL, which, since much of this software is cross-platform, might help AMD sell more high-priced workstation GPUs to their Windows-based customers.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Rick Lang] “The 12 cores claim made me think it must be dual 6-core CPUs but Apple didn’t explicitly say that. Other people are claiming it is only a single 6-core hyper threaded processor, so really just 12 threads. I can’t believe the reality distortion field under Tim Cook is going to claim 12 threads is the same as 12 cores so still hoping there is a single 6-core option and a dual 6-core offering. But we know even the entry-level Tube will have two GPUs!”
You can clearly see there’s a single CPU socket in the photos Apple has posted, and it seems unlikely they’d post photos of a single socket version of the machine if there were a dual socket version.
So, it’s almost certainly going to be a single next-generation Xeon E5. If I recall correctly, these showed up on a leaked roadmap some months back. Based on how Intel prices its higher core count CPUs, a 12 core model is going to be… not inexpensive.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.