Frank Gothmann
Forum Replies Created
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A big two thumbs up from me for that statement! Reminds me how much I miss my cherished grindhouse round the corner.
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Which is what I have said: lots of adapters, at a cost: your product links incl. the Magma box will set you back 2.000 bucks. Pile them up and you have a “tower”, both in size and weight. And most of that cost will be on the Mac user bill because hdmi, esata, usb3 etc. are standard ports on most Lenovo and Acer portables already so prices are not likely to go down too much for the Mac market alone.
Raid connectivity etc. to an Air or Macbook Pro – yeah, that is great. No doubt. Still no reason not to have standard ports built in. -
[Jeremy Garchow] “As far as power, not sure what you mean. Why will it need more than what you can get from the outlet on the wall?”
The box can only acomodate cards that draw a max of 150 Watts (the smaller enclosure only 80, same for the MSI). Most GPUs draw more than that. A Quadro 4000, according to spec, draws 142, that’s too close for compfort if it spikes. A current Radeon HD 7970 peaks at over 270 w.
[Jeremy Garchow] “Macs don’t have USB ports? I’m not following you here. Are there other computers that have built in sata? Clients always send me USB drives too as they are the cheapest/most ubiquitous.”
What I am saying is that I’d like to see a broad range of IO options based on real world usage. There is USB2, FW800 and TB in Apple’s future. Why can’t we have USB3, eSata, FW800, TB, hdmi and whatever is actually out there. Apple’s concept of pushing a certain technology by eliminating or keeping out others has not worked in the past, why is it always the same story all over again where people end up on an island having to buy adapters that introduce more issues (eg display port) and cost.
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I agree that it’s an impressive demo. And I agree that it’s great for anybody who needs fast io on the road with mobile devices. Never disputed that.
All I am saying is that there’s a lot more to the whole story than the one-example-fits-all approach.
There’s the driver issue, energy is a problem since most GPUs draw much more power than the external box can provide.
PCIe 3.0, on a dual cpu tower, will pack 80 lanes vs TB’s 4x so even a future revision of TB will have to go a long way to match that. Power is not an issue and Sandy Bridge Xeons will outperform regular i7s.
And PCIe 4.0 is in development, as is external PCIe.
So.. why limit the possibilities, why build even more walls? My clients don’t walk in with TB or FW800 drives. Most come with USB 2.0, some USB 3.0 or eSata. I doubt this will change anytime soon.Wouldn’t it be convenient to have these built in, no adapters, especially since it’s only politics why Apple chooses not too, no technical reason whatsoever.Do I need that kind of performance provided by PCIe 3.0? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s there, today, so why should I settle for less if the mobility advantage of TB has zero value for me as I simply don’t work on the road and the cost of deploying TB is more expensive, less compatible and has limited cross platform capabilities.
It has zero advantage for me so I refuse to cheer at the prospect of this being the only choice for high bandwidth io in Apple’s future. I’ll happily cheer at the prospect of it being an addition, not a replacement.Yes, Apple probably won’t have to build MacPros anymore to further their business. To me, that’s bad.
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I don’t think you’re the bad guy though it seems you like to be since you brought that up before. My first response in this threat wasn’t even aimed at you. You felt inclined to comment, in a sarcastic way, and I felt inclined to respond back because there is nothing in my original comment you can disagree with, or is there?
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You original post said “Yowza. So uhh, about those MacPros….”.
Somebody else replied:
A lot of people are predicting the death of MacPros but with new technology like this, will it matter?”So unless I am misreading, the implication is that a tower isn’t really required anymore, a refresh is less likely because of what the demo shows and its demise won’t matter.
Which is generalising, because is IS required for tons of other stuff, just not that one specific example (unless you need to render of course). -
[Jeremy Garchow] “You’re right.
Might as well drag out the MacPro on set to review/transcode Red footage as a laptop based system surely can’t handle capture, playback, broadcast out, editing and storage.
Why bother with a 3lb laptop when a 40lb MacPro will suffice?”
Why is it that people here tend to take a very specific example and try to generalise it.
If a TB equiped Air, running Windows, using a not-yet-released hw box can handle a very specific task it instantly and automatically means all currently established means of doing all sorts of things have become obsolete. Without any data or real-world reports to substantiate that. Not quite so.
I don’t want to take your TB goodness away, why of why are you so hot about killing of what others may need to get their work done?
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[Shane Ross] “Yeah, you can get an iMac and do the same thing, but have the external monitoring because they have two TB ports.”
Two ports but nevertheless only 1 controller so no difference to the Air.
I’d be interested in seeing some reports on how chaining devices impacts bandwith. It’s only PCIe 4x – Red-Rocket, Raid and IO, something has to choke at a certain point.
Said it before – great additional IO option, no replacement for PCIe, no replacement for a tower. -
Again, depends on what you need it for. That’s the cheapest card on the market. It doesn’t have balanced audio, no synch and no device control.
It also has only two channels of HDMI audio, doesn’t do any up-/downconversion as far as I can see (never owned this card so I can only really comment on it based on the specs). It’s an entry level card that probably does what it does ok but I’d go for something different, also to be a bit more future proof.Regarding PP; that’s not specific to BMD/Aja cards, it applies to all cards. It’s doable, just “hicksups” sometimes and not as solid as Avid’s IO. Again, it’s doable and it may be resolved altogether with CS6.
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Given your IO requirements, your choices are the Kona LHi and the BMD DeckLink Studio.
Both have SDI IO, too, but those two are the only cards that offer also HDMI and component.
The Kona costs a bit more but has more features and is my card of choice. However, I have nothing bad to say about BMD cards so the Studio will do you just fine if you don’t need those features (TC Overlay, etc.)Both work fine with MC6 and CS5.5 (with the known current issues with Premiere. CS6 will hopefully fix that).