[Gary Taylor]

Check out the new Kona card.

https://www.aja.com/products_kona.html#lh

Gary

[Gary Taylor]

Yeah,
I think these machines are more somebody like who has been on the fence for a long time. If things line up the way I am expecting I see the high end system in my future. If I had a dual 2.5 it might not make alot of sense but I think a new dual dual machine would make sense for me. Apple has made me a joiner (can’t switch).
Gary

[Gary Taylor]

I know I am looking forward to getting one. I am salivated thinking of the floating point performance on the new Dual Dual with the Quadro card. Just makes me want to say WOW!
Gary

[Gary Taylor]

That was a driver issue more than anything else. Once BMD stopped supporting AJA hardware they had to write their drivers as well as create the hardware. A company like AJA builds new hardware on spec for customers all the time. But as you say the proof will be in the pudding. Even BMD has had problems delivering their Multibridge on schedule because other suppliers let them down.
Gary

[Gary Taylor]

Yeah, I get a discount from a major manufacturer and even with their discount the system I want costs 5K. These machines are promising.
Gary

[Gary Taylor]

Very cool,
Like I said, I wouldn’t worry about AJA. Their engineering is plenty fast.
Gary

[Gary Taylor]

Yeah, I think a real opportunity for Apple will be the OpenGL drivers for the workstation cards. It could really make a huge difference from what we had before to have sort of thing done in hardware.
Gary

[Gary Taylor]

Hi George,
I don’t think the Multibridge is shipping yet is it? I know of several PCI-e RAID cards but those vendors to my knowledge have never said anything about Mac driver support.
Thanks,
Gary

[Gary Taylor]

I did see on Apple’s PCI-e fibre channel card on their web site after I first posted. Do you know any of the companies you mentioned have shipping cards with Mac drivers? Or at least an announcement for driver support? I have been looking that Multibridge for a while and now having a solution I can disconnect from my Mac and connect to a PC seems pretty slick. It isn’t shipping yet is it?

I know there will be other cards eventually but the prospect of a system with ALL NEW drivers doesn’t excite me as much. The Apple fibre channel card might be my bet just to hope it works.

I am not so worried about AJA coming up with a card. I know they are smart enough to be working on PCI-e cards. I think their engineering is plenty fastAs someone said it wasn’t a question of if but when for this switch. I just didn’t expect it to be a complete switch.
Thanks for the info,
Gary

[Gary Taylor]

Hi Tom,
In the long term PCI-e is in many ways technically superior because each slot is independent of the others. No more having to worry about which slot your Kona or Decklink card is vs your RAID adapter. The problem is we will need new cards with new drivers to make use of these benefits. I am sure hoping Apple has a vendors lined up to release RAID cards at the outset. I just saw they are talking about their Fibre Channel card been updated to PCI-e so that might work for me. Here is a link for some more info about PCI-e and PCI-x.

https://www.eweek.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=PCISIG&i=49002,00.asp

Hope that helps,
Gary