[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

I realize I kinda contradicted myself later on this point. It’s all up to apple, wether they’ll let you set up the computer such that there’s no display signal in the Thunderbolt connections.

If they’re nice, and any option other then #1 is used, they’ll let us stick in our own GPU and there would be no Display data going to the thunderbolt ports, which wouldn’t be a problem as long as your’re not using a thunderbolt display.

I think it’s more likely that they’ll use a built in GPU and hopefully leave at least 1 slot for us to stick a better GPU in and as long as the software supports this setup, then that wouldn’t be a problem.

My original point was that Thunderbolt forces Apple to change the Mac Pro, so it isn’t a question of if the Mac Pro get’s a redesign, but how much. And given they have to redesign it, I believe that apple will lean toward a more forward leaning of at most 2 PCIe slots.

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

that’s not the same as a user replaceable GPU, Though that would be fine as long as Abobe lets their Mercury playback engine work on a second GPU. (right now it only works on the Primary GPU)

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

it’s here, in the Final Cut Pro X forum:
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/335/20022

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

[Jeremy Garchow] ” “I see Thunderbolt as forcing Apple to drop PCIe… And PCIe is the reason people buy Mac Pros.”

But thunderbolt is part pcie, so how and why would apple drop pcie?”

I miss typed. I meant to say PCIe slots.

Here’s a very long explanation of my logic:

You can’t change the GPU because the Display Port signal output from the GPU needs to be sent to the Thunderbolt controller. There are only three ways to do this, and apple is very, very unlucky to chose two of them.

1) A built in, non-replaceable GPU. This is how all other Thunderbolt equipped Mac’s work. The output from the GPU is sent to the Thunderbolt controller across the circuit board.

2) A Custom PCIe 16x GPU with Thunderbolt ports instead of regular Display Port connectors or DVI connectors. Basically, Apple would take an ordinary ATI GPU card and stick thunderbolt controller chips on it. They’d get their Display Port signal from the ATI GPU and their PCIe connection and feed it all out together. Unfortunately this would limit the speed of the GPU cause the Thunderbolt Controller would be using at least 1/4 of the 16x PCIe connection.

3a) A slight variation on #2, except that the custom GPU would feed it’s Display signal along an internal Display port cable to a Thunderbolt controller somewhere on the Mother board. In this case the GPU card would have no ports on the outside of the computer.

3b) same as 3a, but ordinary GPU is used and the PCIe 16x is moved so that the GPU card is completely contained within the Mac. This way the Display Port cable(s) which drive the THunderbolt controller can be plugged into the normal GPU without exiting the computer.

Those are the possibilities.

Number 3b would be the best for us, as it would allow all current Display Port GPU’s to work.

Number 3a would be ok, but new GPU’s would have to be made, so our options would be limited for a while, since all current GPUs wouldn’t work with Thunderbolt. (It’s posible that Apple would let you use a normal GPU, there by leaving you with THunderbolt ports that serve data but not display information.)

NUmber 2 would also be limiting to us as we’d have to wait for new GPU options as the old ones wouldn’t work with Thunderbolt.
(Again ok if apple lets us use old GPU’s)

Number 1 of course would mean no user replaceable GPU.

How likely are each of these?

Well, I’d say that number 1 is likely,

Number 2, while perhaps a great way to get thunderbolt ports on Windows computers, it is totally Un-apple, (I’m sure they want a Thunderbolt port on the front as well as the back, and this option wouldn’t allow that. Also, this would be limited to two thunderbolt ports.) and so I rate that one Very, Very unlikely.

Number 3a would be great, and the most likely choice if apple realizes how much we pros need to be able to swap out GPUs and other things.

Number 3b is unlikely because it would require a redesign and I strongly doubt that Apple wouldn’t redesign the Mac Pro so as to be able to continue offering PCIe slots. I believe that any redesign of the Mac Pro will be Thunderbolt centric and and redesigning the Mac Pro to offer option 3b would be un Apple as that wouldn’t be forward thinking and they’d just have to redesign the Mac Pro again as soon as 100Gb Thunderbolt comes out. Simply put, option 3b requires an extra redesign before apple goes all Thunderbolt.

Keeping PCIe Slots at all also requires an extra redesign before the Mac Pro goes all thunderbolt, and that’s why I said before that I believe that Apple is far more likely to keep the current design until they dump PCIe slots all together.

So the question is, when will that be?

Well, if Apple has any love for us pros that won’t be until 100Gb thunderbolt comes along.
But if the fact that rumors of a small Mac Pro have been going around for months, I think at least a partial dropping of PCIe slots is in order.

Unless they have 100Gb Thunderbolt up their sleeves for the upcoming refresh, They’d better chose Option 3a or we’re all going to be stuck for a few years.

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

[Paul Jay] “Full power DaVinci on an iMac or MacBook Pro.”

Not if my reading on the DiVinci forum is any indication. There was one poster who had his Quadro in a 4x slot so that he could have a RedRocket in the other x16. (the first x16 being taken up by the GPU driving the UI, a 120 I think.)

Well, the up shot was it didn’t work very well, and after switching the RedRocket and the Quadro things worked a lot better.

I’m eager to see someone test this, but I’m not expecting it to work very well.

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

PP uses the sad Mac excuse for a file dialog?

I wouldn’t know. I edit on Windows! Fooled you there… You were preaching to the choir!

I own a MPB that’s my personal computer and a Windows 7 edit monster (named Odin) that I built myself. I had the option to go Mac about a year and a half ago, but decided that Windows was a better choice, because there was no longer any reason to edit on Mac other then if I’d used FCS, which I didn’t. Interesting given what happened this year with the EOL of FCP and the potential EOL of the Mac Pro.

Another pro Windows point, I just learned that DiVinci resolve on windows will support 16GPUs! It only supports 3 on Mac. Given the prices of Quadros and the fact that the GTX series is faster anyway and a lot less expensive…. I feel the need for SPEED!!!

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

Carful Mark…. You’re expecting PP to act like FCP and blasting Adobe when it doesn’t. I agree with your points, and I expect #2 has a high likelihood of being fixed, but making comments about the skill of the interface designers at the respective companies silly.

I remember FCP driving me nuts over the convoluted method of editing linked audio and video separately.

They both have their faults…

We’ve learned to edit so that the tool works for us.

P.S. I’m told that track tabbing thing was borrowed from AVID, so if you don’t like it, shout at them.

P.P.S Sorry, I have a particular beef with apple about their bad interface design… cough*finder*cough

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

From someone who’s been editing on PP since CS2, here’s some thoughts on your thoughts. I’ll be typing these in as I read your article:

You can make any window fullscreen by hitting the ` key. Not quite the same as full screen play back, but if you expand the program window to full screen it’s close.

Mackie control is only missing from this version of Audition. It’s coming back in CS6. (confirmed by the lead developer.) Maybe PP will get it as well. Don’t judge audition based on CS5.5… it’s going through an FCPX like rewrite. I still use Audition 3 for half of my projects cause of the missing features. (however, unlike FCPX there’s very good communication with the developer… and that poor guy has had quite the ear full over some of the stupidest missing things. No grouping of clips, no MIDI, no Mackie, no Metronome, no CD authoring… I have to say, it’s been interesting watching everyone go through FCPX after having Audition CS5.5 dumped on me a couple months earlier.)

I’m guessing renders seem slow because you’re used to FCP borrowing encoded frames from the source and rendering those sections at the speed of a file copy. PP can’t do that. (Why they don’t add it I don’t know, Seems like an obvious addition. Maybe with all the FCP blood coming in it will be.)

When PP won’t render a video, despite the fact that it won’t play back in real time, you can force it to render any section of your timeline by selecting it with the work area and selecting Sequence>Render entire work area.

Great Article, By the way. I agree with everything, pretty much.

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

Well, it’s a bug, obviously.

Are you rendering using Adobe Media Encoder or in Premiere Pro itself? I have had several instances (involving dynamically linked AE comps and DNxHD files) when things didn’t render right in AME but a export from Premiere worked fine.

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Per channel. So, it’s 20 Gb total throughput, as far as I understand it anyway.”

yes and no. Yes, it is technically sending 20 Gb total each way, but you can’t use all of that for any one use.

Thunderbolt had Display Port and PCIe in the same cable, but they’re two separate systems. You can’t have anymore then 10Gb of each. So calling it 20Gb is incorrect cause if I want to send data X from point A to B, 10Gb is how fast it’ll get there. There’s no way for it to use both channels.

At least that’s my understanding of the connection.

There is the possibility that PCIe over both channels would be possibile, but in that setup, there would be no Display Port signal.