[Marcus Moore]

Thunderbolt has to be supported on the CPU for Apple to use it in it’s hardware. The new Ivey Bridge E chips are the first TB enabled Xeon chips to do that.

It was the same thing with USB3- Apple integrated it into it’s products as soon as it was embedded on the chip, which it was when the Ivey Bridge Macs were released last year (with all but it’s Xeons).

[Marcus Moore]

When it’s updated to Haswell- possibly.

You can put a DecLink4K Extreme into an existing MacPro, can’t you? And it looks like you can put it in an external PCIe Thunderbolt chassis.

On the broadcast monitoring side I think many machines will be able to run 4K if not now then when the Macs are refreshed with this year’s chips. But who knows, if Apple DOES have plans for a Retina ACD, perhaps (like in 2004), only the MacPro will be able to run it. I’d wager against it, but I’m sure it will be the only one able to run 3 of them.

All I’m saying is that people looking for anything other than thru-put oriented features of FCPX to be exclusive to this machine are probably off base. That’s like saying really intensive After Effects projects are exclusive to high end Machines. They’ll be annoying as hell to work with, and they’ll take a long time to render, but you can do them.

[Marcus Moore]

I have no idea how this type of developmental release works. I’d imagine its a game of putting together enough fixes to merit an update.

But I’d also imagine that the dev team has some sort of release schedule planed at least a year out. Whatever the next update is, 10.0.9 or 10.1, its well underway, so it might not be so simple to just push whatever is coming down the cue for the sake of inserting a maintenance update into the schedule. If those bug fixes are already tied into a big feature release- then they’re probably stuck with it for good or ill.

I dunno. Someone more knowledgeable than me may say different.

But I would say that if the next feature release is coming with the MacPro (presumably in Sept/Oct), we probably will see another maintenance update before then.

[Marcus Moore]

The key word there is “optimized”. That points to exactly what I was saying- making sure the software can take advantage of the hardware. But that’s a long way from MacPro ‘specific’ features.

[Marcus Moore]

I’d love to see Apple start realizing the potential of more targeted press events.

Apple tends to be stingy with Media events. They’re philosophy is that if they get the press together too often the media impact falls. That’s a fair point. Apple can’t have any kind of media event without speculation building up to a point that the actual announcement can never satisfy.

But with Apple’s ability to do keynotes streamed live to aTVs, iPads, and Macs- it would be great to see a “Pro” focused event with the MacPro and associated software being the ONLY focus. I think the only challenge for Apple is to make sure they can position it properly to that people know in no uncertain terms that shouldn’t be expecting iPhones, iPads, or anything else. And beleive it or not I don’t think that’s THAT easy-

I remember reading a report from one joker who said Apple was going down the tubes because they didn’t announce anything amazing at the event he attended- which would have been sad on it’s own, but is especially inane when you realize that it was the annual shareholders meeting that he was talking about.

Ug!

[Marcus Moore]

Seems to.

[Marcus Moore]

Every time FCPX is updated it gets closer to 7 in terms of feature-set (and in most cases, surpasses).

But don’t expect any of the core ideas to change (whether you like them or not).

Apple is never going to do FCP8.

Also, I’m a bit confused by all this talk about what the MacPro is going to do for FCPX. Yes, those that buy the machine will reap the benefits of the faster hardware, but Apple can’t tweak the software exclusively for that machine, since MOST of it’s user-base is not going to have one. Performance will improve, but I don’t know why anyone would expect “MacPro” features.

[Marcus Moore]

We aren’t OVER due, but this past Thursday marks 3 months since 10.0.8 dropped (just before NAB), which is about the average interval time up to now.

Here’s the release document I keep on my notepad whenever one comes out (last part is day of the week it was released). Those in BOLD were the “Feature” releases:

10.0.0 – 2011.06.21 Tu
10.0.1 – 2011.09.20 91 DAYS Tu
10.0.2 – 2011.11.16 57 DAYS W
10.0.3 – 2012.01.31 76 DAYS Tu
10.0.4 – 2012.04.10 70 DAYS Tu
10.0.5 – 2012.06.11 62 DAYS M
10.0.6 – 2012.10.23 134 DAYS Tu
10.0.7 – 2012.12.06 44 DAYS Th
10.0.8 – 2013.03.28 112 DAYS Th

[Marcus Moore]

Can it be done in just a cable?

Or are there protocol issues… which is why it has to be done thru a box?

[Marcus Moore]

That’s good some good reasoning, Walter.

Optimized performance is obviously the point. I spent a ton of money on a G5 Quad when they were released, but I’m not sure I ever got the real benefit out of using using the software I did.

I believe I’ve read from you that Motion and FCPX particularly will benefit from this- where GPUs power is more important than CPU cores.

I haven’t looked into this in a while, but its no longer as simple as GPUs are real-time performance and CPUs are for rendering, is it? My impression is that line has started to blur, even if its only in one direction with rendering being aided by GPUs now.

Where is the benefit to 24 cores now? 3D applications I’m guessing?

Benchmarks tests for this thing are going to be interesting.