Mailing List AE-List@media-motion.tv ? Message #41683
From: Carey Dissmore <carey@imugonline.com>
Subject: Re: [AE] The Future of the Mac Pro in Video Post
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:18:22 -0600
To: After Effects Mail List <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
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I was tempted to entertain the idea of a revised Mac Pro in the video blog post but it seemed too speculative, as opposed to dealing with the idea that Thunderbolt can't sustain enough lanes of data to fully saturate a GPU, and the potential mass migration if---and that's a big if---Apple didn't offer a refreshed/redesigned Mac Pro.  By the way I didn't think my take on it rose to rumor status because the Thunderbolt spec is a known thing. The future Mac Pro is an either/or thing.

My hope for any redesigned Mac Pro would be that it still offered full-bandwidth PCI-Express support for GPUs, even if it pushed a bunch of other stuff onto Thunderbolt. 

In the future, 100Gbps Thunderbolt (think 2018-2020 for release date) would accommodate this kind of bandwidth. However, looking that far ahead at what sorts of architectures and applications might be in play is pretty hard to do. 

carey

On Jan 16, 2012, at 4:44 PM, James Culbertson wrote:

Agreed. And that approach is quickly becoming more realistic for many.

But all of this is just rumor, including of course Carey's original blog post.

Perhaps Carey should have put "Rumor:" at the head of his original subject line to remind us that none of us really know what will happen.

I happen to believe the rumors that there will be at least one more MacPro revision before Apple comes up with some more modern version of the MacPro. I guess that is a plausible as anything else that has been written on the subject here and elsewhere.

James


On Jan 16, 2012, at 1:38 PM, Tony Romain wrote:

It may just be that we're just seeing the next evolution in the role of the workstation in a production set up.  Maybe there are advantages to not having your workstation be the end all be all for all I/O, processing, etc.  But rather a new ala carte model that is catered to your specific application.

There are plenty of people who manage to cut video (offline at least ) on a laptop with an external raid…  maybe in the future there will be ways to offload higher end video processing/RAM/GPU intensive calculations to an external video processor, specifically tuned to that task…

not saying this is the best approach or cost efficient.   But just wondering of what the possibilities may be…


--
tony romain :// principal/creative director

trance
motion graphic animation and design
323 651 1114

From: James Culbertson <albion@speakeasy.net>
Reply-To: AE list <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2012 12:46:54 -0800
To: AE list <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Subject: Re: [AE] The Future of the Mac Pro in Video Post

I imagine most video pros will want to stick with a MacPro for at least one more generation before depending upon Thunderbolt extensively.

I'm waiting for the next revision of MacPro before upgrading personally. Though i can see how iMacs and MacBookPros are becoming more realistic for intensive video work as time passes.

James


 
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