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| Hi all, Just sort of jumping into the fray on this thread now with a couple of side-angle comments. First, I too have seen this whole issue coming to a head when I made my Mac Pro future blog post way back in January. I'm a Mac guy who has had PCs around for years but other than doing AE and encoding on them during the Mac performance valley between G4's and G5's (those were dark times for performance), I've been doing most production work on Macs and remain more comfortable there. Having said that I'm a performance nut and long overdue for an upgrade to my Mac Pro 3,1 (which is currently stuffed with SSDs, 4 drive RAID, and dual CUDA cards...basically as upgraded as it can be without swapping the whole box out). Alas, really concerned that big iron hardware from Apple themselves is not going to be with us much longer. Hope remains for the operating system to find it's way onto other big iron though... Within the world of PC hardware, It's true that dual Xeon boxes are the top performance route but I have to admit they are quite pricey. However they are really built for max performance for heavy lifting. We AE folks have much higher performance demands than people who only edit. We can lay the lion's share of the high cost of dual Xeon boxes at the feet of Intel who charges north of 1600 per CPU (you need two) in quantities of 1000 to the builders. That's just those parts, nothing else. When you compare it to the numbers achievable on 6 or 8 core i7 systems, especially overclocked similar to what Teddy Gage seems to have built, you find yourself looking at bang-for-buck factors and getting wooed by the performance that can be achieved with one of these $350-500 CPUs in a well-built system for around $2-4k. Apple has never built a machine with this type of CPU in a tower configuration with slots and room for things like more ram, drives, CUDA cards, etc. So it has left a big hole in the middle between iMac and Mac Pro. As Mac users, we sucked it up and bought Mac pros because we needed them, but if we're stuck migrating platforms we start examining options, cost structures, etc. carey On Apr 13, 2012, at 6:19 PM, Stephen van Vuuren wrote: >> That sort of thing is only meaningful for the first week and a half. Work expands to fit the available resources > > Or contracts.. and only if you let your tools dictate your work. It should be the other way around. Maybe you have the overhead to absorb that kind of inefficiency, but I don't like to operate on that. My own two cents... > > I used to be a very high paid IT infrastructure wonk before I returned to filmmaking in 99 - and that sort of thinking got many, many companies in very deep water. I did very well and advanced quickly by great boosting computing performance, user skill levels and massive increase in infrastructure speed, redundancy and capacity all while cutting spend per user of total IT budget. The CTO of the company was so convinced I was going by spending more, he hired the Gartner Group to analyze the whole company and our division came out first on satisfaction, first on performance but well below corporate average on spend. > > Look at Google - they have applied the best thinking in this area of price/performance/TCO to a science. The cool think about their work on storage drives is I see how true it's been with my own storage planning for the eventual 150 TB that Outside In will consume (right at about 60 TB) right now. But I've paid a tiny fraction of what a standard RAID storage solution would have cost. > > I think for individuals, small shops and large in the post world, the same type of science in dealing with price/performance and TCO goes a lot further than letting "work fit available resources". I strongly believe infrastructure science is the way to be one step or more ahead of competition in technical field. > > stephen van vuuren > 336.202.4777 > > http://www.sv2studios.com/ > http://www.outsideinthemovie.com/ > http://www.stephenv2.me/ > > A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later. > –Stanley Kubrick > > > -----Original Message----- > From: After Effects Mail List [mailto:AE-List@media-motion.tv] On Behalf Of Tsassoon > Sent: Friday, April 13, 2012 6:59 PM > To: After Effects Mail List > Subject: Re: [AE] iMac and AE > > That sort of thing is only meaningful for the first week and a half. Work expands to fit the available resources. I've done most of the work that I've done in my life on computers that wouldn't keep up with today's phones, as we all inevitably will. > > I buy Apple machines because I find them cheaper to administer, and at two years will still sell for 50% of retail. That is, I've found their TCO is the lowest. What's needed though are more Thunderbolt peripherals, including ePCIe boxen. Is there something stopping nVidia from writing their own OSX drivers for a wider range of their cards? > > > Tim Sassoon > SFD > Santa Monica, CA > > Sent from my iPhone > > > > On Apr 13, 2012, at 1:34 PM, "Stephen van Vuuren" <stephen@sv2studios.com> wrote: > >> You can’t get a Sandy Bridge E system from Apple > > +---End of message---+ > To unsubscribe send any message to <ae-list-off@media-motion.tv> > > > > +---End of message---+ > To unsubscribe send any message to <ae-list-off@media-motion.tv> |
