Mailing List AE-List@media-motion.tv ? Message #44512
From: Dann Stubbs <dann@darkskydigital.com>
Subject: Re: [AE] [OT] The Mac Pro is dead
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2012 18:48:46 -0400
To: After Effects Mail List <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
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apple used to have a modular computer "stack" design concept - i could see this coming back with the TB connectors being the connectivity. video cards are popped into an empty "shell" case and plugged in. (or purchased pre-packaged in their TB ready shell)

just a thin "master" stack that has the OS boot rom in it that is flash upgradable controls it all... plug in the HD, power supplies, central processing unit and ram etc... essentially nearly the entire computers is modular at this point. 

not that i personally like this idea but the whole modular/consumer friendly thing seems the direction - no more consumer level fear of the "guts" of the computer when they are all in safe sterile apple branded plastic enclosures that just plug and play... easy to upgrade and add on to as well. your computers does not become obsolete anymore - just pop off the piece you want to upgrade and the rest can stay as it is.

i could see these "stacks"  becoming so much of a commodity they'd be sold anywhere... after all if anyone told you 10 or 20 years ago you'd be buying 32 or 64GB  of hardware storage on the counter at 7-11 for $8 you would have laughed... yet look at the little USB drives that sell just like that...

i guess it will be interesting to see where the path leads... my old school side wants things to not go too radical, but the adventure side says bring it on and  we will roll with it as it evolves and wonder how we ever did without it.

dann
___________________________________________________________________

Dann Stubbs  -  dann@darkskydigital.com
Dark Sky Digital -  http://www.darkskydigital.com

http://www.RenderKing.com  Value Priced C4D, VRAY Render Farm
___________________________________________________________________



On Jun 14, 2012, at 5:38 PM, Chris Meyer wrote:

That was my assumption as well, until Dave Bittner pointed me to some tests which showed a near-negligable performance dropoff of putting an NVIDIA card in a Thunderbolt-connected PCI chassis compared to having it on board. If AE is using the card as a render farm, and the time spent computing dwarfs the time spent transferring the frames…well, you know the rest.

This obviously changes with the more frame transfers you intend to do, such as multistream realtime playback (i.e. Premiere Pro). That said, David Helmly posted a video where he showed putting a RED Rocket in an external chassis was still a worthwhile boost to a MacBook for those doing RED work in Premiere.

willing to have my assumptions rocked -
Chris




On Jun 14, 2012, at 2:24 PM, Tim Sassoon wrote:

At NAB the NVidia rep told me that their #1 user request by far was for a TB-attached CUDA engine/GPU. He said that the _current_ TB implementation wasn't fast enough to make that as good a solution as user would hope for.


Tim Sassoon
Sassoon Film Design
2525 Main Street
Suite 206
Santa Monica, CA 90405
W 310.664.9115
M 310.266.8630

On Jun 14, 2012, at 1:20 PM, Tony Romain wrote:

That's kind of what I've been thinking too… just ditch everything in the computer except for a souped up graphics card and processor.  Everything else is external and thunderbolt connected


--
tony romain | principal/creative director

trance
motion graphic animation and design
323 651 1114

From: Tim Sassoon <tsassoon@aol.com>
Reply-To: AE list <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Date: Thursday, June 14, 2012 12:58 PM
To: AE list <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Subject: Re: [AE] [OT] The Mac Pro is dead

Okay, decade, schmeckade. And I know in all seriousness that you don't have a million bucks :-)

But computing power generally has an inverse proportion to size. In order to become more powerful, they must shrink. Then there's Quantum Computing, where suddenly the current chip paradigm looks like tubes and punch cards compared.

Most of the space in a current tower are disk and peripheral bays, PCI slots, and power supply. Disks will be SSD, and peripherals can be outboard, Thunderbolt can supplant internal PCI, and then you only need a fraction of the power supply. What do you have then? A Mac Mini with better CPU's, pretty much. And I suspect that in the long run, that's Apple's point. That instead of buying one Monster Truck of a computer, you'd be better served by buying a fleet of FIT's.


Tim Sassoon
SFD
Santa Monica, CA



On Jun 14, 2012, at 11:39 AM, Stephen van Vuuren wrote:

> The "pro" computer ten years from now will be the same size as today's iPhone.

I will bet a million dollars, in all seriousness, in front  of all the witnesses here, that this is not the case. Physics says no as does Moore’s law and what we will be doing with said computers in ten years.

I will agree the iPhone of ten years from now will outperform todays tower. But I am sure enough to bet a million dollars that pro’s will need far more power than that. The iPhone today much slower than the pro CPU in 2002. And the pro CPUs 10 years ago can’t run any recent version of CS6 (which requires Core 2 Duo minimum).
 
Unless you are hoping some massive revolution in chip/CPU/drive/RAM/storage, I think my best is pretty safe.
 
Plus, my towers have been getting bigger over the last 10 years, not smaller…
 
stephen van vuuren
336.202.4777
 
 
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





 
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