OT: New Nehalem Mac Pros Released!!!

Ouch hot!

[www.apple.com]

...the new iMacs too!

[www.apple.com]

...oh and the Mini returns!!!

[www.apple.com]


Looks like they'll release the GFX cards as separate purchases so I can stick the ATI 4870 in my Xeon... woooooooooohooooooo!

[store.apple.com]


Man I'm feelin' my inner shopaholic geek stirring



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

I'm definitely going to skip this generation. The price of an entry-level Mac Pro with the ATI graphics card and the now-mandatory DVI dongle is $3,777 including AppleCare. I got an equivalent previous-generation Mac Pro last month for about $2,800, and it doesn't need to be any faster than it already is.

In fact, I think we're going to look very closely at picking up a six-pack of refurbed 8x2.8s to replace some iMac assistant stations, if they become available. The new systems just aren't as good a value.

I am with you, Ben

Boy...I'd be super-pi$$ed if I just bought a MacPro (thinking grafix processing / rendering now...don't be nervous editors). This new 8 core 2.93 Ghz is supposed to be 2.4 TIMES FASTER than the high end (previous gen) 8 core 3.2 Ghz. Thank god I couldn't afford it at the time

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

lol

I'm putting in a pre-order now for the ATI4870 but its 5-7 weeks on the Apple UK Store



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Quote

I'm definitely going to skip this generation.

Aye - unless something nasty happens to my current system I'm going to wait until next time.

or

If I win the lottery

or

If some client wants to pay me huge wads of cash to cut a talking heads...



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Quote
This new 8 core 2.93 Ghz is supposed to be 2.4 TIMES FASTER than the high end (previous gen) 8 core 3.2 Ghz

looks to me from apples site. real-world activities are more on the order of 1.5x... not really sure what "synthetic performance tests - STREAM, memory throughput" means to day to day use?

I'm with all of you - will skip it. Though the ATI4870 sounds like something nice.

Andreas

im going to have to see some real-life side by side task times before i drink the $1000 kool-aid

Some prelim comments from Barefeats

[www.barefeats.com]

Michael Horton
-------------------

Barefeats is the shizzle...I have always based all my hardware purchases on Rob's test results and recommendations. He likes the new architecture which allows a smaller core clock speed to be faster that the last gen MacPros. Sweet...waiting on those Barefeats benchmark tests

Glad I didn't make that purchase in January...whew!!

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I am waiting also. I am in mostly dv country and i am happy with my 3.0 quad whizzing thru the render. 1.5 times faster wont really change much for me.

Plus, apple moves like lightening in its redesigns and in about 20 months they will have something 4x faster than the current models. maybe a nahelem 4.0 8core with space for 64g ram with a ati 9999x with 1g ddr.

Ben is a rebel on the new frontier. Go Ben. Its ya birthday.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

the 4870 looks nice until you see the 4870 X2 with 2GB of DDR5 ram. Apple is always lagging behind PC's in terms of gfx cards. I will nonetheless buy a new MacPro to replace my 8 yr old G4. I think I have waited long enough!!!

"Never underestimate a kick to the nuts"
Bas Rutten

Its kind of, so what? As long as we're still running at 32 bits in Studio and can only access 4GB of ram, there's really no big gain here (talking editors, Motion users, DVDSP users here). The hardware's getting too far ahead of the software. Isn't it the app that needs a kick, not the machine?

i kind of feel "so what" to all of it... i was making plenty of dough with my quad G5 (until aftereffects CS4 came round). and i can make more than plenty more with my 12 week old intel octocore stat-quo box - until the delivery paradigm takes some major change... another 30 sec here or minute there isnt going to change my world...

if i ran a service bureau, that may be a different story. but on a one or two machine basis - unless there is a studio as good as i am, IN my market whos gonna neck-and-neck me to a deadline...

why bother?

I've the same opinion as Clay. It's great if you're in the market for a new mac. However FCS and the OS needs an upgrade to tap into all the cores the machine is capable of. If FCP becomes 64 bits, going on an Octo will be like strapping on a jet engine.

But there's one more. No FW400 ports on the new machine at all:

Connections and audio


Four FireWire 800 ports (two on front panel, two on back panel)
Five USB 2.0 ports (two on front panel, three on back panel)
Two USB 2.0 ports on included keyboard
Front-panel headphone minijack and internal speaker
Optical digital audio input and output TOSLINK ports
Analog stereo line-level input and output minijacks



www.strypesinpost.com

Well, bear in mind that Final Cut itself is only part of the equation. If you're not working in uncompressed, the individual Quicktime components that handle your compression and decompression also factor into your performance. For instance, ProRes was specifically designed to scale linearly up to eight processors, so you get roughly twice the real-time performance on an eight-proc system as a four-proc. Assuming you're not I/O bound on your framestore, obviously. Rendering also benefits from more processors.

Where the limits of Final Cut itself come into play is when you're applying effects. Some effects run on the CPU, and some run on the graphics card. Final Cut basically ceases to be a real-time system when you load on the effects, unfortunately. Hell, even Avid has a real-time timecode burn-in effect now. It's a shame FCP doesn't.

>Where the limits of Final Cut itself come into play is when you're applying effects.

That's quite a big thing. Final export, render, etc.


>even Avid has a real-time timecode burn-in effect now.

Workarounds:

1) with the AJA cards, you can get a burn-in in real time if you are sending a signal out. Can't remember if this is possible off the Decklink.

2) QTsync for encoding to DVD/Web..

Both are pretty much instant, although they're 3rd party solutions.



www.strypesinpost.com

Quote

1) with the AJA cards, you can get a burn-in in real time if you are sending a signal out.

That's only useful if you are going to tape which some of us are phasing out bigtime. If you want to make window burn quicktimes, you have to RENDER the window burn into the timeline = which sux.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I'm not sure why QTSync keeps coming up. Maybe I'm stupid and I just missed it, but when I looked at it, I found that it does not actually do a burn-in. What it did when I checked it out was to create a Quicktime text track that would show the timecode if-and-only-if you were playing it back in Quicktime Player. It's of no help at all if you need to, for example, burn a DVD with burned-in timecode, or if you need to create a Quicktime of your offline cut with timecode burned in for the online editor's reference.

But like I said, maybe I just did it wrong.

Here's a quick tutorial on how to get that timecode track onto your QT movie without rendering.

1) Run QTsync,

2) hit apple 0 to open QT movie

3) shift apple t to create and position your timecode track. QT sync can read QT timecode information and use that for the burn ins. there's a button at the bottom of the timecode palette tool to attach the timecode track to the movie

4) apple s to save a reference QT movie with timecode (it's okay even if you're working off a reference movie from FCP. That works too).

5) drop the reference QT movie created by QTsync into Compressor and encode away.

Alternatively, you can export a reference movie from FCP and drop a timecode generator on it if you don't have an AJA card and require full RT playback to go to a device like a set top DVD recorder/VHS/VCD recorder/Tape decks without timecode generator, etc..



www.strypesinpost.com

...sounds like a bigger PITA. I'll just render...it's FASTER ( especially on an 8-core)

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

QTsync is much faster. You're just using it to create a timecode window.

After you're done, you can encode your original fcp export to encode a version on DVD without timecode and the reference movie from QTsync for another version with timecode.



www.strypesinpost.com

watch the Charlie Rose show with Jen-Huang --CEO of Nvidia --

will show you the Smoking Fast computers that are in the pipeline--Jay--


Watch Interview with CEO Nvidia

Andreas Kiel Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I'm with all of you - will skip it. Though the
> ATI4870 sounds like something nice.


I wonder how loud that ATI4870 is though. And what's the deal with the MiniDisplay port on a workstation? Sometimes I wonder what Apple is smoking.

- Justin Barham -

It seems like these rough, probably pretty unscientific benchmarks are consistent with what a lot of folks have been saying:

[www.macrumors.com]

Unless you're willing to shell out the fifty-nine hundred bucks for the 8x2.93 system, performance of the new Mac Pros seems like it's going to be at best comparable to the previous generation systems, and in some cases the 8x2.66 is slower than the old 8x2.8. Yes, the top-of-the-line Mac Pro does scream, but the price is kind of ridiculous.

Meanwhile, the Apple Store has refurbed 8x3.2s for $4,100. Still kind of a lousy deal compared to the sweet-spot 8x2.8s we could buy last year, but so be it.

This happens periodically, in Mac-land. Apple skips ahead of the current price-performance curve a bit, and releases a Mac that's extremely fast and extremely expensive, usually dropping a previously available, more cost-effective model to do it. If you're in the market for a new system and you can get your hands on a 2008 8x2.8 model with the ATI 2600 card, do it. Do it right now.