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WWDC - NO FCS 3 - WTF?
Posted by drtuzi
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Re: WWDC - NO FCS 3 - WTF? June 09, 2009 02:02PM |
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The big news is QTX and Snow Leopard with 64Bit.
Snow Leopard isn't gonna mean a hill of beans unless all our current apps are re-written for a 64-Bit OS. I will be upgrading to Snow Leopard when Adobe & Apple release 64-Bit apps for Macs.
When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.
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Re: WWDC - NO FCS 3 - WTF? June 09, 2009 03:58PM |
PPC's are dead, man. We all have to deal with that. Sure you can still use them...but eventually you will have to upgrade because it's antiquated technology and if you plan to be successful in this business, you can't sell your services on antiquated gear. Clients want to BRAG about their Post Production peeps and their toys. I know...I have a nice speedy G5 Quad in my office with a Kona LHe in it that is extinct...haven't used it for anything except email for over a year now. The Kona is transferrable to a newer PCIe machine, but the Quad PPC is a boat anchor. I just hope it's fast enough to run my son's online video games (my old Dual 1 Ghz G4 is bogging under the pressure of my son's FLASH-based online games now - tossing it out soon. The video card can't handle the poly count).
Studio WILL be tied up in Snow Leopard. Count on it. I wouldn't be surprised if they pull the plug on PPC development altogether in 2010. All my plug-in developers are one-by-one dropping support for PPCs.
Get used to it. Start saving your $$$.
When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.
Studio WILL be tied up in Snow Leopard. Count on it. I wouldn't be surprised if they pull the plug on PPC development altogether in 2010. All my plug-in developers are one-by-one dropping support for PPCs.
Get used to it. Start saving your $$$.
When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.
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Re: WWDC - NO FCS 3 - WTF? June 09, 2009 04:14PM |
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Oh well, when they make the announcement I am sure I will be contributing to the economic recovery.
...as will we all.
When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.
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Re: WWDC - NO FCS 3 - WTF? June 09, 2009 08:10PM |
I think it's more accurate to say, Andy, that given all the new under-the-hood stuff in Snow Leopard, Apple could very reasonably decide not to bother releasing any non-maintenance builds of FCP until the new OS is available.
The 64-bit thing, however, pisses me the hell off. Mac OS X has been a 64-bit operating system since ? um ? Tiger? I think? Whenever it was, by any reasonable definition of the expression, Mac OS X has been 64-bit forever now. I believe it was in Leopard that the user-interface libraries were released in a 64-bit version, making it possible to trivially deploy 64-bit user-interactive applications (before that, you had to do some message-passing stuff to use a 32-bit UI to control one or more 64-bit background engines). Point being, if 64-bit were a priority for Apple, they could have released a 64-bit Final Cut Pro years ago. Why haven't they? Because 64-bit by itself won't benefit Final Cut users! Certain operations on long longs are optimized on Intel processors, but that's outweighed by increased cache-line misses that 64-bit pointers cause. In fact, all other things being equal, a 64-bit-compiled program will run more slowly than a 32-bit-compiled program!
And as for Quicktime X, it remains to be seen whether there will be a ton of API changes, or whether Quicktime X will be bug-for-bug compatible with Quicktime 7. It's entirely possible that Final Cut Pro 6 runs just fine, without a hitch on Snow Leopard and Quicktime X. A lot of the announced changes in Quicktime X ? like Color Sync and GPU decoding ? are entirely under the hood and would require no API changes at all. So really, I'd be surprised if Quicktime X will have that much of an effect on FCP.
What will have one hell of an effect on FCP is Grand Central Dispatch, Apple's new doohickey thing for writing highly parallelizable applications. It's not really a library, and it's not really a set of compiler extensions; it's a little bit of both, and it will absolutely require source-code-level changes to Final Cut Pro in order for it to have an effect. You can probably run Final Cut 6 on Snow Leopard just fine (I'm guessing), but you'll find that Final Cut 7 is magically much faster on 8-processor (and more) systems, due to the changes deep under the hood that Apple is no doubt implementing to support GCD.
The 64-bit thing, however, pisses me the hell off. Mac OS X has been a 64-bit operating system since ? um ? Tiger? I think? Whenever it was, by any reasonable definition of the expression, Mac OS X has been 64-bit forever now. I believe it was in Leopard that the user-interface libraries were released in a 64-bit version, making it possible to trivially deploy 64-bit user-interactive applications (before that, you had to do some message-passing stuff to use a 32-bit UI to control one or more 64-bit background engines). Point being, if 64-bit were a priority for Apple, they could have released a 64-bit Final Cut Pro years ago. Why haven't they? Because 64-bit by itself won't benefit Final Cut users! Certain operations on long longs are optimized on Intel processors, but that's outweighed by increased cache-line misses that 64-bit pointers cause. In fact, all other things being equal, a 64-bit-compiled program will run more slowly than a 32-bit-compiled program!
And as for Quicktime X, it remains to be seen whether there will be a ton of API changes, or whether Quicktime X will be bug-for-bug compatible with Quicktime 7. It's entirely possible that Final Cut Pro 6 runs just fine, without a hitch on Snow Leopard and Quicktime X. A lot of the announced changes in Quicktime X ? like Color Sync and GPU decoding ? are entirely under the hood and would require no API changes at all. So really, I'd be surprised if Quicktime X will have that much of an effect on FCP.
What will have one hell of an effect on FCP is Grand Central Dispatch, Apple's new doohickey thing for writing highly parallelizable applications. It's not really a library, and it's not really a set of compiler extensions; it's a little bit of both, and it will absolutely require source-code-level changes to Final Cut Pro in order for it to have an effect. You can probably run Final Cut 6 on Snow Leopard just fine (I'm guessing), but you'll find that Final Cut 7 is magically much faster on 8-processor (and more) systems, due to the changes deep under the hood that Apple is no doubt implementing to support GCD.
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Re: WWDC - NO FCS 3 - WTF? June 10, 2009 08:18AM |
Huh. I never heard those rumors. I don't really understand what Media Manager and Spotlight could possibly have to do with each other.
But I get what you're saying. The thing about Snow Leopard is that there really aren't any significant new user-exposed features. There's some profound under-the-hood stuff, though.
Here's a forinstance. Right now, there's no significant technical barrier to building 16- or 32-processor Mac Pros. There's heat to deal with, obviously, and some basic engineering issues to address, but technologically, knock yourself out.
The problem is, it's always been very difficult to get scalable performance on large-processor-count systems. Back in the day, I used to work on 24- and 32-processor SGI systems, but we needed those processors because these were hard-real-time, man-in-loop simulators, and each discrete task on the system was given its own dedicated CPU to guarantee responsiveness and low latency. The culling task, for instance ? the part of the system that decided which polygons were obscured by other polygons and thus would remove them from the scene graph so they wouldn't have to be rendered ? was given its own CPU.
There are two issues with that. First, you have to write software like that with the specific aim of putting separate tasks on separate CPUs. And second, software like that can't scale up or down. We couldn't have run our software on an 8-processor system; it would simply refuse to start up at all when it failed to allocate sufficient processors. And we could have run it on a 64-processor system, but it wouldn't have benefitted, because those extra processors would have just been sitting idle.
Writing software that can run on a small machine ? say a two-processor laptop ? but that runs faster on a large machine is really challenging!
Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch, or GCD, is basically a system-level job queuing and thread pooling system. What that means is that the developer breaks his code up into discrete chunks called blocks ? a block being some data and some functions that operate on that data ? and then throws the blocks onto an OS-provided work queue. The OS creates the right number of threads of execution for the underlying hardware, then parcels out the queue items to the thread pool on behalf of the application. What this means in practice is that a developer can write a program once, and GCD will guarantee that that program achieves the best possible performance on an arbitrarily large system.
Here's a real-world example: You know how we all set up Qmaster on our Macs so Compressor can take advantage of multiple processors? GCD totally eliminates the need for that. In the future, Compressor will be written with GCD in mind, and will create tasks and put them on the queue, while the operating system decides how many of those tasks to do in parallel across the total number of processors available in the system.
The cool part is that GCD provides an architectural foundation for extending the work-queue-thread-pool structure across the network. Since work tasks are encapsulated as blocks, and blocks in Objective C can trivially be serialized, work tasks can be passed over the network to another GCD runtime instance on another system, effectively forming parallel-processing clusters at the operating system level.
I've got no reason to think that this network-dispatch functionality is going to be implemented in Snow Leopard. But GCD puts the foundation there, so it could be implemented later.
Yes, applications have to be rewritten ? well, revised slightly ? to take full advantage of GCD. But since so much of what most applications do is already abstracted away by the various system libraries Mac OS X provides, most applications will see some benefit immediately, without changing anything at all.
I don't expect the FCS 3 applications to be in that category, though. I think they're gonna take full advantage of GCD to scale performance on larger and larger deskside-class Mac systems.
But I get what you're saying. The thing about Snow Leopard is that there really aren't any significant new user-exposed features. There's some profound under-the-hood stuff, though.
Here's a forinstance. Right now, there's no significant technical barrier to building 16- or 32-processor Mac Pros. There's heat to deal with, obviously, and some basic engineering issues to address, but technologically, knock yourself out.
The problem is, it's always been very difficult to get scalable performance on large-processor-count systems. Back in the day, I used to work on 24- and 32-processor SGI systems, but we needed those processors because these were hard-real-time, man-in-loop simulators, and each discrete task on the system was given its own dedicated CPU to guarantee responsiveness and low latency. The culling task, for instance ? the part of the system that decided which polygons were obscured by other polygons and thus would remove them from the scene graph so they wouldn't have to be rendered ? was given its own CPU.
There are two issues with that. First, you have to write software like that with the specific aim of putting separate tasks on separate CPUs. And second, software like that can't scale up or down. We couldn't have run our software on an 8-processor system; it would simply refuse to start up at all when it failed to allocate sufficient processors. And we could have run it on a 64-processor system, but it wouldn't have benefitted, because those extra processors would have just been sitting idle.
Writing software that can run on a small machine ? say a two-processor laptop ? but that runs faster on a large machine is really challenging!
Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch, or GCD, is basically a system-level job queuing and thread pooling system. What that means is that the developer breaks his code up into discrete chunks called blocks ? a block being some data and some functions that operate on that data ? and then throws the blocks onto an OS-provided work queue. The OS creates the right number of threads of execution for the underlying hardware, then parcels out the queue items to the thread pool on behalf of the application. What this means in practice is that a developer can write a program once, and GCD will guarantee that that program achieves the best possible performance on an arbitrarily large system.
Here's a real-world example: You know how we all set up Qmaster on our Macs so Compressor can take advantage of multiple processors? GCD totally eliminates the need for that. In the future, Compressor will be written with GCD in mind, and will create tasks and put them on the queue, while the operating system decides how many of those tasks to do in parallel across the total number of processors available in the system.
The cool part is that GCD provides an architectural foundation for extending the work-queue-thread-pool structure across the network. Since work tasks are encapsulated as blocks, and blocks in Objective C can trivially be serialized, work tasks can be passed over the network to another GCD runtime instance on another system, effectively forming parallel-processing clusters at the operating system level.
I've got no reason to think that this network-dispatch functionality is going to be implemented in Snow Leopard. But GCD puts the foundation there, so it could be implemented later.
Yes, applications have to be rewritten ? well, revised slightly ? to take full advantage of GCD. But since so much of what most applications do is already abstracted away by the various system libraries Mac OS X provides, most applications will see some benefit immediately, without changing anything at all.
I don't expect the FCS 3 applications to be in that category, though. I think they're gonna take full advantage of GCD to scale performance on larger and larger deskside-class Mac systems.
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Re: WWDC - NO FCS 3 - WTF? June 10, 2009 09:22AM |
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Re: WWDC - NO FCS 3 - WTF? June 11, 2009 04:39AM |
The GTX285 is what I'm looking at buying - the NVidia Quadro FX 4800 wasn't fast enough on games or ProApps (on Leopard) to make it worth the cost although if I did more 3D visualisation it would be.
I may wait until Snow Leopard roars and then take a look at benchmarks when Open CL and CUDA are involved then see if the big boy screams.
For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]
I may wait until Snow Leopard roars and then take a look at benchmarks when Open CL and CUDA are involved then see if the big boy screams.
For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]
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Re: WWDC - NO FCS 3 - WTF? June 12, 2009 02:33PM |
The GTX285 supports OpenCL and CUDA already and the drivers for 10.5.7 come with it - apparently its available now!
For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]
For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]
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Re: WWDC - NO FCS 3 - WTF? June 12, 2009 08:02PM |
The GTX 285 looks delicious. One Gig VRAM is important to me having dual monitors and using Motion (half the VRAM always gets divided between each monitor.) I hope they really dial in the drivers for OpenGL though. Nvidia has developed a reputation in some circles for not having the best Mac drivers in regards to how they perform in the Pro apps. I'm paying attention to the BareFeats tests. So far they've only done 3D on the GTX 285. I'm sure soon they'll run it through Motion etc.
Tasty looking beast. But how's her Motion?
- Justin Barham -
Tasty looking beast. But how's her Motion?
- Justin Barham -
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Re: WWDC - NO FCS 3 - WTF? June 12, 2009 10:31PM |
Who cares what it looks like...giving up 2 PCIe slots for a video card? Not if I don't have to.
When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.
When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.
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Re: WWDC - NO FCS 3 - WTF? June 13, 2009 02:32PM |
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It doesn't take up an extra slot.
I guess that's a good thing then
When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.
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Re: WWDC - NO FCS 3 - WTF? June 13, 2009 04:13PM |
grafixjoe Wrote:
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> I guess that's a good thing then
I only know that because I thought the same thing myself.
- Justin Barham -
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> I guess that's a good thing then
I only know that because I thought the same thing myself.
- Justin Barham -
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