APPLE RELEASE NEW MACS!!! (In August)

MacPros: [www.apple.com]

Good points:

Processors: 4, 6, 8 or 12
Memory: DDR3 1333MHz
ATI GPU Options: 5770 & 5870
BTO Internal SSD RAID

Bad points:

No Nvidia 400 series option
No USB 3
No (obvious) Crossfire or SLI or Tesla options
No Blu-ray Drive (Still only 18x SuperDrive)
No LightPeak or Silicon Photonics (Ok thats just my personal wish...)


iMacs: [www.apple.com]


27" LED Cinema Display [www.apple.com]

Shame no new LED 30" with built-in iSight yet...


and a nice Magic TrackPad for Desktops [www.apple.com]

I wonder if you will be able to configure it alongside a keyboard and use it as a control surface - maybe supply simple plastic overlays for color or audio faders?



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

Doesn't help me personally. Waiting on the new super MBP.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Looks like the machine to run 64Bit FCP8 with RED Raw support on. The new GPU's are real nice, should help Motion and Color (real time?) a lot.

Connections seem strange though: 2x USB 2.0, and 2x FW 800 ports on the front. I'd rather have all the ports on the back. FW 400 ports are gone, ok, but then why no USB 3.0?

So, no, I don't really need it just yet either, although releasing the new machine prior to a new software great-leap-forward could be the gameplan here. Flying a holding pattern.

FW400 disappeared w/the last gen machines I think and that was all the time the 4 ports on the front showed up (which is much nicer than having to get on all fours repeatedly to connect/disconnect things in the back, IMO). USB 3 would've been nice and as would've eSATA. Yes, I know that's what PCI slots are for but the Mac Pro only has 3 and those get used up very quick (at least they do in my office). The apparent lack of support for Nvidia GPUs is disheartening as well.


-Andrew

> Connections seem strange though: 2x USB 2.0, and 2x FW 800 ports on the front.

Front ports are great for short-term connections and if you need to switch devices constantly. Horrible for long-term connections where you'd have cables in your way all the time. (I always have a FireWire 800 cable connected to the back of my CPU) So did they really get rid of the ports in the back? That sucks.


www.derekmok.com

No, they still have the ports in the back (3xUSB 2 and 2xFW800)

>Horrible for long-term connections where you'd have cables in your way all the time

Personally, I see FW as a plug and play interface that's great for portability. For long term connections, I'll get an eSATA card. The front ports are very important, especially when the back of the Mac relatively inaccessible.


>but then why no USB 3.0?

I think it's the adoption rate for devices (not to mention, Apple doesn't have a hand in USB development). However, I believe there's a card for a USB 3 connection for Macs.



www.strypesinpost.com

HDMI port would have been nice.

Ben King Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> 27" LED Cinema Display
> [www.apple.com]
>
> Shame no new LED 30" with built-in iSight yet...
>

It's worth noting that the 27" is now the ONLY display available. All other sizes have been discontinued.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

They must be thinking that with the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad, you'd have enough of smaller screen designs.



www.strypesinpost.com

Why would anyone want anything smaller? I am waiting for the super-mac-daddy 27" Macbook Pro

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I wonder if they'll release a 17" iPad Pro.



www.strypesinpost.com

grafixjoe Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Why would anyone want anything smaller? I am
> waiting for the super-mac-daddy 27" Macbook Pro

And the Mini Cooper that comes with it to carry it around?!?

Apple isn't featuring this update as it's one of those "speed bump" releases.

You're not seeing USB3 or eSata because my guess is you'll be seeing LightPeak early next year and that's Apple's "next big thing" on connectivity. I've heard LightPeak will be backwards compatible with USB3.

For those who were looking for CUDA or "Mercury Engine" type enhancements I suspect that'll come with FCS4. I think it's the old (as I've said before) software to motivate the hardware purpose, so you'll see those features near the time FCS4 happens.

This might also mean FCS4 is not super close. My wild guess is an announcement around January and another round of MacPros announced at around the same time.

Two things about Light Peak:

One, it's backwards compatible with everything. By design. It's intended to be a totally protocol-agnostic optical interconnect. Anything that's represented as packets of data ? that is to say, everything these days ? can be muxed down a Light Peak connection with no software-level changes at all. You can run USB, Firewire, Fibre Channel, and HDSDI all on the same cable at the same time.

Two, it's a myth. It's a science project. It's a technology demonstration. As anything even vaguely resembling a shippable product, it simply does not exist. Despite Intel's repeated insistence that Light Peak gear will ship in 2010, my totally worthless opinion is that they're way off. They're talking about shipping electro-optical transceivers that are smaller than twelve cubic millimeters and that have a cost-to-manufacture of less than $12 each, which is a lovely dream, but the realities of manufacturing simply can't deliver that within the next couple-three years at absolute minimum.

Plus which, they're talking about rolling out first-generation Light Peak adapters at ? ahem ? ten gigabits per second. Yawn. Ten gigs might sound like a lot, but it's not especially fast nowadays. A typical Infiniband host adapter, such as you might use for high-performance networking between systems in your machine room, runs at 40 gigabits and costs about $600.

So as it currently sits, Light Peak isn't sufficient for high-performance applications, and it's not cheap or easy to manufacture enough for consumer applications. It's possible that everything may fall Intel's way, and we might see the occasional Light Peak adapter on the market within the next year, but right now it's an expensive, complicated solution in search of a problem.

And as for why they're no USB 3 on the 2010 Mac Pro, that's easy. On a Mac Pro, Firewire connectivity is provided by a separate on-board controller, but USB connectivity is built into one of the two main system controller chips provided by Intel. Intel won't ship USB 3 on system controllers suitable for use in workstations like the Mac Pro until 2011 at the earliest.

And on the subject of Final Cut 8, my prediction based on what I've heard from little birds is that we'll see it drop in 2011, probably June or July-ish, possibly but not probably after public demos at NAB.

. . . or USB3 will be delivered when Apple switches to AMD processors if Intel fails to deliver LightPeak by the end of the year.

Hee hee. Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

Quote

but right now it's an expensive, complicated solution in search of a problem.

Yeah one BIG problem of LightPeak is that we'll have to have breakout boxes or external hubs for all the legacy connections we want to use. Meaning an LP addition to the cable octopus orgy until manufacturers start (if ever) using an LP port with additional port(s) in order to daisy-chain peripherals.

Still it would be nice to be able to run a simple 10GBps network right out of the box.



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

I agree about the adaptor mess but I do think the BIG benefit of LP will be getting past the limit of 3 free PCIe slots. Many devices that go into PCIe may be handled by LP. It's actually one of the things that the new Blackmagic USB3 devices hint at.

To put it another way, there are some of us who'd have to consider (or dread) pulling PCIe cards to change the config periodically for different jobs because the slots are full for whom LP would obviate that.

Apple has not been timid about changing connectors, just look at the display out changes. Another is the move to firewire 800 when (now older) cameras are still firewire 400. I suspect Apple doesn't see USB3 as a long term answer whereas LP opens up a lot more flexibility. It may save them a bundle on the quandary of expanding PCIe slots are living us with that limitation.

Doesn't matter to me how many cores are crammed into a machine if the apps aren't natively coded to use them. Until FCP can use all the cores to render, I don't see myself upgrading. I already have a 8 core and 7 of them aren't being used currently. Compressor can use them but why do I have to set up a cluster? Why doesn't compressor natively see all my cores?

Does Color use multicores to render?

CHL

Chi-Ho Lee
Film & Television Editor
Apple Certified Final Cut Pro Instructor

>Does Color use multicores to render?

No. Like the Resolve, FxPlugs and many other good things out there, it uses the GPU.


>Until FCP can use all the cores to render, I don't see myself upgrading.

To be honest, there are times I wished I had more cores when I'm in AE. FCP is really an offline editor, and it's really not built for effects. Most of the decompression and re-compression of the codecs are done by Quicktime, which actually does maximize your cores. That said, although I generally do not render that much in FCP, I would still like a more efficient renderer, as rendering a whole bunch of text overlays can take pretty long.


>Why doesn't compressor natively see all my cores?

If you're rendering on multiple cores, you'll have to split the job up to the different cores, then piece the segments together. That's not necessarily what I want to do on short encodes, although a switch to toggle multiple processors within Compressor would be much more elegant.



www.strypesinpost.com

And now we come to the fundamental quandary of multiprocessing. So your computer has eight (poor baby) or sixteen (meh) or twenty-four execution units. Do you really want every application trying to use ALL of them, ALL the time? Of course not. That'd be a train wreck. So instead, smart applications default to using a small number of units simultaneously, but give you the option of using more. But that still sucks, because maybe you want to use all your units except when you're doing other hints at the same time. Which means you have to micromanage the task scheduler by turning units on and off manually.

Enter Grand Central Dispatch, which moves all the task coordination work into the operating system. The application says, "Do this operation in parallel," and the OS decides, based on the number of units available and the work being done at the time by other applications, how many tasks to run at once.

Thing is, Grand Central Dispatch is VERY new, and it'll be years yet before it's fully adopted.

To make the conversation a bit more pedestrian... How bout those new iMacs!

Seriously - how about them - has anyone heard if they have the same crappy ethernet controller that doesn't allow jumbo frames?

This was an issue on the first i5 and i7 iMacs - but the core duos were fine in this regard

(was trying to set up an EditShare network without investing in macpros)

was hoping this imac refresh would address the issue - but hope is fading

Re: iMacs

For the first time ever... and option for 2nd internal drive. SSD flavored!

JK

_______________________________________
SCQT! Self-contained QuickTime ? pass it on!

Well, here we go... Good ol' Caldigit.

[www.caldigit.com]



www.strypesinpost.com