8-core mac, today or later?

[D. O'Bryan]

Word on the street is Nov 13th for the Penryn Mac Pros. Don't quote me though!

I sure hope the speculation is correct... I'm waiting patiently to buy one so I can finally take a good look at my 2k RED footage. :(

[MikeCurtis]

I completely agree with Mark and mostly agree with Noah - more cores are good, storage for throughput...BUT...RAM ain't gonna make it faster beyond a basic threshold. It'll let you run more simultaneous apps, which helps you work faster, but in terms of pure processing speed...once you have enough RAM to not be paging out to disk, you're not going to get meaningfully faster by adding more. Had to tell this about 9 times to the Photoshop guys that had 32GB of RAM in their 8 core Mac that were getting into video..."But won't it help somehow?" he kept saying...."Nope - where would it help?" I'd say. "Some kind of buffer somewhere?" he'd ask, "For a lot of processing, you only need to hold one, maybe a few frames in RAM at a time...how big is your frame size?"

That finally put an end to it.

[Mike McCarthy]

Although I agree with that, I see one exception: After Effects (Or other compositing app)

Currently AE is 32bit, and limited to 4GB, but a future 64bit version could legitimately use >32GB of Ram. At 32bpp, 4K is 150-200MB/Frame. That is 20-30 frames stored in 4GB, while 32Gb still would only give you 10-15 seconds of preview. No storage system will support that data rate for the next few years. FusionIO offers some interesting possibilities, but that is a ways out as well. Until then, previewing at half-res from a wavelet 4K file should be a reasonable solution.

But regardless, 99% of users will not be able to fully utilize even 4GB of RAM. For most realtime editing apps, 4GB should be more than sufficient, especially since NLEs can process compressed footage.

As noted earlier, the impending release of new Intel CPUs should offer many advantages besides speed.

[MikeHedge]

I am waiting to build a PC.... I hope that in the weeks to come some answers regarding the new chips show up.

[Christian Edwards]

amd over intel. pc not mac

[JustinGD]

So if I use FCS2 including Motion and Color for 98% of my work, is 4 GB of RAM all I need?

I think I'm waiting untill at least March for my Red, so Apple has some time, but I may as well start my research now. Any word on new Apple monitors any time soon? or should I use 12" CRT's untill I can get a Red 4K monitor

[Bruce Allen]

Mike is right on the RAM.

McCarthyTech, be aware that though AE only uses a max of 4gb per thread, AE3 has a new feature (similar to Nucleo) where it can spawn additional threads to render other frames in parallel. So you can use up a ton of RAM pretty quickly.

Here are benchmarks where they seemed to come close to using up 16gb RAM...
http://www.barefeats.com/octopro4.html

Here's one showing the difference between a 4gb RAM and 2gb RAM (because you need > 2gb RAM to do multiple frames at once in CS3?)
http://www.barefeats.com/imacal4.html

Eirik, don't worry about that G5 being old... a lot of them are still in use in Hollywood. All of those folks addicted to Trapcode Shine had to wait until the summer for the Intel version anyway ;)

Personally, from the benchmarks of the upcoming Intel procs that I've seen, the improvement seems closer to 10% than 30%, sadly. Maybe they'll boost clock speed, though? The new chips seem to almost be underclocked (they run well under their specced 130W TDP).

The only question is how big a leap forward the end-of-2008 chip design will take?

Khristian, I, like you am also fervently hoping AMD keeps in the game. If it weren't for them Intel would probably still be trying to sell people Pentium 4 based designs. AMD chips ARE still faster at certain things, plus the overall power usage of their systems is currently less too.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

[Christian Edwards]

amd are far superior to intel

[Mike McCarthy]

amd are far superior to intel

Unfortunately while that may have been true in the past, they currently come no where even close. Ever since Intel released the Core2 series, replacing the inefficient Netburst architecture, AMD has had no competitive response.

Bruce, while I have used Nucleo, I have not had the opportunity to test the new CS3 integrated multiframe rendering. I was speaking of RAM previews before, and as I understand it, those will still be limited to 4GB total, even with a 64bit OS, but I can't absolutely confirm that, since I don't have a 64bit system with >4GB Ram yet. It would be great if it did though, and my first 64bit system will have 8GB of RAM to take full advantage of AE's new feature.

[Bruce Allen]

I was speaking of RAM previews before, and as I understand it, those will still be limited to 4GB total

Correct. RAM previews are still limited to 4GB.

All I'm saying is that is you want to do the whole "rendering different frames across different cores thing" (which is by far the fastest rendering option, since AE isn't particularly well multithreaded) then you probably want to have > 4GB RAM. Like, 8GB+...

Given the price of RAM, it might in some cases give you better value for money to go for 4 (highly-clocked) cores until more people optimize properly (give 'em a year or so)... depends on which software you run.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com