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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

HP 820 Tower - RED EDITION

yup.. the buzzsaw is all metal. Love the unimog.
 
Jarred Land said:
yup.. the buzzsaw is all metal. Love the unimog.
Click to expand...
I'm gonna find me some skateboard blanks and get the buzzsaw on em :)
Of course if there was an actual deck at the RED site, Id opt for that easily ;)
 
A post I made on macrumors that I thought was relevant.

deconstruct60 said:
If RED needs to sell RED stuff that's primarily RED's problem. Apple will work with them so the products work well together. But Apple isn't going to sign up as a major salesman/vendor for RED.
Click to expand...

It's not about selling RED. RED doesn't need any help with that, trust me. Here's the thing, much of the RED crowd is, or have been Mac users. Even I will admit that PC offerings are completely blowing Mac offerings out of the water right now with hardware best suited for working with RED material. The PC side is making the roadmap for hardware pretty clear, if you want power and expandability, go PC. Apple doesn't tell us much.

The generally thinking of the current Mac based RED user is "Please Apple come out with a powerful system because I really don't want to switch to PC in the future." or "I really don't want to switch, but I'm getting pretty tempted." Apple is damn near pushing the pro market out the door and telling us to just switch already. As if they don't want to bother with our "needs."

It's not about what the current Mac system can or can't do, they are good machines. It's just that they are already behind what competitors offer. When you're spending $10k+ on a workstation, like I'm ready to do, you need to know that it will be supported well into the future.

Having a system aimed directly at arguable the most pioneering company in cinema technology products today would reassure a lot of people that Apple is still serious at being in the pro market.
 
Personally, as much as the RED/HP offering is "cool" and, I am sure, will be an awesome performer, I am going to stay in what I'll call the Ketch/Toia/Cioni camp for now. Mark seems to be doing some pretty great stuff on his laptop and Michael seems to be pretty impressed with the the Retina MBP. And Ketch, well, I think design matters to Ketch - after all, he is Italian! :-) Nice to see there are som REDuser luminaries that aren't running off to the "dark side." Now if we can just get Jim to hang in there a little longer! :-)

I am not so sure it is the "tower" format that is going to be the game changer for Apple; I think their next offerings will be a ground breaking in a paradigm of modularity (hmmm, sounds like a familiar model to REDusers) - connecting fast storage and high resolution graphics and expansion chassis through TB. And, one reason I'll remain loyal to Apple is that I want to see where they take FCP-X (cuz I know that will never run on a PC!).

So, if you need more power "yesterday," then I guess you have to open up your options a bit. I am lucky, I can afford to wait and see what develops. :thumbup:
 
It seems like the move to 22nm based chips with their lower power/heat issues is the next major step. Kilgroe feels like Apple is waiting for them and I agree.

It will be interesting to see where they go with the form factor, I'm thinking rack mount friendly with an exoskeleton.

Looks like the newest MBP is a helluva stop gap, props to Michael for sharing notes about performance when doing the kind of tasks RedUsers care about.

Cheers - #19
 
Maik Müller Menendez said:
I'm totally fine with windows, as long as it is 7 and not 8 with that crappy metro-stuff. ;)
BTW, i love that new workstation, great move RED.
Click to expand...

Yeah let's underestimate MS's ability to fuck this all up in the very near future.
 
Something is up at Intel, possibly a huge rethinking of workstation and server processors. I can't say much more than that as I don't know much more than that, but I'm hearing there's a real buzz there today. Seems the MIC (Many Integrated Core) tech is exceeding expectations by quite a bit and now that the cat has come out of the bag it has people thinking. This is "Knights Corner" and is initially being released as a PCIe v3.0 X16 accelerator card add-on. Intel announced the other day that it will debut as the "Xeon Phi". But it's looking like they may be intending to package this in PGA chip form for direct integration onto system boards as an integrated co-processor or even primary CPU on the primary bus with no PCIe in the mix.

Word on the street is the Xeon Phi is over 450 (yes, FOUR HUNDRED FIFTY) times faster than a Xeon E5-2620 in a computational sense...
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Something is up at Intel, possibly a huge rethinking of workstation and server processors. I can't say much more than that as I don't know much more than that, but I'm hearing there's a real buzz there today. Seems the MIC (Many Integrated Core) tech is exceeding expectations by quite a bit and now that the cat has come out of the bag it has people thinking. This is "Knights Corner" and is initially being released as a PCIe v3.0 X16 accelerator card add-on. Intel announced the other day that it will debut as the "Xeon Phi". But it's looking like they may be intending to package this in PGA chip form for direct integration onto system boards as an integrated co-processor or even primary CPU on the primary bus with no PCIe in the mix.

Word on the street is the Xeon Phi is over 450 (yes, FOUR HUNDRED FIFTY) times faster than a Xeon E5-2620 in a computational sense...
Click to expand...
jeff are you an alien? :)
 
Terry VerHaar said:
I am not so sure it is the "tower" format that is going to be the game changer for Apple; I think their next offerings will be a ground breaking in a paradigm of modularity (hmmm, sounds like a familiar model to REDusers) - connecting fast storage and high resolution graphics and expansion chassis through TB.
Click to expand...

I agree that might be cool and a great way to add the power you need and be able to scale it up, but as of now, TB isn't close to being fast enough to do any of that.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Something is up at Intel, possibly a huge rethinking of workstation and server processors. I can't say much more than that as I don't know much more than that, but I'm hearing there's a real buzz there today. Seems the MIC (Many Integrated Core) tech is exceeding expectations by quite a bit and now that the cat has come out of the bag it has people thinking. This is "Knights Corner" and is initially being released as a PCIe v3.0 X16 accelerator card add-on. Intel announced the other day that it will debut as the "Xeon Phi". But it's looking like they may be intending to package this in PGA chip form for direct integration onto system boards as an integrated co-processor or even primary CPU on the primary bus with no PCIe in the mix.

Word on the street is the Xeon Phi is over 450 (yes, FOUR HUNDRED FIFTY) times faster than a Xeon E5-2620 in a computational sense...
Click to expand...
I think, Intel got tired of GPU getting ever so increasing importance in the system performance. Pretty much all heavy lifting is slowly moving into GPU territory. Hence the Xeon Phi idea...
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Word on the street is the Xeon Phi is over 450 (yes, FOUR HUNDRED FIFTY) times faster than a Xeon E5-2620 in a computational sense...
Click to expand...

Never heard of this before your post. Sounds really exciting. Looks like they are due out late this year or early next too.

phi.png
 
The real game changer, right there. The end of render times and smooth as butter 6K (or more, we don't know if Jim, Jarred and co pull out another "Everything changes" move). Great times!
 
Eric Z said:
Jeff Kilgroe,
You mind running the Black Magic Design Disk Speed Test on your Z820?
Run it on your fastest storage system (SSDs, RAID Arrays) for at least 5 min each run.
It performs reads and writes continuously until you decide to stop it.
Click to expand...

I've already run it, but can probably do so again tomorrow and post a screenshot for you as a benchmark for the internal LSI controller. I currently have it configured with 5 x 2TB 7200rpm Hitachi UltraStar HDD's. I'm showing about 450MB/s or so write and about 490MB/s read with both the BMD and AJA (as well as other) benchmarks. I did try it with all 8 ports routed to an external chassis and 8 x 2TB WD RE4 HDD's. I couldn't really score over 500MB/s on either read or write with that setup. It would spike on initiation until all the cache was overrun, then performance settled. The LSI controller is definitely a bottleneck, which is rather tragic for a system like this. I'd like to see if someone else can get better results with it, but that's all I could muster. That external chassis (Sans Digital - 8 bay) is going to be connected to an ATTO or ARECA RAID controller soon, I need to buy one for this system.

I'm running an 512GB OCZ Vertex 4 SSD as my OS / apps drive and it's working pretty good. Unfortunately I need to update its firmware, which will wipe the system. The previous firmware had a glitch on certain types of read operations -- primarily deep buffer requests and this slowed down the read performance. Funny enough, I get a blazing 450~460MB/s write in the BMD test on this SSD, but reads are in the mid 300's... So that's my next major issue to tackle with this system. I'll probably just wipe it and do a fresh install of everything rather than cloning the drive and restoring it. Mostly because there's a few things I'd probably do differently now that I've tried so many different components in this system and installed several drivers I now know I don't want or need. :)
 
Terry VerHaar said:
Personally, as much as the RED/HP offering is "cool" and, I am sure, will be an awesome performer, I am going to stay in what I'll call the Ketch/Toia/Cioni camp for now. Mark seems to be doing some pretty great stuff on his laptop and Michael seems to be pretty impressed with the the Retina MBP. And Ketch, well, I think design matters to Ketch - after all, he is Italian! :-) Nice to see there are som REDuser luminaries that aren't running off to the "dark side." Now if we can just get Jim to hang in there a little longer! :-)

I am not so sure it is the "tower" format that is going to be the game changer for Apple; I think their next offerings will be a ground breaking in a paradigm of modularity (hmmm, sounds like a familiar model to REDusers) - connecting fast storage and high resolution graphics and expansion chassis through TB. And, one reason I'll remain loyal to Apple is that I want to see where they take FCP-X (cuz I know that will never run on a PC!).

So, if you need more power "yesterday," then I guess you have to open up your options a bit. I am lucky, I can afford to wait and see what develops. :thumbup:
Click to expand...

Terry, Apple stock much? (you lucky dog!)
 
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