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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 :)

New HP Z8 Workstations built for 8k video editing :)

"The price starts at $2,439, but expect the top-end Z8 to be priced in the tens of thousands of dollars."
 
Zeb B said:
"The price starts at $2,439, but expect the top-end Z8 to be priced in the tens of thousands of dollars."
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I can't even find 128 GB RAM anywhere. But a 2x64 GB RAM sticks is $1500. So to fill all 24 slots with those would give you 1.5 TB of RAM and cost $18,000. So at least double that for the full 3TB. But probably a bit more because 128 GB chips will be so new, it won't work out to only double. Probably $40-50K in RAM to fill it up right away.
 
I think you could edit 8K fairly well with several GPUs and a lot less than 1.5TB of RAM. Heck, I don't know a lot of post systems that even have 256GB of RAM (at least of the machines I've seen in LA). I also think the speed of the CPU and the size of the GPU are going to be the major governing factors in terms of project speed.

The Z8 does look like a very, very cool machine.
 
The system is totally built to be future proof which I like. But yeah, a bit pricey, unless it comes with a 8k monitor as well :yesnod:
The sad thing is, Tim Cook will show us all what expensive really means when the new mac pro is released. Remember back in the day, a fully tricked out cheese grater tower was well over $20k...
 
Marc Wielage said:
I think you could edit 8K fairly well with several GPUs and a lot less than 1.5TB of RAM. Heck, I don't know a lot of post systems that even have 256GB of RAM (at least of the machines I've seen in LA). I also think the speed of the CPU and the size of the GPU are going to be the major governing factors in terms of project speed.

The Z8 does look like a very, very cool machine.
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What Marc said. This Z8 Workstation is all about range, and a broad range of prices versus performance. For "most of us" 128GB is going to be ideal as a max unless we're doing real heavy lifting.

If you are doing say.... uncompressed 8K or perhaps "beyond" (like some of those scary VR folks right now) a big box certainly can show some benefits.

At the moment, a good GPU or two or three plus a decent processor (or two), and a healthy amount of RAM is certainly what is needed. That and some speedy RAID setups.
 
Marc Wielage said:
I think you could edit 8K fairly well with several GPUs and a lot less than 1.5TB of RAM. Heck, I don't know a lot of post systems that even have 256GB of RAM (at least of the machines I've seen in LA). I also think the speed of the CPU and the size of the GPU are going to be the major governing factors in terms of project speed.

The Z8 does look like a very, very cool machine.
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Editing and grading 8k is one thing. Soon I think we can do that on our phones. Compositing and rendering 3D scenes for 8k is a different ball park all together. As soon as you need to leave the r3d format and go into 16bit float uncompressed and massive amount of layers etc then Tb´s of ram gets eaten pretty quick.
 
Cameron McKinlay said:
The system is totally built to be future proof which I like.
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Well they are not future proof at all. Looking back to 2012 when we bought a couple of i7-3960x we can consider ourselves to be lucky that those workstations where pretty future proof (not much procress between 2012 and 2017) and HDD's and RAM where cheap. The reason we bought them was that we wanted the speed.

These days are different however. RAM is expensive, NAND is expensive and this is the last generation of 14 nm. 10 and 7 nm will arrive next year and so does PCIe 4.0.

When you don't need the speed at the moment I wouldn't buy into these kind of expensive systems, they are a lot but not future proof.
 
No such thing as a “future proof” piece of tech. Least of all a complex, cutting edge workstation computer. The worst part about the big workstations is that they become very expensive in a hurry as you pile on the options, RAM, storage, etc... With each addition they become increasingly harder to recover the investment and you can only re-purpose them once or twice in their lifetime before they’re worth too little to re-sell or just become a boat anchor.

HP did a nice job on the new Z series, but made a few questionable decisions too. The lack of 10G Ethernet is a head scratcher for sure...

Like Misha points out, we have 10nm coming soon and PCIe v4 as well. Once those arrive, the resale on all the current PCIe v3 systems is going to tank. Just the way this all works. I’m liking what HP has done to the Z8 overall, but I wouldn’t recommend buying one unless you know you can get 3+ good years out of it. I usually don’t buy any computer where I’m less than 95% sure I can ROI the thing in 18 months or less.
 
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That's a lot of money just to compress it back down to 2K or soon 4K. I'm still shaking from the 4K upgrades 6 core and 8 core workstation update. Camera, workstation, software Monitors etc. I need to sell movies man. =) or hookup with people in Cali to shoot one hell of a film.
 
Björn Benckert said:
Editing and grading 8k is one thing. Soon I think we can do that on our phones. Compositing and rendering 3D scenes for 8k is a different ball park all together. As soon as you need to leave the r3d format and go into 16bit float uncompressed and massive amount of layers etc then Tb´s of ram gets eaten pretty quick.
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No reason to be using 16 bit uncompressed anything in 3D and compositing. OpenEXR has very good lossless compression. TB of ram is definitely not needed for rendering even massive 3D scenes either unless it is done in a very unoptimized way. 128GB is more than enough for this usage as well. Honestly easier to eat up ram with R3D footage than it is with 3D scenes.
 
andrewhake said:
No reason to be using 16 bit uncompressed anything in 3D and compositing. OpenEXR has very good lossless compression. TB of ram is definitely not needed for rendering even massive 3D scenes either unless it is done in a very unoptimized way. 128GB is more than enough for this usage as well. Honestly easier to eat up ram with R3D footage than it is with 3D scenes.
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True and when you do want to work like this get a single core EPYC7551P ($ 2.100) with 2x Cache/scratch drive Highpoint Raid SSD7101 $ 400 + 4 x samsung 960pro 512 GB $ 1.120 = $ 1.520 ~ $ 3.040 in raid 0. 25% overprovisioned you get 3 TB of NAND with a sustained read of 14 GB/s and sustained write of 12 GB/s.
(uncompressed RGB 16bit 8k 24 fps = 4.75 GB/s or 60 fps = 11.8 GB/s).

And then you can still throw in 4 GPU's and a declink card (2 x 10Gb/s nic's are on the motherboard) 16 HDD's in raid 10, etc....
Will save you a lot of money.
 
Comparing the Z8 to the iMac Pro is pointless. Totally different machines, built on different hardware, aimed at different segments of the industry. The iMac Pro is crazy expensive when comparing raw specs to what can be purchased, or especially assembled yourself, elsewhere. That’s not the point... It’s competitively priced within its market segment and offers some advantages the competition does not — multiple TB3 ports, best 4K~5K display on the market... Anyone considering a Z8 is probably not going to consider an iMac Pro and vice versa. Now if someone is trying to decide between the two, then they obviously don’t know what they actually need or want and I wish them luck. The upcoming Mac Pro will probably be a much more apt comparison to the Z8 which will receive an update probably about the same time as the Mac Pro launch for the Xeon v5 revision.
 
Jeff: I wish I knew which "year" Apple will release the new Mac Pro. I am hoping for June 2018 but would not be surprised for it to slip into 2019...
 
Jeff, exactly. Why consider a iMac Pro if something much better is cheaper. I've turned off the flat trashcan, so to speak, making analogues to the present Mac Pro.
 
FrankMcPartland said:
Jeff: I wish I knew which "year" Apple will release the new Mac Pro. I am hoping for June 2018 but would not be surprised for it to slip into 2019...
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Plan on late 2018 or early in 2019. The v5 Xeons are not expected until Q3, they have not entered the OEM tester channel yet and same with PCIe v4 that will arrive along with them.
 
FrankMcPartland said:
Jeff: Maybe they will give us a “preview” of the new Mac Pro at the WWDC in June of 2018...
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I hope so. And I’m going to be surprised if they don’t. I’m fully expecting the initial reveal at WWDC and launch at the end of the year like we saw with the iMac Pro. And with the TouchBar MacBook Pro in 2016.

...And from what I know of the E5 v5 series Xeons, you better hold on to your wallets.
 
For general editing, yes you can get by with 32GB. You’re also not using all of your cores/threads. Once you have 64GB or 128GB at your fingertips it’s really hard to go back. Even for relatively simple tasks in RC-X or Resolve, you can actually hold an entire shot in memory at 4K+ resolution and scrub effortlessly back and forth as you color it. If you do anything that seriously uses 10+ cores and you have 64GB of RAM, that only leaves you with about 2.4GB per thread of usable memory. Which can be stifling if you’re actually trying to render anything substantial. All comes down to what the system is being used for. Working with 8K R3D clips with less than 4GB/ thread is pretty painful in my experience if you’re doing anything more than editing.
 
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