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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 :)

Thanks Apple...

Ivan G said:
I just got my new mac pro 2.93 and it's twice as fast as my previous machine 2.66 running compressor! Looking good folks!! Now where's FCP3?
Click to expand...

Ivan: was your 2.66 an octo (dual quad)?

And any (similar) speed increase on exports from FCP?
 
tmorten said:
Seems like that should be: "Thanks Intel"... :).

Cheers,
Tim
Click to expand...

Yeah, all PCs, no matter if Dell or Apple, are sourcing their power from the 2 main CPU manufacturers.

We are using core i7s PCs as the new Apple PCs since half a year now, they are good processors.

For dual corei7s we wont buy Apple, as their PCs are much to expensive for entry-level dualcore workstations.

I sincerly hope that Apple will finally support 4K, not only 2K as FCP in the future. Also it would be nice, if any of the upper-class systems, such as Avid DS, Discreet Smoke, DVS Clipsters, Quantel eQ series etc would run on the Apple PCs with full linux and windows support.

However, i am afraid that will take at least 1-2 generations of Apple PCs until the better systems will run on the Apple computers and OSX will finally also be 4K, not 2K only, ready. So far, not even Nvidia HD-SDI i/o is supported again with these PCs :(
 
Jannard said:
A special thanks goes to Apple for releasing the new Mac Pro. The dual i7 core Intel processor model just cut transcode times in half (roughly).

So if you open an r3d in RED Alert! and make a "look" using REDspace or REDlog and curves/saturation, etc. it saves the look to the .rsx file. Then open a bunch of these in RED Rushes and output to whatever format you want (say ProRes or Avid)... your dailies/edit files crunch out MUCH quicker.

Processing speed is RED's friend.

Jim
Click to expand...

That's great to hear Jim. We did the launch event for the Core i7 for Intel and I'm sure both Apple and Intel appreciate the feedback! I look forward to working on one.

Mark
 
James Press said:
Ivan: was your 2.66 an octo (dual quad)?

And any (similar) speed increase on exports from FCP?
Click to expand...

Yes and yes FCP does export much faster. I'm not trying to sell anyone but I've been through a shit of Mac Tower upgrades and I've finally noticed a difference without benchmarks. I should also mention that this is my first Mac that has Leopard installed. My previous was Tiger and that might of played a role.
 
I agree with the PC argument, but for $1600 I would build each with a P6T and overclockable memory. Then have all of those running at 3.8GHz in one weekend, EASY and rock solid stable with proof after running a 24hs instance on all 8 threads... :D

However, if that macrumor is true, about pro apps getting a re-vamp, then that coupled with the new OS, coupled with the i7's might mean the overclocked rendered farm idea is out... especially since I personally would want to make it a hackintosh... and a hackintosh render farm should like a PITA anyway and wouldn't be a good idea... unless you like Premier of course.
 
Yeah, I am really interested in what fcs3 would offer in terms of workflow.

I am still with my G5 on FCS2 and if I plan on getting a Scarlet, I better consider these new mac pros into the budget.
 
For the folks who wanted the link--this isn't a bad place to get it:

http://silverado.cc/shop/product.php?productid=1105

:-)

Seriously, there are some things people should be aware of when getting these new machines.

RAM is optimal in these systems in triads, not pairs. The new boards are optimized for running triple-channel instead of dual-channel. Installing in configs of even 4's or 8's will reduce your system from triple-channel to dual-channel.

A sweet spot to hit is 24.0 Gb using six 4.0 Gb sticks, but right now there is a crush on the 4.0 Gb chips and OEM's like Micron are still 2-4 weeks out from getting these sticks to market in quantity.

For now, using six 1.0 or 2.0 Gb sticks will maintain the triple-channel capability. If you need more RAM later, just swap out for the 4.0 Gb sticks when they ship in volume.

If you want to max these machines to 32.0 Gb, its not the end of the world, but you'll take a slight performance hit.

Next--you can't use an SSD in these machines! At least not yet. We've been using custom sleds to adapt Intel's X-25M drives into the previous generation Mac Pro's, but those sleds and the new Mac Pro sleds are differently sized. The hard drives stick out further when mounted to the new sleds--which is a LIFESAVER for your fingers.

The old sleds used to painfully pinch your fingers if you pulled them out wrong because there was hardly any room between the handles and the drives. That has been eliminated and now installing and removing drives is a breeze. However, if you want to use hard drives from an older gen Mac Pro, you WILL have to manually unscrew your drives from older Mac Pro sleds because of the size difference and install them with the new sleds.

We should have new sleds for the SSD's within 1-2 weeks. We have a few 160 Gb SSD units from Intel and will be doing some testing once we can get these installed.

For now, the fastest possible config involves multiple Western Digital Velociraptor drives in a RAID 0 configuration--say three of them--with a 1.0 Tb drive for backup. Or, you could do 4 across the board with an external 1.5 Tb drive for backup. Makes things VERY fast, but also reduces general usage inside your Mac.

You could reduce this to a two-drive Velociraptor setup and add a couple of Seagate 2.0 Tb drives and have the best of both worlds--a dual drive RAID 0 made up of two 10,000 RPM drives and add'l 4.0 Tb of storage.

One thing that boggles my mind are the things that were left off this machine. I would have included SSD support right off the bat, but it wasn't in the cards. More puzzling is the lack of Blu-Ray support now that the machines ship with DisplayPort--which should enable playback of Blu-Ray content with an HDCP-layer to the 24" LED display.

One more thing--no eSATA support. This is pretty standard on the PC side of Nehalem boards, but totally missing on Mac side. If you want eSATA support, you still have to use up a PCI slot.

FYI for those of you who are curious--what config are we getting for our own setups here?

Two 2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
24GB (6x4GB)
3x 300 Gb 10,000 RPM Velociraptors
1x 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB
One 18x SuperDrive
One Blu-Ray Burner
Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse
Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad
AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi Card with 802.11n

Our storage is Dulce, CalDigit, or Active Storage--so we use either a PCIe card or Fibre Channel.

These are awesome machines, but true that they are pricier than their PC counterparts. Times being what they are, if you want an upgrade to 8 Gb RAM for free--send an email with "REDUser" in the subject and we'll hook you up when you order a new Mac Pro.

Torrey
-----------------------------------------------
Torrey Loomis
President & CEO - Silverado Systems, Inc.
Outfitter to the World's Foremost Apple Professionals
2600 East Bidwell Street, Suite 280
Folsom, CA 95630
(916) 760-0032 • FAX (916) 404-5258
torrey@silverado.cc
http://www.Silverado.cc

Check out our StudioBuilder blog at http://silveradosys.blogspot.com
 
I built an i7 Windows 7 system back around christmas. It's a headline worthy chip. If you do anything that uses multiple cores to their max you definitely want to spend even the marginal extra over Core 2.

Also the 920 supposedly overclocks like a dream even with standard cooling.
 
ibloom said:
In addition to some intel goodness if you've got an extra 40 Gs lying around you might want check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs

Seek time is an angry god ruling over all of us. But clearly his reign is about to end.

IBloom
Click to expand...

There's something fishy about that benchmark as it's really easy to get wrong numbers out of iometer. What's fishy is that board is pci-e x8 and getting 2GB/s is not realistic for x8. Theorhetical ya, but 1600 is more realistic. I have that same board and the most I got was about 1100MB/s although I'd like to try and replicate their results.
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
Also the 920 supposedly overclocks like a dream even with standard cooling.
Click to expand...

So much so it should be a crime to have one running stock. 3.6 on air..? Every single sample, easy. With a good cooler you can CERTAINLY go higher.

Ever since the first Duos Intel has been an overclocking machine, and as architecture gets smaller they are only getting better. 4.0GHz isn't a club anymore, it is more like a Woodstock.

So I'd say: iThank Intel!

Like mentioned earlier on this thread. I think that is not why Jim started this thread. He must be happy about something more than the chips. Maybe Apple called him to say something like "the party has started, repeat, the party has started" or some other spy code signal type stuff :D

MORE PICTURES pretty pleeease :D
 
torster said:
For the folks who wanted the link--this isn't a bad place to get it:

http://silverado.cc/shop/product.php?productid=1105

:-)

Seriously, there are some things people should be aware of when getting these new machines.

RAM is optimal in these systems in triads, not pairs. The new boards are optimized for running triple-channel instead of dual-channel. Installing in configs of even 4's or 8's will reduce your system from triple-channel to dual-channel.

A sweet spot to hit is 24.0 Gb using six 4.0 Gb sticks, but right now there is a crush on the 4.0 Gb chips and OEM's like Micron are still 2-4 weeks out from getting these sticks to market in quantity.

For now, using six 1.0 or 2.0 Gb sticks will maintain the triple-channel capability. If you need more RAM later, just swap out for the 4.0 Gb sticks when they ship in volume.

If you want to max these machines to 32.0 Gb, its not the end of the world, but you'll take a slight performance hit.

Next--you can't use an SSD in these machines! At least not yet. We've been using custom sleds to adapt Intel's X-25M drives into the previous generation Mac Pro's, but those sleds and the new Mac Pro sleds are differently sized. The hard drives stick out further when mounted to the new sleds--which is a LIFESAVER for your fingers.

The old sleds used to painfully pinch your fingers if you pulled them out wrong because there was hardly any room between the handles and the drives. That has been eliminated and now installing and removing drives is a breeze. However, if you want to use hard drives from an older gen Mac Pro, you WILL have to manually unscrew your drives from older Mac Pro sleds because of the size difference and install them with the new sleds.

We should have new sleds for the SSD's within 1-2 weeks. We have a few 160 Gb SSD units from Intel and will be doing some testing once we can get these installed.

For now, the fastest possible config involves multiple Western Digital Velociraptor drives in a RAID 0 configuration--say three of them--with a 1.0 Tb drive for backup. Or, you could do 4 across the board with an external 1.5 Tb drive for backup. Makes things VERY fast, but also reduces general usage inside your Mac.

You could reduce this to a two-drive Velociraptor setup and add a couple of Seagate 2.0 Tb drives and have the best of both worlds--a dual drive RAID 0 made up of two 10,000 RPM drives and add'l 4.0 Tb of storage.

One thing that boggles my mind are the things that were left off this machine. I would have included SSD support right off the bat, but it wasn't in the cards. More puzzling is the lack of Blu-Ray support now that the machines ship with DisplayPort--which should enable playback of Blu-Ray content with an HDCP-layer to the 24" LED display.

One more thing--no eSATA support. This is pretty standard on the PC side of Nehalem boards, but totally missing on Mac side. If you want eSATA support, you still have to use up a PCI slot.
Click to expand...

Very informative post Torrey. I had forgotten about the memory being triple channel. How do you think a 4x4GB + 2x1GB would affect system performance?
 
Deanan said:
There's something fishy about that benchmark as it's really easy to get wrong numbers out of iometer. What's fishy is that board is pci-e x8 and getting 2GB/s is not realistic for x8. Theorhetical ya, but 1600 is more realistic. I have that same board and the most I got was about 1100MB/s although I'd like to try and replicate their results.
Click to expand...

Did you have 24 SSD's in a Raid??

I bow to your expertise.

But I think the main thing that is interesting about SSD's is low seek time. In most data intensive operations it seems to me that seek time is the main slow down. Much of the optimizations that are now needed for applications using conventional hard drives are no longer needed.

Not really my world, but having one of those things hooked up to your scratch or nuke box, sounds like quite a lifestyle choice.

IBloom
 
Deanan said:
There's something fishy about that benchmark as it's really easy to get wrong numbers out of iometer. What's fishy is that board is pci-e x8 and getting 2GB/s is not realistic for x8. Theorhetical ya, but 1600 is more realistic. I have that same board and the most I got was about 1100MB/s although I'd like to try and replicate their results.
Click to expand...

Deanan,

We've seen 700 MB/s on a Mac Pro with just three SSD's. If there is a potential bottleneck, its definitely not the drives.

I'd like to see that same Samsung video run with an AJA benchmark to see what sustained transfers look like.

As soon as we get some cabling, we are going to try running 4 of these in the new Mac Pro. We should see results of near 1 GB/s on these Intel drives.

Tor
 
facetmedia said:
Very informative post Torrey. I had forgotten about the memory being triple channel. How do you think a 4x4GB + 2x1GB would affect system performance?
Click to expand...

Andrae,

Good question--I'll have to test that out. Its not a typical config, so we'll need to wait until we have some spare parts we can assemble.

However, I can run it by Rob-Art at Bare Feats. I think he has the parts and wherewithal to do that test.

My initial guess is that the system would treat the ram as three pairs of two, instead of two triads.

Tor
 
Anyone saw this acer? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883103200
It comes with liquid cooling, ovreclocked to 4ghz. It only needs a paint job, red instead of orange :)
On the raid side, i am getting 500mb/s with 5 disks in raid 0 mode, using an onboard raid in my tyan motherboard. Tyan mothers are really good, mine has 16 ddr2 slots, using 2gb chips make it really cheap and you can have 32gb.
 
Deanan said:
There's something fishy about that benchmark as it's really easy to get wrong numbers out of iometer. What's fishy is that board is pci-e x8 and getting 2GB/s is not realistic for x8. Theorhetical ya, but 1600 is more realistic. I have that same board and the most I got was about 1100MB/s although I'd like to try and replicate their results.
Click to expand...

They're using two RAID controllers, not one. 2GB/sec should be easily reached. Frankly, the most impressive thing about the whole thing to me is that their local Samsung rep gave them 24 SSD's to play with and someone spent the money to let these yahoos build that system... I'd do it to if someone else were paying the bill. :)
 
Deanan said:
There's something fishy about that benchmark as it's really easy to get wrong numbers out of iometer. What's fishy is that board is pci-e x8 and getting 2GB/s is not realistic for x8. Theorhetical ya, but 1600 is more realistic. I have that same board and the most I got was about 1100MB/s although I'd like to try and replicate their results.
Click to expand...

Deanan,
It seems that You haven't seen the video closely,

For 2GB/s they use :
10 drives on Areca (pciex8),
8 drives on Adaptec (pciex8),
6 drives on Skulltraill mobo.

They have found almost what everybody else has found that limit for sata/sas controllers are from 850 - 1000 MB/s.

With two 12port Arecas and 24 sata drives You could get around 1700 MB/s.

Regards
 
I'm told by people who build really blazing systems, the trick is to half fill a bunch of SAS controllers and software raid them.
D
 
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