The new Macbook Pros are out!

[Stephen Gentle]

Tertiary question:

Does anyone know of a laptop manufacturer that doesn't use an onboard graphics chip so that it can be upgraded in such a way? I've never had the pleasure.

They don't exist. Apart from RAM, battery and hard drive, pretty much the only thing you can sometimes replace is a wireless card. It's silly to talk about 'closed systems' with regard to laptops because they all are. And that's a big part of what makes them so much smaller than a desktop.

I'm guessing this has more to do with the graphics ability to run a certain number of HD displays at once. The 15", with a less powerful chip, wouldn't be as able to run 5760x1080 as would a 17".

My question was about the fact that the US and UK sites say you can only ever have one display, whereas the Australia site says that the 15 and 17 inch laptops can drive two displays through Thunderbolt.

 

[Geoff McLeod]

This could be a real game-changer with post production facilities. I could be possible to keep everything on laptops and simply keep larger monitors at work.
Now if the Ki Pro would come out with Thunderbolt and Prores 444 that would be fantastic. This is brilliant work from Apple and Intel.

 

[Michael Olsen]

They don't exist. Apart from RAM, battery and hard drive, pretty much the only thing you can sometimes replace is a wireless card. It's silly to talk about 'closed systems' with regard to laptops because they all are. And that's a big part of what makes them so much smaller than a desktop.

I didn't think so - thanks for that, Stephen.

 

[L. Langer]

Tertiary question:

Does anyone know of a laptop manufacturer that doesn't use an onboard graphics chip so that it can be upgraded in such a way? I've never had the pleasure.

For the most part, only the custom laptop builders use them and they represent a very small part of the industry though you will find upgradable graphics (on paper at any rate) used by Dell, HP, etc. in their application-specific professional-grade laptops. I say "on paper" because the parts themselves are very hard to come by and only made in very small orders, which means you more than likely won't get anything to upgrade to beyond what you already have. Needless to say, the price of those notebooks typically make the Macbook Pro look like an Asus Eee Netbook by comparison.

 

[Cid J Salcido Uyarra]

...am i the only one not that excited?

i'm right with you. I still have an OG 15'' Unibody w/PCIe Express Slot w/ 1 year of Apple care. I'll wait til Apple works the kinks out cause it looks like a last minute plan after USB turned down a universal port form factor pitch from Intel. 1/4 of the External Drives on the Current Market are USB 3.0. Where the hell is Thunderbolt support and accessories? It's pretty obvious Apple sells more MacBook Pro than MacPro or iMac. So they want us to adopt this method of workflow. Not sure how much I like daisy chaining, I'm a fan of a crap ton of ports. Plus it seems like they're trying to tender to the video market with this port. Seems like FireWire all over again, all of a sudden it's 2003. Compatibility always wins. Funny how Apple wanted to make it proprietary.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Adobe explained their reasoning for going with CUDA over OpenCL, at the time of development, on another past Reduser thread. There were sound technical reasons, but they expected to support OpenCL at some point, but when that will be is anyone's guess.

Their reasons were perfectly sound at the time the started developing the GPU acceleration. But that was a couple years ago. I'm sure they have an OpenCL incarnation in the pipeline somewhere and at some stage of completeness. I'm a programmer and pretty familiar with OpenGL, CUDA and OpenCL. There are lots of reasons to choose CUDA for GPU accelerated functions. Not so many reasons to choose OpenCL and first and about the only good reason being that it's an open standard.

At this point CUDA is so well-established, I wish nVidia would just open it up so everyone can play. nVidia doesn't want to open up though. PowerVR and ATI have been killing it in the hardware department lately and winning over more and more market space. nVidia is all but non-existent the mobile GPU sectors for notebooks, smart phones, etc..

Apple support for OpenCL has been rather lackluster too, but has been making huge strides just recently. I think this is a good indication that the upcoming pro apps will be GPU accelerated and it won't matter if you have an ATI or nVidia card in your system.

A lot of us are hoping for OpenCL support on the new iPad. That would have been a huge advantage on the current iPad if Apple and PowerVR had offered it. ...Hopefully we'll find out on wednesday.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

They don't exist. Apart from RAM, battery and hard drive, pretty much the only thing you can sometimes replace is a wireless card. It's silly to talk about 'closed systems' with regard to laptops because they all are. And that's a big part of what makes them so much smaller than a desktop.

Of the handful of notebooks with upgradable graphics cards that ever existed, all were a miserable failure. I don't think there are any on the market currently.

The only complaint I've ever had with the Macbook Pro line of systems is their lack of ports. Even with the new models, I'm still complaining. There should be two TB ports on the 17", damnit!!!! Even on the Mac Pro, we're port-starved. There is only one Firewire 800 header shared between two ports and only two USB headers... No eSATA, they sell a RAID card with no external connectivity... I totally understand Jobs' desire to eliminate all the cable clutter, but doing so by not allowing us to connect anything isn't the best solution.

I don't give a rat's ass about USB3.0. I've used it enough to firmly establish my hatred for it. As to why Apple has continuously denied eSATA to its users is a complete mystery to me.

 

[Michael Hastings]

Blu-ray = Apple doesn't care about it. It's all about streaming... that's where the industry's going. Netflix, Amazon, Apple, MS... it's all about streaming movies.

.

And consider that even if u want something physical, 8 gig USB flash is as cheap as bluray discs were a few years ago.

Bluray missed the boat except for us early adopters.

 

[L. Langer]

A lot of us are hoping for OpenCL support on the new iPad. That would have been a huge advantage on the current iPad if Apple and PowerVR had offered it. ...Hopefully we'll find out on wednesday.

I'm sorry to disappoint you Jeff, but it's not coming anytime soon. The ducks just haven't lined up for it but they are slowly waddling their way into position.

 

[L. Langer]

Where the hell is Thunderbolt support and accessories?

It will be some time before there is a wide-range of products, but there are customizable storage options using Thunderbolt that will be released in the coming weeks. Everything else will take time to come to market as there is no real demand or need for products that use Thunderbolt at this time beyond high-speed storage.

 

[paul ross jones]

Cool, thanks. I was sloppy in going through the pages...



This seems interesting:

http://eshop.macsales.com/search/data+doubler

Anyone tested it ?

i run one of these in my macbook pro 17. i use an 128 ssd as system, and a 750 sitting in my dvd drive. it works well.

paul

 

[L. Langer]

i run one of these in my macbook pro 17. i use an 128 ssd as system, and a 750 sitting in my dvd drive. it works well.

paul

What are the temps like with that setup as far as your secondary drive is concerned?

 

[paul ross jones]

the laptop has been very cool (as in temp). im sure the ssd has a big part to play in this.
but i dont tend to do a lot of processing to the 750- this is used for storage. but i have done large of processing in one go with the 750 (im a stills guy that uses capture one to process raws) and the fan hardly comes on even though the processor is being used to the max.
so far this setup has been the best computer i have ever had, very happy.
i just got my 1st gen 15inch unibody back off my producer who was borrowing for the last 6 months. it is soooo slow compared with my 17inch (i5), and it gets incredibly hot, it even starts the fan up when surfing the web!

paul

 

[Eric Santiago]

Thought the same and checked. You can configure it with 1680x1050 option.


It seems like one has to choose between high speed I/O and using external monitor...

Anyone read up on HiDPI? Sounds like close to 4K stuff

 

[N_Villers]

I think thunderbolt (lightpeak) will be revolutionary and have been hoping for this for a long time.

It is finally fulfilling the dream that the internal bus architecture of computers (currently PCI-e 2.0) has become externalized. This means that specialized components do not need to depend on the basic internal architecture of the PC and allow them to be externalized without performance limitation (bandwidth not included). With thunderbolt, attaching any device externally is from the computer's standpoint indistinguishable to an internal one. All that an external device requires is to integrate a thunderbolt chip/port (very tiny) and to use their own pci-e drivers (already exist).

Think modular.

This is exactly how RED has chosen to develop the epic with each new module attached directly to the central PCI-e bus. Mabye we will see a thunderbolt module - althugh not sure why I'd need one but... who knows. The beauty of the Epic and now with thunderbolt is that they can all be added later.

In the last few years we have just begun to see PCI-e over cable products enter the marketplace in the form of expansion chassis and external raids. Many on this user forum have used expansion chassis to overcome the pci-e slot limitation and now Resolve supports it for multi GPU acceleration on the mac. The direct attached external pci-e raids are reported to be the best performing in their class though I have little direct experience with them. CalDigit among other companies now have a SAN product running over PCI-e that claims very high performance. Thunderbolt is in essence operating the same as these products by extending the system bus outside the box. Latency and the task of managing system wide dataflow and switching is greatly simplified because everything is native to the system as a whole.

With everything sharing the same interconnect and protocol internally and externally the notion of discreet computers can start to blur. An external TB switch could potentially allow shared processing, shared I/O, shared storage, shared gpu clusters. DAS, SAN, NAS might become terms that might change completely.

Monitoring also will become much simpler with vastly improved bandwidth. External video I/O companies will gorge on all the possibilities.

The next generation MacPro's are where I believe we will really see the true potential of thunderbolt. Maybe the optical version will be ready by then. I bet that there will be a mechanism built seamlessly into the OS to allow universal device interconnects and robust sharing. Linux has already contained this capability for several years. My heart has always been with the mac mini - such a small discrete little box quietly humming away tucked in its corner. Imagine a cluster of these all jointly inter-connected though an external switch/hub to a fast Raid, multiple displays, one or more workstations. Plug any new device in and it is available to every attached system. Management software could be developed to assign tasks and give priorities. Many software companies already offer products that assign zones and use network centric file formats such as MetaSan or EditShare.

What has being missing is a cheap physical link and universal protocol. All of the other 10Gb+ technologies, infiniband, fiber, SAS, 10Gb Ethernet require dedicated HBA cards, expensive switches and either their own or 3rd party management software that run a myriad of different protocols ie. iscsi, fcoe, aoe etc.

Decentralization and modularity. Every user doesn't need 4 cards in their mac pro while some users need more. Thunderbolt solves this problem and allows radical new thinking. I bet Apple will come up with something big with their next big update to the mac pro.

Something big is in the air I feel, with FCP being hyped as it is and now thunderbolt and the new OS coming soon I think we might be up for the next big step. Remember it was Apple that helped popularize USB in the first place, an innovation that really opened up external devices to begin with.

-noel

 

[Stephen Gentle]

Where the hell is Thunderbolt support and accessories?

WHY DOESN'T ANYONE SUPPORT MY TWO DAY OLD TECHNOLOGY?

Of course you can't buy anything for it yet... Hell, I've hardly seen any USB3 accessories in shops around here. But AJA, Apogee, Avid, BlackMagic and a few others seem to be committed to producing products for it according to Intel's page.

Compatibility always wins. Funny how Apple wanted to make it proprietary.

What are you talking about, IEEE 1394 (Firewire) or Intel's Thunderbolt (which multiplexes VESA DisplayPort and PCI-E, over a standardised Mini-displayport cable?). Whatever it is, Apple isn't making anything proprietary...

 

[Matt Johnston]

They don't exist. Apart from RAM, battery and hard drive, pretty much the only thing you can sometimes replace is a wireless card. It's silly to talk about 'closed systems' with regard to laptops because they all are. And that's a big part of what makes them so much smaller than a desktop.
.

Not true. The Sager that I posted (and the AVA directs, and some others) have upgradable graphics cards.

(and 16gb of ram upgrade for $160)

My workstation is OSX but Apple is done pissing me off for a while.

 

[Stephen Gentle]

Not true. The Sager that I posted (and the AVA directs, and some others) have upgradable graphics cards.

I can't see anywhere in the product specs where it says this... Can you give me a link to a replacement card?

As far as I know, there's no standard interface for mobile graphics cards (there are PCIe connectors for wireless cards and stuff but they're only like 2x - I haven't seen anything in laptops that is x8 or x16 which you would need) so if manufacturers did have upgradeable graphics cards, they would probably have to be proprietary, so the point about closed systems is moot...

 

[L. Langer]

I can't see anywhere in the product specs where it says this... Can you give me a link to a replacement card?

As far as I know, there's no standard interface for mobile graphics cards (there are PCIe connectors for wireless cards and stuff but they're only like 2x - I haven't seen anything in laptops that is x8 or x16 which you would need) so if manufacturers did have upgradeable graphics cards, they would probably have to be proprietary, so the point about closed systems is moot...

http://www.mxm-sig.org/

There are both x8 and x16 options but it depends on the system design as far as what you get under the hood. You can generally swap cards between computers with a bit of finesse but the parts themselves have to be obtained through third-parties (or authorized service providers) and they are not easy to install. There is a whole "upgrade scene" that revolves around swapping out cards whenever there is an upgrade available from the third-party black market though some custom builders will upgrade you to whatever they have in stock that is better than what you have if you call them and ask, so long as it is compatible with whatever revision your board uses.

 

[Matt Johnston]

I can't see anywhere in the product specs where it says this... Can you give me a link to a replacement card?

As far as I know, there's no standard interface for mobile graphics cards (there are PCIe connectors for wireless cards and stuff but they're only like 2x - I haven't seen anything in laptops that is x8 or x16 which you would need) so if manufacturers did have upgradeable graphics cards, they would probably have to be proprietary, so the point about closed systems is moot...

Same as the Sager. User replaceable card mentioned in the specs. Yea they can be hard to find, but gamer dorks do it all the time.

http://www.malibal.com/boutique/pc/configurePrd.asp?idProduct=285

4 ram slots, dual drives, eSata and USB3, 1.5gb Nvidia card, 1920x1080 matte display and 16gb ram for $1,500 I really genuinely don't understand the new Macbook Pro hoopla. I prefer OSX too, but I really don't get it? What am I missing? Most of the work I am doing now is in the field (literally sometimes) with some pretty tight deadlines. All AVCHD lately and I don't think the new MBP could keep up. Even the Elitebooks and the Thinkpads slaughter the new Macbooks.