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Comment by sdan | Hacker News Reader

$5k max

Citation needed. Apple hardware is expensive, yes, but usually isn't that far out of line with prices for equivalent specs.

are you sure? 1.5 TB ram on amazon is around 11.5K (https://www.amazon.com/24x64GB-DDR4-2133-PC4-17000-Upgrade-P...) Cursory search. But still, surely you can't build one for 5K

Can you even buy half the ram for that cost?

> 1.5 TB DDR4 ECC Ram

No, that much RAM is over 10k alone.

The RAM itself would run you up more than double that amount.

This isn’t gonna cost less than 20k.

Is that including an FPGA?

I'm guessing you can get (multiple) good nvidia cards to match apple's afterburner cards

Probably not for the same power envelope.

Doubt it. FPGA is almost guaranteed worse in performance/watt and performance/dollar compared to ASIC.

Only in cases where reprogramming capability or lack of initial cost of production make sense FPGA is used.

Well here’s the relevant specs for what it does:

> Compatible with Mac Pro (current generation) PCI Express x16 card

> Accelerates ProRes and ProRes RAW codec in Final Cut Pro X, QuickTime Player X, and supported third-party applications

> Supports playback of up to 6 streams of 8K ProRes RAW or up to 23 streams of 4K ProRes RAW

So if there’s an NVIDIA card that does all that, great, happy to hear it. I heard Adobe Premiere was recently updated to support the Afterburner as well so hopefully it also works with NVIDIA’s equivalent.

Actually, NVIDIA driver for current version of macOS don’t exist.

Like, there are only two GPU manufacturers left in the world, and requisite macOS driver for the bigger and better one, flat out don’t exist.

If somebody is willing to prove that they can build equivalent hardware to this monster for only $5K, I am willing to overlook the operating system entirely.

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