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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

> It's such a specific use case that I'm not entirely sure what the use case even is.

Live TV production, I think. Mostly in the rackmount form-factor. A plethora of "IO breakout boards" is what turns a regular computer into a "video production system" head-unit.

Though also, at least three of the PCI-e cards shown on the slide were for fibre-optic networking. So, presumably, this would be the Mac to get if you're trying to Beowulf the M2-Ultras together for some kind of NUMA-friendly ML model training. Or just for a render farm. Insofar as Apple dogfoods things, I would guess this is what they use them for themselves.

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I liked how one of the cards on the screen was a sound card, as if a PCIe slot wasn't 1000x overkill for that amount of I/O. We had USB ports that could handle that when Bill Clinton was still president of the United States.

There was also what I believe to be an SDR card (the one with all the antenna-inputs) — which is pretty interesting in its implications, but perhaps not the brightest one in this context. Aren't RF antennas also lightning rods? :)

There was also something there that had DB9 and DB25 connectors, but both female. (I would think this was a weird SuperIO card, but the computer side of a serial port is usually male.) There was also a lot of stuff on that card. Anyone know what that one was?

That's the sound card. It's a Lynx E44. It has two giant breakout cables.

Plus for audio tasks that USB isn't good enough for, there is Thunderbolt (Avid will do 256 channels via TB3) and Ethernet (256+ channels via AVB possible).

I thought that too, but the existence of highly affordable SDI-to-Thunderbolt adapters means the Mac Studio should still suffice unless you need a very large number of inputs... and I don't know how many multi-SDI PCIe cards there are.

AJA makes a couple of Thunderbolt 3 external SDI capture/output devices with 4x bidirectional SDI I/Os. If you want more than that you need multiple devices or a PCIe card. AJA and Blackmagic both make 8x SDI cards, as do a couple other vendors.

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