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Comment by darkstar999 | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it. Who is the market for these, and why?

You ever tried to edit 4K video? Real time editing is very important to post-production studios and when you are adding effects, rendering etc in a time sensitive environment - and you are a Final Cut person - then this is a great tool.

This is not for your average dev or photo person, this is legitimately a 'Pro' machine aimed at very small a subset of Apple customers who actually mean quite a bit to the company. It is a quality perception game, when Hollywood is using your stuff you gain a certain mystique.

If you're doing 4K check out Dell, they actually have a monitor for it.

I actually dont, but I leased office space in a post-prod studio for a long time and am still friends with the owner. There is a demand for raw horsepower on a level many people dont understand.

I do understand :-)

My preferred architecture for serious users at the moment is to have the horsepower in a datacentre, monster boxes with 96 cores and 2T RAM, connected to SAN via Infiniband/Fibre Channel, and on the user's desktop, a thin client, connected to it via gigE. Schlepping the data back from the DC to the office, crunching it on a normal desktop box and sending it back again is a wild goose chase.

Without being too verbose, have you configured your admittedly over-provisioned desktop as a thin client and actually tried the post-prod workflow this way?

I'm just saying that it's being looked at, and current hardware is definitely _not_ up to the task.

This is not for video editing but for number crunching. I am saying that I am familiar with apps and users that have an insatiable demand for memory...

Do you have any links handy for researching how to set up or rent/buy from a vendor such a solution?

There's little magical about it - it's just very expensive. Multi-gigabit MAN links for example! And Infiniband is not cheap either. You can use something like FreeNX for your thin client solution. Storage would be something like 3Par or HDS. The servers and desktops themselves are actually not the major cost in a setup like this.

Honestly, if 4k video editing is the goal, why the hell is it capped at 64GB of memory. Being able to store more than like a minute of the 4k film in memory would seem useful.

According to http://web.forret.com/tools/video_fps.asp?width=4520&height=... ... which is the "Camera: Red One 2540/60p" preset.

We haven't seen benchmarks yet but I bet the PCIe SSD can stream more than 64GB of video off the disk in 60 seconds.

A Surface tablet with integrated GPU manipulating raw 6K video from a RED Dragon in real-time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A7Y5KCI1wc

I like my Surface but what they are showing and doing in that video is not truly editing. Showing raw or changing colors is not exactly the bar you need to get over.

But then, wouldn't you want a beefier machine? 64Gb of RAM seems a bit on the low side for such tasks.

I would also think having multiple disks would be a pretty important feature (so you can stripe them for speed...) A single SSD? Really?

For video editing, proc and gpu are actually the important parts once you hit a certain point with ram and disk. Think about it, 4K videos in raw form are about 15gb per minute so you need a threshold of swapping and loading with ram and disk that allows you to move data in and out fast enough so the editing can be done in ram but you experience no lag as the user.

With disk in PCIe and a good controller you are getting around 1gb per second disk action so you have more than enough headroom.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for your explanation :)

I'd imagine the intent with storage is to use the Thunderbolt ports to connect to a storage device (probably one with hardware RAID) that takes up far more physical space than is available inside the Mac Pro chassis itself and has far larger capacity / redundancy that they couldn't fit into the form factor reasonably.

Can't you use a render farm instead?

Video editors, recording engineers, anyone who needs a super powerful desktop that runs os x and has a big budget for such things.

I am baffled as to why apple went with such bespoke / underpowered hardware. It would have been relatively simple to update the internals of the existing mac pros and add thunderbolt 2 support.

Yup, and they could have pushed out a Mac Pro update much faster if they stuck with the old tower design.

And nobody (outside of the real market for Mac Pros) would have cared. Being audacious with their design gets attention from mere mortals which helps their brand image overall.

The budget isn't even that insane. I'm actually in the market for a new machine in the month or two. By the time I spec a 27" iMac up to where I'd want to be (Fusion Drive, i7 processor, graphics upgrade) it's close to 3 grand anyway, so making the jump to the base Mac Pro and just using my existing monitor isn't an insane jump.

Honestly, I'm of the opinion that I'd be better off decoupling my display anyway, and a base model Mac Pro is perfect in terms of power for me. And it looks pretty. I like having a workstation, and this is a hell of one!

Yea exactly. That said, I'd love if they "offered" a lite version for, say, $2500 with consumer Radeon(s) instead of the Firepros.

Well, this is the problem. Back in the day, it was pro graphics and video, and developers. Today, well, it's still nice for the pro video and 3D people, but you don't need it for photoshop, and certainly not for development. It's doomed to become ever-more niche as computer capabilities grow.

The lab I work with likes Macs, so I get to optimize for it. We have an interesting (and expanding) database of peptides, and just about everything we do will benefit from the extra horsepower.

Film editors will gobble these up.

Not really. You can do 4k in real time on relatively inexpensive machines already and it's better to invest price difference into storage. I did just that last year while I was waiting for new Mac Pros. AVID and Premiere work great on Windows as well. It would be great if Adobe supported Linux, but oh well.

People who want a really powerful Mac.

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