thunderbolt / RRocket /Nvidia quadro

[Sven Seynaeve]

With thunderbolt to pci-e expansion coming from Sonnet and Magma.

Could this mean , we could hook up moren then 1 unit like from Sonnet , 1 for Redrocket, 1 for an nvidia quadro card, and maby even 1 more for a second Rrocket????

Guess this is supposed to work, would be a killer combo for mobile editing and eventually grading as well...

[Stephen Gentle]

With thunderbolt to pci-e expansion coming from Sonnet and Magma.

Could this mean , we could hook up moren then 1 unit like from Sonnet , 1 for Redrocket, 1 for an nvidia quadro card, and maby even 1 more for a second Rrocket????

Guess this is supposed to work, would be a killer combo for mobile editing and eventually grading as well...

Theoretically yes, but I think a Rocket alone should be able to suck up just about all the bandwidth of a Thunderbolt port. If you have an iMac or something with two ports, you could use one expansion chassis on each port, but I doubt you'd get that good performance dasiy-chaining them on a single port.

But I'm just speculating - hopefully someone does some tests eventually because I'm interested in a mobile Thunderbolt rocket solution for my MacBook Pro, and I'm hoping that it will work chained with a RAID.

[Olivier Madar]

Thunderbolt, resolve and pci-e expansion are the last argument for Apple vs windows machine. The new intel processor are out, and still no mac pro... There a lot a notebook with big nvidia card in the PC land that would make Adobe CS5 much more usable than with the i7 Macbook 2011...

[Sven Seynaeve]

was also thinking getting a heavy laptop that will do the job,

unfortuntaly my quadcore system sometimes quits without warning due to overheating when rendering with ppro.

don't have this when rendering heavy projects with edius though. This is off course the part where I get a little scared investing in such a 8K laptop system , without any testing before.

question remains how long it 'll still take to render heavier projects out when using the cpu compared to having a macpro with redrocket which might do the heaviest calculation.

some realworld explanation and tests with ppro and working systems with red epic would be nice.

[Olivier Madar]

Some news from magma expansion about External Graphics

"There is an interoperability issue with MacOS using graphics (GPU) cards externally through Thunderbolt. Unfortunately, external graphics solutions for MacOS X do not work and we do not expect a resolution from Apple in the short term. We realize that external graphics support is a feature that many users want so we’ll let you know if this changes. For the time being our recommendation may be to run Windows using Boot Camp, but this is not yet confirmed as a working solution."

So, the possibility to use an nvidia quadro with a macbook pro seems compromise. I will look further to the "big" PC laptop.


Olivier

[Brian Merlen]

Yea with the Magma announcement I wonder if any brand enclosures will succeed in bringing a mac external gpu to market...and even if they do will thunderbolt provide enough bandwidth? For now I think I will forgo this until it is proven a viable option...

[Subhadip Sen]

Thunderbolt doesn't have nearly enough bandwidth to power a high performance GPU without bottlenecking. Sony Vaio Z's external GPU is a HD 6650M - which is a mid-range GPU at best - and even that is slightly bottlenecked over Thunderbolt. OS X is by far the most GPU unfriendly platform out there - as expected there's no way to get an external GPU running, yet. It's not just Apple, AMD and NVIDIA driver teams largely overlook driver development on OS X - there's extreme pressure from the Windows clientele which makes 99% of the high performance GPU market - and unlike Linux there is no open source development.

For those looking for Quadro on the go affordably, would be wise to look at notebooks like Lenovo Thinkpad W series.