This IS the Avid L2: Re: [Avid-L2] iMac vs. Tower MacPro for upgrading Avid stations, CPU vs. cores?

Friday, October 24, 2014

Re: [Avid-L2] iMac vs. Tower MacPro for upgrading Avid stations, CPU vs. cores?

I have an all Mac production house I work with... The big limiting factor in what systems you can use is if you are staying with UNITY for your shared storage.

There are no drivers/workarounds for AVID UNITY to run on anything past OS X 10.7.5 for Fiber and 10.6.8 for ethernet attached. Thus you are stuck there until such time you replace your UNITY as a shared storage solution.

Newer iMacs (and Mac Mini's) cannot be back rev'd to Lion. The newest machines you can work with and still us UNITY are 2011 models. The 2011 iMacs with 3.4Ghz i7 processors are indeed often faster than our 12 core Mac pro towers. However, in the case of fast local storage for finishing, the Mac Pro tower allows for simple, cheap and fast internal RAID0 arrays.

Once place where our iMacs with quad core i7 CPUs seem to go much faster is in AMA and AMA transcoding. The graphics cards in the iMacs are more hefty as well, and in the newer 64 bit versions of AVID this seems to make a big difference.

Of course there is the added expense of either Thunderbolt to PCIe card cages (SonnetTech ones work well) for your ATTO fiber cards or the ATTO Thunderlink adapter which also works quite well. In either scenario you are usually looking at 1,100 to 1,200 to connect to UNITY fiber via thunderbolt.

Hope this helps...

Dave Hogan

Burbank, CA

On Friday, October 24, 2014 2:09 AM, "Chris_Sporleder@hotmail.com [Avid-L2]" <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

I'd just point out that it is quite possible to upgrade the CPUs in a 2009-2012 Mac Pro tower. It is not difficult in a single processor 2009 or a 2010-12 dual processor, the dual 2009 is a little trickier and you can pay someone to do it for you if you like.

Xeon processors are available from server recyclers coming off lease after 3 years, and I've put dual 3.33ghz 6 cores in my 2009 for about $650. There are six-core 3.47 ghz processors within reach as well. This, plus GPU upgrades and internal RAID card/SATAIII cable upgrades can keep these beasts very sprightly.

Now, there is an adapter from China available for beer money that allows you to put an Apple Samsung flash SSD designed for the latest macbook pro/mac pro in a PCI-e slot with read/writes well over 1,000 mb/s and use this as your boot disc.

My 2009 Mac Pro benchmarks in multicore performance as high as a new high spec Mac Pro trashcan with these upgrades. I admit this is the thrifty drive a 10 year old Volvo mindset, but for an independent/freelance it gets multiple additional years before having to make capital investments.

The new iMac looks like a great platform, but will have a shorter shelf life given the lack of upgrade options, thermal constraints, and the hobbled SSD read/write speeds (700 v 1200+) (I even wonder if this 2 lane PCI-e SSD was a choice to make sure they didn't steal Mac Pro market share with this retina iMac)

---In Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com, <huipro@...> wrote :

John,

Future qualification issues aside, apples brand new iMac with 27" 5K display makes a compelling argument as an alternative to the MacPro cookie jars.

It'll cost you around $4K all tricked out, but this is where the MacPro starts. From there, you'll need to add the expansion hardware. But that's a given now.

If it can handle 4K media reasonably well, as they say, I think people will begin to warm up to the idea of all-in-one iMacs again.

Sent via iPad NanoS

On Oct 23, 2014, at 3:00 AM, "'Carmichael, Scott A' sacarmic@... [Avid-L2]" <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

We went with the highest end iMacs of the latest model and couldn't be happier. The BM thunderbolt IO has worked great. We are using Thunderbolt > to PCIe chassis for our FC san interfaces. My only regret is not going with SSD drives in the iMacs.

On Oct 20, 2014, at 9:48 PM, John Moore bigfish@... [Avid-L2] <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

I work at an all Mac Production company that is looking to upgrade it's fleet of older MacPro mc 5.5 systems. The quandry is should they go iMac or Tower Mac Pros that they can still obtain. They are seeing faster renders on a iMac that a producer station has. The iMac has 3.4 GHz. processor and our older towers are all 2.66 GHz or less. I feel this is why there is such a discrepancy in render time. I was advised that when getting my 12core 2012 MacPro that going for the top end CPU speed wasn't worth it so I have 2.66 GHz but in my gut I've always felt clock speed is an important factor in Avid renders as it doesn't take advantage of GPUs or multi cores for most rendering tasks. I regret not getting the 3.1 GHz., or whatever the max cpu clock speed was, but it's not a huge problem for my home system.

We are thinking for the upgrade to get iMacs for the edit stations and hang a BM or AJA thunderbolt I/O box and a thunderbolt to fibre adapter for our Unitys. Hurdles will be having to spring for BCC upgrades, I assume our bundled BCC 4's and BCC 5's would qualify for an upgrade, and OS Compatibility with our existing Unity 5 medianets. For our AE stations we are thinking of going with MacPro Towers so we can have the expansion slots for connectivity in the machine room.

Curious how others feel about cpu speed vs. cores when dealing with Avid and also the Tower vs. iMac quandry as it relates to connectivity etc... The trash cans are not in our sights and I don't think they should be but I'd appreciate any and all experience and suggestions.

John Moore
Barking Trout Productions
Studio City, CA
bigfish@...