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Trash Can Mac? ... Jeez .. way to disrepect something thats going to be f**king awesome!
Yes it will be MUCH better than anything currently available. I can't wait to get one myself. Personally I do very well with my 3 iMacs (2011-2012 versions) soif you're all strapped for cash why don't you think about having a central computer to write with and slave machines to run your libraries.
P.S .. please remember to put some spaces between your paragraphs.
You should look for benchmarks :
Here is one
The article is in french but the tables are in English
http://www.macbidouille.com/news/2013/12/15/de-nouveaux-resultats-geekbench-du-mac-pro-2013
The price of the 12 core new Macpro is VERY expensive !
Hetoreyn, that is what I am thinking. To use my current PC MIDI, a PC slave (that was my main slave originally) and a new Mac Pro with the flash memory as a second slave. With that system, and 64gb of RAM on the Mac Pro, you could probably do large orchestral setups without any glitches. (such as a glitch I recently had - a large group of instruments suddenly doing extreme velocity crossfades, all of them separately - it almost blew the entire neighborhood's power supply.) Partly because I like the MIDI sequencer I am using, but also because it will maximize the sample performance which is my main interest. Also, apparently the flash memory is faster than SSD.
I wanted to ask cm if he knows whether it is necessary to store samples on a separate hard drive on the new Mac Pros. I am thinking it would not make any difference because it is all totally RAM? So you could you have a single terabyte flash drive with everything - OS, MIR and samples?
Hi William
What DAW do you use ?
How will organized your orchestral template ?
What players are you using ?
You are speaking of large template, how large ?
Will you have more than one MIR ?
Best
Cyril
@William said:
I wanted to ask cm if he knows whether it is necessary to store samples on a separate hard drive on the new Mac Pros. I am thinking it would not make any difference because it is all totally RAM? So you could you have a single terabyte flash drive with everything - OS, MIR and samples?
correction: it is not RAM, but Flash connected via PCIe (similar to Angebird Wings) - SSDs contain Flash memory.
so far i couldn't find any ram-disk except gigabyte i-ram, meanwhile considered to be legacy http://www.gigabyte.eu/products/product-page.aspx?pid=2678#ov
as data throughput (on the new mac pro) has been measured 900 MB/s write and 1200 MB/s read i'd assume it is configured as 2 x 512 GB in raid-0 (stripe).
every controller ourdays is using some random-write algorithm to avoid writing to certain memory-cells too often, so data will be spread across all cells from start and things like de-fragmenting or storing data in blocks is history.
not sure though if all will fit on a 1 TB *drive* (system, software, data, recordings, various garbage ...), also consider operating systems tend to *grow* little by little ...
it is better to have 3 places
1) system 64 or 128 GB
2) VSL libs (on a raid 0 on the older Macpro, no idea about the new Macpro)
3) HD or ssd to put your audio files
Thunderbolt to PCIe is around an other 1 K euro
cm, thanks, but to clarify are you answering it doesn't matter if one stores samples along with the OS? The reason I ask is - if you use a separate drive for samples perhaps you will lose some of this advertised speed of the PCLe memory? I would not be doing any recording of audio on this computer, only playback of samples which are recorded externally.
Cyril this is a slave and the DAW is not on the sample playing computer. The orchestral setups I am talking about are the hypothetical largest that can be done.
One other thing I wonder is - if one is using this computer almost totally for VSL, is there really a big advantage of having more Xeon cores than 4 or 6 other than bragging about it and looking cool? Isn't the real factor in increasing VSL reliability and performance the MEMORY AMOUNT AND SPEED? I am trying to keep the rather high Apple price down just a little bit. Another way of putting it is - where should the most money be spent in order to optimize VSL performance?
now using the macpro just as a sample player is - phew - cool ;-)
having the samples on a separate drive at comparable access will IMO require 2 flash-drives in a raid-0 via thunderbolt.
USB3 has 5 Gbit/s theoretical throughput, thunderbolt2 has 20 Gbit/s, the fastest SSDs deliver ~600 MB/s (usually *only* 480 - 500 MB/s), which means a SSD raid-0 will deliver more than even USB3 is able to transport (1 Byte = 8 bit + overhead).
it doesn't matter at all to have OS and samples on one drive - after the OS (+ applications) has started there is almost no more drive access from the OS, everything is handled in RAM. some access could happen for the OS' pagefile (which also resides on disk), but to my knowledge this is not the case with VEPRO or MIR (once the arrangement is loaded).
how many cores are required/reasonable ... hmmm, besides that will strongly depend on your arrangement and amount of plug-ins unfortunately i currently don't have any performance figures for the Xeon E5 generation at my hands.
i'm too looking at a new MacPro. After my experience with my 8 core machine I'll opt for the pricier 12 core as Logic really uses the cores very well. Logic has already been updated for the new MacPro. I've been reading astonishing perforance figures for MacPros running 4k video with Final Cut Pro - also configured for the Mac - seems it tasks the dual GPU's so the real world performance is way way higher than you would imagine just looking at the Geek bench scores.
I run all my VSL stuff using VI Pro as an au plug-in in Logic. As Apple have tweaked Logic to play with the MacPro will that also make the VI-Pro able to use the power of the MacPro?, and a question for the software experts - is the processing power in the dual GPU's of any relevence to Audio Apps? -if it was then it might make sense to opt for the higher powered GPU option.
Thanks
Julian
@William said:
Cyril this is a slave and the DAW is not on the sample playing computer. The orchestral setups I am talking about are the hypothetical largest that can be done.
The DAW is important, it might put limits !
Hypothetical is not the way you go with computer !
Some people are using many players !
You better wait for benchmarks !
Hi William,
With multiple SSDs and cheaply available RAM I find the only thing holding back mega VSL sessions is CPU. Now if the new MacPro is handling 4k video like a high end PC handles HD then it's sort of giving 4 times the performance. This could equate to about 400 instances of VI-Pro.
http://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/articles/1307-the-first-24-hours-with-apple-s-new-mac-pro-and-final-cut-pro-10-1
Now if this can be translated into audio then having everything on one machine will be much more elegant, timesaving and powerful. Just have to see how the software evolves.
Julian
You're probably right about that. 4 to 12 core processors are available on both the HP and Mac computers. However I notice that RAM is much more limited on Mac. The HP Z820 workstation I was looking at has 16 DIMMs so you can expand to a huge amount of RAM. That can be very important for MIR.
Though again, the Mac has a PCLe drive which is faster than previous SSDs for loading samples. But I've found such a huge improvement with loading of samples from the Crucial SSD I installed recently that it doesn't need to be much better! So the inflated price of Mac is looking less necessary to me. I priced two systems - one an HP Z820 and one a Mac Pro with almost exactly the same specs (actually more RAM on the HP) and the HP was around $6,000 and the Mac Pro $11,500.
Can you give us the link with the HP Z820
this link : http://shopping1.hp.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/WW-USSMBPublicStore-Site/en_US/-/USD/ViewStandardCatalog-Browse;pgid=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx?CatalogCategoryID=x.IQ7habXDwAAAFCulgtkXzC
Does not show that the HP is 6K$ but 9,9 K$ and for this price does not include a graphic card !
This is the link I was looking at but it is generic and does not have all the options so the prices are highly variable depending on what you spec out -
Hi William
This HP station is only 4 cores !
The 12 core HP station is 9999 $ and that without graphic cards and without Thunderbolt
http://shopping1.hp.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/WW-USSMBPublicStore-Site/en_US/-/USD/ViewProductDetail-Start;pgid=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx?ProductUUID=tdMQ7EN5zgQAAAFBXYFNbJcf&CatalogCategoryID=x.IQ7habXDwAAAFCulgtkXzC&JumpTo=OfferList
The link you gave us does not compare to the high-end 12 core Mac (2.7GHz 12-core with 30MB of L3 cache) that is at 6999 $
You can buy this 6 999 $ Mac at Apple and buy the memory and SSD extensions elswhere (Crucial .......)
Our main concern is going Thunderbolt, the Thunderbolt to PCIe chassis are quite expensive at the moment because Thunderbolt is only starting, and we have audio cards !
Best
Cyril
If you look at the HP link it goes to different models and options including more cores and graphics cards including a Tesla which is huge capacity. Many different possibilities so it is complicated to figure out exact costs.
Concerning the Mac Pro I was not talking about Thunderbolt drives for sample playback, but wanted to use the internal pcle flash which would be even faster, using this machine as a slave in an already established system. This internal pcle memory would apparently be the fastest for sample streaming. Also, it would be very compact with a single terabyte drive storing all the current VSL samples.
The Thunderbolt ports are extremely fast though so if you exceeded the internal memory (with more Dimension Strings??? yeah! ) one could expand in that direction. As long as one is dreaming.
@William said:
If you look at the HP link it goes to different models and options including more cores and graphics cards including a Tesla which is huge capacity. Many different possibilities so it is complicated to figure out exact costs.
I have seen this !
But there is no secret, if the HP 12 core is costing 9900$, the expansion of the one you selected will cost the same or even more !
(in France we are saying : you cannot get the butter, it's milk and the farmer's wife LOL)
