Hardware upgrade - advice sought...

So time for my venerable MacPro 1,1 to be retired. I'm veering toward a top end iMac to replace it - it will run X, Legacy and A**d along with Resolve perfectly well for my needs.

My main thought is on the video hardware. Currently I'm running a Blackmagic Multibridge Pro for I/O. Do I use this via a Thunderbolt expansion chassis, or sell the whole caboodle as a going concern and replace with something newer (one of the BM TB solutions for example). Any experience with TB expansion chassis running PCIE cards like the BM units?

Cheers,

Jason

Congratulations. A top end iMac will certainly be a great improvement over your current setup.

An expansion chassis will work for your BM card as its maximum bandwidth requirement is dual link 3GB/s and even classic TB gives you 10 GB/s.

OTOH if you are looking at a future proof investment you may want to consider selling your PCIE Multibridge while you still can get a decent price for it and buy a Thunderbolt BM Ultrastudio 4K unit instead. This will save you the cost of an expansion chassis and it will give you the latest technology at a lower price than your existing card.


- Ronny

I would suggest waiting for the current iMac to be updated to the haswell chipset version. The main reason being that haswell has AVX2 which has some substantial performance improvements when compared to AVX.

We all now that one of the reasons that FCPX seems to run smoother on a iMac vs Mac Pro is AVX.

The (not) so funny thing is that the new XEON cpu in the coming Mac Pro only seems to have AVX since its based on Ivy-Bridge.

@ Ronnie - yes you'd kinda mirrored my thoughts. The relatively little extra outlay for 4k compatibility is probably worth it for future proofing.

@mousefarm - I'm wavering on the wait/not wait. Haswell might be a bit quicker - but the majority of my stuff is documentary based rather than FX, so taking a bit longer to render isn't a problem for me - and there are some good refurbs on Apple at the moment...

Jason,

I think it's a good idea to get rid of that PCIE card and get the newest box from BM. If you get a resonable price for your Multibridge Pro (I'm sure you will) the whole process will cost you less than an expansion box and you will have better performance and more options.

I agree that AVX is one of the many reasons why a new iMac will (sometimes) perform better than a MacPro when running FCPX. Like many modern programs FCPX has been written to support AVX with CPUs that use this extension. AVX2 on the other hand will not have any significant influence on performance with FCPX or any other NLE, for different reasons:

- AVX2 only expands integer AVX instructions to 256 bits. Video editing and finishing applications use floating point processing under the hood, so adding 256 bits integer processing does not have any influence on how fast such applications process their data.

- AVX needs to be addressed in the code of an application. To work with AVX2 FCPX, Avid, PPro... would need to be recompiled and this takes a lot of work. As AVX2 won't add any advantages to these applications anyway, this won't happen any day soon. So as long as your CPU, your OS and the applications your use support AVX you are good for many, many years to come.


- Ronny

Qoute from the following link: www.anandtech.com/show/6355/intels-haswell-architecture/8

"The other major addition to the execution engine is support for Intel's AVX2 instructions, including FMA (Fused Multiply-Add). Ports 0 & 1 now include newly designed 256-bit FMA units. As each FMA operation is effectively two floating point operations, these two units double the peak floating point throughput of Haswell compared to Sandy/Ivy Bridge. A side effect of the FMA units is that you now get two ports worth of FP multiply units, which can be a big boon to legacy FP code.
Fused Multiply-Add operations are incredibly handy in all sorts of media processing and 3D work. Rather than having to independently multiply and add values, being able to execute both in tandem via a single execution port increases the effective execution width of the machine. Note that a single FMA operation takes 5 cycles in Haswell, which is the same latency as a FP multiply from Sandy/Ivy Bridge. In the previous generation a floating point multiply+add took 8 cycles, so there's a good latency improvement here as well as the throughput boost from having two FMA units."

So AVX2 and FMA does seem to impact Floating point performance. FCPX will hopefully support this some point in time.

This will not be any priority soon because the impact of AVX2 on CPU floating point processing is insignificant while GPGPU processing is becoming much more important for such tasks. The new MacPro will emphasize on this new trend, and FCPX will be fully optimized for GPGPU processing.

As Intel's own Haswell Instruction Descriptions describes: "AVX2’s support is particularly useful for processing visual data commonly encountered in consumer imaging and consumer video processing workloads. With Haswell, we have both AVX for floating point, and AVX2 for integer data types."

Consumer imaging applications that use integer processing will benefit from AVX2, floating point processing will continue to rely on AVX. I think that is very clear.

So AVX2 at this point is not important for professional video. It does offer better power management in laptops. And the new MBPs will certainly have Haswell processors as well.

- Ronny

Hey Jason

So what did you decide?

I've just ordered a late 2013 iMac with 780M 4 Gb graphics and 512 Gb Flash drive. It should be on my desk october 7. Let me now if you want any specific testing done. I will do some testing in FCPX comparing it to my late 2009 iMac. (Published in a separate thread)

Now I just need to find a good external thunderbolt drive for mediafiles....

Hi Mouse,

haven't made a decision yet - I'm going to wait now the new iMacs are out to see how the pricing of the MacPro lies when it arrives. If I can get a good base model for the same sort of cost as the iMac I may well bite the bullet and go for that instead - at least I can re-use my monitors etc. So I'm in a holding pattern at the moment, praying my ageing MP keeps on going through a couple of small corporates!

I'd be very interested in hearing about your experience with the iMac though. I think it will perform well with the video card and Haswell's extra oomph.

Jason

Hi Jason

Got the iMac today

I haven't done any systematic testing yet. FCPX opens in 2,5 seconds (with only one event and one project on the internal flash drive). And now I can scrub and play GoPro 1080p 50fps footage without optimizing to ProRes. Everything just feels soooo smooth. Retiming and doing optical flow on a 20 second clip was done in no time.

For more systematic testing check this out: www.barefeats.com/haswel1.html

Let me know if I should do any specific testing for you.

(My old mac is an iMac late 2009 2.8 i7, 256 Gb SSD, 32 Gb ram)