Apple should make this.
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 at 8:19AM 
OK, this is a brief post that I will flesh out later but… Apple should not make a new Mac Pro. Instead they should give me the ability to gang together 4 or 8 Mac Minis, using Thundertube technologh along side Grand Central Dispatch. Take a close look at this quote from “The Book of Knowledge”.
“Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) is a technology developed by Apple Inc. to optimize application support for systems with multi-core processors and other symmetric multiprocessing systems.”
See that, “And other symmetric multiprocessing systems”… that, to me, sounds like it doesn’t have to be all in ONE box. So what if I could take a really hard render and distribute it across 8 Mac Minis. Remember, those little guys are quad core now. So you could have 32 cores on the same AE render, managed at the system level.
Maybe its some sort of hardware thing for an additional $1000 that has 8 Thundertube Ports that I can plug in all my Mac Minis that I would buy as I can afford them. Just a thought… and I wanted to post this first.
UPDATE 1: Brian Mulligan makes a really good point. Most of what we do is more dependent on GPU than CPU… but then again, maybe there is a way to put a few GPU cards in a box on this Thundertube Squid idea I want Apple to build.
UPDATE 2: Check out this product by Sonnet
UPDATE 3: Why not put it all in one box? Because scalability would be awesome, for $800 or $1000 I could add 4 more cores to my project, and imagine what it would be like if you could upgrade slowly? Or, how about this, I travel a lot, I could take just as much power with me as I felt I need.
UPDATE 4: As of 3PM today, (June 5) 9to5 Mac has announced that they believe Apple WILL announce new Mac Pros next week at WWDC. So, I guess they are going to wimp out and NOT put my BRILLIANT plan into effect this weekend, I’m sure they could hack something together to make my Mac Mini ThunderTube Enabled Render Farm a reality by Monday morning… I guess they feel like taking the weekend off.
Reader Comments (4)
The issue isn't processors as much as it GPU. Premiere and AE (raytracing) and very much CUDA and GPU based for rendering.
That IS a good point Brian... maybe a box that has a GPU card (or two) that ALSO attaches to this device via Thundertube.
Chris, be careful what you wish for :)
At the moment I am running the standard ati card for the gui with two monitors attached, a quadro 4000 for GPU in Davinci Resolve and CUDA in Adobe stuff, a blackmagic card for monitoring and a sata card for fast storage in my mac pro... Something like that would need a few external enclosures or racks, and even thunderthingy caps out with all that stuff. I mean it's not faster than pci, is it? And what a mess of boxes, cables, power supplies one would end up with. i would really like to see a MacPro with 6 pci slots, would love to have a red rocket or two nvidia cards in there...
cheers,
martin
ps: love your podcast, always interesting and so much fun. keep it up!
Modularization of their computer products would be amazing! I think this concept can CERTAINLY fit into their product/marketing concept as well. Apple has always maintained the idea of a product ecosystem, where each product is nice on its own, but improves when another apple product enters the fray. I don't know enough about computers to know how they would achieve your idea Chris, but i'm certain some serious internal reconfiguration would need to be implemented across the their product line. As i'm certain they wouldn't make this new feature mac mini exclusive. It would also be cool to link two or three iMacs together in the same way you envision the mac minis. It would be awesome to partition CPU and GPU usage so one or two machines are working on importing and transcoding footage while you can continue editing on the remaining available processing power.