Turn any Thunderbolt-equipped Mac into a Mac Pro

High-end media producers have become concerned about the future of Apple's Mac Pro, for two reasons:

1. The Mac Pro hasn't received a major update in years, and
2. Apple withdrew the Mac Pro from Europe on March 1st because it doesn't meet European safety regulations.

It's entirely possible that Apple plans to update or replace the Mac Pro later this year--but it's also possible that this is it for the Mac Pro. That makes ways to expand Apple's other models even more important. For the past couple of years, Apple has touted its 10Gbps Thunderbolt interface as the expansion interface for media producers, but Thunderbolt docks have been very slow in coming to the market.

Engadget reports that Sonnet, which already offers a line of Thunderbolt expansion chassis, adapters and disk arrays, has introduced the Echo 15 dock, with the widest array of interfaces I've seen. It includes:

• Four USB 3.0 ports
• Two eSATA ports
• One Thunderbolt port (in addition to the Thunderbolt connection to the host computer)
• One Gigabit Ethernet port
• One FireWire 800 port
• A DVD or Blu-Ray drive
• Room to mount a 2.5" or 3.5" SATA drive internally

The Echo 15's prices will range $399.95 for the DVD-equipped model with no hard drive to $549.95 for the model with a Blu-Ray drive and 2TB hard drive. Sonnet is taking pre-orders at its website and expects to begin shipments this summer. The Echo 15 is priced very competitively compared to docks from Belkin and Matrox that have fewer ports and no optical or hard drives.

 

Intel's Sandy Bridge...and a little Mac (and Final Cut Pro) speculation

At Intel's IDF Conference, the company provided more details about its new Sandy Bridge architecture. According to Anandtech, the first Sandy Bridge processors will be shipped for performance-level (gaming and media creation) PCs in early 2011, and will migrate to entry-level PCs in 2012. One major change in Sandy Bridge is that its GPU core should provide performance easily double that of Intel's existing integrated graphics. It won't keep NVIDIA or AMD up at night, but it should be good enough to lessen the demand for add-on graphics cards in entry-level PCs.

Sandy Bridge has an integrated MPEG2, VC1 and H.264/AVC decoder that Intel claims will use only half the processor power for HD playback as existing processors. It also has a AVC encoder/transcoder that, in a demonstration, was able to transcode a three minute 1080P 30Mbps video into a 640 x 360 iPhone video in 14 seconds, at a rate of 400 fps. This gets into the performance range of high-end, GPU-accelerated encoders. Sandy Bridge will also have an enhanced Turbo Boost feature that will allow the clock speed of individual cores to be boosted beyond the normal thermal design power (the maximum safe power dissipation of the chip) for brief periods of time.

Okay. so I said something about the Mac in the title, right? According to Anandtech, Core i3, i5 and i7 processors with Sandy Bridge architectures will ship in Q1 2011. Every MacBook Pro, iMac and Mac Pro ships today with at least a Core i3. Next, let's add Light Peak, Intel's new 10Gbps optical competitor to USB 3.0. There's no support for Light Peak in the first Intel chipset announced for Sandy Bridge, but that doesn't mean that it can't be added.

Add it all together, and it sounds like the Apple notebook and iMac product lines will be fully refreshed some time next year with a combination of Sandy Bridge and Light Peak. There goes the I/O limitations of Apple's notebooks and desktops. (Apple won't have to reengineer the Mac Pro right away--they can simply offer a PCI Light Peak card.)

Let's throw one more thing into the mix. There's been a lot of rumor and speculation surrounding the next release of Apple's Final Cut Studio, with a battle between bloggers--some saying that a new version will be released no later that NAB in April 2011, and others saying that it won't happen until 2012. The "2011" school says that the new version of Final Cut Studio will have Adobe Mercury Engine-like performance, but the "2012" school says that's not possible without major architectural changes. If Apple is writing the next version of Final Cut Studio to take full advantage of the features in Sandy Bridge, it most definitely is possible in the 2011 timeframe.

So here's my semi-informed speculation: In Q1 (perhaps late Q1), we'll see the first updated MacBook Pros with Sandy Bridge and Light Peak announced. New iMacs will follow. Then, in the April timeframe, just before NAB, Apple will announce the new Final Cut Studio that takes full advantage of the new computers ("great time to upgrade!"). Deliveries of everything will occur by the end of Q2.

Apple's new iMacs and Mac Pros need better I/O

There have been a lot of negative comments in the media production community about Apple's new Mac Pro tower computers and iMacs. The new models are faster and have better graphics than the models they replaced, but they have the same I/O capabilities, and in the case of the Mac Pro, the same number of slots as the old models.

Many observers were looking for Apple to introduce USB 3.0 interfaces or the 1.6/3.2 Gbps FireWire standard, and were disappointed. I suspect that one big reason why Apple didn't implement USB 3.0 is that Intel is moving very slowly to support the new standard. Intel's motherboard chip sets, which are by far the most popular, still don't include USB 3.0 support, although USB 3.0 cards can be added. Yesterday, Intel announced that it had completed development of all the components necessary to implement 50 Gbps transfers over a single fiber-optic link. Intel calls this technology the Silicon Photonics Link (SPL,) and expects to have it available commercially within five years. This looks like the latest version of Light Peak, which was reportedly developed by Intel at Apple's request.

My suspicion is that SPL is what Apple is really waiting for. With SPL, Apple could attach many high-speed devices that currently need different interfaces, such as disk arrays, displays and audio/video capture devices, using a single interface. Apple doesn't want to encourage adoption of slower interfaces that it will replace in a few years' time with SPL. However, the problem is timing. If SPL is two years out, Apple might be able to hold out, but if it's really five years away, they can't wait that long for a faster interface. I don't believe that S1600/S3200 FireWire is an option; Apple has wanted to drop its FireWire interfaces for years and has kept them only because of strong pressure from the user community.

There's another issue, and it concerns how the iMacs and Mac Pros coexist in Apple's product line. The new iMacs, which come standard with Core i3 or i5 CPUs and can be ordered with i7 CPUs, are fast enough for most media production tasks, but they're crippled by slow I/O. For example, there are very few ways to get high-speed video into or our of an iMac; MacBook Pros have better I/O options because they support Expresscards, while iMac users are limited to USB 2.0 and FireWire.

An iMac or MacBook Pro with a couple of USB 3.0 interfaces, or in the future, a SPL interface, would make the Mac Pro obsolete except for highly specialized applications. Once Apple's notebook and desktop computers have extremely fast I/O, they will be able to do perhaps 95% of what a Mac Pro can do. I think that one big reason why the Mac Pro hasn't had the massive redesign that it's needed for a few years is that Apple sees it as eventually going away.

The viability of Apple's desktop and tower computers for high-end media creation depends in large part on how Apple solves its I/O issues. It can't wait five years for SPL; it's got to come up with something much sooner than that.