8 core Mac Pro

I remember jumping from a 2GHz P4 to a dual core opteron 1.8GHZ, it was pretty amazing how fast that thing could compile. I literally built my entire OS within 8 hours, w00t. Now I don't use gentoo, but those were pretty fun days.
 
Tree bought us one of those last month for video rendering. Such a nice boss eh? Too bad it blew up after 2 weeks and then spent 6 weeks in apple customer care until we got it back this past week. ;(
 
good ol' apple....it's not an 8 core machine...it's a dual quad core. what's more....don't price check it with a dodgy heart.
 
The only VMs worth running are userspace linux, much less overhead because you don't have to emulate or translate anything. You run 1 kernel and each person gets access to a chroot jail with the OS.
 
*cough* hackintosh *cough*

be interesting to see XP work in that enviroment.
 
well what is normally a 8 hour render on our fully loaded macbook pro became a <4hour job on the new 8core. So its not overkill just yet. Would love to see that time down to 1 or 2 hours.
 
Are you doing batch rendering to get various formats?

You could build a dedicated linux box running mencoder and it will spit out virtually any format you want, I use it to archive dvds occasionally and the quality is pretty good. Of course you have to have the master rendered :\
 
The big project is taking our video feeds from the sunday service and encoding them to flash for streaming on our website.

The new 8core gets a lot of other Final Cut Studio work done during the week and is quite speedy. I can't imagine what topping it off to 32gig of ram would be like. The form-factor design of the unit in general is so beautiful. I love taking off the side panel and showing ppl the guts. Just gorgeous!
 
using the top command you can watch the ram usage, if it goes to 100% while rendering then you are probably hitting swap and you will be paging to the [slooooow] hard disk.

The top command in freebsd/osx is a bit hard to read tho :P
Code: 
Processes:  74 total, 2 running, 72 sleeping... 257 threads            18:39:17
Load Avg:  0.75, 0.58, 0.53     CPU usage:  5.7% user, 12.3% sys, 82.0% idle
SharedLibs: num =  231, resident = 55.0M code, 7.23M data, 25.1M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 11287, resident =  317M + 19.8M private,  160M shared
PhysMem:   239M wired,  493M active,  256M inactive,  989M used, 34.1M free
VM: 11.5G +  161M   742481(0) pageins, 75689(0) pageouts

Basically I have 256mb of ram free. I generally consider the inactive free, as OSX will cache up the full amount of ram if it can.

Linux equivalent, generally you consider free + cached the amount of ram left.
Code: 
top - 18:42:32 up 23:38,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Tasks:  57 total,   1 running,  56 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.0% us,  0.0% sy,  0.0% ni, 100.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:    262144k total,   115380k used,   146764k free,        0k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,        0k cached
 
you know, I've been looking at getting a Mac for awhile, though I don't do a whole lot of video stuff or graphics stuff (though I wouldn't mind doing it as a hobby).
 
Coolspot said:
you know, I've been looking at getting a Mac for awhile, though I don't do a whole lot of video stuff or graphics stuff (though I wouldn't mind doing it as a hobby).
Click to expand...
mini mac with maxed ram is the best expirimental tool for mac. i enjoy mine
 
vibrokatana said:
I remember jumping from a 2GHz P4 to a dual core opteron 1.8GHZ, it was pretty amazing how fast that thing could compile. I literally built my entire OS within 8 hours, w00t. Now I don't use gentoo, but those were pretty fun days.
Click to expand...

what distro are you using now?
 
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